They walked together into the spilling white carpeted light of the terminal. People flowing around them. East barely noticed them.
“This was terrible,” Walter said. “I hated it. Hitting the dude. But I’m glad you were there. It wouldn’t have gone on without you.”
“I know,” East said.
“We did it,” Walter said. “I got to go.”
“Be careful.”
“I will.” Walter slapped East’s shoulder. “Love you, man.”
He slapped Walter back and started walking. He burped; it came up raw, bitter. Love you, man. He didn’t love Walter, and he didn’t say shit like that. He made sure of the bills in his pocket and he looped the luggage tag with the number through the hole in Martha Jefferson’s key. And he made his way out toward the garage. But before he left, he looked back. Walter was in the security line, watching him, his pants sagging already below his belly but the ticket clutched in his hand. East raised a hand and Walter smiled back. There. That much was enough.
He returned to the trash can out front and fetched the greasy white bag he’d stowed. He could feel its contents, the two loose weights inside. The popgun he’d shot Ty with and the other, the Glock that had killed Carver Thompson and his girl. The two guns with history. The third, the Taurus that no one had fired, the clean one, he’d left on his brother, tucked it into his pants at the end. He tightened the bag and clutched it to his hip.
“Can I help you get somewhere?” sounded a voice over his shoulder.
Maybe the airport cop had seen him. Maybe it was taking trash out of the can that had brought him hovering. Maybe it was just the way East looked. Or felt.
“Naw, man,” he drawled without looking. “You can’t help me.” Then he was moving again, off into the garage. He was a bad man now.
—
First he drove south. South was away from the police and the van; it was away from Wisconsin; it was neither here nor there. Farms by the side of the road, naked highways, no trees. Sometimes he glimpsed ghostly barns lost on plains, herds of pigs thwarted behind wire.
His eyes felt caked, sticky, like they’d rolled around in the gutter before he’d popped them back into his face.
Brown signs pointed the way to a state park: picnic, camping, river access. Something in his mind started at the idea of a river — it promised crossing, crashing, the cold water dividing this from that. He turned off the highway down the old, tree-lined road.
A cruiser rolled by. STATE PARK RANGER. Cop of a different color is still a cop.
Then he neared a little farmhouse a quarter mile before the wooden park gate. The old house stood gray and alone on a big swath of forgotten land. Weathered past color, the way the gun barn had been. Weeds the height of a man had grown up all around. Two signs advertised it for sale, but sun had baked their red to pink. They’d been there awhile.
He nosed Mrs. Jefferson’s car in. The drive circled around to the back. He could almost bury the car in these weeds. There was a space beneath a tree where small gray birds dove in and out. Birds so small they might have been babies. He hid the car in the shadows there, tucked the greasy bag under the seat, and watched the birds until he fell asleep.
III: OHIO
16
When he awoke, it was coming out of him like magma, like a volcano, punching a hole through the rock, spilling down his face. The black eye giving forth its flood. The back of the house, the abandoned oil tank, the meadow of weeds, the belly of the tree. A place where people had lived and left. He sobbed until it gave out. But he knew as it did that it had changed nothing. No words, no pictures, no thought. It was just a trick of the muscles, a release of the glands.
His skin grew dry and cold as the car cooled, and it was night when he woke up again.
—
Not afternoon dark but night dark. The stick-on digital clock on Martha Jefferson’s dash read a quarter past eight. So he’d been asleep for six hours.
Not a night’s worth, but a good sleep. He hadn’t had a night’s sleep since they’d left The Boxes on Tuesday.
If he was right, it was now Friday night.
He stood and pissed into the roots of the tree. A choir of small voices chirruped in the darkness. Something moved, and he startled. Wind. Weeds and wind. The back of the house, nobody’s house.
He waited outside.
—
The car was old but well kept, well tuned. It rolled smoothly on the polished, rolling, back roads. Like the van, it was better than it looked. East filled the tank at a station where two empty roads crossed, each road a story lit by the station’s glow. He wiped grime off Martha Jefferson’s windshield and dried the runoff with a paper towel.
He was sorry to do the old lady wrong. But he wasn’t going back to Des Moines, Iowa — to the airport or anywhere else. That lady had had a good look at him; she had heard him sleep. She had his measure. There was no guessing the things she knew about him, or what Walter had said while he snored. It was not impossible that after everything, Martha Jefferson would be the one who called him to account, for sleeping in her backseat, for stealing her car away. So he polished her windshield clean, and the cold biscuit sandwich he bought out of the cooler, he ate outside the car — no crumbs, no wrapper.
He switched on her radio, but it was all static. Loath to disturb the station knob where she had it set.
Each time a junction opened the four directions for him, he went away from home. He went east.
He passed signs for Chicago at four o’clock in the morning. For a moment he considered it. Chicago: everyone knew that was a town for gangsters, Michael Jordan’s city, full of people and ways to make money. He had guns to travel by. But the gray-yellow light of the city under the clouds brought back Michael Wilson’s crawling into Vegas. Just a taste.
The billboards advertised everything, promising everything.
The long, steamy reach of the city flanked him for miles, gray factories lit by orange bulbs on his left, huge skeletons of iron that had held trains or loaded boats or moved the road over rivers or launched rockets into the sky.
In Indiana, on a larger road now, he had to stop with other cars at a booth and take a ticket out of a box, like at a parking ramp. He sat still and read it. It was going to cost him four dollars somewhere down the road. Someone behind him honked.
Booth, camera, stolen car. Keep doing what the others do.
Then the last signs of the city dropped away, and he was back in darkness, the highway narrowed down, the starry blocks of houses placed just so behind the trees.
At sunrise he’d reached the end of the state. A gauntlet of booths blocked the road; cameras everywhere now. He pulled in slowly where it said CASH and surrendered his ticket. “Four sixty-five,” the woman said.
He’d barely heard humans speak since he’d left the airport the afternoon before. A sign advertised the last exit before a new toll pike. It was Ohio now. He took the little road south, Highway 49, then again turned east.
About eleven o’clock in the morning, in a small town with a sagging water tower, where the sun had quieted itself behind clouds, he had gone far enough in Mrs. Jefferson’s car. His tank of gas was nearly gone. He had crossed three state lines.
On the main street, he located a little corner police office. Meters out front. He stopped in a space and made sure his money was with him. He took one gun out of the bag, rolled the bag shut on the other, and shared the guns out between his two front pockets. He left the key in the center ashtray and left the car unlocked.