by Ace Atkins
Quinn watched. The other men exchanged glances. All looked down at the table.
There was a good twenty seconds of silence when all Quinn could hear was breathing and rain pinging on the roof. He sat and waited.
“You didn’t know,” Mr. Jim said.
“Know what?”
Mr. Jim looked to Varner and Varner to old Judge Blanton, Quinn noting Blanton must’ve been elected their spokesperson.
Judge Blanton took a big swig of whiskey. “Sorry, Quinn. Ole Hamp stuck a .44 in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Go figure.”
2
Lena stood before the cracked motel mirror, hair wet and combed, body wrapped in a towel, thinking only a sixteen-year-old girl could be so damn stupid to find herself in Shithole, USA, knocked up and out of cash. But she’d made that decision to find Jody, and she would’ve walked to Texas to get the truth on why he’d disappeared into a plan that had been sold as the greatest opportunity of his entire life. He said he’d hook up with some true brothers in Mississippi and make enough money that he and Lena could stop thinking about having to stock shelves at the Walmart, or worry about paying bills or borrowing money from their kin. They’d ride into town in that big car, a car that made everyone sit up and take notice, riding up so damn high that you had to look down just to see people on the sidewalks. You could spit on their pinheads, is what he’d said with that gap-toothed smile, her being too stupid to have a trace of doubt in those words.
Her reflection had fogged up from the steam. She wiped it away and looked at herself, looking for maybe a little determination in those sleepy eyes that challenged her flip-flopping gut.
She reached into her tiny purse and found that sweet little .22 peashooter she’d stolen from her grandmother.
Lena watched the mirror for several minutes, practicing just what she’d say, arms outstretched and sighting down the barrel at old Jody, watching him shit his drawers.
“How ’bout some answers, baby, or I’ll start shootin’ right for that troublemaker.”
Quinn found the girl’s motel room empty, the bed a wreck, and damp towels on the floor. He went back to his own room and changed out of the stiff black suit and into blue jeans and boots, pressing a rolled blue shirt with a hot iron. He brushed his teeth and ran a comb over his head, although his hair had been shaved high and tight the day before, tucking all his civilian gear neat back into his ruck.
The rain slowed to a steady gray drizzle.
He asked the night clerk about the girl, but he hadn’t seen her.
He asked a maid. The maid saying she’d seen the girl walking the road before daylight. Quinn looked at his watch.
He didn’t want to go. But he knew he had to.
Son of a bitch.
His mother opened the door, holding a young child in her arms and a margarita in an outstretched hand. She looked at Quinn, put the drink down on a table, and hugged his neck, Quinn smelling the same oversweet perfume she’d always worn, her crying and wanting to know why he hadn’t called. On the stereo was maybe the last song he’d heard her play, “How Great Thou Art” sung by Elvis Presley. Everything in the Colson house growing up had been either Elvis or Jesus. Jesus and Elvis. You get two of them in one song, and that sure was a winner.
Quinn hugged her back, but found it a little difficult with the boy between them.
Their house was a basic ranch built with his daddy’s L.A. money when Quinn had been born. His mother had already strung Christmas lights under the drainpipes; a dime-store plaque with a Bible verse hung on the door. A faded movie poster for Viva Las Vegas hung over the television. He used to get so damn sick of her obsession, sometimes secretly glad that Elvis was dead so he wasn’t as much competition. Quinn knew his daddy had felt the same way, maybe the reason he’d shagged ass from Jericho.
His mother was tipsy on margaritas and gospel as she pulled him inside, the television room, the dining room, and the kitchen unchanged from his childhood. In the kitchen, she asked if he wanted anything; a picked-over turkey wrapped in aluminum sat on top of the old gas stove beside some congealed green beans in a pot and half a skillet of corn bread. She still had his high school portrait under a magnet on the refrigerator next to a photo of him after basic.
“Sure,” he said.
She shifted the child to the other hip, the boy curious and bright, watching Quinn as he walked to the refrigerator and pulled out a cold Budweiser. He smiled at the child, the kid maybe two, obviously of mixed race, with coffee-colored skin and soft blond curly hair.
Quinn’s mother made him a plate, heated it up in the microwave, and nervously sat down. Her eyes were bloodshot, and hazier than he’d recalled. She was unsteady, not knowing what to do with her hands.
“You know why I didn’t come?” she asked.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“If it had been reversed, if I’d said those things to him, you couldn’t have paid him to go to my service. He may be dead, but he’d understand. He’d respect my decision.”
Quinn ate and took a sip of beer. He shrugged.
“How long are you home for?” she asked, lighting up a Kool, finding some comfort in the action. “I appreciated those nice blankets you sent. Did you see them on the sofa? And the letters. I appreciated the letters, but I do wish you’d respond to the ones I wrote. It’s like we were both playing tennis with ourselves. Don’t you read what I send? Did you get the toothpaste?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Quinn leaned back and sipped his beer. “You could’ve warned me. You told me he had a heart attack.”
“What’s the use?” she said. “Knowing what he did doesn’t help. I just wish he hadn’t been such a selfish person not to think about his family.”
“Because killing yourself is a sin.”
She covered the little boy’s ears. “Quinn!”
“By the way, who in the hell is this kid?”
His mother stood up and turned the child around to face him. Quinn took a bite of turkey, some burned corn bread.
“This is your nephew,” she said. “If you’d opened a few letters, maybe you would’ve known it.”
“Hey there, kid.” Quinn grabbed the child’s tiny hand and shook it. “Where’s Caddy?”
“We haven’t seen your sister for six months now.”
Quinn was dead asleep at the motel when he heard a banging on the door—must have been nearly two in the morning—and he stumbled, looking for his jeans and his watch, confirming the time. As he pulled back those cheap antique curtains, he spotted Deputy Lillie Virgil standing underneath a bright outside light. She’d been at the funeral, but there had been a lot of handshaking and good manners, and it was not the kind of place for a solid conversation. “You looked in a funk,” Lillie said as soon as Quinn opened the door. “Figured we could talk later.”
“It’s kinda early,” Quinn said, leaning into the frame, feeling a blast of cold air, the dry asphalt lit dull by the crime lights in the lot. “Jesus.”
“You mind putting on some clothes?”
Quinn was wearing a pair of white boxers and walked into the room to look for his blue jeans and boots, which felt awkward and loose without laces.
Lillie looked over the room as he dressed, smiling at the way everything was as neat as a pin except for the unmade bed, everything he’d brought home packed away in the Army ruck. She ran a hand across the bathroom counter, seeing he’d wiped down the sink after shaving and hung his towel up to dry.
“You look like you want to make a fast exit,” she said.
“Makes things easier to find.”
“Been a long time, Colson.”
“Lillie.”
Lillie stood about as tall as Quinn in her boots, her curly hair wrapped up tight in a bun, Quinn recalling watching her play soccer and baseball, running as fast as the boys at state track meets. She’d always been the tomboy, the girl that women would marvel over when she applied a bit of lipstick or wore something other than blue jeans to their school prom.
Lillie curled her hair and wore it down, with a sparkly dress, but she went with this shit-bag redneck—in Quinn’s humble opinion—who’d tried to get her drunk and get himself laid. Quinn hearing about all this the next morning. Even in a dress, Lillie Virgil still broke the son of a bitch’s nose, the hick telling everyone in town that Lillie was nothing but a lesbian. And as far as Quinn knew, that may have been true; he never saw her after she’d gone up to Ole Miss and then became a cop in Memphis. She came back to the heart of darkness to take a job in Jericho on account of a mother dying of cancer.
“I was sorry to hear about your mom.”
“She suffered a long time,” Lillie said. “I got your letter.”
“You want me to follow you?”
“You ride with me,” Lillie said, smiling, as Quinn pulled into a plain white T-shirt and reached for a flannel shirt, buttoning up. “I’m supposed to be on duty, and if someone sees my car out here, someone is going to complain. And if someone complains—well, you’re the military guy. Shit rolls one way.”
“Who’s in charge now?”
“Wesley Ruth is acting sheriff.”
“God help you.”
“Amen.”
“How ’bout some coffee?”
“Dixie Gas opens in two hours.”
“Couldn’t this have waited?”
“Nope.” She shook her head and walked out, leaving the door wide open, crawling into the Jeep Cherokee marked TIBBEHAH COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE to wait.
The night flew past back roads and trailers and endless fields of harvested cotton, spindly and dry in the moonlight. The rain had let up, and steam rose from the fields like wispy phantoms. Lillie rolled down the windows, and Quinn could smell the damp earth and decaying crops, and all of it felt oddly comfortable in the cab. The scanner crackled while Lillie remained silent, one hand on the wheel while she took slow, gentler turns on country roads, breaking through patches of fog. She lit a cigarette and blew smoke out the window.
“Who’ve you seen?” she asked.
“The Three Wise Men . . . My mother.”
“I saw her this week. You knew she wouldn’t go to the service. She had it out with your uncle over Caddy’s baby. Hamp was an old man, and that kind of thing, the child being black, didn’t set too well with him. You know what your mother said?”
“I can only guess.”
“She said that Elvis Presley used to go to black dances down in the Delta and that he would’ve been a black man if he’d had a choice.”
“Yep, that’s what she’d say.”
“She say what happened to Caddy?”
“She didn’t know.”
“She’s in Memphis.”
“I don’t want to know.”
“Strung out.”
“Not my concern.”
“Jesus, Quinn. You sure grew hard.”
“After a point, you have to give up on some people. People wear their own paths. Just where are you taking me?”
“You know, a lot of folks want to see you,” she said, flicking the cigarette butt out into the night. “Boom didn’t mean to miss the funeral. He wanted you to know he had to attend to some personal issues. Between me and you, he’s having a mess of adjustment problems, and who can blame him after all he went through. But he’s going to be okay, I believe.”
“Which arm did he lose?”
“His right,” Lillie said. “You know, they gave him weapons training at Walter Reed to help him adjust. He can drive but won’t. For some reason he hates being behind the wheel.”
They turned off 9W and onto a county road, taking a hard turn into a long valley filled with cows, grazing in the headlights, a long stretch of barbed wire on cut cedar. She headed west at the crossroads and shined her lights up onto the dark house. His uncle’s home was a two-story white farmhouse built in the 1890s by Quinn’s great-grandfather, a hardened farmer who’d once shot a man dead over ownership of a creek.
“I loved your uncle.”
“He knew you were too good for this place.”
“He didn’t kill himself, Quinn.”
“Oh, hell,” Quinn said. “Do you realize that every time someone sticks a gun in his mouth, someone doubts it? What’s the official version, ‘He was cleaning his weapon’? I knew a kid in basic who’d been in and out of juvie, obviously off his medication. He offed himself in a toilet stall. How many people clean their weapon sitting on the john? You don’t need to protect my feelings. I’m not religious. I don’t believe he’s burning in hell.”
“Would you shut up long enough for me to explain?”
Quinn shut up.
“Johnny Stagg found the body,” she said. “You know he’s on the board of supervisors now?”
Quinn didn’t speak. Johnny Stagg was the poster child for white trash who’d crawled their way out of the backwoods. The man, now in his fifties or sixties, started out working angles at a shithole retirement home, getting the elderly to sign away their family land for his comforting friendship. People say Stagg logged out half the county that way, raping the earth down to the soil and trying to make himself respectable in the process.
Lillie said, “He called the funeral home to fetch the body.”
“What else could you do?”
“I saw your uncle. Crime scene was a mess with dumb shits tramping over everything. State people should’ve been brought in.”
“What difference does it make?”
“We won’t know now,” she said. “Wesley called it an accident and said any further questions would only sully Hamp’s reputation.”
“Maybe he’s right.”
“I found that .44 way out of reach, and an entry point that wouldn’t make sense to a blind man.”
“You’re a loyal friend,” Quinn said. “But my uncle wasn’t Jesus Christ.”
“Did I say that?”
Lillie got out of the Cherokee, still looking tall and athletic in blue jeans and a slick brown sheriff’s office jacket. She moved up the steps, motioning at Quinn to come the hell on, opened a screen door, and then ripped through some crime-scene tape.
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” Quinn said, not really sure he wanted to face that kitchen where the old man had stumbled with the .44 and contemplated the world being so damn unlivable that he’d just as soon check out. There would be reminders, as Quinn knew a person can hold a lot of blood, and that shit isn’t just a grease stain on this world.
“Suit yourself,” she said, holding the key in the palm of her hand. “These are yours now.”
“Come again?”
“He left everything he owned to you. Didn’t your momma tell you?”
Lillie Virgil handed Quinn the key. Quinn shook his head and stepped up to the front door.
3
Lena hoped she’d found Jody when the trucker dropped her off at the pulp mill just outside the Jericho city limits. She’d met the old, gray-headed guy at the Rebel Truck Stop off Highway 45, where he’d said sure he’d be glad to take her to town, and the man had seemed all fatherly and simple till he began to massage her skinny knee between gearshifting. She began to talk of her morning sickness and diarrhea, and the knurled fingers moved, and he kept his eyes on the blacktop before letting her out. She walked the rest of the way, the walking keeping her focused and sane and of the right mind to get to Jody, to ask him why he’d left her like he did, promising to return when he made a little money and make right by her.
The company road wound for a quarter mile, the air smelling rotten as an outhouse, till she found the office, a busted trailer up on concrete blocks. Wasn’t anyone there when she knocked, and she kept walking toward the corrugated-tin building and the smokestacks blowing out the rotten air. She used a red bandanna to cover her mouth, soon spotting three men on lunch break, sitting atop blocks and eating sacks of hamburgers from the Sonic Drive-In. They were skinny and wild-eyed and didn’t say anything to her, averting their eyes from her long legs and bulging stomach.
“Y’all kn
ow a boy named Jody?”
She described him, placing her hands on her hips.
They shook their heads.
“Heard he may have been working here.”
She described him again right down to the long blond hair, jug ears, and pimples on his cheeks. She told them he had a tattoo on his left hand of a Chinese symbol of some sort.
“There’s a boy started with us couple months back, but he don’t go by Jody.”
“What’s his name?”
“Booth. Charley Booth.”
“Is he here? Can I see him?”
One of the men chewed his hamburger for a good long while before answering, the other workers looking to one another with little grins on their filthy faces.
“I guess,” he said. “He’s still in jail, selling drugs to some black folks. Does that sound like your boyfriend, miss?”
The men snickered like a bunch of kids.
Lillie dropped Quinn back at the Traveler’s Rest, where he got in his old truck and drove toward the Fillin’ Station diner at the edge of the Square. A group of old farmers sat at a back table, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and talking crops and local politics in a mixture of grunts and coughs. Many of them had mud and cow shit stuck to their rubber boots, and the texture of their skin was like parchment. They complained about cattle prices and the rain that had ruined the cotton crop. Quinn could see their battered pickups parked outside like horses tied to the post.
The waitress—the older woman who’d accepted the flag from Hampton’s casket—kept refilling their coffee in thick mugs and shuffling back to the kitchen before bringing Quinn out a plate of country ham and eggs.
Quinn introduced himself. She said her name was Mary.
Mary was of medium height, medium weight, with pale blue eyes and hair dyed an unnatural brown. She looked like dozens of people he knew. About the only thing of note about her was the strong perfume she wore that cut through even the scent of bacon and cigarettes.