East tried to look ahead at the brown mountains, to think about the way ahead. He tried not to watch. But it wasn’t in him. A career of watching — a few years was a career in The Boxes — had made him the way he was. He spent his days watching, keeping things from happening. And sometimes he could see things coming. Sometimes he looked through a pair of eyes and saw what a U was deciding, what a neighbor feared.
Sometimes this watching wound East up. It was never finished. There would always be another thing, another thread, another pair of eyes. Days began sharp and tuned themselves sharper, until by the time it was over, the world made a quivering sound, like a black string humming. He could barely stand to be near things.
He slept in his box at night just to dampen the sound of the string. To blind him, deafen him, gratefully. Sometimes in the night beneath the box he woke up gasping.
Cars merged fitfully: they’d reached the obstruction. A vast brown Pontiac lay beached in the right lane, broken down and proud of it. Two women, bleached hair shining and loose, awaited the tow like parade queens. They sat up on the back, perched, putting lotion on. After them, the speed picked up.
—
The air conditioner was killing him. East weighed a hundred ten pounds, give or take. He reached into the first-aid kit and wrapped himself in the flimsy red blanket. The boys in the front seat laughed.
The traffic thinned out, and as the van climbed toward the mountains, they darkened, the solid brown breaking into purples and grays. All East’s life the mountains had been a jagged base for the northern sky. It was the first time he’d been this far toward them, in them. He’d never seen them broken into what they were, single peaks dotted with plant scrub and rock litter, and the open distances between.
He couldn’t stop looking — the slopes and tops and valleys that slowly revealed themselves. Like a new U moving in slowly, taking a look at the house, at the boys, maybe going away, maybe hanging around, deciding he’d just go up for a look, deciding he’d go inside. They all went inside sooner or later. He wanted those U’s to decide, to go in or go away, come again another day, so he could stop watching them. In the same way he willed Michael Wilson to drive faster, to pell-mell it down the highway past the Pathfinders and Broncos and Subarus heading up into the hills for the afternoon. He wanted into the mountains. Almost wanted them over with.
Light poured between them, careened around them.
The purple and brown details opened, resolved themselves, then whipped away as they were passed. Shattered pieces of things. At length the van passed through a canyon where an entire hillside was on fire, white smoke fanning low in the wind.
The boys made no comment on this apparently normal disaster. East studied it, not breathing. Then it too was past.
—
Green signs flared by. Cajon Junction. Hesperia. Victorville. Thousands of windows punched into the valley, cars sliding on and off, streets littered with people. His eyes sought them out and registered. Hard to stop.
When he closed them, let his eyes rest, he felt, as he always did, that someone or something had turned its gaze on him.
“Go on and sleep if you like, Easy. I got it,” Michael Wilson murmured. “Fat boy already checked out.”
“All right,” East said quietly. Walter had gone facedown on the tray of his breast.
Ty’s video game behind him trumpeted happily. A new level.
In the afternoon darkness, they stopped for gas.
The ground had flattened — hills and fences, scrub and arroyo. But mostly empty. Sometimes East found his eyes had gone blurry, the miles spinning past like bus-window reflections. Normal afternoons, he’d sleep seven hours and get up for a while before heading to the house. Last night’s sleep had been full but fruitless: his head was dried up, his lips stiff. The sun lay way over on the mountains, behind a shelf of cloud.
“Where are we?” said Walter, blinking too.
“This the desert, son,” declared Michael Wilson.
Shimmering heat. The low sun wasn’t sending it, but the pavement below them glowed white. East stepped quickly across.
The bathroom outside was locked, so he pissed in the back between two sun-cooked cars. Around him, the ground made a cracking sound, fine dry things touching in the breeze. Part of the moon was up, a white tab.
Inside the gas station, different oils, girl magazines. One ice cream cooler and one for drinks. Next to the counter where you paid for the gas was a grill.
“I can make you something, hon,” said a woman, white, sun-scraped.
There was nothing in the place that he needed. He wandered outside. Michael Wilson stood squeegeeing the windshield.
“Boy, did you just piss out in the field?”
East glanced down. “Yeah. I just pissed out in the field.”
The older boy laughed. “Country already.”
East didn’t answer. The jokes, the small laughs. He recognized Michael Wilson working, trying to do his job. The light talk of the leader. He dawdled past the van and stood on the apron of concrete and loose stones, looking around at the unbuilt land. Something moved in the distance, a ghost or tumbleweed. He’d seen a tumbleweed once, in a cartoon. This looked like that, a cartoon tumbleweed in cartoon land, hills and rubble, nothing with a name. Nothing real.
“Get in, Country,” called Michael Wilson. “We got to find something for y’all to eat.” And East turned back to the van, pale blue and dusty, like the sky.
5
Only once did Michael Wilson try talking to Ty. They were riding out what was left of California. Or maybe it was Nevada. The land was dark, and sometimes the spread of headlights showed them low, brushy hills. Michael Wilson leaned away from the wheel.
“What’s your story back there, young’un? Fighting them aliens still?”
A long, intent wait, and then the voice floated back, quavery, almost a little girl’s: “Are you talking to me?”
“Yeah.” Michael Wilson, for once, was not laughing.
“Tired of riding, man,” Ty said. “Tired of bullshit. Why we ain’t flying?” He switched back on the game with a musical flourish, as if the conversation were over.
This pushed Walter’s button. “Oh, no. Really, man? Impossible. No way.”
Michael Wilson: “We trying to keep low, young’un. You gotta use a credit card to buy a plane ticket. ID to buy, ID to get on. It don’t matter if the ID ain’t real; they still gonna track you.”
Their song changed quick, thought East. Bitching about it themselves an hour ago.
“We’d be so fucked,” said Walter. “They would know where we get off, where we catch a ride.”
“So there’s some trouble? Four little black boys done shot a man? A man who’s a witness in LA next week? Look, I see where we got these four little Negroes just flown in from LA.”
“I wonder when they flying back.”
“Let’s get a picture of them off the video.”
“Let’s call up the SWAT team.”
Michael Wilson laughed. “Airborne Negro Detection System activated.”
To all of this Ty snarled, “So what if they do?”
Michael Wilson and Walter glanced across at each other, holding their merriment.
“Fuck you,” said Ty. “The both of you.”
East sat with hands folded inside the red blanket. Pinning it shut. So this would be it. The funny faces in front tangling with Ty. For days.
“Oh, maybe you could fly,” said Walter. “But you a wanted man then. This way, we’re sneaking in, sneaking out. You remember that astronaut lady who wanted to kill her boyfriend’s new girl? Drove all the way from Texas to Florida to get away with it? She had gas cans in the back, never stopped. She wore diapers, man, trying to keep off the cameras.”