“See if you can put your trash in here. Be cool with it.”
Walter emptied his pockets on the bench beside him: granola bars, van key, the money in a clip, paper napkins clean and used. He covered his pocket with a napkin and fished the gun out into it. Into the bag it went. East crumpled the bag and took it back, tucking it into a corner of the trash can, just so.
“Feel better now?” said Walter, up on his feet.
“No.”
Walter frowned. Disappointment, maybe. What mattered to Walter, East saw, was solving problems. Inventing. Wasn’t anything in East’s stomach that Walter could solve.
A police car went by, white cop, black glasses, who knew what he was looking at. Airport security. Passed without slowing.
East’s mind hurt and he could see only a part of it: the part that was made up. Nothing in him wanted a plane. He didn’t trust it. Or maybe he didn’t trust himself. Sick, tired, out of control. That person he’d always reined in, in himself or others — noisy, violent, fractious — he felt behind him, or just beside him, or attached, like a shadow. Outside him, maybe, but double. Visible.
He’d never been on a plane. But all he knew about them — the getting on, the staying put, the thousand people packed together — was not going to happen today.
“I’m gonna make it on the ground, man,” East declared. “You take your plane if you want to. If you think it’s safe.”
Walter said, “Really?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s safe. I mean, this way,” Walter said, and he could not help looking guilty. “For me. Nobody saw me, man. In Wisconsin, because I was running behind. Or with Ty, because I stayed in the van. They just saw you.”
East toed at a spot on the pavement. “All right.”
“I mean—” said Walter, then gave out.
“Come on,” East said. He wanted to be done with it, finally alone. “Let’s see how it goes.”
—
He observed the line to the counter from a bench some distance away. What happened at the gate was out of his hands. He liked Walter. Walter was handy in ways he’d never imagined being. But there wasn’t anything he could do for Walter. Across the country they’d come together — a team. A crew, right? Now scattered to the wind. They’d put bullets in the right guy — finished the job. But all East felt was beaten. That’s what it cost. The week was a wound he hadn’t even steeled himself to look at yet. Yet he felt it bleed.
He had a hundred dollars in his pocket. Walter had the rest. He was thinking about that thin hundred and the little clutch of ATM cards he hid under the block of wood in his bedroom, that he’d agreed not to bring, that he’d hidden away so he could follow Fin’s rules. He wondered about the home Walter had, that steady place with a computer and a library, maybe a piano or a cat, and the people he had there. Who would be in LA when he got back, or when he didn’t? Who might be wondering where he was right now and, if Walter got taken down at the counter, or at the gate, or pulled off the plane, would wish they were here where he was sitting right now, watching Walter make his mistake, watching him crawl up to the backlit ticket counter with his teacher’s-pet grin and his pocketful of twenties? Overconfident. Or maybe just lucky.
Rather be lucky than good, people said. East felt neither.
What East had — the house in The Boxes, a crew, the everyday job with Fin’s gang, and Fin himself, maybe even his place under the office building, and Ty, whatever Ty had meant at the end of that invisible gravity that bound them unhappily to each other across the blocks and years — all that was gone. All defunct. The streets would be there, and the business, and he was skilled. But he was known too, one of Fin’s. Even if he caught on with another outfit, he’d be secondhand, a refugee. Never a citizen. Nothing he’d ever done with Fin would make way for him.
He’d start again from the bottom, like a kid ten years old.
Watching the ticket counter in Des Moines, he thought of LA, the smell of the steady flowers mixed with the smell of sun and desert and cars and food frying. The people he knew, the ghost that was his mother, the guys who had scattered. None of it was anything he’d buy a plane ticket back to today.
That was the business, and the business was closed.
Walter’s agent was a young man, thin, a thin moustache, a face without fat on it. East could see that the man didn’t think much of Walter — fat, black, wrinkled clothes smelling of nights and days. Raggedly cheerful. All his brilliance invisible inside. The agent listened, his lips pursed on the edge of a grimace. Tapping his screen, asking, checking the license, asking again. Soundless from here. Eyebrows working like two small animals.
A moment passed when he was hoping the man would reject Walter. Would stop him dead at the counter, would take him down. So East could retrieve the guns. So East could blow holes right through the ticket agent, renounce himself. Throw everything down in an avenging storm.
He shook his head to clear it. A printed document came over the counter. Walter nodded again. And he stepped clear.
Are we gonna get caught? he had asked Walter.
The fat boy hitched his pants on one side and sauntered back to East, incautious, a little proud of himself.
“How much it cost?” East said.
“Man.” Walter whistled. “Three hundred and some. A lot. You buy at the last minute, they get you.”
Grimly East remarked, “We got to plan ahead next time.”
“There’s one person,” Walter said. “That girl at the doughnut shop. She saw us both. She saw us get into the car. She knew Martha Jefferson, knew she was going to the airport. If they asked her about us, man, she could trip us up.”
“But you got your ticket,” East said. Beyond considering possibilities. “You’re gonna go anyway.”
“I’m really gonna go,” Walter said. “Let’s find someplace to talk. I got to be at the gate in twenty minutes.”
—
They sat apart in bathroom stalls, trying to purge, then huddled together at the sinks. Around them the businessmen cast down their eyes, wet their hands in the basins. Walter slipped East a wrinkled wad of bills. East counted it out. Seventy-one dollars.
“You take it,” Walter said. “Give me back a twenty I can show. Get me on a bus or whatever. Get me home.”
East fed him back a twenty. Now a hundred and fifty-one dollars was his stake in the world.
“Here,” Walter said. He gave East a slip of paper from the airline counter. A suitcase tag, a 310 number on it and an elasticized string. “Give me till tonight, man. Then call me. I’ll take care of you, man. I swear it.”
East laughed hoarsely. “You gonna take care of me? Really?”
Walter stammered. “East. Why I’d wrong you? I mean, you’re a bad man now, right?”
East lowered his head.
“You tell me where you’re at. Town and address. I can buy you a ticket: plane, train, whatever you want. I can rent you a car. I can wire you money. I can probably find you a house to crash in.”
“All right,” East said. “I know it. We better ditch these van keys.”
“Oh shit. You’re right,” Walter said. He grabbed a series of paper towels from the wall, dried his hands, and they wrapped the two keys up in them. Tossed it out.
“What happens to that trash?”
“They burn it. Some incinerator somewhere. They’ll wind up in the ashes. But nobody ever looks at that shit,” Walter said. “Whyn’t we get out of this bathroom? I’m tired of the smell in here.” Suddenly he was smiling, lighter. “E, man. We finished it.”