Dodgers by Bill Beverly
My rating: 4/5 cats
In his mind he was boiling it down: Drive the roads. Meet up for guns. The job. He tried to follow it in his mind, see where the problems were. But there was nothing to see. Only these boys. Kill a man? More like keep them from killing each other, these three boys, for two thousand miles in this ugly van. That was what they’d brought him in for. That was what he had to do to get back home.
this is crime fiction where crime takes a backseat to character development, a coming-of-age novel whose protagonist had never been a child, a road trip novel with a body count.
sixteen-year-old east has run the yard of a drug house in the boxes, a winding neighborhood in l.a., for two years. he’s smart, humorless and practical, and he’s not in the game for the glamor or the bravado, but because at sixteen it’s the most lucrative thing he’s qualified to do. it’s also a job for which he is well-suited: he’s quiet, deliberate, calculating, cautious – but his is a caution born of common sense, not fear. and despite living on his own, sleeping in an overturned cardboard box in the basement of an abandoned building, avoiding his own mother’s addictions, despite having a younger brother who has gone full-tilt into thug life, despite having been exposed to a full spectrum of horrors in his young life:
Unlike the boys, who came from homes with mothers or from dens of 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.
for all that, east hasn’t become completely hardened. he’s still a thinking, feeling, questioning young man with a more sensitive nature than many of his peers.
after the police raid “his” drug house, east is given a “redeem yourself” assignment by his uncle-kingpin fin to join three other boys on a road trip to wisconsin where east’s badass thirteen-year-old brother ty is supposed to shoot a witness set to testify in court against fin’s interests.
and once on the open road together, two thousand miles and the oldest of them just twenty years old, outside of the narrow confines and lack of options their hometown offers, east sees that the world is much bigger than what he’s seen of it so far, the criminal life is not inevitable, and he finds himself at the crossroads where a different adult future is possible.
but there are also different dangers, away from the more racially diverse populace of l.a., and four young black men stand out in certain towns across the vast white belly of america.
“East. We ain’t in the woods anymore. There’s a hundred cops right over there. And the longer we stay here, the blacker we get.”
the traits that make east perfect for running a yard also make him a good choice to guide us into this story – he’s a watcher, an observer, and we experience all through the eyes of a black teenager somewhat apart from the other boys and also very conscious of being scrutinized for “otherness” by the wary white gaze of strangers.
even among other criminals, there isn’t an automatic camaraderie that transcends race; transactions are tainted by casual racism, which east absorbs and deflects, not willing to give anyone power over him.
“These ain’t the low-end Saturday-night specials city niggers use,” said the man, licking his lips. “No offense.”
There it was. East saw it fly out and watched it sink. Just a stone in the water.
the nature of the road trip lends itself to introspection, with the hypnotic sameness of the highway’s yellow lines stretching into forever, the backseat catnaps and rushed meals from fast food joints, the high spirits of teenagers away from home for the first time, full of the pride of being entrusted with a very adult mission and the giddiness of unsupervised adventure, seeing the world from a different vantage point, making their own decisions, which are frequently very poor ones indeed.
it’s another fantastic debut novel – strong writing, strong voice, wonderful descriptive passages both visual: Gym muscles down his belly like puppies in a litter and philosophical: They’d done some things right. But nobody would tell you how many things were left; it’s meditative without dragging (much), and it’s a fresh take on literary crime writing.
change the setting from l.a. to baltimore, and this novel would be a perfectly satisfying season of the wire where east would obviously be
although east’s little brother is more of a pill than bug. and i guess the book would have to be retitled “orioles,” which is definitely a step down, title-wise.
it’s a great first novel – a little draggy at the end, but definitely one to watch in the crime-lit genre.
