East is East

The luminous hands of the clock radio showed 3:35. I have more of a right than any of them to be there, he thought, and his fingers trembled as he fastened the snaps of his spiked wristband. From the back room he could detect the soft stertor of his mother’s breathing, the dip and rise of her feathery snores. The image of the granola bars in the kitchen (chocolate chip-peanut butter) came into his head, but only briefly and not very persuasively—he was too excited to eat.

Outside, the smell was stronger, sweeter, leaching through everything and killing all those habitual stinks of crab and hogs and the dog-run out back of the Arms place. Royal threw himself down on the front steps to lace his hightops, and then it came to him: he was smelling pipe tobacco, Yerdell Carter’s special blend with cinnamon and rose hips all ground up in it. But then—and his hands froze on the laces—was he late, was he missing it? An undercurrent of waking life suddenly whispered to him out of the dark—the distant snap of a match, a murmur of conspiratorial voices: everybody was in on the secret. A soft curse escaped him and the little wheel in his chest accelerated a notch. He was thinking of the coon hunters his father convoked each autumn under the big old live oak in the front yard, dogs whining, shadows milling, the spit of tobacco, soft truncated jokes caught somewhere between throat and lips. Royal jerked at the laces, the blood pounding in his ear—more of a right than any of them

—and then he was down off the porch in a single covetous bound and tearing across the lawn to the Arms place.

Jason was up already, fussing over the dogs with a cup of coffee in his hand, looking important and old, though he was just two years, eight months and eleven days older than Royal. The porch light, a single dull 25-watt bulb, made a yellowish pocket in the night, and before he was halfway across the lawn, Royal could see the dark shapes of the men gathered there, eight or ten of them, squatting in the shadows and solemnly masticating the sandwiches Jason’s mother had made up for them in the unlighted kitchen. His eyes told him what his nose already knew: Yerdell Carter was among them, his pipe softly glowing, a deer rifle propped up between his legs. The others (he recognized Jenkins, Butterton, Creed, friends of his father and coon hunters all) hunched over shotguns, embracing the dull gleam of the steel as casually as they might have embraced umbrellas on a day with a threat of rain.

The dew was heavy and Royal came up on them with a squeal of his sneakers. He was breathing hard. Too tall for sixteen, gangling, with the tapering long African shanks of his father and the carefully chopped dangle of his bleached and processed hair, he looked—well, different

—and he knew somebody would have something smart to say about it. Yerdell Carter was the man. After crushing a mosquito with an audible slap, he grinned out of his ruined old face and asked Royal if he was going to catch himself a Chinaman.

Royal didn’t answer. His father should have been there in his place, but his father was driving truck in Kansas or Wyoming or some such windblown terminus Royal knew only from videos. His father was driving truck about two thirds of the time, and when he came home, he came home. Royal was sixteen and twenty pounds underweight, a loose gangle of gristle and bone. But where Jason and the dogs were going, he was going too. And nobody was going to stop him.

Jason looked up from his dead father’s dogs and offered him a sandwich, white bread and bologna. “Uh-uh,” Royal said, shaking his head as if he’d just been offered the body and blood of Christ, the flesh warm still and palpitating. “Ain’t hungry.”

The night before—six hours ago, that is—he and Jason and Rodney Cathcart had been watching Rock’n

’Roll High School on Jason’s VCR when Sheriff Peagler came to the door. Jason’s mother was in bed already and the three of them just about shit blood when they saw who it was: they’d been smoking pot—all the roaches they’d saved over the course of the summer rolled into one thin miserable number—and the smell of it hung over the parlor like an evil ghost. But the sheriff wasn’t interested in pot. He was interested in the two big coon hounds and the little yellow bitch Jason’s dead father had paid a hundred and ten dollars for in Brunswick.

The sheriff was a bone-thin white man with deep creases in his face and two hard blue eyes that took hold of you like pincers. He’d been a high-school football star—a wide receiver—and he’d won a scholarship to some college up north, but dropped out after two seasons. He wore a hat and a badge, but he dressed in jeans, T-shirt and boots like anybody else. He knocked once and stuck his head in the door. “Jason,” he said, “would you step out here a minute?”