“Yeah. He’s gonna be happy I heard from you, though.”
“Who’s running things?”
“Oh,” moaned Walter. “It was gonna be Circo, you know? Everyone was gonna hate it. But then he got a DUI and had weed on him, and Fin, on the inside, said no. Fin hates that, you know, distractions. So it’s kind of complicated, kind of in process. We’re changing up. Getting out of the house business. Some dude actually bought thirty blocks, the houses, the U’s, the kids, everything.”
“He bought, like, the houses? That people live in?”
“He bought the rights,” Walter said. “Any business going on in there, he gets to own that. Paid a lot of money. And—”
The strangeness of news from home. Like a message in a bottle. “Did Michael Wilson make it back?”
“I heard he did,” Walter said. “I ain’t seen him.”
“Why is Fin still in?”
“Aw, man,” said Walter. “He got, like, a billion dollars bail. At first it was a hundred thousand, and we had that easy, so the judge went sky high. They ain’t letting him out. Ever.”
East glanced around in the dark.
“Anybody talking about it?”
“No one saying anything about that,” Walter said.
East felt a twang of disappointment. In spite of himself.
Walter laughed. “You still out there, man. That’s what mystifies me. What are you doing? You need money, I can send it. Or a ticket. You could fly home now, no problem, except there’s a couple things I gotta fill you in on.”
“No. I’m here now.”
“I kept waiting on you to call.”
“No, I’m here,” East said. “So, man. What are you doing?”
“Me? I’m back in school,” Walter chuckled. “Missed a week, nobody said shit. But I’m going to private school in the spring. Last semester, college prep, no more Boxes. They sending me up, I’ll live there. Do a little recon, you know.”
“Like Michael Wilson at UCLA?”
“Maybe. Good school up in the canyons. Kids up there, they’re either movie stars or geeks.”
East tried to imagine it. He didn’t know what to imagine.
“What are you doing?”
“The old thing,” said East. “Just watching.”
“What? You found a house and crew?”
“Different.”
“Different but the same?”
“Yeah,” East said.
“That will hold you,” Walter said, “but that’s little boys’ work, E—you know it. We did that when we were little boys.”
East felt the sting. But it passed. “Walter. I need you to do something.”
“What?”
“Send me something. Go over to my mother’s house and tip my bed up. You’ll find a wood block that don’t belong, with a butterfly bolt. Get my ATM cards, and if you can, get my phone, and mail them to me.”
He gave Walter his mother’s address and the street address of the range.
“I saw that area code. Had to look it up,” Walter said. “Ohio?”
“Ohio.”
“Is it like Wisconsin, all cold?”
“Warm and mountains,” East said, “just like LA.”
“How I’m gonna get in there, your mom’s house?”
“Tell her I need it. Give her fifty dollars, man. She’ll let you in like anything.” Grimly he added, “Probably let you in for five.”
“You ain’t coming back, are you?”
“I don’t think. Don’t tell anyone what I told you.”
“Believe me, man. I’m keeping quiet about all this. You’re not coming back?”
“Don’t tell nobody I’m out here,” East repeated.
“I won’t say a word,” Walter said. “But you’re not coming back. I can’t get my mind around it.”
—
Perry put the mail on the counter and regarded it sideways. Express package, addressed to Antoine Harris. It took a day and a half.
“Last name Harris,” he observed. “First time I knew you had a last name.”
“I lose track myself,” East said.
“I must engrave you a nameplate,” Perry declared.
All day the package glowed in the cabinet, radioactive with his previous life.
That night he tore the brown paper and tape and unwrapped a shoebox that had come from under his bed at home, with a pair of his old, outgrown shoes, battered but still whole, still real. Why had Walter sent those? He almost chucked them into the trash. The stink of his socks, the bedroom at his mother’s house. His salt.
Then he felt around. Down in one toe, a flat bundle was wrapped in brown paper with the scrawl he could barely make out: COULDN’T GET PHONE. WILL KEEP LOOKING. W. Inside the fold, a thousand dollars in twenties, wrapped around his ATM cards, and one more card: a license, State of California.
The name, his own. Strange to read it there, in that official type, beneath the watermark. The address, his mother’s, the birthday, his own. A few days past now—he’d forgotten it. He was sixteen now. A licensed operator.