Right out on the edge of the main road they were doing it. It was these people he needed to avoid. He had had plenty of friends who’d used, who’d become deep U’s before they were teenagers. He could resist them. But he had no friends out here. He wondered how young they would be.
—
The old lady’s face returned to him, her pointed voice, and he heard her talking to Walter as he walked in the cold. He saw her looking at him. Or sometimes it was the face of the Jackson girl, leaking blood and going to sleep on the street, or the screaming mouth of the girl in Wisconsin. Her body, under the toppled suitcase. All of it inside him now, screaming to get out. Everything.
Another mile, he thought. Another mile.
As he passed a gas station, two men asked did he need a ride. He looked up, but then one was talking to the other, even though they were both looking at him. Two of them, one of him. He put his head down.
His sense of the direction was partial. But the winter sun kept slipping to the right. Soon he could walk under the cover of darkness.
A while after every intersection, the highway sign said EAST. So he kept on.
—
Inside he was used up, but his body pleased him, as if it were a specimen he were observing. Even after hours of walking, his body was light. When it rained lightly, the rain did not chill. He breathed it, absorbed it with his skin; it sated him, and the wind dried what it left in his sweater. The wind pushed him. His legs, so soft after driving, came back warm and good and hard. When he bent to retie a shoe, they quivered like engines idling.
How long he had walked he had no idea. It grew dark and colder, and he would have to decide. It was going to get a lot colder. He could see the plants shrinking, small plumes from chimneys. A regret hit him: couldn’t he have driven the car one more day? Couldn’t he have driven this all in an hour?
No. He had to keep telling himself. The car, he’d had to leave it behind.
By now it had a ticket. By now it was in the computer. Unless it was Sunday and the meters weren’t enforced. This too he wondered about. He forgot what day it was.
—
Signs promised the next little town a mile out — churches, Neighborhood Watch, a billboard for a Chevy pickup built in America. The trees walled off the neighborhoods from the last ruined fields. The first liquor store, just outside the line. The streetlights began just beyond it, windowpane-yellow under the trees.
As he walked past houses again, his body came back into focus, took on color and shape. People crossed the street — walking together, older, twenty, dressed loosely or lightly, jackets open or sweaters and scarves. Dressed to walk outside but not for long, drinking from paper cups in the cold, disappearing into houses or coming out, holding hands, worrying, laughing. East stared at the big old houses with flags and open windows, even in the cold. At last a large stone sign the size of a bedroom wall announced it: it was a college. These were students, like Michael Wilson once was.
He couldn’t stop looking. The way they walked — they met and bunched on the sidewalk, sat on the porches. They crossed the highway carelessly, and cars slowed for them. So sure of their world.
He broke from the road and followed a group of six that was cutting across a parking lot. Shiny sedans like he hadn’t seen since they’d left LA: Volkswagens, Acuras, Hondas, Hondas, Hondas. Two students split off toward a building with a hundred long, lighted windows. East stuck behind the larger group. Three boys and a girl. They crossed between buildings and across a green field. Like kids rambling a neighborhood. At last they approached a large squarish building. East caught up and followed them in. A gymnasium: a desk said ALL VISITORS MUST SHOW ID, but the boy at the desk was on his phone. East ignored him as the others had, and the boy never looked up.
Inside, the four students turned left into a noisy arena: girls playing volleyball under blue-white lights. East followed the polished hallway. He knew what he wanted: MEN’S LOCKER ROOM. Inside, on a toilet, he sat and waited until he stirred inside, that ship, that load, until he could rid himself of it. Then he followed the sound to the showers — quiet lights, two older men cleaning off, pump tubs of soap and shampoo on the wall.
He opened an empty locker and stripped off. He hung the pants with the two guns gingerly. If someone were to find it now. Well, if someone were to find it ever.
But his money he drew out and took with him into the showers.
The tiles, square and divided by the lines of white grout, rectangles from here to forever, were gritty under his feet. That was his feet’s grit. His body was caked with it, the grime of a week, all the way back to The Boxes. His body reddened in the scalding water and hurt the same inside and out, softening like meat under a hammer. He kept his head in the stream and tried to wash it clear.
—
In one locker, a forgotten pair of clean socks. A worn red T-shirt lay atop a locker. It had a dusting of sawdust, but that shook out. The breast read CHAMPION.
He wadded up the last bitter Dodgers T-shirt and stuffed it into the trash. Farewell to baseball. Farewell to all that white people’s love.
His shoes, when he tied them again, seemed ragged on his feet. Dark drops on the toes and laces — he hadn’t noticed them before. Spots. They could be anything. He padded the hallways, keeping quiet. No one stared, particularly; no one ejected him, yet. Weight rooms, a pool where the very air looked blue, the big gym where the game had ended. The crowd had gone, and he entered and drank from the fountain. A small man in a blue work shirt was motoring one set of stands back into a stack against the wall. A team of younger assistants removed the volleyball net with small, flashing tools, then carried off the chairs and official’s tower. Efficiently the blue-shirted man swept the bleachers opposite, stopping here and there to polish with a towel anchored to his belt, then retracted them as well. The whole room changed. It was, to East, an interesting thing. He sat and watched against the wall, the two guns lumpy and hard against his thighs.
At last, the small man locked shut a storeroom, working off a large ring of keys, and then his assistants disappeared. Two black men came in with a basketball, taking the court at one end, dicing, lots of leaning and hand checks. Damn, they laughed. Damn.
One of the two left, and the second noticed East lingering by the stacked bleachers. “What’s up, young man? You looking for a game?” he called over.
East shook his head. But the player stepped closer, scrutinizing. Something changed in his voice. “You all right? Need something to eat?”
East tried tucking his head away in his sweater. He couldn’t begin to talk to the man.
“I can slide you into my dining hall. Get you some help if you need it.”
East shook his head again, stood, crept away. The guy seemed okay. But nothing was enough to trust him. And no sense in just bringing the man his trouble.
—
He slept the night in the gymnasium. Collapsed, the stacked bleachers made a tower of thin shelves on their backside, each one twelve inches below the next. East slid himself onto one of these shelves, waist-high. The next plank was just a few inches above his nose. Like a tool in a drawer, he thought, like a body in a morgue. It had been more than twenty-four hours since he had slept, but even in his dreamless sleep he knew that he must stay quiet.
—
At five in the morning East was awake. The gym must be closed, he judged, but he lay in his safe slice of darkness, mind and body still, until the first sounds careened in the hallway: a mop bucket, the metallic knock of deadbolts. His fingers straightened the guns in his pocket, and he waited until he heard the first voices, early comers. Then he slipped out of the bleachers. He considered taking another shower. But it would only be luxury. He could not stay here in the gym forever.