“But right now we need to go,” said East. “Get in.”
—
He found a four-lane road westward and took it. Avoiding going back through town, where people would see them. Neighbors. The wind cut in through the broken side window, swirled through the van, searching. Ty was trying to rig a sling for it with the Ace bandage roll from the first-aid kit. East waited until his breath was steady before he turned around.
“The fuck was that, Ty?”
Ty, working on the window, was serene. “What? You hollering at me now?”
“What happened?”
“What happened?” Ty stopped and glanced forward for only an instant. “Mission accomplished, son.”
“The girl. I told you, don’t shoot the girl. Why don’t you just kill everyone you see?”
Ty said, “Thinking on it.”
East banged the steering wheel. “Just evil. Evil! And those dudes. Run right up where they can see you. Why don’t you just tell them how many people you shot lately?”
Ty paused ironically. “Sure. Say. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we should be subtle. Driving a van with nigger wrote down the side.”
“People can’t see that in the dark,” East snapped.
“People can see whatever they want.”
It was what Ty did. Move East off the subject. Though East couldn’t bear to move back. It was like a furnace behind them, something blinding hot.
Empty dark road before them. No lights or shapes. East fought his eyes — they kept searching the pavement rushing under them. Had to keep looking down the road.
For all the planning, they had nothing now.
“We got any help from here on out?” he asked Walter. “Or are we on our own?”
Walter opened his hands slowly and closed them.
“Ty?”
“You got a car,” Ty said brutally. “You got a gun. Make your way.”
“You got to change cars,” Walter said. “We’re just gonna have to get a new car.”
“Could call Abe,” said East. “See if he can hook us up.”
Said Walter, “No. Listen to me. We’re on our own now.”
A little town was coming up, and East slowed for its speed limits. The van passed through the center of light — a gas station, bright as the vault of a refrigerator, and two late-night girls out pumping gas, brown hair fanned out over their fur hoods. They turned, watched the van roll past, painted words like a banner on the side they could see.
Fuck you niggers.
If nobody knew who they were, still, everyone would remember seeing them. When it came to connecting the dots, everyone would draw lines.
They had most of a tank of gas and a few hours before daylight.
—
Two more towns and East found a gas station with a blue-lit phone on its outskirts. He pulled in. “I’m gonna call,” he said.
“They won’t know anything,” Walter said. A beaten-down quiet in the middle of his voice. “Do what you want,” he conceded.
Ty had gone silent in the back. Sunk back into his bench. Like a monster who rises out of the sea and then submerges.
East climbed out with a handful of quarters and gritted his teeth at the loud sexy recorded lady. Then the bloodless operator who tried to connect.
A red light blinked ceaselessly over an intersection.
He looked back at the van, battered now — they’d smashed the plastic grille trim with something, those kids. Taken out one of the front turn signals. This, he thought. This is what it’s like. It hadn’t been his bullet, but he’d said, It’s him. He’d risked his life to prove it. Get him was going to be the next thing he said, if not for the girl standing there.
He didn’t want to think about the girl right then.
—
“Y’all did it?” Abraham Lincoln said. Surprised. “I mean, the whole deal?” Like nobody had any idea.
Some sort of muttered consultation kept East waiting, looking sideways out of the wind. Finally Abraham Lincoln came back on the line. “Okay, thanks for calling.”
“That’s it?”
A long silence.
“If it makes sense, just go on home,” the voice said.
—
They sat in the lot near the blue pay phone’s glow, a bone-dry wind scraping under the van. It rocked them side to side like a cradle.
Walter sighed. “So we’re here. Making it out is up to us.”
East watched the red eye of the traffic light switch on and off.
“One idea,” Walter continued. “Go on. Find a store, buy some paint and tape, fix the window and the taillight. Paint the van up. Another idea: we ditch the van and get home some other way. Plane. Bus. Whatever. We might not have ticket money for three. But two of us could hole up and one goes home and wires back.”
If he’d brought his ATM cards, East thought. If he hadn’t come clean the way they said but brought something extra. Like Ty did.
“Better idea,” said Ty. “We carjack some bitch and get out of Dodge.”
“I thought about that,” said Walter. “That guarantees us attention, though. That gives them a car to look for, a car to hunt.”
“Got to get rid of this van,” Ty said. “For real. It ought to be burned. Soaked in gas and burned.” He ejected his magazine and reloaded in the dark.
“Let’s not waste time,” East said. “Decide right here. Can you call someone, man, and fix us up some tickets?”
“Today?” said Walter. “Not today, East. We got us a dead man. Federal witness. Three boys getting on a plane. Nobody wants their name on that purchase. And if they figure it out while we’re still in the air, we’re fucked. We’re locked down. You like those chances?”
“We’ll keep on, then,” East said. “Do something about the van before daylight.”
“Not soon enough,” said Ty from the backseat.
“Ty,” said Walter. “Don’t you want to get rid of that gun?”
Ty said, “This gun’s the one thing I got.”
—
Westward they kept on, cutting a corner off Minnesota, then down into Iowa. Roads nobody hurried on, roads where they weren’t expected. Soon the sun would come up. Walter laid his gun on the dashboard, but it kept rattling, sliding around. So East pocketed it.
Fuck you niggers. They carried it with them through a dozen little towns. First the tall, ghostly farmhouses, then the little shops with their new trades hand-painted over the old signs. AUTO BODY, BEEF JERKY, TAXIDERMY, ASISTENCIA CON LOS TAXOS.
The occasional truck in the oncoming lane, pushing its blast of air.
“It’s getting light,” said Walter. “If you see something that’s open, let’s get some paint.”
They rolled by one large discount store in a shopping plaza, a thousand parking spaces deep. The letters were stripped off the concrete façade. Given up for dead.
“I gotta take a leak, man,” said Ty. “Gas station right up here, man, please.”
“You might want to park a way off,” said Walter.
“We need gas anyway,” East observed.
Maybe they’d been lucky. Maybe they should have expected to be stopped long ago. East walked into the little station shop and found a roll of red tape for broken taillights. FOR TEMPORARY USE, the package said. The cashier wore a red sweater the color of Christmas and a strange thing on her head. It appeared to be a pair of stuffed antlers. She was a big lady, big diamond ring, somebody’s mom.
“You got any paint?”
The lady shook her head. “The new ordinance.”
“What new ordinance?”
“When certain people,” she said loudly, as if it were a rehearsed speech, “spray paint all over the middle school? They won’t find it quite so easy next time.”