“Nothing? People are dead now, man.”
Ty ran his fingers over the box and picked out another doughnut.
“Shit be crazy,” he said.
—
All that time, flickering again inside his skull. The van, the hours of country. Rolling under their wheels like wave tips passing his brown calves at the beach. The same feeling, the same dull roar, tires, water, the same laying out of light on the sand and fence posts and all there is. Lightly flying. He still felt it.
He shook his head out, the way he would sometimes after waking from a dream.
“How is Fin?”
“Fin?” Ty chewed slowly. “Two days after we left town, he turned himself in.”
“He did what?”
“He walked into a police station and sat down. Tired. Living house to house,” Ty said. “Don’t think they weren’t surprised, though.” He held up a finger while he worked something in his mouth. “Come back, man. It’s what Fin wants. Fin knows you shot me. But he don’t have but one bastard son.”
East rubbed his eyes. The light of day was finding the skylights.
“Terms of my employment,” said Ty, “is, I have your back.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said at last.
“If I was gonna kill you,” said Ty, “this was my chance. No, come back. ’Cause Fin is giving us hell till you do.”
East stood. He tested his shaky legs. Ty made no objection to it.
“These doughnuts.” Ty was mumbling through a full mouth. “Good. I see why a girl like you would settle down.”
“I never heard you talk so much,” East said.
“Well,” said Ty, “we all got to do things we don’t want to do.”
—
In The Boxes, when someone insulted you, you insulted them back, or if someone punched you, you punched them. But everything was subject to organization. If an insult came from inside, you threw it back. If it didn’t, you found out first. Found out what you could get away with. It was possible you could get away with nothing. Possible you would need to swallow your pride.
If somebody really hurt you, bruised or beat or shot you, you didn’t need to ask. Injury called for injury. No need for organization. These rules of living were inside out. These rules of living kept boys polite day to day, even if they had free rein to kill.
A brother putting a bullet into a brother was unacceptable. It had happened, no doubt. One must have had a reason. But there would be a response. East had known this without consultation. He knew it the way he knew walking, he knew language. He had come to Ohio expecting to be kicked, to be gutted, for the last bullet in the world to find him and spit in his face.
He did not expect to be fetched back. He did not expect doughnuts, still soft from the oven, or to be handed an air ticket reading FIRST CLASS LAX DATE OPEN with a name he’d never heard, clipped to a California state driver’s license with that same name. Same name and a picture of his face, taken back one day when everything made sense.
—
Ty’s car was a sleek gray Lincoln, parked a quarter mile down.
“How’d you get hold of this? You’re thirteen.”
Ty fiddled with knobs. “You forgot my birthday. I’m fourteen now.”
That’s right, fourteen now, East thought. Both Sagittarius, born early December.
“Steal it?”
“No, man. Just a car service.” Finally Ty exploded with disgust. “Fuck this motherfucker. How you get defrost and heat at the same time?”
East flipped through the knobs, chose something. Ty shook his head and gunned the engine. It was smooth, new and powerful. “Couldn’t figure out the radio either,” he confessed.
East had told a lie—that he had business to close up. Money hid and deposited, debts to be collected and paid. Otherwise, he feared Ty was just going to put him on a plane, today. It surprised him when Ty simply said okay.
As for Ty, he was flying home immediately.
“Don’t make me come back,” he warned. “This car, we got one week.”
“We got?”
“You got six days left. More than that, I have to make a call. I don’t want to make that call. So six days.”
“All right,” East said.
The wound was bandaged now. Ty had helped him disinfect it back at the range. The big first-aid kit had everything he needed. But picking the shirt out of the sticky, clotting blood hurt almost as much as the whupping. Ty bandaged the arm and taped it down. Squeezed it once, like a joke, and East screamed. “See?” Ty murmured. “See?”
Light rain fell. The temperature was dropping again.
“One thing I forgot to ask. How’d you get here?” Ty said.
East considered. This too, this memory, seemed like a train on a different track than he’d been on. “Old lady rode us to an airport. Walter flew home. Then I stole her car.”
“You stole a car? You stole it? From a lady who gave you a ride? Cold,” said Ty. “You get rid of it?”
“Left it two days back.”
“Two days, what?”
“Two days of walking.”
“You burned the car, right?”