Dodgers (8 page)

Half a dozen cars and trucks slumbered. A back lot over the rise showed the lights of big trucks, their box tops white under the high lights. At his feet, sprinklers fed a few planters, bright yellow flowers alert in the night. A pair of small buildings. Fiercely he looked around for whatever.

Restrooms. Cautiously he approached.
THIS FACILITY BUILT AND MAINTAINED BY THE STATE OF UTAH.
Utah, then. He pissed sleepily into a urinal in Utah. Green light. Moths stumbled drunkenly around the walls. The strange white soap gobbed automatically onto his hands when he reached. A man came in and looked at him with interest. He ducked his head and left.

The second building had Coke machines. East bought two cans. A dollar apiece. A clock said two-something in the morning.

Near the van, atop the weedy rise, sat a picnic table with a view of everything: front lot, back lot, all there was. East sat and drank. The van was dusty. He watched a truck, tipped with light like a fantastic ship, fly past.

There were no trees.

When he awoke with a start, the can was tipped over, dry to the touch. Grainy light. Flat clouds smudged the eastern horizon where the light was beginning. He cursed himself for falling asleep in the open.

Some of the parked cars had changed. A man combing his hair outside a Maxima was the same man who'd eyed him a few hours earlier. One of those. Dark birds hung like kites.

East descended the slope to the van, tapped Michael Wilson, and thumbed him over. Michael nodded, ashen, and squirmed across to the other seat. As soon as he'd fastened his belt, he was asleep again. East split open the warm can of Coke. He shortened the seat up and cranked the mirrors down.

Driving. He'd driven a few times for Fin, or dropped someone off, someone too gone to drive. He knew how.

On the other hand, he'd never been north of forty miles an hour.

For some miles he ran slowly, feeling the van track on the road, letting traffic funnel past. More cars now than in the evening. He could see them.

Then he picked it up to seventy-five.

The scene of the night before troubled East still: the flashing light under the canopy, the blood on the pavement, the chance that Ty was carrying a gun out here where they were supposed to run clean. And before that: the four of them bolting the van, leaving the job behind for—for what?
Just a taste.
It was all on camera—they'd made trouble. Maybe running down the road would let them leave it behind.

Only option he had.

The land changed—orange sky, light, the white of the flats giving rise to orange stone, crumpled and ridged, and dirt. The windshield filled with sunrise working its way up to blue.

He could glimpse the people in cars, the pickup-and-toolbox men, hidden behind wraparounds, heading to some job. The sleeping families, drivers with their coffee cups. The lone rangers, a man or a woman, sometimes intent on the road ahead, sometimes on the phone yammering. White people. Maybe some of them outrunning something too.

A half hour, an hour maybe, before everyone would wake up. That much alone, that much peace. The tires hummed, and he felt what Johnny had said about the van now: sorry-looking, yeah, but solid. He liked being up high, liked the firm seat. He could see the land, the flash movements in the brush, an animal, too fast to spot. Dog, maybe, or coyote. They had coyotes in LA, but they were skulking creatures, big rats. They ran down alleys and stayed in shadows, and before long somebody would shoot them dead. No law against doing it. Just another gunshot in the night.

When the other boys stirred and began cursing, East was sad. They rolled their limbs, spewed their night breath. They would be back with him soon. A chimneyed orange mountain loomed beside him, and East studied it closely as he passed it, its worn layers, saying good-bye. A secret. The last thing that was his alone.

Bright morning. East stopped at a shiny new gas station, TV screens humming at the pump. All the boys jumped out: East pumped the gas in the dry air. Los Angeles had dry air, but it smelled like something—always something. The air here smelled like nothing, or nothing that had a name.

Inside the store loomed hanging race cars and inflatable superheroes. A massive grill counter stretched across the back: no one there, yet people were taking food from a window. Walter studied it: you touched a screen till you had pointed out everything you wanted. Every item on every shelf had a price lit up in LEDs. Every little thing made a noise.

“This joint is fucking cool,” said Ty.

Finished pumping, East headed for the bathroom and its cherry-cake smell. Some things never changed. A white boy pulled up at the next urinal. Hat on backwards.

“Sup, homes,” he said.

East raised his eyebrows. This boy right up on him.

“Sup,” he pronounced ironically.

The white boy finger-stabbed. “Manny Ramirez. My man.”

East wasn't sure. He tightened his eyes, rushed his hands below a faucet, then rushed out. What was it with some people?

This was white boy's turf—he recognized that.

Outside the bathroom, Michael Wilson stood in line. Prepaid with twenties, so he had to wait for change every time—the price of doing business in cash. Blankly he stared, just a customer, and East watched him from behind. The cashier was an older lady with a huge amber stone caught in a fold of her throat.

“Seven dollars and thirty cents from sixty, sir,” she said.

“Ma'am, you got scratch-offs?”

“There's no lottery in Utah, sir.” The same note in her voice.

Michael Wilson bobbed his head agreeably, and East let him walk away. What was it? Buying lottery tickets. Stealing a little. How much?

What did Michael Wilson expect to do if he won?

Something hit him on the shoulder. It was the same bathroom white boy on his way back out. “Be cool, bro,” he said, jabbing his finger. “Fly's open.”

East looked down. Bro was right.

Just ten minutes here, but his morning calm was plucked. The dark string inside blurred and buzzed. He followed Michael to the van, every bit of air a puzzle, every person a future event. He climbed into the back and slid the door shut.

“Awesome station, man,” said Walter, a fragrant family box of chicken biscuits steaming up his lap. “They all need to be like that.”

East buckled his belt. “Who is Manny Ramirez?”

Both boys in the front let go a snort.

“Ninety-nine, Easy,” said Michael Wilson.

“You ever check your shirt?”

East looked down.
Dodgers.
“What?”

“On the back. His name is on the back of your shirt, man.”

“Yard boy don't get out much,” Michael Wilson crowed.

After an hour, they crossed into Colorado. East felt the ground rising. He rode up front as Walter drove, Michael dozing, soft-eyed, in the middle. The hot food had upset East's stomach.

Mountains stood before them, above them, like in LA. But in The Boxes, the mountains were only a thing, like a wall or a tree: a sun-baked ridge above the valley full of everything. Here the ground was nearly empty of buildings and the mountains were like people, huddled figures, blue and gray and white, so high.

They were unmoving stone, but they tore East's eyes from the boys in the van and the unidentifiable people motoring up the same road. East gave up watching the people so much. They didn't stare back as much as they had in Utah. The people seemed younger, fitter. Some gazed at the mountains too. Some rode hollow-eyed. Families with kids drowned in their movie players; mountain boys with their racks of bikes and skis and packs; thin, straight-haired white women in their Subarus. They didn't stare back. Unsurprised by him.

Only one black man they saw, driving a moving truck.

Come noon they bought a tank of gas and two pizzas at an exit called Glenwood Springs. A bathroom stop, a round of sodas, little wooden buffalo roaming the counter near the gray cash register. Boxes so hot they singed East's fingers; they steamed on the van's floor till the windows ran wet.

They drove on until a sign announced a turnoff:
SCENIC OVERLOOK.
“Let's hit that,” Walter said. “We can eat there.”

“Oh,
we
?” laughed Michael Wilson, but Walter took it well.

The view, framed between two immense, square boulders, revealed just how far up they'd come. A gorge opened below, green, vertiginous. Two little kids from the gigantic white Navigator next to them hollered, “Wow! Wow!” East started, expecting them to be staring at him.

But they were just teetering on the edge, gaping down into the gorge below.

He slid out of the van. Again he had to find his legs, find his stance. Behind the handrail the ground was slippery pebbles. He approached the edge and looked down gingerly.

It took a moment for East's eyes to read the scene. He could see the valley's depth, feel the real wind dipping down it. But he could not convince himself that it was real. Space both vast and unattainable, opening up between the blue walls of stone. The air below was cold, he could feel it, a reservoir, and he could sense something about the chasm, all the time piled up there. Close to forever. More time than he had in a hundred lives like his.

Birds wheeled in midair, far below.

“Mommy, Daddy!” the kids cheered again. “Look! It's amazing!” East stood there too, the cold air streaming up his face, full of the smell of snow and stone.

For hours they worked in and out through the passes: town-size shadows sliding over the mountainsides, dark mossy valleys, clouds on the road that blinded their way. How blank it had looked on the map, this space, this state. How different to have to cross it. The road sank in and swelled out, like intestines. East asked for a turn at the wheel, but his stomach made him give it up right away. Sitting shotgun, next to the guardrail, was worse.

Their next stop was so that he could throw up. He was awake, dripping sweat; he had been dreaming of a terrible yellow goldfish. “Stop the van,” he gasped.

Michael Wilson skidded off along the guardrail.

East fell out, a first taste like cement; then his backbone arched and his lunch rained over the rail.

Pizza, Coke, the rest.
Jesus
. He looked away, at the miles between him and the next solid ground. Same birds, flecks beneath him. The air smelled wet, like the rock.

He felt better—for a moment, he knew. But he breathed in wetly, the air of that moment.

“Who's next?” Michael Wilson said. Nobody in the van was even laughing.

“Never been up in the mountains before, huh, Easy?”

“I don't know,” East grunted. “It's different than I thought.”

“Never been nowhere, huh?”

It wasn't in him to argue.

Stickers covering the Jeeps and Subarus:
THE EARTH DOES NOT BELONG TO US, WE BELONG TO THE EARTH
.
IT'S NOT A CHOICE, IT'S A LIFE
.
CRISTO SALVA
. Bicycles on the back, in the bed, on the roof, wherever they could strap on. “
Crazy
motherfuckers riding bicycles up here,” said Walter. “You know there's no air? Go out and see if you can run a hundred yards.”

“
You
can't run no hundred yards,” said Michael Wilson, “
any
where.”

Somewhere in the afternoon they topped out finally and started coasting downhill toward the city of Denver. East eyed the silver Colorado State Trooper cars, Chargers and Expeditions and the long, flat Fords. They scattered everywhere on the downhill, working the speeders like sharks tracking prey. Once a trooper dogged their back bumper for miles. “I'm going fifty-five, motherfucker,” Michael Wilson protested. “Fifty-five minus two.” The trooper hit the lights, jumped out from behind them, and bit on a Jeep. Everyone started breathing again.

Ty's gun,
thought East.
Ty's gun, Ty's gun, Ty's gun.

The van knifed past the city, the buildings low and shiny and suddenly too colorful below the cold blue sky long-grained with clouds. As they merged from one highway onto another, East turned back to look. The mountains stood in line behind them, still close but collapsed now, pressed together. No hint of what they were, what they held. Just another line, a little brighter and sharper than the brown line of home.

And they could see what was coming. Flatland, an endless sea of it.

“Someone else drive,” said Michael Wilson. “I'm tired of seeing shit.”

Walter took the wheel. Michael reclined in the shotgun seat, rubbing his face with a pair of fingers. East sat back on the middle bench and watched him fuss and prod. “You learned that where? Tokyo Spa?”

“East, baby, no,” Michael said. “I learned this from your mother.”

East smiled and watched the road, the eastbound trucks. After a while he shut his eyes too. Let himself fall off to sleep.

Except for the chirping. He peeked around at Ty. Ty did not look back. The muscles in his fingers twitched around the gray plastic tablet of his game. Something with aliens and bombs. Ty could lie around playing forever.

“Don't that thing run out of batteries?” East protested at last.

Ty's eyes zeroed in. “Run out all the time,” he murmured. “But I don't.”

“You go see your mother?”

“No,” snorted Ty. “Did you?”

“Yes. I took her some money,” said East. “Night before we left.”

“Well,” said Ty, more quietly, “ain't you nice.”

East said, matching Ty's quiet, “Somebody said you might have a gun on you.”

His brother's eyes ticked up and down, following something minuscule along an inch-long track. Then at last the game flashed in his face, and he relaxed.

“That's my business.”

“You know you got no need to be holding,” East pressed. “Fin said stay clean till we get the guns.”

“
Fin
said.”