Bill Beverly
Dodgers
This book is for Olive, who gave me a new life
And giving a last look at the aspect of the house, and at a few small children who were playing at the door, I sallied forth…my course lay through thick and heavy woods and back lands to town, where my brother lived.
Every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the world.
I: THE BOXES
1
The Boxes was all the boys knew; it was the only place.
In the street one car moved, between the whole vehicles and skeletal remains, creeping over paper and glass.
The boys stood guard. They watched light fill between the black houses separated only barely, like a row of loose teeth. Half the night they had been there: Fin taught that you did not make a boy stand yard all night. Half was right. To change in the middle kept them on their toes, Fin said. It kept them awake. It made them like men.
—
The door of the house opened, and two U’s stumbled out, shocked by the sun, ogling it like an old girl they hadn’t seen lately. Some men left the house like this, better once they’d been in. Others walked easy going in but barely crawled their way out. The two ignored the boys at their watch. At the end of the walk, they descended the five steps to the sidewalk, steadied themselves on the low stone wall. One man slapped the other’s palm loudly, the old way.
Again the door opened. A skeletal face, lip-curled, staring, hair rubbed away from his head. Sidney. He and Johnny ran the house, kept business, saw the goods in and the money out with teenage runners every half hour. Sidney looked this way and that like a rat sampling the air, then slid something onto the step. Cans of Coke and energy drink, cold in a cardboard box. One of the boys went and fetched the box around; each boy took a can or two. They popped the tops and stood drinking fizz in the shadows.
The morning was still chilly with a hint of damp. Light began to spill between the houses, keying the street in pink. Footsteps approached from the right, a worker man leaving for work, jacket and yellow tie, gold ear studs. The boys stared down over him; he didn’t look up. These men, the black men who wore ties with metal pins, who made wages but somehow had not left The Boxes: you didn’t talk to them. You didn’t let them up in the house. These men, if they came up in the house and were lost, someone needed them, someone would come looking. So you did not admit them. That was another thing Fin taught.
—
Televisions came on and planes flashed like blades in the sky. Somewhere behind them a lawn sprinkler hissed—fist, fist, fist—not loud but nothing else jamming up its frequency. A few U’s came in together at seven and one more at about eight, crestfallen: he had that grievous look of a man who’d bought for a week but used up in a night. At ten the boys who had come on at two left. The lead outside boy, East, shared some money out to them as they went. It was Monday, payday, outside the house.
The new boys at ten were Dap, Antonio, Marsonius called Sony, and Needle. Needle took the north end, watching the street, and Dap the south. Antonio and Sony stayed at the house with East, whose twelve hours’ work ended at noon. Antonio and Sony were good daytime boys. The night boys, you needed boys who knew how to stay quiet and stay awake. The day boys just needed to know how to look quiet.
East looked quiet and kept quiet. He didn’t look hard. He didn’t look like much. He blended in, didn’t talk much, was the skinniest of the bunch. There wasn’t much to him. But he watched and listened to people. What he heard he remembered.
The boys had their talk — names they gave themselves, ways they built up. East did not play along with them. They thought East hard and sour. Unlike the boys, who came from homes with mothers or from dens of other boys, East slept alone, somewhere no one knew. He had been at the old house before them, and he had seen things they had never seen. He had seen a reverend shot on the walk, a woman jump off a roof. He had seen a helicopter crash into trees and a man, out of his mind, pick up a downed power cable and stand, illuminated. He had seen the police come down, and still the house continued on.
He was no fun, and they respected him, for though he was young, he had none in him of what they most hated in themselves: their childishness. He had never been a child. Not that they had seen.
—
A fire truck boomed past sometime after ten, sirens and motors and the crushing of the tires on the asphalt. The firemen glared out at the boys.
They were lost. Streets in The Boxes were a maze: one piece didn’t match up straight with the next. So you might look for a house on the next block, but the next one didn’t follow up from this one. The street signs were twisted every which way or were gone.
The fire truck returned a minute later, going the other way. The boys waved. They were all in their teens, growing up, but everyone liked a fire truck.
“Over there,” said Sony.
“What?” said Antonio.
“Somebody house on fire,” said Sony.
The smoke rose, soft and gray, against the bright sky. “Probably a kitchen fire,” East said. No ruckus, nobody burning up. You could hear the wailing a mile away when someone was burning up, even in The Boxes. But more fire engines kept rumbling in. The boys heard them on the other streets.
A helicopter wagged its tail overhead.
—
By eleven it was getting hot, and two men crashed out of the house. One was fine and left, but one lay down in the grass.
“Go on,” Sony told him. “Get out of here.”
“You shut the fuck up, young fellow,” said the man, maybe forty years of age. He had a bee-stung nose, and under his half-open shirt East saw a bandage where the man had hurt himself.
“You go on,” said East. “Go on in the backyard if you got to lie down. Or go home. Not here.”
“This my house, son,” said the man, fighting to recline.
East nodded, grim and patient. “This my lawn,” he said. “Rules are rules. Go back in if you can’t walk. Don’t be here.”
The man put his hand in his pocket, but East could see he didn’t have anything in there, even keys.
“Man, you okay,” East said. “Nobody messing with you. Just can’t have people lying ’round the yard.” He prodded the man’s leg lightly. “You understand.”
“I own this house,” said the man.
Whether this was true, East did not know. “Go on,” he said. “Sleep in back if you want.”
The man got up and went into the backyard. After a few minutes Sony checked on him and found him asleep, trembling, fighting something inside.
—
The fire’s smoke seemed to thin, then came thicker. Trucks and pumps droned, and down the street some neighbor children were bouncing a ball off the front wall. East recognized two kids — from a neat house with green awnings, where sometimes a white Ford parked. These kids kept away. Someone told them, or perhaps they just knew. For the last two days there had been a third girl playing too, bigger. She could have grabbed every ball if she’d wanted, but she played nice.
East made himself stop watching them and studied the chopper instead where it dangled, breaking up the sky.
When he glanced back, the game had stopped and the girl was staring. Directly at him, and then she started to come. He glared at her, but she kept advancing, slowly, the two neighbor kids sticking behind her.