Dodgers - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

BILL BEVERLY grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and studied at Oberlin College and the University of Florida. His research on criminal fugitives and the stories surrounding them became the book On the Lam: Narratives of Flight in J. Edgar Hoover's America. He teaches American literature and writing at Trinity University in Washington, DC.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2016 Bill Beverly

DODGERS – Chapter 1

The Boxes was all the boys knew; it was the only place.

            In the street one car moved, between the whole vehicles and skeletal remains, creeping over paper and glass.

            The boys stood on guard. They watched light fill between the black houses separated only barely, like a row of loose teeth. Half the night they had been there: Fin taught that you did not make a boy stand yard all night. Half was right. To change in the middle kept them on their toes, Fin said. It kept them awake. It made them like men.

            The door of the house opened and two U’s stumbled out, shocked by the sun, ogling it like an old girl they hadn’t seen lately. Some men left the house like this, better once they’d been in. Others walked easy going in but barely crawled their way out. The two ignored the boys at their watch. At the end of the walk, they descended the five steps to the sidewalk. One man slapped the other’s palm loudly, the old way.

            Again the door opened. A skeletal face, lip-curled, staring: hair rubbed away from his head. Sidney. He and Johnny ran the house, kept business, saw the goods in and the money out with teenage runners every half hour. Sidney looked this way and that like a rat sampling the air, then slid something onto the step. Cans of Coke and energy drink, cold in a cardboard box. One of the boys went up and fetched the box around; each boy took a can or two. They popped the tops and stood drinking fizz in the shadows.

The morning was still chilly with a hint of damp. Light began to spill between the houses, keying the street in pink. Footsteps approached from the right, a worker man leaving for work, jacket and yellow tie, gold ear studs. The boys stared down over him and he didn’t look up. These men, the black men who wore ties with metal pins, who made wages but somehow had not left The Boxes: you didn’t talk to them. You didn’t let them up in the house. These men, if they came up in the house and were lost, someone needed them, someone would come looking. So you did not admit them. That was another thing Fin taught.

            Televisions came on and planes flashed like blades in the sky. Somewhere behind them a lawn sprinkler hissed fist fist fist, not loud but nothing else jamming up its frequency. A few U’s came in together at seven and one more about eight, crestfallen: he had that grievous look of a man who’d bought for a week but used up in a night. At ten the boys who had come on at two left. The lead outside boy, East, shared some money out to them as they went. It was Monday, pay day, outside the house.

            The new boys at ten were Dap, Antonio, Marsonius called Sony, and Needle. Needle took the north end, watching the street, and Dap the south. Antonio and Sony stayed at the house with East, whose twelve hours’ work ended at noon. Antonio and Sony were good daytime boys because they knew how to look all right, look busy. The night boys, you needed boys who knew how to stay quiet and stay awake. The day boys just needed to know how to look quiet.

            East looked quiet and kept quiet. He didn’t look hard. He didn’t look like much. He blended in, didn’t talk much, was the skinniest of the bunch. There wasn’t much to him. But he watched and listened to people. What he heard he remembered.

            The boys had their talk – names they gave themselves, ways they built up. East did not play along with them. They thought East hard and sour. Unlike them, who came from homes with mothers or from dens of other boys, East slept alone, somewhere no one knew. He had been at the old house before them and he had seen things they had never seen. He had seen a reverend shot on the walk, a woman jump off a roof. He had seen a helicopter crash into trees and a man, out of his mind, pick up a downed power cable and stand, illuminated. He had seen the police come down and still the house continued on.

He was no fun, and they respected him, for though he was young, he had none in him of what they most hated in themselves, their childishness. He had never been a child. Not that they had seen.

            A fire truck boomed past some time after ten, sirens and motors and the crushing of the tires on the asphalt. The firemen glared out at the boys.

            They were lost. Streets in The Boxes were a maze: one piece didn’t match up straight with the next. So you might look for a house on the next block, but the next one didn’t follow up from this one. The street signs were twisted every way or were gone.

            The fire truck returned a minute later going the other way. The boys waved. They were all in their teens, growing up. But everyone liked a fire truck.

            “Over there,” said Sony.

            “What?” said Antonio.

            “Somebody house on fire,” said Sony.

            The smoke rose soft and gray against the bright sky. Probably a kitchen fire, East said. No ruckus, nobody burning up. You could hear the wailing a mile when someone was burning up, even in The Boxes. But more fire engines kept rumbling in. They heard them on the other streets.

            A helicopter wagged its tail overhead.

By eleven it was getting hot and two men crashed out of the house. One was fine and left, but one lay down in the grass.

            “Go on,” Sony told him.

            “You shut the fuck up, young fellow,” said the man, maybe forty years of age. He had a bee-stung nose, and under his half-open shirt East saw a bandage where the man had hurt himself.

            “You go on,” said East. “Go on in the back if you got to lie down. Or go home. Not here.”

            “This my house, son,” said the man, fighting to recline.

            East nodded, grim and patient. “This my lawn,” he said. “Rules are rules. Go in if you can’t walk. Don’t be here.”

            The man put his hand in his pocket but East could see he didn’t have anything in there, even keys.

            “Man, you okay,” East said. “Nobody messing with you. Just can’t have people lying round on the...