“Why is Fin still in?”
“Aw, man,” said Walter. “He got, like, a billion dollars bail. At first it was a hundred thousand, and we had that easy, so the judge went sky high. They ain’t letting him out. Ever.”
East glanced around in the dark.
“Anybody talking about it?”
“No one saying anything about that,” Walter said.
East felt a twang of disappointment. In spite of himself.
Walter laughed. “You still out there, man. That’s what mystifies me. What are you doing? You need money, I can send it. Or a ticket. You could fly home now, no problem, except there’s a couple things I gotta fill you in on.”
“No. I’m here now.”
“I kept waiting on you to call.”
“No, I’m here,” East said. “So, man. What are you doing?”
“Me? I’m back in school,” Walter chuckled. “Missed a week, nobody said shit. But I’m going to private school in the spring. Last semester, college prep, no more Boxes. They sending me up, I’ll live there. Do a little recon, you know.”
“Like Michael Wilson at UCLA?”
“Maybe. Good school up in the canyons. Kids up there, they’re either movie stars or geeks.”
East tried to imagine it. He didn’t know what to imagine.
“What are you doing?”
“The old thing,” said East. “Just watching.”
“What? You found a house and crew?”
“Different.”
“Different but the same?”
“Yeah,” East said.
“That will hold you,” Walter said, “but that’s little boys’ work, E — you know it. We did that when we were little boys.”
East felt the sting. But it passed. “Walter. I need you to do something.”
“What?”
“Send me something. Go over to my mother’s house and tip my bed up. You’ll find a wood block that don’t belong, with a butterfly bolt. Get my ATM cards, and if you can, get my phone, and mail them to me.”
He gave Walter his mother’s address and the street address of the range.
“I saw that area code. Had to look it up,” Walter said. “Ohio?”
“Ohio.”
“Is it like Wisconsin, all cold?”
“Warm and mountains,” East said, “just like LA.”
“How I’m gonna get in there, your mom’s house?”
“Tell her I need it. Give her fifty dollars, man. She’ll let you in like anything.” Grimly he added, “Probably let you in for five.”
“You ain’t coming back, are you?”
“I don’t think. Don’t tell anyone what I told you.”
“Believe me, man. I’m keeping quiet about all this. You’re not coming back?”
“Don’t tell nobody I’m out here,” East repeated.
“I won’t say a word,” Walter said. “But you’re not coming back. I can’t get my mind around it.”
—
Perry put the mail on the counter and regarded it sideways. Express package, addressed to Antoine Harris. It took a day and a half.
“Last name Harris,” he observed. “First time I knew you had a last name.”
“I lose track myself,” East said.
“I must engrave you a nameplate,” Perry declared.
All day the package glowed in the cabinet, radioactive with his previous life.
That night he tore the brown paper and tape and unwrapped a shoebox that had come from under his bed at home, with a pair of his old, outgrown shoes, battered but still whole, still real. Why had Walter sent those? He almost chucked them into the trash. The stink of his socks, the bedroom at his mother’s house. His salt.
Then he felt around. Down in one toe, a flat bundle was wrapped in brown paper with the scrawl he could barely make out: COULDN’T GET PHONE. WILL KEEP LOOKING. W. Inside the fold, a thousand dollars in twenties, wrapped around his ATM cards, and one more card: a license, State of California.
The name, his own. Strange to read it there, in that official type, beneath the watermark. The address, his mother’s, the birthday, his own. A few days past now — he’d forgotten it. He was sixteen now. A licensed operator.
The photo he remembered taking in a drug house a year ago, a different shirt, a new haircut. Someone had been fighting in a bedroom upstairs as he had sat straight against the backdrop and looked the camera in the eye.
Maybe it hadn’t been much work to make. But Walter had made it. He wasn’t sure how to feel. Was it a reward? An invitation? Or was it a rope, tying him down to a spot on the ground? With Melanie and the Jackson girl clinging somewhere along the line?
He stared at his face for a while, till he felt sleepy. He concealed the license in a small crack behind the baseboard. He reached up and switched off the light.
At some hour in the dark, the thick, cloudy, pressing winter dark, he heard the front bolt scrape, the heavy door pop open. He tipped his box back. Soundlessly he rolled his body onto all fours and then uncoiled, balanced and erect.
With a quick twist he unscrewed a stout broomstick from the push broom and carried it before him, ready.
“Antoine?” came Marsha’s voice.
—
She was too shaky to drive herself. He helped her into one of Perry’s trucks and took the wheel. All that morning they kept vigil at the hospital, in a high room that looked down upon a snow-covered drainage pond. Perry lay sliced open, a network of tubes and lines crossing him like roads and wires on white countryside.
20
His time at the range seemed to fall off the clock: the light came late, and even the short December day seemed to go on forever, across hours that hadn’t been numbered yet. The regulars stopped in to ask what East knew. They weren’t going to the hospital to see Perry, weren’t sure they were even allowed. But they missed Perry; they wanted to talk. They leaned on the heavy glass of the candy-shop counter. Some of them told East about their fathers’ heart attacks, some about their own. There was a little business going on in back but nothing that pulled East away from the counter. He rented time and guns and sold paints while the regulars loitered around him.
Some of these men had never said an extra word to East before. He hadn’t been among them a month’s time yet. What did it mean, that they came to him instead of Marsha, that they saw him as Perry’s friend, his confidant. They weren’t telling East about Perry — with Perry gone, they were telling him about themselves. “Wish him well,” they said. They left cards for East to take to the hospital, sometimes group-signed: GET WELL, they wrote in ballpoint pen, some neatly, some in childlike scrawl. SEE YOU SOON.
Soon. The time had crawled to this point. It stood still for him, poised like a cat at the top of its leap. He waited for it to begin to come down. He wondered at the future of Stone Cottage without Perry. He had come to think almost protectively of the town, though he had only just arrived.
On the third day she returned. She wore a brown sweater, corded and woolly: East imagined that once her hair had been brown like that. He asked how was Perry, and Marsha asked if he knew what a do-not-resuscitate order was.
“It means he’ll get what he wants,” she said dully. It meant they knew already that Perry would die tonight or tomorrow. Something seized in East’s throat, and he reached the broom handle and leaned until he could speak again.
This could be decided by a piece of paper a man had signed.
“Does he know?”
“Does he know what?”
“Does he know,” East said, betraying something like panic in his throat, “that he’s going to die now?”
She lifted her hand and bit it. She turned, seeming very small, and he waited for her at some distance.