by Ace Atkins
Lena watched him, noticing his large, veiny arm, lined with tattoos, and the way he turned out the window again and dug a lump of dip from his lower lip, flinging it down onto the pavement and turning his black eyes right on her.
She sucked on her milk shake, not backing down for one damn minute. She’d paid for her food and would enjoy it, even longer than she’d expected. She turned away and watched a man in white working the grill, flipping over patties and checking some fries in a grease trap.
Lena placed her hands in her little knitted coat, feeling the wind kicking up over her back.
“I love the look of a woman with child,” a man said. “Y’all got that glow.”
She craned her head.
He smiled at her, wearing a black T-shirt with no sleeves like it wasn’t about forty degrees out, and reached out and grabbed her last two fried pickles and put them on his fat tongue, sliding into the seat in front of her.
“Don’t look at me like that, girl,” he said, scratching the stubble on his chin, his teeth yellowed. “You can forget that Charley Booth. Right now, I may be the best friend you ever had.”
10
Quinn bought a bag of dog food in Bruce and left out a bowl for Hondo at the farm before picking up his old truck and calling home, letting his mother know that he wouldn’t be able to make that church service. He had to pull the cell away from his ear at her response. “It’s important,” he said. Words were said about the chickenshit casserole and the preacher dropping by and some kind of plaque that had been arranged. She made him promise three times to at least make the lunch and all three times he’d agreed.
“Okay,” she said, finally.
“Okay?” he asked.
“Okay.”
“Love you, Momma.”
He headed east back to the truck stop, finding the lot pretty bare, maybe ten or so trucks chugging out those diesel fumes. The drivers catching some fuel and rest for a couple hours before heading on. The whole scene reminded him a bit of some staging areas in Iraq, when getting supplies down highways had been a major operation and strike teams were sometimes needed to clear the way. You could kind of feel the expectation in that silence.
Quinn walked the ground between the trucks, seeing no one. Even the cabs were empty, with the truckers sleeping or in the diner eating. He walked the rows twice and then walked inside the Rebel Truck Stop, ordering a plate of eggs and hash and black coffee. The truck stop was a massive operation, with an adjoining Western shop where they sold hats, boots, and big belt buckles with horses and bulls on them. You could buy Mexican blankets and bullwhips, and John Wayne movies on DVD for five bucks. Dirty movies for ten.
Quinn paid his tab and walked back out into the cold. The morning light shone hard and bright white across the blacktop.
He walked the rows again. A couple trucks pulled away, leaving only a handful, and it seemed to him that the night’s action had probably picked up and left. Sunday, even for some hard-up truckers, wasn’t the best time to get laid in Mississippi.
About halfway back to his car, he saw her.
At first he thought it was Kayla again. The girl using the pay phone was dressed in a jeans skirt and T-shirt, some black tights the only thing protecting her from the cold. She wore big black oversized glasses, but as he approached he saw it was the girl from the other night that he damn near hit on Highway 9.
She turned to him and then back to the corner of the pay phone, the wall scrawled with keyed crude drawings and biblical passages. He tapped her on the shoulder, and she turned and said, “What?”
He stood there. She hung up, the change rattling down in the return.
She scooped it out quickly.
“How you making out?”
“Fine,” she said, hugging her arms up over her extended belly.
“You look cold,” Quinn said. “Can I buy you something to eat?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m with a friend.”
“Jody?”
She shook her head. “Another friend.”
“You look like you’re getting close,” Quinn said.
She nodded.
“Don’t you think you better put on a jacket?”
“I can round up the money for that motel room,” she said, shifting from leg to leg in the cold wind.
“Don’t worry about it.”
She nodded and turned back to the glass door of the truck stop. Quinn watched her move to a back booth, removing the glasses and showing off a nasty black eye. A waitress put a menu in her hands, the girl folding the glasses and then unfolding them, placing them back on like blinders. Quinn walked back inside and went to her table. He didn’t say anything but leaned down and wrote out Luke Stevens’s cell phone number on the back of a book of matches. Underneath he wrote QUINN and his cell number.
She looked at him and frowned, leaning into an open hand propped on an elbow. She didn’t make a move to pick up the matchbook.
“This doc is a friend of mine,” he said. “You get that baby checked out. I’ll make sure it’s paid for.”
“I don’t know you.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Quinn said. “You want to tell me what happened?”
“Not really.”
“My name and number is written there, too.”
“Why are you doing this? You want somethin’?”
“Don’t be so tough that it makes you stupid.”
“You go to hell.”
Quinn tipped the edge of his baseball cap and left.
He sat in the cab of his truck for a long while, getting a nice view into the diner, the place like the inside of a fish tank. The girl sat alone, drinking a Coke, until a man entered from a side door and took a seat across from her. He was a decent bit older—or looked older—with a shaved head lined with black stubble, the same length as the hairs under his nose and on his chin. He had a lit cigarette in hand and kept his arm around the back of the booth while he made rapid, wild gestures and pointed. The girl just looked down at the tabletop, reaching for some sugar and putting it into her glass, finding some kind of interest in the way it dissolved.
The man wore a sleeveless T-shirt, his arms thick with veins and muscle. Every few minutes he’d reach for his phone, talk for a bit, then slam it down. He kept picking it up, looking at the face of it, and typing on the keys.
He didn’t speak to the woman as he ate, and then he moved for the back door, Quinn cranking the engine and driving slow to the diesel pumps, where he saw the man, short but powerful-looking, approach a dually Chevy with the back window obscured by a large decal of an evil clown’s face.
Quinn kept driving to a decent vantage, no one even looking at his truck, and he killed the engine. The man leaned into the open window of the truck, revealing a .45 tucked into the back of his tight ragged jeans. When he turned back, he was still laughing, walking along with a rotten smile on his face, his breath clouding in the cold, a fat green shamrock tattoo across his neck.
The dually Chevy cranked to life and worked a fast U—turn, passing Quinn.
The driver was a skinny fella who wore a homemade splint of silver duct tape on his left wrist.
Jericho had always been a lonely town on a Sunday. About the only place open was the truck stop; the Fillin’ Station and all the downtown was closed. There was a new storefront church in the old town movie theater where a hand-painted piece of plywood advertised the services of Brother Davis. Only two movie posters were under the glass; one for a film starting Kirk Cameron about saving your marriage and another showing a large airliner advertising the LAST DAYS OF MAN. Half that parking lot was filled, and with the windows cracked Quinn could hear the singing and electronic-piano music inside. He drove east, knowing he had to be back by one to his mother’s, feeling like he didn’t want to face the farmhouse alone and hear those dull, empty spaces when he talked and shuffled, feeling like the cavern needed to be filled up with something new, pushing out the dead and hollow.
Ri
bbons and ribbons of country highway opened up under him, splitting off Main and heading up toward the town cemetery, Quinn half thinking he should visit his uncle’s grave but not really wanting to stop, just driving past a volunteer fire station and an old cotton gin that had been closed for years. He passed the old ammunition factory and a transmission-repair shop, and everything kind of ended there, past the original town cemetery, where Civil War soldiers had been buried when Jericho had been a hospital during the war, Quinn recalling all the stories and visits with his uncle while his father was away, chasing another business scheme or shooting a movie.
Where the paved road ended, a gravel path grew under his tires, curling up to the north in a single lane of more dirt and gravel, signs for PRIVATE LAND and hunt clubs and logging companies nailed onto pine trees. This was the place where people came to dump their old refrigerators and washers and car parts, in the long ravine choked with last year’s pine straw and faded beer cans and diapers and old plastic dolls. Quinn wished he had a beer right now as he drove, searching for music on the radio but finding only messages of salvation and digs at the sinners of this world. He checked in with the old rock ’n’ roll station out of Tupelo but found that it had become nothing but the yelling voice of talk radio. He wished he’d brought some music with him. Keeping the windows down, the cold air feeling good on his face and in his lungs, he reached into his jacket for that extra cigar that Judge Blanton had given him the other day and lit it. As he circled the bend, he found himself on blacktop again as the road headed back to join up with Highway 9, a few trailers off to the north over some cleared land.
A lone figure walked far in the distance, a big, hulking shadow keeping up high on the shoulderless road, wearing an old Army coat and ragged pants tucked inside flopping desert boots. Quinn slowed behind the man, honking his horn.
Boom Kimbrough turned.
“Get in,” Quinn said, reaching for the passenger-door handle, cigar clamped in his teeth. “Where are you goin’?”
Boom shrugged.
“You’re coming to lunch,” Quinn said. “Don’t think you’re leaving me alone with my momma’s church friends.”
Boom smiled at him, and Quinn gunned the motor just like when they went riding in high school, trying to stay one step ahead of the law, knowing every back road and fire trail in the county. “You remember when we smoked ole Deputy Frank? He about shit his pants, trying to prove we were the ones who outran him. I wonder what happened to him.”
“He’s dead.”
“He always reminded me of Barney Fife.”
“Where you been?” Boom asked.
Quinn told him about the meeting with Uncle Van and the truck-stop whore, the trip to Bruce, and then seeing the pregnant girl at the Rebel Truck Stop.
“You sure it was the same guy?”
“’Less I broke another man’s wrist.”
“You do love to fight, Quinn.”
“It was him.”
“What’d the other one look like? The one with the girl?”
Quinn gave a description of the sleeveless muscle shirt and the shaved head, the bad teeth and the .45. “And he had a tattoo of a shamrock on his neck. Must be Irish.”
“That or he’s in the Aryan Brotherhood.”
“That’s their symbol?”
“Yeah. The peace sign was taken.”
“Sound familiar?”
Boom nodded, adjusting his large weight in the cab of the truck, reaching down to roll back the seat and pulling at the seat belt with his left hand. “That motherfucker’s name is Gowrie. His people moved in here about two years ago. He is bad news, man. He’s plugged into the Memphis scene, cooks meth all around the county, and fucks with anyone who gets in his way.”
“Why do you think Wesley wouldn’t tell me that?”
“’Cause he got a little bit of sense,” Boom said. “And knows you.”
“So what’s in this for Johnny Stagg?”
“Here we go,” Boom said. “Fuckin’ with things. Quinn, you just can’t help but fuck with things.”
11
So he hit her. Lena wasn’t all that surprised by it after she spat in the man’s face, but she was surprised by him handing her a wad of twenty-dollar bills and saying for her to get cleaned up. He’d taken her back to where he lived, where they all lived, and she found out his name was Gowrie. She wasn’t sure if that was his first or last name or just something folks called him. He and his boys had five trailers laid down in this big gully wash off some back road north of Jericho. He’d told her they planned on getting Charley out real soon—Lena still getting used to folks calling him Charley, or sometimes Slim—and that if she’d just stay put, they’d take care of her. They were Charley’s family, and now that he’d planted his damn seed, they were Lena’s family, too. The smack in the face happened only once, when she got kind of hysterical. She said she’d sit in the car, and then he just started to drive, taking her up and around the Square, and then flat out hitting it on the main road north. She’d reached for the handle of that black Camaro and, the next thing she knew, she felt like she’d been kicked by a mule.
They had electricity out at the trailers, something she was surprised about because it was so far off the main road. But she heard the loud humming of generators and saw a mound of red gas cans by the mouth of a leaning barn. The trailers were all rusted and worn, looking like they’d been picked up and set down plenty, the steps fashioned out of scrap wood, some just loose bricks laid down in the mud. A long sluicing ravine fed into the mouth of the old barn, that looked like something that had been there for a hundred years, and by midday she found this was a place where the men, about fourteen or sixteen of them she was pretty sure, would gather. Some of them brought their women and children. Some were alone. Most of them smoked weed or chewed tobacco, circling around Gowrie as he spoke to them, Lena waiting for a sermon but instead learning of a world that was about to collapse in on itself due to all the Mexes and niggers in their midst. And if they didn’t get to work, get some money to buy more weapons, they’d be swept up in a darkness that would descend on the land like locusts.
Gowrie was geeked-the-fuck-out. She’d seen plenty of folks with their minds burning on that crank. But Gowrie was wild-eyed overtime. One time he just flat out kicked a boy from a folding chair when he thought the boy’s attention had wandered. It was that kind of speech, Gowrie walking and spilling out all matter of hateful things, wearing a T-shirt reading WHITE PRIDE, WORLDWIDE over a Celtic cross.
Lena grew restless in the chair, wanting to get up, her feet hurting, growing hungry, but afraid to move. The damn thing finally broke up after what seemed like forever, and trucks and four-wheelers started, Lena noticing more shithole trailers up into the scrub oak and pine. They lit a fire and gathered around it, passing around whiskey, and crank to snort. The day was cold but bright.
No one spoke to Lena for a while, and she was afraid to move from the radiator in the barn. When she could, she’d get clear of these people and back on the road. She’d give ole Charley Jody Booth one more try and then she’d find her way back to Alabama.
She felt hands on her shoulders and she jumped. But it was just a dumb boy putting a jacket on her. The jacket was warm and smelly and about four sizes too big. But she was in no place to refuse it and thanked the boy, who was short and fat and had the face of a pig.
His hair was shaved down, like all the men in Gowrie’s world. But his teeth seemed a mite better, and his voice was even and steady, asking if he could fetch her some food. She just nodded and followed, moving back to a row of freezers laid side by side at the back of the barn. A big Honda generator kept them going, and the boy opened the top of one of them to show food stocked like the cold section at a Walmart. TV dinners, sausage biscuits, even whole pies and ice cream.
The boy’s T-shirt had a picture of Alan Jackson on it. His arms were covered with goose pimples in the cold. He smiled a lot as he lifted a whole chicken potpie into a microwave and se
nt it spinning. He poured her a tall Mountain Dew in a plastic cup and took her over to a card table piled high with books so worn they’d grown soft and spineless. Weapons of the Middle Ages. Being White in America. The Coming Race War. Several comic books featuring Wolverine.
“You know Charley Booth?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Are they really gonna get him out?”
“That’s what Gowrie says.”
“He creeps me out.”
“Shh. Gowrie’s got a lot on him. Everything we got here is on account of him.”
“I think he’s crazy.”
“How’s your eye?”
“How’s it look?”
The bell dinged on the microwave, and the boy brought the potpie out to her. His jacket felt mighty warm. And she no longer noticed he had the face of a pig. She just saw a mess of freckles.
“My name is Pete. They call me Ditto.”
“Why they call you that?”
“I guess on account of me agreeing with most folks.”
You had to hand it to Jean Colson, she could sure put on a Sunday spread. Quinn and Boom stepped into the full house, barely noticed by all the people Quinn didn’t know, piling their plates with boiled ham and fried chicken, potato salad, and collard greens. His mother had made biscuits and corn bread, two pies, and that damn casserole based on cream-of-mushroom soup. Quinn took off the rancher coat, hung his baseball cap on the hook by the door, and started the progression of handshakes and hugs, making sure Boom was included in the conversation when the conversation turned to war. Boom seemed not to give a damn, excusing himself to join the line for the food, Jean making him comfortable up at the long, polished dining-room table, filling his glass with sweet tea.
Sometime in the night or the early morning his mother had decorated for Christmas, lights across the mantel, garlands on the front railings, and candles around the kitchen. The house smelled inviting and warm. His mother brought him a plate, and he sat down next to Boom, his chair in the center of the table, the wide mirror in the hallway reflecting Quinn flanked by family and friends, an elderly aunt patting him on the shoulder, more potato salad passed from his left. Elvis, as always, played on the stereo, Jean choosing a nice mix of old-time hymns and songs from his movies. “Peace in the Valley.” “Clambake.”