Dodgers (6 page)

Only once did Michael Wilson try talking to Ty. They were riding out what was left of California. Or maybe it was Nevada. The land was dark, and sometimes the spread of headlights showed them low, brushy hills. Michael Wilson leaned away from the wheel.

“What's your story back there, young'un? Fighting them aliens still?”

A long, intent wait, and then the voice floated back, quavery, almost a little girl's: “Are you talking to me?”

“Yeah.” Michael Wilson, for once, was not laughing.

“Tired of riding, man,” Ty said. “Tired of bullshit. Why we ain't flying?” He switched back on the game with a musical flourish, as if the conversation were over.

This pushed Walter's button. “Oh, no. Really, man? Impossible. No way.”

Michael Wilson: “We trying to keep low, young'un. You gotta use a credit card to buy a plane ticket. ID to buy, ID to get on. It don't matter if the ID ain't real; they still gonna track you.”

Their song changed quick, thought East. Bitching about it themselves an hour ago.

“We'd be so fucked,” said Walter. “They would know where we get off, where we catch a ride.”

“So there's some trouble? Four little black boys done shot a man? A man who's a witness in LA next week? Look, I see where we got these four little Negroes just flown in from LA.”

“I wonder when they flying back.”

“Let's get a picture of them off the video.”

“Let's call up the SWAT team.”

Michael Wilson laughed. “Airborne Negro Detection System activated.”

To all of this Ty snarled, “So what if they do?”

Michael Wilson and Walter glanced across at each other, holding their merriment.

“Fuck you,” said Ty. “The both of you.”

East sat with hands folded inside the red blanket. Pinning it shut. So this would be it. The funny faces in front tangling with Ty. For days.

“Oh, maybe you could fly,” said Walter. “But you a wanted man then. This way, we're sneaking in, sneaking out. You remember that astronaut lady who wanted to kill her boyfriend's new girl? Drove all the way from Texas to Florida to get away with it? She had gas cans in the back, never stopped. She wore diapers, man, trying to keep off the cameras.”

“You remember that
astronaut
lady?” Ty sneered, and in the back he muttered softly to himself like an old injured dog. Again his thumbs worked the buttons of his game. And that was the end of Michael Wilson talking to Ty.

They were awake, but softly. Then Michael Wilson spoke. “You want to take a little drive into Vegas? See the sights?” The instrument panel lit the curve of his cheek like a moon.

“No,” said East.

“Let's keep moving,” said Walter.

But then the hollow dark of the desert was pierced, and colored light caught the undersides of the clouds. The boys stared ahead, rapt.

The van crept smoothly toward the emerging city's glow. It was like the orange flare of a cigarette—crawling, twinkling, growing bright. Buildings rose out of it like a great lighted forest. Vehicles of all descriptions visible on the road again in the spilled light. Then they were flashing through it, and everyone was watching, even Ty.

“Listen. We got to get off for gas anyway,” Michael Wilson suggested, and
Yeah, yeah,
they all agreed.

So much light. Crossing, cross firing, leaving nothing empty, no shadows. Barely had the van cleared the ramp before a pyramid appeared. A grand white pyramid, razor-edged, spotlit. Everything dressed up: even the parking ramp had a fairy on it, or a genie.

“City of sin, my niggers,” drawled Michael Wilson, steering now with one hand.

He and Walter leaned out their windows, ogling, here and there letting out a holler. Evening, desert air. East sounded out the names as they passed: MGM. Aladdin. Bellagio. Flamingo. Treasure Island. Stardust. Riviera.

“Just like Disneyland, man,” Michael Wilson added.

Couples. Women in pairs or threes. Men in vast teams. Families fitted out with prizes and bags. Wandering blind, their shadows spilling out in eight directions, walking like nobody walked in The Boxes.

“ ‘Biggest payouts on the strip,' ” Michael Wilson read with a growl.

“But every sign's saying that,” replied Walter.

Abruptly Michael Wilson sat up and swung the van into a parking lot. Wasn't any gas station here, East noted, but he let Michael snake the van back where low glaring lights caromed off tall buses and campers. A colonnaded canopy shone ahead, dancing in neon light. Michael aimed them that way.

“Michael,” East prodded. “Just getting gas, right?”

“Sure,” Michael Wilson said. They swooped in under the overhang to find one yellow rectangle outlined on the pavement just down from the door, a car just pulling out of it. Michael eased the van in there and parked it. Lights dancing in the wet of his eyes.

“You boys want to take a look?”

“
Hell
yes,” Walter said, already rolling out.

“Hey,”
East insisted.

“Don't worry, E,” Michael Wilson said. “I know you're on tight. But you basic street Negroes don't get to Vegas every day. We got to
see
this, man. Half a minute.”

A tall lady in a silver cocktail dress and heels wafted by, shiny. Then it was Ty, brushing past without a word. East reached in vain, but his brother was already out the sliding door.
Damn.

So this is how Michael Wilson was going to do it. Sudden turns and promises.

To his left, a line of columns and potted palms. Lights moving on everything. They riled East, set his mind jumping. To the right, Ty wandered on the pavement, skinny, behind him a long row of golden doors. East clutched at his red blanket unhappily.

“Come on, Easy. It can't be that bad,” Michael Wilson crooned. “If you scared, later I'll have fat boy read you a story.”

The black carpet seemed limitless. Patterned neon curlicues forever, up steps, down ramps, no ceiling above, just the blinking lights on a thousand machines with their nonstop ringing jangle. The din was aggravating. East had seen a casino on TV—that gave no hint of how it would be, like a factory, a city, clanging, clanging, bells that weren't real, that couldn't be stilled, from distances that weren't real either. Clanging that didn't matter, signaled nothing, just made up the air of the place. Everything clanging.

Just the banks and banks of lighted boxes, and placed before each one, a person, rapturously lit.

Signs on the pillars warned,
NO PERSONS UNDER THE AGE OF
18
!
But nobody was stepping after them: the doormen, the head-nodding security with ear coils, the waitresses with drinks in monogrammed glasses, the burly Mexican women wheelchairing old folks with oxygen tanks. Nobody accused Ty. No one watched with a purpose.

These people looked drugged,
East thought,
or lost.

He straightened his shirt and made to catch up. Michael Wilson was monologuing:
Yeah, yeah, I'm a show you what's tight.
Headed for something. Then at the end of a long, littered aisle, they came upon a clearing and a low, carpeted mesa—three shallow steps up. Glowing green tables in formation, ringed by white people. Michael Wilson took the steps at a trot, and the boys flocked along.

East hung back, parked himself on a column. Tried to see, not to be seen. He watched people eyeing the boys as Walter and Ty milled behind Michael's shoulder, peering down at the green felt.

Michael wedged himself in between two white women in dresses that noted the bones of their backs. “Deal me in, man,” he demanded, fanning a handful of twenties. Sidney's money, East thought. Fin's money.

The dealer was the second black man at the table. Tall and prim with a silver clef on his tie. Neat. “Hey, brother,” Michael Wilson addressed him, more directly. “Deal me in.”

Now everyone looked up at this university Negro with his money hanging out.

The dealer pursed his lips; his politeness was contempt. “Please, sir. First you put value on a card. Then at the table you buy chips.”

The money levitated in Michael Wilson's hand. His answer.

“This is not a cash game, sir.”

“Oh. It isn't.” Not a question, a challenge. No one else spoke. “Okay, my brother,” Michael Wilson purred. “I see you in a minute.” He broke away, pushing between Walter and Ty, and East caught his look: humiliated. An acted-out sweetness, packed with rage.

Now East fell in beside Michael, got up shoulder-close as they walked.

“Mike. We got to get. You said a half minute. We ain't supposed to be here.”

“Ten minutes, E,” Michael Wilson muttered, bulling high gear through the crowd. East glanced back at Walter and Ty, and they tried to keep up. Michael veered toward a spill of light jutting up: musical notes, blazing in turn, stepping up the wall into the dark. He found a service window, jailhouse bars over the counter, polished to a scream, and no one in line. Not a real window; like a window in a movie. Like
The Wizard of Oz.

East caught up just as Michael put his hands on the white marble counter, the stack of twenties flat under his left. “We ain't got time for this,” he argued.

“Sir?” came the voice behind the bars.

The cashier was not a young woman, but her cheeks and eyes were dolled up with glitter. She eyed them each in turn: Michael, East, and then Ty and Walter as they jostled in.

Michael Wilson faced the woman and lit his face up just like hers.

“I want one hundred dollars' poker chips, ma'am,” he announced.

“Sir.” She inclined her head, as if reciting a rule in school. “You must be eighteen to enter, sir.”

Michael's smile. “I'm twenty, ma'am.”

“Yes, but, sir,” the woman said. Patient, undeterred. “Are these gentlemen with you? Do they have ID?”

East watched Michael's eyes: one flash. Then his smile hooked itself back on. “They aren't
gambling
,” he said. “So, what? They can't even watch? Can't see me?” He laughed. “How I'm gonna leave my babies in the car?”

The woman took a step back out of Michael's breathing room. She had decided. Michael saw it too.

Walter spoke first. “Mike. Let's step out, man. We don't want any trouble down here.”

East caught a movement from the direction of the card tables. A big blue suit with a headset was bearing down. A security guard, the size of a football player. “Now look out,” he warned.

At last something made Michael quit smiling. Now his strut became a hurry as he herded the three boys back. They skittered between the ringing machines, dodging players who careened, drugged, from stool to stool. But where had the door gone? Ty broke off ahead, scouting; East had lost his sense of direction entirely. Walter was lagging behind, and East waited up.

“
Go
, man,” he snapped.

“I'm going. I'm going.”

Something made him cruel, made him jab at Walter. “This is your fault,” he said. “
First
one out the van.”

“I said I'm going,” Walter panted.

The players saw them coming now, and they got out of Walter's way, tokens rattling like chains in their plastic cups. East glanced back: the security man was cutting them room. But still he trailed, talking into a cupped hand.

A short whistle from ahead. They'd located the exits.

Past the first set of doors, they spilled out into the vestibule, piano music raining down. But now Michael Wilson had stopped, knelt to tie his shoe. East fished his keys out and slipped them to Walter: “Start the van.” The doors sucked air as the seals broke, and East caught a slice of the night outside, the heat and sound of motors. The guard trailing them had stopped near the doors. They'd done what he wanted them to do.

Except Michael switched feet, began reknotting his second shoe.

East couldn't watch. “Quit stalling, man.”

“Ain't the most family-friendly establishment you could ask for, is it, E?” Michael finished the knot and admired it before he stood. Cheery now.

“Mike, I'm gonna tell you something,” East began.

“East, man.”

The grin on him. It didn't matter what you said. It just came back.

East faced Michael Wilson up. “How long you gonna take in there? And how much money you gonna spend?”

“East,”
Michael Wilson purred. “Just a
taste.
” He sized his thumb and finger a half inch apart. Like a U in the yard—he wasn't even seeing East. He was staring back through the inner doors. “Slots, man—you put twenty dollars on a card, you can play it in a minute. Might even win. I'll let you play, man. You gonna like it.”

“Fin's twenty dollars?”

“Fin ain't here. I'm in charge. Like Fin said.”

“Then
be
in charge.”

“I am,” grinned Michael Wilson. “All that's holding me up is one whiny little bitch.”

The seal of the golden doors broke again as a pair of ancient women staggered in from outside, gasping,
“Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness!”
Then the revolving lights outside found their way in too, announcing it, some new, bright kind of trouble.

Outside, under the canopy three cars wide, things were sudden and sharp. Every sound, every fidget of the lights was back in focus; every sound had a maker. An engine whined. A woman was shrieking. The palm leaves shivering in an invisible breeze.

The yellow light was spinning off a big white tow truck, and somewhere East heard Walter's hollering, a muffled squawk.

Michael Wilson: “Where's the
van
?”

East pointed; then he ran.

The tow truck was bulky, a wide silver bed tipped back like a scoop, and a steel cable ran taut down under the little van's nose, reeling it in. East's stomach slid. High on the wall he glimpsed the sign now:
RESERVED PARKING/TOW ZONE.
Of course.