He drank, used the bathroom, then saw three people on the way out of the building, enduring the briefest of greetings. Frosty air. Except for its watery lights, the campus was largely dark. He felt good after the long night’s rest. Eight hours, nine?
Ninety dollars and change left after gas and tolls and the food of the first day. He bought a bagel with cream cheese at a walk-in place on one of the side streets. A bageclass="underline" three dollars and eighteen cents. His first college lesson.
—
Today the road rose and fell. The trees twisted low and misshapen, as if storms had combed them many times. A few dark apples still dangled. He hungered, but he dared not walk into the orchards. Once he found an apple on the side of the road and picked it up. Nearly perfect, like bait in a story for children. He put it in his pocket with the gun.
He noticed tags on the backs of the signs across the road: C+W. Some of the paint weathered, some still glossy fresh. On most of the signs. Then on all the signs. He turned around and looked behind the signs on his side. Tagged as well. He was walking through territory.
A figure came walking toward him on the shoulder gravel half a mile ahead. At a shorter distance he decided that the figure was a girl. He sank his head low into the collar of his sweater. Avoided even taking a good look. A mass of brown hair pinned back. She had a down jacket on, but she was shivering too. He felt relieved when she was by him.
One house caught his interest. He saw that it had burned from the center out, not long ago. The bricks were still smoked black. The roof’s peak had given way to something like the mouth of a volcano. Heavy smudge still bloomed in the air. Across from the front yard, a school bus, still caution-yellow, but its long yellow sheet metal was marked in primer gray: CHRISTIAN WOLVES. Then the plus sign. Like a cross.
Like the van. He stamped it in his mind, then crossed to walk on the other side.
—
Slipping. A light rain had done little more than grease the roadside. His joints were webbed with red exhaustion. He had not reckoned on the cold. Toward midday he crossed a small junction, not even noticing it until a truck hurtled past.
He touched his pocket. The apple was gone. He could not remember eating it or throwing it away. The guns were still there in the loosening pockets, riding the bruises they were making on his thighs.
The next town was two miles off, and he thought that if it had a store, he would buy clothing. If it had a place to rest, he would rest. He imagined Walter walking with him, his voice, his hypotheses: what this closed factory had made, how those trees were planted, how this kind of church felt about black boys. But Walter could never have walked this far. Walter would be home, wondering why East hadn’t called. And worrying about that old lady, Martha whatever. She’d be coming back on the plane, East recalled. Perhaps today. And Walter would be beside himself with guilt over it.
He wondered if he was far enough. He felt far. He felt lost. But if there were such a thing as far enough, it wasn’t a place you could walk to.
The next town was what he settled on. Far enough was going to have to be here, at least for a while, even if he hadn’t glimpsed it yet.
—
This town wasn’t much. A couple of places by the highway, closed or indifferent, cigarette butts and harvest stubs blown clear up to the doors. Telephone books rotting in split plastic bags. East glanced up with effort at what remained of the signs: TIRES, VACUUM REPAIR. It didn’t matter now. A nightclub that once had some style: a splashy sign, now a skeleton, and exterior walls studded up with white stones like a dinosaur’s armor. Some sort of weird, fenced yard like an impound lot that said SLAUGHTERRANGE.COM. HELP WANTED in soaped letters in the window. A matronly farmhouse across the road disapproved of it all.
He turned down the side road and found a main street parallel to the highway. There, an old grocery, a post office full of cobwebbed shipping boxes, a pawnshop. Two stores said ANTIQUES but were falling apart themselves. The windowsills on the hardware store were rotting. A doughnut place seemed to hold the only people now, and one bar, blinking BUD, where they would be tonight. A Laundromat, machines scraped out and yawning.
And the little moteclass="underline" Starlight. Two little wings of ten rooms each spread from an airy center office filled mostly with dust. Curls of neon tubing still clinging to the sign. It was the sort of motel you found on big north-south streets in The Boxes, but open there, sprawling, a clientele there to use or drink or hide, who sometimes just lived there for decades, disapproving of the others, fallen oranges rotting beneath their parked cars that never moved. But here in Ohio, the Starlight was empty, bleached sun-white and then dusted again, front door padlocked though the sign still said OPEN.
Town wasn’t much. Clearly they’d run the highway just north of it at some point. But the highway had failed to keep it alive.
Boy, this is why you get on the plane, he thought.
Outside the Starlight Motel, he climbed atop a concrete planter full of poisonous-looking dirt and surveyed. Relieved now of its relentless moving forward, his body cracked with want. A passing moment of sunlight lit the houses briefly. In the offing was a church, a shingled thing jumbled together like children’s blocks, a big cross, gilt and dirtied.
Two days walking in the air had thinned out his stubbornness. But the stubbornness that remained was choosing. He had chosen. This is where you said you’d stop, he reminded himself. Small, and no people out: everything he saw to hold against the town, to walk away from — to flee it, in fact — were reasons that, standing in the fading light, he steeled himself against.
A pickup truck with five kids in parkas in the back, sitting packed together, rumbled by slowly. All five kids turned their heads to look. Their mother gave him a single glance and blew a plume of smoke out her window, then flicked the lit cigarette butt after it.
He didn’t even know the town’s name.
—
After an hour, when his eyes had measured the town and his body had stiffened with cold, he climbed down from the planter awkwardly and walked to the grocery store. Closed. But oranges and cans on racks inside: at least that. At least the store was alive. He scrutinized the darkness inside, then backed off and read the sign. CLOSED ON SUNDAY. He had never heard of a grocery store being closed on Sunday.
Maybe, then, it was Sunday.
Next he walked to the doughnut shop. It was emptier than before, perhaps. But open. He paid his money for two large fried apple fritters, then added a cup of hot chocolate. He was beginning to treat the cold as a permanent adversary. The hot, doughy air of the shop was worth the people staring. He stood numb, breathing the steam off the scorching cup.
He used the bathroom for what he hoped was not too long. Hot water at the sink up his forearms, over his face, around the back of his neck. Carefully he dried himself. The clatter out by the main highway drew him back that way. The weird impound lot had, in the last two hours, filled with trucks and cars. The building there resembled a small barn backed up to a clumsy, bulldozed berm a story high, blocking off view from the road. A few dim lights burned cold on poles. The clatter back there was shooting. It had started just before sunset. He had heard the first shots from the doughnut shop as he stood there eating a fritter, dreaming on his feet. The first burst made him spill the rest of his hot drink on his fingers. Triggered, not automatic, four or five shots in all. He looked up, shaken: the locals in their booths had looked up too but were already back to their doughnuts.