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Bill Beverly

Dodgers

This book is for Olive, who gave me a new life

And giving a last look at the aspect of the house, and at a few small children who were playing at the door, I sallied forth…my course lay through thick and heavy woods and back lands to town, where my brother lived.

James W.  C. Pennington, The Fugitive Blacksmith (1849)

Every cheap hood strikes a bargain with the world.

The Clash, “Death or Glory”

I: THE BOXES

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 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, steadied themselves on the low stone wall. 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 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; 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 at 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, payday, outside the house.