“Iowa.”
Walter was still frosty at East. He’d dropped off the interstate without an announcement. When East had asked, after some driving, “You headed where the guns are?” Walter nodded once. Merely.
“This the way the directions said?”
“Uh-huh.”
It was their first real stretch off the interstate. First time East had seen country like this. All East thought of Iowa was a map and outlines of products: corn, a tractor, the smiling head of a dairy cow. That was Iowa to his mind.
This road had none of those. Houses thrown up like milk cartons in lonely space — dingy, flat, unpainted cinder-block foundations. Strips of siding hanging off the corners like bandages. In front of each waited a little collection of beat-up vehicles like a boy would arrange in a sandbox. Cheap LED Christmas lights glowed from behind the windows, and sometimes, behind the drainage ditches, a Baby Jesus was standing yard.
Their backyards stood empty, a darkness forever.
The boys rode quiet and tense, East feeling the shifting road through his seat. A little town arose with its dull light reflected on the bottoms of clouds. Signs, steeples, a little grocery store closed for the evening, red still glowing in the plastic letters along the roofline.
“This is it,” Walter said. He coasted into the lot, splashed through the puddles. Out here it had already rained, or been hosed down, one or the other.
“This is it?”
“Ain’t it enough for you?”
“Walt, man,” East said. “Just, you don’t run guns at the food store.”
“They do.” Walter pulled the van around once and then sat idling, lights on. “You feeling better?”
“Fine.”
“You look a little less green than you did,” said Walter. “Thought you’d be puking again.”
East snapped, “It don’t hurt so much if you don’t talk about it.”
A light drizzle speckled the windshield.
“How you doing, Ty?” Walter called.
The reply came, “Fabulous.”
“You psyched, man? Getting your hands on more guns?”
“Yeah. All I ever think about,” said Ty drolly. “Guns. Guns. Guns.”
Something, East thought. Something Walter knew about talking to his brother that he didn’t. Even jiving him. As if they knew each other, when they didn’t.
He and Ty, they didn’t know each other, when they did.
Then, from behind the grocery store, a small black pickup tiptoed out near them, not a glance from the driver, no signal, almost indifferent.
“Is that it?” said East.
Walter’s eyes were buzzing. The truck’s turn signal pulsed once. Toward the road.
Walter pulsed the light back, and the pickup revved and began to crawl out. “We’re in business.”
Walter crouched over the wheel, maintaining the distance between the van and the little black truck. Back down the highway the van unwound them, past the houses and signs and fields they’d already seen, then onto an eastbound route. Here, fewer houses and no maintenance — the pavement was lined by dropouts, potholes the size of dinner plates chipping off onto the shoulder. Both vehicles nosed along the center line.
“You set this up too, Walt?” said East.
“No. They did,” said Walter. “I mean, there’s a guy. A broker. Guy they call Frederick. He does it all by phone. He never handles a gun.”
“Is he here? Or in LA?”
“This ain’t my bailiwick.”
“It ain’t what?”
“I don’t know where the man is. I didn’t set this up,” Walter said through gritted teeth. “Ask me a few more questions, why don’t you?”
“All right,” said East. “All right.”
Another road, wider, ran straight between two fields dressed in stubble. The headlights touched the white, embarrassed carcass of a deer. Then the pickup slewed diagonally and stopped astride the center line. It surprised Walter: he chirped the tires stopping.
A passenger leapt out. Blue sweatshirt, hood knotted tight around his face. Just a nose, a white nose, a pair of eyes like coal-black holes. Walter grabbed the shift lever. But there was no time to do anything, nowhere to go.
“Be cool,” East cautioned.
The passenger strode past them into the field, up the beginning of a beaten two-track. He popped a bolt on a metal gate. Then, turning, he beckoned.
“This freaks me out,” said Walter. “They could lock us in.”
“Well, that fence ain’t much,” East murmured.
Walter swung the van toward the track. The hooded passenger motioned to roll down the window.
“Grim reaper — looking motherfucker,” Walter said under his breath, and cranked the window down.
The air pushed in, starry-cold. They saw the ball of the boy’s head turning but not the face, heard his words but nothing in his voice. He could have been the grim reaper. He could have been anyone. “You’re going to go till you hit a barn that’s got two Harvestores. Tall blue silos,” the voice came. “It’s about a mile up over the hill.”
Courteously Walter said, “What hill?”
The passenger gave no sign Walter had spoken. “Follow that trail. On the other side, you will find it, down the hollow. You can’t miss. Understand?”
Walter and East both nodded in a daze.
The boy’s nod back was a single chop of his nose.
“You can get back out this way,” the nose said. “Or there’s a drive out the other side if you can find it.” He pushed the long gate and it creaked open before them.
The boys sat stricken. Not sure of the etiquette. Like being little at Halloween, at the weird house, when somebody’s dad answers the door in a costume and offers you a pull off his whiskey — what you do then.
“Go,” the nose said. “It ain’t no good out here waiting.” He scented something up the road and tossed his head: In.
Walter touched the accelerator and the van lurched through. In the taillights the boy swung the gate shut and departed. His small taillights moved away like tiny stamps.
Walter stopped, distracted, the van idling, working his chin with his fingertips.
“I don’t know, man.”
“What?”
“Do you like the feel of it?”
“The feel of it?” East sized up Walter. Got this far before he decided it was scary? “Like you said, it’s set. It’s all ready. No time to change our mind.” More gently he said, “Go on, man.”
Walter strapped his fingers around the wheel again.
But the van pitched this way and that, as if carried by hand. The track was a rough bargain between tires and ground — polished in places but muscled and bushy with weeds in others. The headlights danced ahead in the mangled fields. After a short time they made a shallow climb on a long, triangular bulge in the earth.
“This must be the hill,” Walter said.
“Was that a mile?”
“I got no idea. I could use some coffee,” he admitted.
On the other side, only dark fields.
Two more such ridges, and then they saw it: twin silos, strange and quiet, nearly invisible below their galvanized caps. A farmhouse two stories high, unlit, paintless, or left unpainted so long that its paint had darkened to match the wood. On the far side, a barn. They rattled their way past the farmhouse and descended to a large bald spot beaten flat by tires, not by treads or hooves. The barn was large, corrugated aluminum. One large low window suggested a light somewhere behind it. A little grass fared poorly.
Walter eased the van in, peering up at the alien silos.
Ty drew his breath loudly. “And here come the wolves,” he announced.
East caught his door again. Two dogs came galloping — the footsteps sounded through Walter’s window, and he rolled it up at once — loosed from somewhere, dull teeth flashing as they rounded and reared in the headlights, snarling. They knifed in and spurred back. Vicious and giddy, gang animals doing simple math, two of them, one truck, therefore with an edge. Was something wrong with them? East wondered. They reared and howled at the van, throats open, but made no sound — nothing but the scuffling of their paws on the beaten ground. East cracked his window: not a thing. Dogs without voices. Like in a movie.