The three boys arranged their shoes by the door.
Dust curled and floated above the candles. Fin sat waiting, like a schoolteacher. When he spoke, it was with an ominous softness.
“What happened?”
Sidney answered, grievous, wheezing. “No warning, man. Paying a whole crew of boys out there. When the time came, no one made a call. Didn’t shout, didn’t do shit.”
“I did call you,” East protested.
“When there was police already banging on the door.”
So Sidney was here to saw him off.
“Why didn’t they call?” Fin said it quietly, amused, almost as if he were asking himself.
Sidney jostled East forward unnecessarily. This meant him: this was his why.
“There was a lot going on,” East began.
Fin, quizzicaclass="underline" “A lot?”
“Fire trucks. House fire,” East said. “Lots of noise. The ends — Needle, Dap — maybe that’s what they was thinking: police going to the fire. Maybe. I mean, I ain’t spoken to them yet, so I can’t say.”
“I think your boys know to call when they see a police.”
“Oh, yes, they know,” East said. “Oh, yes.”
“And why ain’t you talked to them?”
“Something goes wrong, stay off the phone,” East answered, “like you taught.”
Fin looked from East to Sidney and back.
“Was there a fire for real?”
“I saw smoke. I saw trucks. I didn’t walk and look.”
“Maybe it don’t matter,” said Fin quietly, “but I might like to know.” He gave East a hard look and then veiled his eyes. East felt a beating in his chest like a bird’s wing.
A minute passed before Fin spoke again. “Close every house,” he said. “Tell everybody. Submarine. I don’t want to hear anything. I hate to say it, but people gonna have to look elsewhere a few days.”
“I got it,” said Sidney. “But what are we gonna do?”
“Nothing,” Fin said. “Close my houses down.”
“All right,” said Sidney. “But how is it this little nigger fucked up, and I’m not getting paid? Johnny neither?”
“I taught you to save for a rainy day,” Fin said. “And, Sidney, I taught you not to say that word to me. You know better, so why don’t you step out. You hear me?”
Sidney fell back and grimaced. “I apologize for that,” he said, and he turned to pick up his shoes.
“You too, Johnny. You can go.” Fin sighed. “East, you stay.”
“You want us to wait for him?”
“No,” Fin said. “Go on.”
East stood still, not watching the two boys moving behind him. When the door beeped open and they left, the woman was there, outside, barefoot, waiting. She brought in a tray with two steaming clay cups. She stood mute, and something passed between her and Fin, no words, borne like an electrical charge. Then she placed the tray with the two cups on the empty ottoman.
Quietly she eyed East and then turned and left through the same door. Beep.
—
“How you doing?” Fin said. “Shook up?”
East admitted it. He was aching where he stood. Tightened up more than ever. His knees felt unstrung. “Yeah.”
“Sit.”
East lowered himself to the second ottoman stiffly and sat beside the steaming tray in the dusky room. Fin spread his shoulders like a great bird. He moved slowly, top-heavy, as if his head were filled with something weightier than brains and bone.
Fin was East’s father’s brother — not that anyone had ever introduced East to his father. Others knew this; sometimes they resented East for it, the protective benevolence he moved under. But it shaped their world too, the special care that was given him, his house, his crew. When East was a child, Fin had been an occasional presence — not a family presence, like the grandmother whose house held a few Christmases, like the aunt who sometimes showed up in bright, baggy church clothes on Sunday afternoons with sandwiches and fruit in scarred plastic tubs. Fin was a visitor when East’s mother was having hard times: to put a dishwasher in, to fetch East to a doctor when he had an ear infection or one of the crippling fevers he now remembered only dimly. Once Fin took East to the Lakers, good seats near the floor. But East didn’t understand basketball, the spitting buzzers and the hostile rows of white people in chairs, and they’d left long before the game was decided.
But since East had grown, Fin was the quiet man in the background. East had never had to be a runner, a little kid dodging in and out of houses with a lunchbox full of goods or bills. He’d been a down-the-block lookout at ten, a junior on a house crew at twelve. He’d had his own yard for two years, directing and paying boys sometimes older and stronger than he was. Not often in that time had he laid eyes on Fin, but often he’d felt the quiet undertow of his uncle’s blood carrying him deeper into the waves.
Did he want to do this? It didn’t matter: it would provide. Did boys respect him because he could see a street and run a crew more tightly than anyone else, or because he was one of Fin’s favorites? It didn’t matter: either way he had his say, and the boys knew it. Was this a life that he’d be able to ride, or would he be drowned in it like other boys he’d kicked off his gang or seen bloody or dead in the street?
It didn’t matter.
—
“Try it,” Fin said.
East touched a cup, and his hand reared back. He was not used to hot drinks.
“Not ready yet?” Fin reached for his cup and drank soundlessly. The steam rose thick in the air. “Now tell me again why that girl got shot.”
East saw her again, her face sideways on the street. Those stubborn eyes. He could still see them. “I tried,” he said, and then his voice slipped away, and he had to swallow hard to get it back. He stared at the tea, the steam kicking up.
“I tried to make her go away,” East said. “She been down the street all weekend playing ball and just came up that minute. Then the police. You couldn’t tell her nothing.”
“I see. Just her bad luck, then. Her bad timing.”
“She was from Mississippi.”
Fin sat and looked at East a long time.
“You know that girl hurts me more than the house,” Fin said. “We got houses. We can move. Every time we move a house, we bring along the old and we pick up the new. It’s that girl that costs us. It’s that girl that goes down on my account.”
“I know.”
“She died.”
East swallowed. “I know,” he said.
Fin agitated his cup and stared down into it. “Get up and lock that door,” he said. “I don’t want nobody walking in on us, what happens next.”
East stood. He stumbled in the carpet’s pile. The lock was a push-button, nothing more. East pressed it gently.
Fin’s dark eyes followed him back to the cushion.
“So you’re free now. Had a house. Had a job. Lost the house. Lost the job.”
East hung his head, but Fin waited on him to say something. “Yes, sir.”
“You wondering what comes next?” Fin smacked his lips. “Because maybe nothing comes next. Maybe you should take some time.”
Take some time, East thought. What they said when they didn’t want you anymore.
“There is something you might do for me,” Fin said. “You can say yes or no. But it’s quiet. We won’t talk about it. Not now, next year, not ever. You keep it till you die.”
East nodded. “I can keep quiet.”
“I know. I know you can,” Fin said. “So: I want you to go on a drive. At the end of that drive, I want you to do something.” He curled a foot up and pulled on it. Fluid joints, a slow movement. “Murder a man.”