“Don’t.”
“This is that. That’s where we are.” He chased tequila by biting the bloody fruit.
And then they were passing again over the abrupt verge between cotton fields and suburbs, zigzagging generally south and west so that the freshly opened model homes of townhouse developments soon gave up chasing them, and they shot into the terrain of gas stations, barbecue joints, and vacant lots full of trash, the territory of mutilated billboards and stucco walls of black graffiti, of low deteriorating buildings and trailers airing the handmade signboards of casual enterprise: AMMO FOR LESS; IN THE NAME FO JUSUS GUARNTEE USED TIRES; BRONDWAY BARBER SHOP; PALM READER; SOUTHSIDE DRIVE-THRU TUNE-UP $$20$$. When they returned to James’s house, she stuck her head around the side of the staircase to see who was downstairs. James was sitting alone in the living room, in the canvas chair, staring out through the sliding glass doors into the back yard. Becoming aware of her, he raised up two fingers in a sign of peace. She followed Dwight up into the kitchen.
“How do you know fences?” Bill Houston asked.
Dwight was looking at Jamie. She didn’t look at him, but continued quartering lemons and limes. “For a couple years I made my living breaking into places and taking things,” Dwight said. “Slice them thinner,” he said to her. “I don’t want to drink the lemon, I just want to taste it. So I made the acquaintance of a fence by the simple expedient of contacting an individual who’d just been fucking busted for B-and-E.” He took off his Clark Kent glasses and rubbed his eyes and looked at Bill Houston. “His names was in the papers.”
“And he gave you his fence?” Bill asked.
“I didn’t go as somebody who needed from him. I appeared as somebody he should be afraid of. And I appeared to his fence as someone his fence should be afraid of. And today I have a very good fence. Toast with me,” he said to Jamie, pouring out shots of tequila into two coffee mugs. He held the salt shaker above his upturned face, spilling some of its contents into his mouth — crystalline sparks, each separately visible through Jamie’s amphetamine fast-shutter — and handed the shaker to her.
Looking at Bill Houston, she shook salt into her mouth, too. Dwight took her hand, linked his arm around hers at the elbow, and put a mug into her grasp. “To crime.” Down the hatch. Each took a bite of lemon.
Jamie handed Bill Houston the salt shaker and performed the identical ritual with him, her elbow locked with his, each holding a mug of tequila. She hooked her leg around his at the knee. She stared into his face. “Don’t shut me out of this,” she said.
“Who’s shutting you out?” he said. “You’re standing right here. I don’t give a shit.”
“Okay,” she said.
“I mean”—he looked at Dwight curiously—”why don’t we just put it in a window somewheres?”
Dwight poured out three more. “I thought she was family.”
“I am,” Jamie said. “If I ain’t, then it comes as a surprise to me, because I been travelling everywhere with this man.”
“Travelling?” Dwight said. “Neat.”
They all three kicked back another shot. The silence went on long enough that it got to be a thing. “Nobody trusts anybody in this kitchen,” Jamie said. She left their presence, walking swiftly down the stairs and through the living room.
She stepped out into the yard carrying half a lemon. In the bare patches around her the dirt boiled. She was sufficiently aware of the temperature to have been able to mention it, but she did not feel heat.
It’s kill or be killed.
Digging her thumbnail into the pulp, she felt the juice of lemon cells explode against her palm. They’re coming for you. The skin rippled on her back. Something had touched her back. Do it.
Do what? They were confusing her. They were deep and ragged and vivid, two or three of them talking all at once.
She went back inside. The TV was on, and it said, The President’s order has been disobeyed. Only ten more days.
Bill Houston woke up. It was the middle of the night. He felt strange and unprepared.
It took him a minute to understand that he was in his brother’s house, that Baby Ellen had been crying and had awakened him. Jamie was up with her, across the living room, and the light was on. Evidently she’d just carried the baby back down from the kitchen, where they’d been warming up a bottle of milk. She sat down, holding Ellen in the crook of her arm, and for a heartbeat, while she reached with her other hand to switch on the radio, she held the baby’s bottle between her shoulder and chin the way she might have done with a telephone receiver, keeping the rubber nipple in the baby’s mouth. She kept the volume on the radio very low, and the music faded in and out, an old Four Tops tune which Bill Houston recognized from another time and another place. He propped himself on an elbow, spying on her, it felt like, because she was unaware of him now. She wore a teeshirt and otherwise nothing. A purple bruise covered the instep of her left foot. I know half a dozen people your age who are dead already, he wanted to tell her.
Baby Ellen was asleep now. With gentle care, Jamie put her back into her bassinet, and checked on Miranda, who slept, covered by a leather jacket, on the sofa. The announcer identified the station and the hour — Little Rock, where it was four in the morning — and then his voice receded as the signal washed away in the weather of distant mountains, and Bill Houston had one of those vivid experiences of being adrift, a revelation of how completely helpless they were, the only ones awake in a great darkness, the only light anywhere — God was about to speak — God was here — they were in God’s mouth, this light — and he watched in wonder and dread as Jamie unscrewed the nipple and tipped the bottle of translucent blue plastic to her lips and drank the milk.
The three brothers picked Dwight up at the corner of Broadway and Central at nine in the morning. He was standing in front of a fried chicken establishment holding a brown paper shopping sack filled with various items for disguise, his foot resting on an olive-drab duffel bag containing two revolvers, a German machine pistol, and a sawed-off twenty-gauge shotgun with a shortened stock. “Friends and neighbors,” Dwight said. Anything could go wrong now.
The four-door mid-size Chrysler the men travelled in was not quite stolen. It had been marked for repossession by one of Dwight Snow’s rivals, and the Houstons had repossessed it first. Burris started to get out from behind the wheel, but Dwight stayed him with a hand. “Just let me have the keys. From this point forward, you don’t ever leave that driver’s seat till we’re through with this car.”
“No keys,” Burris said. “We busted open the trunk and wired it shut.”
“Good. No problem.” Dwight put the duffel bag into the trunk.
He sat in the back seat next to Bill Houston and dealt out things from his shopping bag — a mustache for James, big round sunglasses for Bill, for Burris a ridiculous grey beard. “Nobody’s going to look too close at a person in a car,” Dwight explained to Burris, “so it doesn’t matter how phony you look. We just want facial camouflage all around. Flowers?”
James, in the front seat, reached down by his feet and handed over a bouquet of wildflowers wrapped in green paper, a gift item sold on the street corners of the city by half-dressed young women. “Here, darling.”
Dwight took the flowers and removed a few. “Hey, why don’t we put these in our buttonholes? A little class. Just for appearances’ sake.” His neat efficiency, as he gripped each flower by its stem between thumb and forefinger; as he looked into the face of each man, handing him a flower; as he moved his eyes in a continual round of the scene outside the vehicle — rear street, Mexican joint, intersection, Kentucky fried, street forward — was inspiring to the others. Bill Houston, sitting beside him, observing his partners, feeling the sun begin to warm the Chrysler’s interior, felt a narrowing and focusing of his own dry-mouthed fear.