East looked away then. He paid for the tape.
“Thank you anyway, ma’am,” he said, his best manners.
The lady put the tape in a useless plastic bag. “You’re welcome, hon.”
Outside, the only person was Ty, standing in the cold in his socks. It was as if the cold and the van had driven something into him, because his eyes were big, and he quivered slightly, the way a cat does watching a yard mouse. The moment East saw him, Ty took the gun out. A car was pulling in, a low white sedan, Infiniti. Ty stepped right into its path and brought the gun up.
The tires chirped, and the sedan stopped short.
What? thought East. Helplessly. For, he saw now, agreeing on a plan, he and Walter, meant nothing to Ty.
Nothing he said or did meant anything in Ty’s mad story of the world.
He wanted to deny it, to return to the starting block and start over. No. In the station’s noisy light, the Glock was a dark fact. The runners weren’t stopping. Ty circled, taking aim on the driver, hollering, “Man! Get the fuck out the car!”
14
The boy wearing dirty socks yanked the driver out of the car. He thrust the gun against the man’s face until the man was up against the pumps, teetering.
“What are you doing, man?” the older boy demanded, one eye a bruise, the other wild.
The younger boy ducked inside the car to look. No wife. No babies. Just this early businessman in his buttons and tie. Unlucky. The boy popped the trunk release and stood up. He gestured with the gun arm. “Get in the trunk.”
A gold tie. Gold with a pattern of bright blue pearls.
“Oh, no,” the man said. Low and collected, even indignant. “I’m not going in there.”
“Give me the keys,” said the younger boy, “and get in.” He leveled the gun again.
“No,” gulped the man. He appealed to the taller boy, to the cashier inside, with his eyes, one raised hand.
The younger boy raised the gun up and shot one hole through the canopy. The echo bounced down, metallic.
“We can’t do it like this,” the older boy said. “It’s crazy. You need to chill out. We can’t come with you like this.”
“Think I need you?” said the younger one. “You ain’t fit for nothing but standing yard.” To the man he said, “I’m a say it just once. To me you’re just one more bullet.”
The older boy thrust in then between the young one and his prey and shoved, made the gunner bounce off the car, nearly fall. The younger one found his footing and turned. The businessman pressed himself hard behind the gas pump.
“Oh,” said the younger one. “So now we see.”
He raised his gun, and the older boy, a gun in his hand though it hadn’t been there until then, shot the younger in the chest. The younger boy uttered a short cry, and he fell. In a flash the older boy was on him, pinning the arm and taking the gun, rifling the pockets, taking a cache of bullets bunched carefully in a greasy wrapping. Opening the boy’s pants and taking a fold of twenties out of the vent in the underwear. As if he’d known it would be there. He stood again and shut his eyes.
“Jesus,” prayed the businessman. “Sweet Jesus.”
“Shut up,” the older boy said. He turned. Then something overtook him. He bent over the young boy’s body, put something back inside the boy’s pants. He buttoned them and stood again, looking down. The boy on the ground opened his mouth, rolled his head back. The muscles of his neck quivered in the night glare.
A fat boy in a van behind sat stricken at the wheel.
In the floodlights’ glare, the older boy’s face was a mask, angles of hardening bone, the eyes shadowy holes. He faced the man with the golden tie. “Run, God damn you,” he said.
“Sweet Jesus,” the businessman pleaded. In the station the woman with an antler headdress held her phone and stared, holding, holding.
15
Walter sobbed. “I seen it,” he blubbered. “I seen there wasn’t nothing but this. We knew you would.”
“We who?”
“Me and Michael,” said Walter. “We knew it was gonna happen like this. Mike, he says, one of these brothers gonna kill the other. I thought he was joking. I said, that’s bad news for Easy. And he said, naw, my money’s on East.”
“Bullshit,” East said. “You making it up. Like everything.”
“No,” wept Walter. “It don’t matter.”
East chewed his lip.
“I’m sorry, man,” Walter sobbed. “I saw it coming. I told myself, no, I couldn’t do nothing. I didn’t get out the van. I couldn’t do nothing. I couldn’t stop you.”
“Stop me?” East said. “Ty’s the one out of control.”
“You the one who shot him. Who was cold to him the whole way.”
“I’m not cold to him.”
“You were,” Walter insisted.
East raced through the dark, dread like two hard hands working his guts, reshaping them, remaking his body. He felt every poke, every lump of food inside him, every stone on the road coming up from the tires to his seat. His road-shocked mind could not even keep time.
He had run from police before: standing yard, after fights, after hurling stones at the windows of stores, hoping something would break. Flight, they called it. One part fear, one part the blindest excitement you’d ever known. It freed you from time, from who you were or the matter of what you’d done. You darted, like a fish away from a net, like a dog outrunning a dogcatcher.
No flashing lights behind them. But no time either to think of his brother, or the other two, knocked down along their trail. And Walter’s grief was unending: his brother’s stoniness, just taking other form.
“I’m sorry,” he said once. But this just started Walter sobbing again.
None of us were perfect, East thought.
“Do you think I killed him?”
“You shot him in the chest, East.”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” Walter said, “that’s how you kill people.”
—
Once, when Ty was about six, East had been sent to enforce his mother’s word. Back then their mother’s bedroom was sunlit and clean and the TV sat small and quiet in a corner — later, it took over the whole apartment. It was time for the TV to be off, their mother said, and Ty wouldn’t turn it off—SpongeBob or something. So East turned off the TV for him. Ty jumped up and hit him and turned it back on. East repeated their mother’s warning and pulled the plug out of the wall. Ty threw the remote and hit East in the head. When East got back from checking his head in the mirror, was he cut, the TV was back on. Louder than ever. East picked up Ty and locked them both out of the bedroom. He caught hell for it — that old broken lock, if you locked yourself out, the only way back in was to take the door off the hinges.
He toted his brother like a laundry sack, one arm locked around his chest and the other around his hips. Ty caught the hand that had him at the collarbone and bit the fourth finger of East’s left hand as hard as he could. First East screamed in anger and shock — it didn’t really hurt yet. Screaming stopped things: startled them, embarrassed them, gave them satisfaction. With Ty it only stilled East so that his teeth could get a better grip. That was when it began to hurt. East had stopped screaming to begin to fight his brother then — put him down, free his arms up, begin wrestling himself out of a set of teeth that only clamped on tighter. That was when he began to imagine simply living as a sort of undying battle. Sometimes in the right kind of light, he could still see the indentations — the chain of little tooth marks circling — in the brown of his skin.