Big windows cut either side of the door, and no flag.
“Big house,” East said. One little sport truck out in front, black.
“These are vacation homes,” said Walter. “Big and empty. By the way, shouldn’t you wake your brother up? He might want to see it.”
East peered back, tried to see Ty. “Naw. Let him sleep.”
Two women approached, jogging down the road. In their fifties, wearing thin fleeces and mittens with reflectors. They raised hands at the crawling van, and Walter raised two fingers back. A natural.
No yards full of dogs. No high decks nearby with neighbors looking out over the trees. East’s eyes ran a check automatically.
“Phone wires come in there,” said Walter. “Pole behind the house, lines in on the back to both houses. We could take them out.”
“Why? They got cells.”
“But do they get a signal out here? Negative bars,” Walter giggled.
East grunted, eyes on the woods. A tire-track path led back into the woods behind the row of houses that included 445. “You could park the van and walk up on that, get in from the back.”
“Watch out for badgers,” Walter said.
They looped back around the lake and headed into town. Found the police station, small, tucked behind the firehouse. Two black-and-whites in the lot and one unmarked, a little white SUV with good cop tires and a winch. Good to know.
“I got to sleep, man,” said Walter. “I keep thinking I’m gonna throw up.”
“All right,” East said. His exhaustion had begun crashing down.
Walter put them back on the highway, the pines ever closer and closer around them, and cruised up until they found the next little village with its lake. It was smaller, this lake, the banks rough and muddy, the public lot an old reach of concrete leading down to some crumbling boat ramps. The homes along the shore had once been vacation homes, but the people living in them were no longer vacation people. Broken chairs and propane tanks in the yard, small sedans turning the color of dirt.
“We found the ghetto lake,” East remarked.
“The people’s lake,” insisted Walter. “You think it’s safe?”
“We got guns.”
Walter laughed and set the parking brake. The whole lot banked downward to the shallow, dark beach.
“Your brother,” said Walter, “that boy can sleep through anything.”
“I’m full awake, son,” Ty spoke up.
“Better sleep,” admonished East. “We gonna need to be awake and available later on.”
“Oh, I will be.”
They closed their eyes on the bright, final day.
11
East slept like a drowned man. One time a pair of kids ran by with fishing lines, disturbing him. Their footsteps and yelling: his tongue in his mouth felt hard and lost. He remembered something people said: Never eat a fish so sick you could catch it.
That was The Boxes. Who knew what kids caught out here?
Walter had moved back to the middle bench. East curled up in the shotgun seat. He closed his eyes again. Sleeping without cover wasn’t as hard as he feared. Maybe there was something different here, out of the city.
Or maybe he’d just given up on peaceful sleep.
—
Later the sun crossed behind the pines, and now their jagged shadows lay on the icy water. Three metallic knocks sounded nearby.
East raised his head. It was a red-haired kid outside, seventeen or eighteen, maybe, his face as flat and empty as a dinner plate, a young moustache that looked just combed. And he was rapping on the window with a pistol.
“Open up.” A cop? East’s mouth was sour. He cranked down the window partway and said, “What?”
“Right now,” the red-haired kid said hurriedly, “you’re gonna need to give me your fucking money.”
East squeezed his face and yawned. “Hello,” he said. “You see we’re asleep?”
“Wake up,” ordered the red-haired kid. He might have been a year or two older than East. His moustache was brave, hairs ranging from orange to fishy white. He tapped the window with the gun barrel once more. Punctuation. Like a schoolteacher, East thought.
“Man,” East yawned. “I don’t want to make you sad. But everyone up in this van got a bigger gun than you, dig? The more people I wake up, the more people gonna be shooting at you.”
From underneath the pale moustache came “Bullshit.”
East considered this. A kid was gonna do what he wanted. It wasn’t your job to change his mind.
“I’m gonna give you five dollars,” he offered, “and you go away. Or else I’m gonna wake everyone in this van up, and then you in some shit.”
“Fuck that,” the moustache said.
“Whatever you decide,” said East. “You woke me, man. Only reason I’m not shooting you right now is I need you to go tell all your friends to let me rest.”
The redheaded boy scratched his face with the barrel of his gun, then pointed it here and there, disheartened, as if picking out a substitute target.
“Here,” said East. He rummaged around in his pockets. Nope: most of his roll was with the gun money Ty had retrieved. He had a ten and three ones left.
“You got change for this?” he said, holding the ten up behind the window.
The redhead squinted. “No, I ain’t got change.”
“Then you can have these,” said East, offering the ones instead. “I ain’t trying to scant you, man, but I need this money worse than you do, so.”
This kid. East saw that bored excitement in his eyes. Every neighborhood had a few of these.
The redheaded boy put the gun away in the gut pocket of his sweatshirt. He reached up to take the ones. East held on tight to make a point.
“If I see you again,” he warned, “I’m gonna shoot you in the stomach, man, first thing. Right in the stomach. Nine millimeter. You might live. It will hurt, though. It will change your life.”
“Okay,” said the boy, and East let the dollars go.
“Be cool, gunner,” he said, and rolled up the window.
East watched the boy pocket the three dollars and go, walking off past a playground, where he gave each empty swing a frustrated shove. Soon the pines swallowed him. East closed his eyes.
But he couldn’t go back to sleep. It wasn’t smart, staying here. It wasn’t The Boxes. No home-field advantage. Chances were that Gunner wasn’t coming back, coming with ten or fifteen friends, all packing. Chance was that Gunner had his three dollars and was done for the day. But you could be wrong about that.
You could be wrong about anything.
He moved over to the driver’s seat and ran the van slowly, gently, another mile up the road, finding a place to park it in the back of a Lutheran church. A group of boys and girls were holding a mad-scramble basketball game fifty yards away. Four adults — parents, maybe, or ministers, whatever, it didn’t matter — stood with coffee and watched the battle. East parked the van in among their Fords, their Hondas. He would accept their company gratefully for an hour or two.
—
Thicker clouds, dull sun. Since late morning they’d slept. Six hours. Not a whole night. But it would focus them, East thought, let them work in the dark. Tonight’s dark. On the middle bench, Walter was still knocked out, whistling and wheezing.
Then he realized with a punch: no head in the backseat, no knees or feet propped. Ty was gone.