The Ranger

by Ace Atkins

  Lena just stared at him.

  “We just wanted to make sure you don’t hold Mr. Gowrie responsible for your health issues,” the slick lawyer said.

  “He tried to make me stay,” Lena said. “If I hadn’t gotten help, I might’ve died.”

  “He was doing what was best,” Stagg said.

  Lena felt a shadow over her and looked up at the face of the slick attorney. He gave her a reassuring smile and said, “Have you spoken to the police?”

  “No.”

  “Do you intend to?” the attorney asked. The crystal on his big watch cast the light in her eyes and made her squint for a moment.

  “What do y’all want from me?”

  “Are you going to call the police on Mr. Gowrie?”

  “No. I mean, shit. I don’t know,” Lena said. “My baby is coming back soon. I have to feed her.”

  “This is a morning of miracles,” Brother Davis said, folding his hands together. “Can we all pray for a moment?”

  “The doctor said I would’ve died if I’d stayed.”

  “Dr. Stevens said everyone was feeling great stress during the birth,” Lamar said. “Is that correct?”

  Lena just stared at him, the lawyer standing over her, rocking up on his shoes and smiling down at her.

  “Mr. Lamar has prepared a statement,” Stagg said. “We’d like you to look it over and sign it. It makes sure you don’t hold anything against Mr. Gowrie.”

  “What’s in it for me?”

  Lamar looked over to Stagg and grinned. Stagg nodded to Brother Davis.

  The preacher with the gold teeth sat down at the end of Lena’s bed and smiled at her, looking content and confused at the same time. He reached over to her finished plate and ran a finger through the last bit of whipped cream and licked it. “We got a special fund for women in your sit-ation. Money and such that can buy clothes, get a baby the right kind of nutrition.”

  Lena rolled to her back and tried to find the controls to raise the bed.

  “That’s all you got?” Lena asked.

  “She sure is a pretty thing,” Brother Davis said. “I just been watchin’ her down in the nursery. Got to hold her. So little, and cute as a bug.”

  Lena tried to get out of the bed, but as she tried to stand her feet disappeared from under her. She fell right onto Stagg’s lap, and his bony hands helped her get some balance and sit back down. He held her hand and rubbed it. “You’re not in the right mind. Givin’ birth is hard on a woman.”

  Lena pulled back her foot and kicked as hard as she could, knocking Brother Davis to the floor. “Y’all get the fuck out of here. And if you step back into this room or go near my baby again, I swear to God I’ll kill you.”

  “Now, that’s a pretty picture,” Quinn said, watching the exit to the hospital from the passenger seat of Lillie’s Jeep.

  “I never doubted Johnny was a shitbag,” Lillie said, “but to show up at the hospital.”

  “They’re leaning on the girl,” Quinn said, remaining quiet for a long while. “Why would Stagg be such a friend to Gowrie? What’s in it for him?”

  “Money.”

  “He doesn’t need money.”

  “You want to bet?”

  “I thought Johnny was moving up in the world.”

  “He was.”

  “And?”

  “He got into some development project that screwed him.”

  “How’d that go?”

  “I don’t know much about it,” Lillie said. “I know he got the whole town fired up that all this business was headed our way.”

  “What happened?”

  “Stagg says it’s still in the works. All I know is, the site’s still empty, and no big companies are knocking on the door of Tibbehah County.”

  “Who’d know more about it?”

  “The old woman,” Lillie said. “You remember Miz Mize?”

  23

  For as long as Quinn could recall, Betty Jo Mize had been the owner, publisher, managing editor, and lead reporter for the Tibbehah County Monitor. The thin paper was published twice a week, her standard column taking up most of the front page, and, when she was truly moved, the text flowed inside, next to the advertisements for specials at the Piggly Wiggly, church notes, and legal announcements. She was the master of the prayer chain, the potluck supper menu, the special Christmas memory, and endless tales of when Jericho had been a prosperous town. Quinn had made her column dozens of times, Betty Jo still calling him Jason and Jean Colson’s boy, although his parents had been divorced for more than fifteen years.

  She was small and frail and white-haired, standing a few inches over five feet, and had been rumored to have been on death’s door since 1986. She often credited her faith in Jesus and the prayers of the community for her good fortune. She was a regular at the First Baptist Church, a member of every women’s club in Tibbehah and its two adjoining counties, a great-grandmother, an avid gardener, and a vicious gossip with a taste for Jack Daniel’s, cigarettes, and filthy jokes.

  Quinn liked her a lot.

  “I’m glad you didn’t go and get yourself killed, Quinn.”

  “I appreciate that, Miz Mize.”

  “Have you seen your daddy lately?”

  “No, ma’am. It’s been years.”

  “That’s right,” she said. “He was a good-looking man.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Quinn nodded. Out through the painted window advertising THE MONITOR, he saw two boarded-up storefronts side by side, the old sporting goods store, now a check-cashing business advertising EARLY PAYDAY LOANS.

  “Quinn, you do realize there are three kinds of sex?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “A man your age needs to understand that. First there is house sex.”

  “Sure.”

  “See, when you first take a wife, you have sex all over the house.”

  “I bet.”

  “And then comes the bedroom sex. You and your wife only have sex with the lights off and under the covers.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And then comes hall sex.”

  He nodded, waiting.

  “That’s when you pass each other in the hall and say, ‘Fuck you.’ ”

  Quinn smiled. Betty Jo leaned back into her desk chair, surrounded by all kinds of Mississippi newspaper awards, framed columns, pictures of kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids. There was an entire collection of ceramic figurines of children praying, lots of dead plants and coffee mugs, two proclaiming her THE WORLD’S GREATEST.

  She grabbed both of them and walked behind her desk, pouring coffee. “Your mother has a new man.”

  “I know.”

  “You want to know about him?”

  “Not really.”

  “He’s okay, Quinn. Really. He’s been married twice, isn’t too bright, but what the hell.”

  “I’m sure he’s a good man.”

  Betty Jo sat back down and passed a coffee mug to Quinn, lighting a cigarette with a small gold lighter. “I heard you’ve been spotted around on leave with Lillie Virgil.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I like her.”

  Quinn was quiet. Betty Jo smoked and winked at him.

  “You hear about the Italian couple on honeymoon?”

  “Is this the one where the bride’s name is Virginia?”

  “Shit,” Betty Jo said.

  Quinn smiled and leaned forward in his seat, noticing the old paneled walls and hard fluorescent light, lots of dust and old knickknacks, stacks and stacks of newspapers. The room smelled of coffee and nicotine. “I want to know about Johnny Stagg.”

  “Good Lord, Quinn. I just ate lunch.”

  “You know anything about him doing business with a man named Gowrie?”

  “I know who you’re talking about. That trash got himself arrested this morning for pulling a gun on Dr. Stevens.”

  Quinn nodded.

  “You know much about Gowrie?”

  “He showed
up a couple years ago. Inherited some land or bought some land, I’m not really sure. But he’s not from here, and if it was inherited, it was from some kind of distant relation.”

  “You know about the drugs?”

  “Of course. Everyone in town knows that.”

  “You write about it?”

  “He hasn’t been arrested until this morning. I can’t print rumors.”

  “And now he’s out.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Luke wouldn’t press charges.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “I hope to find out.”

  “That doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.”

  “Are they friends?”

  “Stagg’s on the hospital board.”

  “Why would anyone allow that?”

  “He’s promised to build something bigger and a lot better.” Betty Jo looked at Quinn like he was a little slow. “He already got a certificate to build from the state. You can’t have a new hospital without that. Quinn, you never heard of the Tibbehah Miracle?”

  “Lillie told me some.”

  “He put together an industrial-complex deal that supposedly would’ve saved this county. Part of the deal was a school and a regional hospital.”

  “What happened?”

  “They cleared the McKibben land, put up the signs, and nothing is coming up but weeds.”

  “Bankrupt?”

  “Johnny says everything is still going to plan. Just spoke in front of the county supervisors last week.”

  “Who’s backing him?”

  “You figure that out and let me know.”

  Charley Booth came to Lena at the hospital with a bouquet of daisies and dressed in a fresh white T-shirt and black jeans. His hair had been slicked back, and he walked up to her, Lena holding the baby, and gave that same semisweet smile he’d given her when they’d first met. “May I hold him?”

  “Her.”

  “May I hold the baby?”

  And Lena didn’t see no harm in it. After all, the baby—she had not decided on a name yet—was half Charley Booth’s. He’d gone to full-time Charley Booth now, and that was good since there would be paperwork and things to fill out, that big black nurse already pestering her. Lena was thinking of something that would bestow some kind of dignity on the tiny girl. She was a tiny girl but needed a big name.

  “What you gonna call her?”

  “I hadn’t set on anything,” she said.

  “How about Wanda?”

  “That’s a terrible name.”

  “That’s my momma’s name.”

  He stroked the little girl’s face and looked up into Lena’s eyes and said, “We gonna be a family.”

  “You told me to go to hell when you was in jail.”

  “I ain’t in jail now.”

  “I don’t see how that changes anything.”

  “We’re getting out of here.”

  Lena didn’t say anything, her damn breath had caught in her throat, and she turned to look out the window, searching for the birds in that dirty water. She didn’t want Charley Booth seeing she was about to cry. But son of a bitch, it was comin’ on.

  “How long till they turn you loose?” Booth asked. She saw where he’d nicked his slim, slight chin while shaving off that peach fuzz.

  “This isn’t jail. It’s a hospital.”

  “When are you gonna get well?”

  “I’m not sick.”

  “This isn’t how I thought things would be,” Charley said. “You got to believe in that.”

  “Let’s take a walk,” Lena said, propping herself up from the pillows, finding her feet on the floor. “My ass hurts something terrible.”

  They found the hallways bare and open and wandered down one end to another, this hospital nothing like the places she’d seen on soap operas. She looked the big black nurse in the eye, this time nodding a hello because she had the father with her and wasn’t just a no-account girl with no damn sense or plan on bringing a child into this world. Charley nodded, too.

  He carried the baby, and they all made their way down to the vending machines. He punched up a couple Coca-Colas and some Little Debbie snack cakes. “Can she have one of these?”

  “Do you have a lick of sense?”

  They sat down in that small, silent room with no windows, just a narrow door. It smelled like burnt coffee and sugar. Someone had left a Bible and a Danielle Steel novel on the table, and Lena thumbed through both of them, searching for a name for the baby, thinking maybe the books had been there for a reason. Her whole life felt like it was coming together.

  “How about Raphaella?” she asked.

  “A what?”

  “For her name?”

  “That doesn’t sound like a Christian name,” Charley said.

  “Says here that it’s a name of Mediterranean aristocracy.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Or we could call her Ruth. That’s right here in the Bible.”

  He opened the snack cakes and pulled out one for himself and pushed the package toward her, biting off half and chewing while he rocked the little baby, touching her little nose with the edge of his finger.

  “I want to take you down to Florida with me.”

  “You got money?”

  “I will have money,” he said, dropping his head into his hand. “Reason I treated you like that was to push you away. I know you could do better.”

  “We’re already in this thing.”

  “I got money coming,” he said. “Can you hold tight for a couple days?”

  “I don’t have no money,” she said. “I don’t have no insurance. I get one more day here.”

  “You stay with me.”

  “Back at Gowrie’s?”

  “I got my own trailer,” he said. “I can’t leave without my money. Then we go to Florida. I already got it all planned out in my mind.”

  “What’s in Florida?”

  Charley Booth smiled, sticking the rest of the snack cake in his mouth and chewing in deep thought. “I’ve always wanted to open up an ice-cream stand.”

  Lillie drove Quinn out to the old McKibben place, a thousand-acre parcel that had been the envy of everyone in the county. Original hardwoods and big thick pine trees, three creeks that had sprung off the Big Black River and ran through the land adjoining a National Forest. The McKibbens had kept it in their family since after the Civil War, the southern edge of the property the site of a cemetery where hundreds of soldiers who had died after coming to the hospital in Jericho were buried. Quinn had hunted the land many times with Judge Blanton and his uncle, even his father on occasion. An invitation out to the land was an entry into the old times of deer camps and the wild woods where Mississippi ran thick with panthers and black bears. Before Quinn had shipped out, he’d walked the northern edge of the property and found an arrowhead, maybe a thousand years old, and had carried it with him as a good-luck talisman from one warrior to another.

  The old creek bed where he’d found it was strong and slow, moving over the pebbled bottom in a place that remained cool even in the hottest month, deep patches of moss on rocks.

  And now he and Lillie stood maybe a half mile from that place, and it seemed as if Quinn had entered a moonscape. Most of the thousand acres had been cleared down to the earth, gravel roads had been laid down and foundations poured for the Tibbehah Miracle that had never arrived. Johnny Stagg’s dream of a sprawling development to bring industry and commerce to backwoods Mississippi. All through the open gashes in the earth were scorched burn piles, logs as big as trucks that had refused to burn, charred and left to rot.

  “They stopped work about this time last year,” Lillie said, the cold wind whipping her hair into her mouth. “Stagg keeps on saying this is going to happen, but no one has heard of one company coming here.”

  “Now he’s hooked in with some bad folks in Memphis.”

  “How bad?”

  “I followed Gowrie’s daddy up to Memphis last night
to a strip club. He was making some kind of deal.”

  “Maybe Gowrie’s daddy just likes to check out naked girls.”

  “And gets invited into a back room with a fat satchel?”

  “Was it that obvious?”

  “I don’t think Daddy Gowrie can spell subtle,” Quinn said.

  “Did I mention Stagg’s personal preacher, Brother Davis, was with Daddy Gowrie?”

  The wind shot like a bullet across the cleared land and stung his ears and face. Quinn placed his hands into his pockets and turned all around him, a stranger in a place that had once been so damn familiar.

  “We had a run-in with Gowrie and his daddy back in April,” Lillie said. “Gowrie’d beaten a man at the Southern Star pretty bad. He bit a damn plug out of the man’s throat. He claimed self-defense.”

  “Why didn’t my uncle run him out?”

  “We’re not the DEA, Quinn,” she said. “Your uncle wanted us to do the best we could. But he was hoping to get some state people in here soon. He knew what was going on and knew Gowrie ran most of the labs.”

  “And then came that fire.”

  “Wesley brought back two graduation photos of Jill Bullard,” Lillie said. “Somebody used that girl all up.”

  “She and Caddy were friends.”

  “How?”

  He told her about Memphis, and they didn’t speak for a long while, Quinn hearing his boots on the turned soil. Some battered earthmovers sat still up by a massive footprint of concrete.

  Quinn headed back to the Jeep, Lillie in tow.

  “Do you remember that time that you and Wesley threw that keg party out here? You must’ve had two hundred folks.”

  “Charged five dollars per head.”

  “That was a good party. We had a bonfire, and that old black man played the guitar. Who was he again? That was fun.”

  “Till those deputies like you showed up and ruined it.”

  “How long did they chase you?”

  “A couple hours.”

  “But you lost ’em?”

  “Didn’t take much.”

  “Your uncle knew.”

  “Oh, hell yes. He knew it was me. But couldn’t prove shit.”

  “Did that bother you?”