“You want us to stay back here?” East said.
“Yeah, let me look. Then I’ll let you in.”
“All right.” East and Walter braced Ty’s thighs as he wormed in in midair. His body seesawed, and his hips disappeared over the sill. Then the pair of headlights swung into the driveway.
13
There would be a few more seconds where the car would be running, seconds where they might not be heard. East had Ty’s legs in his hands. Ty was still pulling, wriggling in.
“We got to pull you out,” East whispered fiercely through the window, past his brother’s body.
“What? No!”
“They’re here.”
“I just got in,” Ty cursed.
The pair of lights swung away as the car picked its way up the driveway. Then they stabbed again across the open A of the house. The lights bounced off the countertops, the faucet. Then the car stopped — it was something new, little high-intensity bulbs — and the lights were doused.
“Now,” said East, and he caught Ty’s hand and hauled him back, up over the countertop and out the window. Ty’s head bounced on the silclass="underline" “Ow, ow, ow, ow,” he complained.
“Shh.”
“The screen. The screen,” said Walter.
“Forget the screen,” East said. He slid the window down and scooped Ty up with him. They scuttled into the pines together. This little square of a yard, the house lights would fill entirely.
“Where my shoes at?” Ty whispered furiously.
“Shh,” East replied.
The doors of the little car popped open. Two people got out: a full-grown man on the driver’s side. Someone else on the other.
“What we got, a girlfriend?” said Walter.
Ty watched intently.
East picked up a pine bough, the needles dry and brittle but still arrayed. He held it over his face, peering through it. The man was coming to the house, thumbing through keys.
He stopped, the man, at the front door and caused an overhead light to come on. They could see him — large, a black man. East wondered: Our black man? The man opened the door and moved through the open space to the kitchen. On the counter he laid a satchel or briefcase. The lights he switched on there were furious, bright, paint-store white: yes. They threw a glare that filled the yard, that counted the trees. East flinched at it.
Were they covered? Deep enough? That last-second dilemma of hide-and-seek: Could you find a better place? Or did moving expose you now?
Slowly the man stepped back out of the kitchen, into one of the sides of the house, soundless — like watching TV with the mute on. Into the kitchen next came the girl. East watched her reach up. She took a cup down from a cabinet and a plastic jug of water from somewhere below and poured a drink.
Dark. Black dark. Hard to make out her features or her age.
“No water,” Ty said. “They’re just camping out here, man.”
“Was that him?” Walter said. “East?”
East stared until his forehead hurt. “I’m not sure yet.”
“Best make sure,” said Ty. “If I shoot, he ain’t coming back.”
Madly East tried to flip through the pictures in the back of his mind. To see again what Johnny had shown them that morning. He could bring up the man’s suit, his heft. Could remember nothing of his face.
Silently the man and girl moved around the lighted house, specimens in a box. So blindingly bright. East felt his stomach begin to knot.
“Just knock,” Ty muttered. “If he answers, ask is he the judge we’re here to shoot.”
“What about the girl?” whispered Walter.
“Don’t shoot her,” said East.
“She ain’t a target,” Ty said, “but she better not fuck with me.”
“That’s cold,” Walter said, “shooting the dude in front of her. Because he looks like, you know — her dad.”
Ty didn’t say anything. East held the fallen bough close. The dry needles prickled across his cheeks.
“You decided yet?” said Ty impatiently.
The neighbors’ houses were distant, dull shapes. The stars wheeled above them, forgotten. East chewed a pine needle. Strange, bitter, sweet, like orange peel somehow. His eyes tightened on the blaring light.
The girl accelerated things. Two people there: one person you had to peel away. To ignore, to not shoot. But that’s how it worked. You thought you had the rhythm, that your pace was the world’s pace. Then someone busted a move. Someone drove up in a fleet of black-and-whites and disrupted. Someone opened a door. The world would have its way with you. You and your plan. There was only that lesson to learn.
You could pretend that it would not, that all your breathing and all your insulation would protect you. Ask Michael Jackson. Ask anyone in LA. Earthquakes rattled up out of nowhere. No radar, nobody yelling Incoming, no warning text on your phone. Only the house jangling, things falling off the wall. East was fifteen. He’d never been through a big one.
Stop. Stop it, he told himself.
He spat out the pine needle and began creeping, moving left along the line of woods around the house. The thrown light was as bright as a ball field: he had to stay well clear. Dark clothes, dark shoes, dark branch, dark skin. One night Sony had brought along his sister’s astronomy book from school — she went to a special all-girl science school she had to ride an hour to get to — and they observed the stars they couldn’t see in the LA sky, they studied the words that weren’t used in The Boxes.
Albedo. Can a body throw back light. It might have been the last word he’d ever learned. East’s albedo was near zero. Not much bounced back off him.
He’d been tracking toward the front of the house, but then the man appeared again at the back, in the kitchen. He lit a match, got the pilot going on the stove. He poured water from a bottle into a silver kettle and set it down. The light over his head drowned his face in shadows. Graying hair. Maybe fifty. Solid, thick shoulders. He washed and dried the girl’s cup.
East stopped and sighted through the bedroom windows. Through one he could see the girl stepping into a bathroom on the other side. Light spilled into the hallway, then the door narrowed and snuffed it out.
Give me a minute, he’d told Ty. Because from what he saw, he could tell nothing, could conclude nothing.
Then the man was moving again, stepping to the front door. East watched him flicker past one window, then the next. At the front door he rummaged in his pockets. Where was Ty now? Ty was waiting. Waiting on him.
The man couldn’t find his keys. He stopped, retraced his path. Back to the kitchen. He reached, took the keys from the countertop.
The stripe of light at the bathroom opened again, and the girl stepped out. She went to the kitchen. Turned the tap, but the faucet gave no water. She reached again for the gallon jug, then the just-washed cup. As she poured the cup full again, she looked out the window, and East saw her eyes. Her face swam, seemed to look at him sideways. The face was the Jackson girl’s face. The one he’d watched die. He caught his breath and looked away for a moment.
Yes. Just the girl, just the man. Nothing more.
Where was the man now? He’d come out the front. He was at the car! In the open air, away from her. Keys in his hand, even. East peered back along the trees’ edge, but Ty and Walter weren’t there where they’d been. Everyone was moving now: without anyone saying Go, it was happening. East slipped left, farther toward the front, past the bedrooms, past the short brown stockade around the air conditioner. One lone pine stabbed up out of the earth, away from its pack. Then he was near the black truck and the car — a little Volvo wagon, snub-nosed, Illinois plates.