“No, he don’t.” Michael Wilson stopped at a light. “He don’t like you.”
Walter giggled. “He don’t like you.”
East kept his mouth shut. Now they’d be teasing him. You just listened. You let it go, you came in when it was done, you kept your hands clean. Otherwise never built anything.
He didn’t see how he’d ever get any sleep in this van.
“You know, we might want to get some food before we hit the road,” Walter suggested.
“Oh, we,” retorted Michael. “I didn’t hear you taking no vote.”
Walter too let it slide off, East noted. You didn’t get to him by calling him fat boy. He’d heard it before. “Good chicken coming up on the right. What kind you want? They got both.”
“Both what?”
“Both kinds. Black chicken and Spanish.”
“If black chicken what made you fat, I’ll take Spanish.”
A noisy drive-through lane threaded between hedges and the little building. The loudspeaker squawked like a fire truck’s horn. Michael Wilson paid and fetched out king-size drinks and a bucket. Walter passed the big drinks back, member VIP cups—you could refill them if you ever came back. Napkins. Hundreds of them.
They crawled onto the Artesia Freeway.
Ty finished a drumstick and twisted his fingers clean in a napkin before he picked up his game. The boy still barely ate. Barely moved sometimes. Unnatural.
They crawled past big yellow lights saying something was happening up ahead. East tried to see over the people in the other cars racked around the van. White man in an Acura to the right, phone pinned to the top of the wheel. Line of little Latin boys in the cab of a pickup, sullen and sleepy. Walter was fishing out a third piece of chicken. “Gonna be Christmas before we get out of LA,” he mumbled.
East tried to look ahead at the brown mountains, to think about the way ahead. He tried not to watch. But it wasn’t in him. A career of watching—a few years was a career in The Boxes—had made him the way he was. He spent his days watching, keeping things from happening. And sometimes he could see things coming. Sometimes he looked through a pair of eyes and saw what a U was deciding, what a neighbor feared.
Sometimes this watching wound East up. It was never finished. There would always be another thing, another thread, another pair of eyes. Days began sharp and tuned themselves sharper, until by the time it was over, the world made a quivering sound, like a black string humming. He could barely stand to be near things.
He slept in his box at night just to dampen the sound of the string. To blind him, deafen him, gratefully. Sometimes in the night beneath the box he woke up gasping.
Cars merged fitfully: they’d reached the obstruction. A vast brown Pontiac lay beached in the right lane, broken down and proud of it. Two women, bleached hair shining and loose, awaited the tow like parade queens. They sat up on the back, perched, putting lotion on. After them, the speed picked up.
—
The air conditioner was killing him. East weighed a hundred ten pounds, give or take. He reached into the first-aid kit and wrapped himself in the flimsy red blanket. The boys in the front seat laughed.
The traffic thinned out, and as the van climbed toward the mountains, they darkened, the solid brown breaking into purples and grays. All East’s life the mountains had been a jagged base for the northern sky. It was the first time he’d been this far toward them, in them. He’d never seen them broken into what they were, single peaks dotted with plant scrub and rock litter, and the open distances between.
He couldn’t stop looking—the slopes and tops and valleys that slowly revealed themselves. Like a new U moving in slowly, taking a look at the house, at the boys, maybe going away, maybe hanging around, deciding he’d just go up for a look, deciding he’d go inside. They all went inside sooner or later. He wanted those U’s to decide, to go in or go away, come again another day, so he could stop watching them. In the same way he willed Michael Wilson to drive faster, to pell-mell it down the highway past the Pathfinders and Broncos and Subarus heading up into the hills for the afternoon. He wanted into the mountains. Almost wanted them over with.
Light poured between them, careened around them.
The purple and brown details opened, resolved themselves, then whipped away as they were passed. Shattered pieces of things. At length the van passed through a canyon where an entire hillside was on fire, white smoke fanning low in the wind.
The boys made no comment on this apparently normal disaster. East studied it, not breathing. Then it too was past.
—
Green signs flared by. Cajon Junction. Hesperia. Victorville. Thousands of windows punched into the valley, cars sliding on and off, streets littered with people. His eyes sought them out and registered. Hard to stop.
When he closed them, let his eyes rest, he felt, as he always did, that someone or something had turned its gaze on him.