was a world
Down there, streetlights got lost in the treebranches. Hard-grain asphalt paved streets left ragged on the edges. Sidewalks ran alongside ditches, great crevices in the earth. Night was the season of the neighborhood.
You see him, you said.
I saw him. It was him.
He go in there?
In there. That's the house.
Every visible window was lit, spilling into the neatly shaped azalea bushes.
They all sat scrunched in the blank-colored SUV, slowing tracking the street, up and down. New rules. Easy rules. No Escalades, no big-rider wheels, nothing recognizable. No complications. End of story.
Tee-mo. Which way the Expedition gonna point.
This way here.
You ready now?
I can be.
Hopscotch?
I'm up.
We gonna do it?
Metallic clicks, grunts.
They sprang forth and entered a house crawling with children and women and massively machine-gunned every male remotely of age. Over wails and lamentations the staccato bursts ripped atmospheric fabric, a gigantic tearing sound. Covering one another, they pointed from body to body and the heat from the barrels rose up to their astonished faces. A motionless five year old sitting up on the floor vomited, churn running uneventfully down the front of his t-shirt. When they were finished they walked out backward, moving in each other's steps.
All right, Tee-mo. Git!
He burned it. I count four.
Good round number. Tee-mo. Go to the field.
The field?
You heard me.
The white guy said, Man all I saw in there was blue! His chest was heaving.
What you talkin' blue for.
I mean blue, as in not red.
Wha? Man. Get this and hold on to it. Blue is not blue. Red is not red. Was a world, but not no more.
Sure, Hi5. What you say is what is.
Rider. You see him?
I aint seen him.
Hopscotch?
Yeah, I saw him.
You did. Where.
In the bathroom. He was the one in the bathroom.
Huge thick silence.
That wasn't him.
What you mean that wasn't him?
That dude was in my seventh grade. He got a whole nother name. A whole other him.
The SUV arrived at the field.
Everybody got out. Hopscotch looked around. Hi5 walked up pistol out straight arm and shot him through the skull before he could get a good handle. Hopscotch fell down like something running on electricity that got unplugged all of a sudden.
The white guy yelled Shit! Shit! What was that for?
He was there because he was sent by the upstairs man. He was supposed to be there. He walked with them like he had rights in the world.
They all got back inside.
That was the wrong place. Aint nobody dead in there supposed to be.
It was the wrong place? Shit. All that blue, I thought for sure— The white guy ran with the boys way down in Houston. Like the bossman's son born with money but he wasn't, he was white, there were whites from somewhere involved, not the supply side.
I told you man. You got the idea somewheres you was a blood? Aint no bloods. All that category shit, it's gone.
They drove off. The SUV was as good as invisible. Neutral colors at night were the same as every color and no color both. Everybody who saw them called it a different color.
Pat and Tim were parked alongside each other in the Safeway parking lot, windows down, when they heard the codes and locations.
Surprised we didn't hear the automatics from here.
No kidding. Tim looked over, as if he could see the place through the dense night foliage.
Pat started to put it in drive.
Whoa. We're not even supposed to be here. You're covering Ticheli east.
So?
Sounds like it's all over anyway. Listen—
A 457 code came over.
What the — is that? I have never heard a 457.
It's not anything.
You mean you know what a 457 is?
No. It's just—I remember something about it. It's not significant. We better roll on out where we're supposed to be.
Pat found a laminated sheet on the floor and scanned over it. Not there. I think I'm just gonna ride by the 10-20, in case they start to call backup—
Pat.
Huh?
Wait. Listen to what I'm saying. Just go where you're supposed to be.
Tim was junior. But Pat caught the tone. Unmistakable.
Tim drove off. If what he said was true he wasn't supposed to be there either. But he turned toward the location.
Pat was beginning to get a bead on the range. No straight players invited. The map was growing.
They waited.
It became weeks and nothing happened. No retaliatory movements or noises. Their representative went into the neighborhood they used to be in and got challenged by no one. Everything checked out.
They won.
And for the wrong reasons.
As always, somebody else dies for you.
