She zeroed in. “You going somewhere? You look like a tramp.”
“Me and Ty need clothes for a few days.”
She hummed, casual but knowing. “In trouble?”
“No.”
“Suitcases in the closet. But they old.”
“I don’t need a suitcase,” East said.
He stopped and waited stock-still till she retreated. After a moment he heard the squeak of the couch springs: she was down. He was alone. He checked the block of wood he’d mounted inside his bed frame, underneath: tight. He loosened it with the thumbscrew. He left his ATM cards there, then tightened it back down.
At the door he said, “I’ll be back in a few days. Come see you then. Come and stay with you.”
“I know you will. I know you gon come back,” his mother cooed.
He took out the remaining money, peeled off three bills, and gave her the rest.
“I know you ain’t in no trouble,” she begged. “My boys ain’t.”
He tilted his face down, and she kissed him good-bye.
—
Down the street, freed from the shout of her TV, East heard the silence hiss like waves. He walked north until he entered an office park of sandy gray buildings nine stories high. Two of them stood in a sort of corner formation, and East walked around them. A faint hubbub of raucous people drinking came from somewhere in the darkness.
A narrow sidewalk led behind the air-conditioning island. The concrete pad full of AC units lent cover as East bent at the last building’s foot. His fingers found the makeshift metal stay wedged between the panes of a basement window. The window fell inward, but he caught it before it made a sound. Quietly, twisting his body in one limb at a time, he crawled through.
The basement crawl space, dim behind dusty windows, was clean, its packed-dirt floor higher at the sides than in the middle. It was empty save for East’s things and a faucet in one corner. It didn’t turn on, but it wouldn’t stop dripping either, and East had placed a wide stainless-steel bowl beneath it; there was always water, clear and cold. He tossed his bundle down and put his face over the bowl, watching his reflection swim in upside-down from the other side.
He drank. Then he washed his face, his hands, the caves of his armpits.
The spot where he slept was a pair of blankets, a pillow he’d bought at a roadside mattress store, and a large, heavy cardboard box the size of a washing machine. The air conditioners hummed all day, all night, washing out the hubbub and street noise. But that was not enough. East paused, stretched, then knelt on the floor beside the box. His hole. He tipped the cardboard up one side and straightened the blankets on the floor beneath it. He smacked the pillow straight and put his bundle of clothes down at the foot of the blanket. Then he slithered beneath and let the box drop over him. Like a reptile, a snake, calmest in the dark. Even the sound of the air conditioners vanished. Nothing. No one.
He breathed and waited.
3
Near East’s upturned box lay his pad of blankets and pillow. His shoes waited together in the shallow dirt, next to the old pillowcase full of clothes. Through the basement windows, early light crept in, the palest blue.
Sleeping through the night wasn’t what he was used to. A long time, he’d been standing yard midnight to noon. He cleaned his teeth with the cold clear water brimming in the steel bowl. He cleaned his gums, fingers stretching his face to strange masks. He washed his arms again and his neck and face. He lowered his pants and washed his flanks and all around his balls, and shivered in the morning chill.
He checked his phone — Antonio, Dap, Needle, Sony. Nothing.
The house. He needed to go back and see. It was ten minutes’ walk out of the office park to the house. East crossed the main street where the awnings were going up, taquerias and rim shops, the outer crust of the neighborhood. Then in, past the houses where everything was waking up, men hopping down their steps with cups and bags and keys, jumping into cars. Joggers and dog-walkers, old women smoking in their doorways.
A few blocks deeper, the cars turned older and were packed less tightly at the curb. The row houses sat blind behind plywood doors and windows — just a few at first, then more. Then two out of three. This was The Boxes.
He turned onto his street. This spot was where Dap kept one end’s lookout. But he hadn’t called. Needle watched the other end, five blocks down. He’d called too late. Sidney said back before cell phones was better: you knew who you could get in touch with and who you couldn’t. You never sat and worried why somebody didn’t answer his phone.
Two old gray women stood clucking on the shelf of their lawns. Most days when they rattled out to judge the morning, he’d been there for hours, eyes and skin already tuned to the movements of the day. But this morning they had the drop on him.
As he neared the house, he studied it sideways: brown face bullet-pocked, splintered, upper windows open like eyes. Smoke still seemed to hang. Now the door was just a sheet of plywood, bolted on. Yellow police tape stickied the yard side to side.
He ducked under to check. Power cords, recharging cables, all gone from the porch. So he had maybe an hour of battery left. Well, they’d be taking his phone. He gazed around the yard, but it told him nothing.
A patch on the sidewalk was still unmistakably bloody. He tried not to look. The Jackson girl’s face was right near the top of his mind and he did not want to be seeing it, inside his head or anywhere else.
A man in a suit came walking past. Every day he walked by wordlessly, but today he nodded at East and thundered, “Good morning.”
East nodded back.
“They caught you, didn’t they, boy?” The man was jolly. “Shut you right down.”
East ignored him, but the man kept on, made cocky by yesterday. “I see you got a pillowcase. Got your life in there?”
East shrugged and walked faster. He could have broken off a stick and beaten the man, bruised him, made him shut up and run. And for what?
He tried his phone in the open air, tried Dap, tried Needle. Neither of them answering. He left brusque messages: “Call me.” But he’d trained his guys: if we run, stay off the phones. Now he was crossing that up.
It was ninety minutes before he needed to show up. He’d get a walk and eat breakfast. He picked his way south through The Boxes. Birds and small bugs stirred among the trees, buzzing like phones. Three little girls were out early, playing chalk on the sidewalk, colored tizas as big as their wrists.
A cough from a porch was directed at him. “Hey, man. Hey,” the voice came down.
East looked, then stopped. It was a man, maybe thirty-five, maybe forty, a U who’d come to his house some days. The man sat drinking out of a tall paper cup.
“What you need?” East said.
It was strange what he knew and didn’t know. He knew this man, his secret hours. He remembered when he’d first showed up in the evening hours, still with a neatly made face, a thick gold band. Then he’d come more often. East remembered when he’d lost his job, and he’d marked the passage of drug time across the man’s face, the thinness he’d taken on and the way his eyes now had that light to them, that ingenious, failing light.
The man’s name was the one thing he didn’t know.
“What you doing now?” the man said.
“Nothing.”
“Where am I gon go?” asked the man indignantly.
East shrugged. He heard again what Fin had said. Submarine. People gonna have to look elsewhere. He knew a house a mile away, one that wasn’t Fin’s. But you didn’t talk about other houses you knew. You didn’t connect the dots.