For a moment he felt a panic. Was this an error, giving the car up? Walking out again into the winter?
One-hour parking. It would be found.
Ty would have pulled it behind a building and set it ablaze.
Quietly he dropped a quarter into the meter and walked away.
17
Out of town he walked on tipped, sunken sidewalks, passing bacon-smelling restaurants and used-car lots laid out precisely, wheel facing wheel, headlights polished and aligned, everything eyeing everything else.
In a low gray midday, the windows of the buildings were mirrors, glass glaring back, insides invisible. The lots lay squared and similar, and seams and borders separated every this from every that. A fence, a rail, a line of grass or littered shrubs like the alley where they’d waited for Martha Jefferson. Or just a line of curb coated in tar. Each place marked the line between this and that, here and there. Each one he passed ticked off the passing from then to now.
He heard the motor first; then tires scratched the pavement behind and stopped at his heel. Little fat-tire police car with the windows rolled down. A moustache, bristling.
“How you doing this morning?”
East stopped. Helplessly he imagined the parking meter — it had to be still ticking. Not that. An age of dealing with cops had taught him what not to do.
“Fine,” he mumbled.
“Going anywhere special?”
“Just a walk.”
The cop looked skeptical and East squeezed his shoulders together, mute.
“Know anybody in this town?” the cop added. They asked a question, then stared into you like a fishing hole, like sooner or later the truth would swim up.
“Not really.” East stood still, hands down in his pockets, where now there was only a small fold of bills and the bent California shapes of some guns.
The police radio burped and whistled. The cop glanced at it, then stilled it with a hand.
East gazed down the road and said, “You got what you need?”
The moustache stared through him. Like a gaze you could actually feel, could round on if you wanted to sleep tonight on a concrete floor.
“You take it easy,” the cop said. Not a farewell. An instruction.
East volunteered nothing. Behind him the engine flared. The tires didn’t crawl but cut a hard U-turn. So somebody had sent the cop out just to take a look at him.
The town smelled like corn cooked too long. Up the road, the two-lane broadened out as it sped up — flat shoulders spreading, cars at fifty or sixty, tossing up black grit and cinder tornadoes that bit his ears. He burrowed down in his sweater. No trees to hide behind, no woods line to trace — this would be straight country walking. Out where anyone could see.
A mile of level fields. Stalks sawed into splintered bits, scraps of wind-trash bright in the ruts. He heard Michael Wilson’s laughing voice: Country.
A sign said it was four miles to the next town.
—
At a junction gas station kept by a teenage girl, he bought a long sub sandwich and a stocking cap. The caps said BROWNS and came in two colors, orange and brown. He chose brown. He chose ham. Inside him, his stomach was a drifting ship. But he should eat. He knew that.
By the door, as the nervous girl prepared his sandwich, a map with a yellow tape arrow showed YOU ARE HERE. No Wisconsin, no Iowa, none of those places on a map that meant what they had done. Just this state, just Ohio, the town where the brown car slept somewhere to the west. He didn’t remember the name of the town. He just wanted away. This was running. From the police and from the spinning inside his body, the yaw.
The girl patted his ingredients together through plastic-bag gloves. When he asked for more tomatoes, she took her phone out of her pocket and laid it on the chopping surface, near onion half-moons, within reach. Her movements sharpened: she pressed the sandwich and sliced it with the quick blade, and then she was done with him, everything but the making change.
He knew he must look horrible.
He took his bagged sandwich and used the little restroom. Everything looked like it had sat for years in rusty water. He would have liked to take a shit, but his insides were dry. The fountain, Halsey Taylor, was just a husk.
When he stepped out, the girl was half-hidden in the back room, on her phone. She saw him and disappeared completely. He would have liked a cup of water.
Outside was a picnic table made of concrete with stones inset, under a hard steel umbrella. It was winter-cold, and the umbrella had once been white with a large red logo, but now the red had faded in the sun and was mostly rusted, and the rust had dripped down and begun to stick at the edges of the stones, like cuticles. It was the least comfortable table he’d ever seen, so he ate the sandwich as he walked, shedding bits of food, bouncing them off his trousers and onto the gritty shoulder of the highway.
In the bottom of the bag, a pawful of napkins, maybe twenty. A long slash of orange in the southern gray sky like a headache, like a crack.
The land changed, from flat and open to woods brooding over a series of prone, steplike hills. People here had hollowed out deep spaces — a long drive back from their armored mailboxes to their houses in the trees. Some were big and pointed, full of shapely windows; others were little boxes made of cinder-block. In front of or beside their houses the people here arrayed their cars and pickups and boats, and some kept dogs on leads or in stockades.
On the shoulder where he walked, East felt the eyes of every driver on the road. He would have kept to the woods, but the last thing he needed was some person’s dog latching on.
Here and there he saw a horse or cow. Or raised boxes in a little cloud. Meat smoking, he thought — or something. Then he got a good look and saw one clouded by bees. Bees: one time back when he still went to school, they’d shown a movie about them. Little colonies, getting along, everyone doing for the queen. Some teacher tried to start a hive up on top of the school — got beekeeper suits and everything. But then a boy had been stung fifty times and had gone to the hospital, and that was the end of lessons with bees.
—
He kept walking, getting far from the little town, the little car. That car was the bone that connected him to Iowa. In Iowa, the van was the bone that connected him to Wisconsin. Somewhere the judge and his daughter lay, and somewhere his brother lay, unable to say his name. Bones. Walter and Michael Wilson, on the ground in LA or anywhere. They could be anywhere. Walter would keep it airtight. Michael Wilson: all East could hope was that he stayed out of trouble, stayed free of anything where telling what he knew was something he could bargain with.
He wondered who was watching. Not about the police — of course they were. Of course they looked funny at every step he took. He knew how to walk around the police. Even carrying the gun in his pocket, he didn’t fear being stopped by them.
It wasn’t just the police that worried him. It was the stop he wouldn’t see coming. The little town centers had been swept and were quiet, older white men catching him in their eyes, holding him there a moment: Single skinny black boy walking nowhere. Had a cap on. Enough to remember him by. Enough to provide a description, or to find him again. They said “Hello there,” and East nodded, walked by. Grateful for daylight.
It was on the unswept edges of town that East noticed the litter of the life — the little circles of stamped-down wrappers, abandoned bottles. He veered off his line on the shoulder of the road to look: yes. The vials and pinchies, the little knots of activity, torn-off matchbooks, plastic ice cream spoons scorched half through. Firing up a plastic spoon, he thought, shaking his head. Over in the blacktop refuse and colorful trash that waited outside the border of the lot for nothing, splotches of vomit and the warm, sad smell of piss.