Dead and Gone

we could hole up before it got daylight when Lune spotted a diner a few hundred yards ahead.

I told him to let me do the talking if we had to go inside. First I checked the parking lot. Most of the cars had New York plates. Some of the big trucks had a whole bunch of them, from different states. I couldn’t figure out why that would be, but I knew they locked the backs of those semis.

I tried door handles, one after another. If I hadn’t believed God hated me personally, I probably would have prayed. A big new Ford station wagon called to me. The back door opened. “Come on!” I whispered to Lune. We climbed inside. There was some stuff there, but it wasn’t crowded. “He could spot us here. We got to get all the way in the back,” I said to Lune, putting my hand over his mouth when he opened it to ask a question.

In the space behind the rear seat, there was nothing but a pair of suitcases. “All right,” I told Lune. “We’re going to just lie down here. If the guy comes out and gets in the front seat and drives away, we go wherever he’s going, got it? But if he opens up this back part, Lune—brother, listen now—we got to run, all right? Just fucking blast outa here before the guy knows what’s happening. See the woods over there? Right across from us? All right, that’s where we head for. I don’t think he’ll even chase us. Maybe figure it was a joke or something.”

“I can’t—”

“Lune, you have to! Look, if he opens up this part, I’ll try and kick him or something. Give you a little time to get going. Remember how you fought when Hunsaker …? Remember that? It’s like that now, too. We got to do it, or we’re fucked.”

He didn’t say anything, but he was breathing real hard. And real loud.

“Okay?” I asked him.

He just nodded.

I don’t know how much time passed before we heard the front door open. Lune squeezed my hand tight. We felt the weight of the driver as he plopped into his seat, even back where we were. Then we heard the blessed sound of the engine rumbling into life.

When the station wagon pulled out onto the highway, Lune let go of my hand.

It was just coming daylight when the driver slowed down. I couldn’t tell if he was getting gas or what, so I snuck a quick look up. It was another diner. We heard the front door open, then slam shut.

When we climbed out of the back of that station wagon, we saw that the diner the guy had stopped at was in the Bronx.

“We’re okay now,” I promised Lune.

Lune stayed with me for almost three weeks. I knew better than to go back to where they’d grabbed me before. I knew some other things, too. Like places where kids our age could make some money. But shining shoes was out—if you took a corner, you had to be able to hold it, and Lune wouldn’t be able to help. If I’d been bigger, or even if Lune had been better at violence, we might have tried to rip off one of the Times Square chickenhawks.

But there were plenty of other ways.

Lucky for us, it was summer. Lots of kids on the streets. The cops wouldn’t give us a second look once we got some fresh clothes. That I knew how to do. Not shoplifting. That was for the artists. All I knew was snatch-and-run.

I wouldn’t let Lune come with me when I hit the stores. It wasn’t just to protect him—I knew he’d screw it up.

Once we had clothing, we hit the strolls, looking for working girls who’d pay me a little for steering, like I’d done for Sandi. But as soon as they saw Lune, they couldn’t stop fussing over him. They all wanted to pat him, or give him a kiss, or cuddle him … that kind of stuff. If I heard “dollface” or “angelpuss” one more time, I was going to puke. But at least they never bothered me with any of that sappy stuff. And some of them gave us money, too.

People were a lot more careless back then. Stealing was easy. The hard part was finding places to sleep. I knew kids from reform school, but I didn’t know their last names, or their addresses or anything—just where they’d be hanging out if they were out.

There were gangs all over the City back then. Small ones, mostly, with four-block squares of turf, although there were a few that could call out a hundred guys for bloody battles that only the newspapers called “rumbles.” I knew I could work into a gang as a Junior—I had all the credentials. But I also knew Lune wouldn’t be able to handle the initiation, so we steered clear of them.

Finally, I found Wesley. Or maybe he found me. He knew places down by the docks that were perfect for hiding out. Wesley couldn’t figure out what I was doing with Lune, but he let him come along. That was Wesley then. If you were with him, anyone with you was with him, too.

Years later, after he’d made his mark so deep the whisper-stream trembled every time he went on the stalk, people said he’d been born a killing machine. They didn’t know Wesley when he had a heart. A heart of napalm, ready to explode into flame for anyone who would love him.

Lune was one of the softest, gentlest people I’d ever known. And Wesley became an assassin so deadly that even his own death didn’t stop his name from invoking terror. But when they were kids with me, they had the same heart.

Late one night, I told them about the fire. Wesley said I could have made sure if I had done them all first. I said I’d thought of that, but I’d seen kids stabbed and not die from it—even turn on the kid holding the shank and fuck him up. And I knew he had, too; we’d watched it together.

“That was in there,” the ice-boy said. “It’s different out here.”

“How come?” I asked him, puzzled.

The next day, we went into a pawnshop. Wesley bought a pearl-handled straight razor for two dollars.

And that night, he showed me how good it worked.

We had a little more than three hundred and fifty dollars put aside—a lot of money, back then. It was time for Lune to go. I thought he’d kick about it, want to stay with me and Wesley. But he kept telling us that he couldn’t find his parents hiding out—he had to go looking for them. Lune figured his parents couldn’t be from New York. The way he reasoned it out was, the place where we’d been locked up—the nuthouse—that was in New York. So his real parents, if they were from New York, they would have found him.

He asked us about our parents, once. We just told him we didn’t have any. When Lune asked us if we wanted to try and find them, Wesley gave him a look that would have scared a scorpion.