by Ace Atkins
“Since when did the messenger think he’s calling the shots?”
“I never do.”
“Me and you got the same friends,” Stagg said. “And I expect you to come through when called. But don’t go to try and give me any advice, sir, or I’ll make sure you go back to writing tickets to cocksuckers in rest stop bathrooms. You understand me?”
• • •
The problem with Mississippi State,” Chase Clanton said, pointing his fingers at the center of Mickey Walls’s chest, “was that y’all had to go and get yourselves a black quarterback. Studies have proven that you can’t have no black man running the offense. You ain’t never gonna see that type of shit with the Tide.”
“It was a good year,” Mickey said. “That boy got the job done.”
“Maybe,” Chase said, settling into Walls’s nice house, the big kitchen, the big-ass TV, and a nice stockpile of dirty DVDs he found. Some looked to be homemade. “But I don’t like it. It ain’t good for recruiting. You get a boy like goddamn AJ McCarron taking snaps and every blue chip in the country will want to go to Tuscaloosa. You see that woman he got? I seen her half nekkid on the Internet. I’m not lying. You got a computer and I’ll show ’em to you. Uncle Peewee found ’em for me. I’ll tell you what, they’ll warm you on a cold night like tonight. Hey! Hey, y’all got some more beer?”
“No,” Mr. Walls said. “Y’all drank it all.”
“No problem,” Chase said. “How about a Mountain Dew or a Pepsi?”
“Help yourself,” Mr. Walls said, trying to walk away from the kitchen while Chase still had things on his mind.
“Things can happen,” Chase said. “Like last year, the fucking Auburn game. About the worst day in my entire life. I was sitting there, watching the game at a Buffalo Wild Wings in Dothan, and I see that ball sail in the air, knowing it wasn’t gonna put them ahead but appreciating Saban for making the effort. Next thing I know, that black bastard took that ball, cheating like a son of a bitch and running it for a touchdown. Tide players didn’t even know what was going on. You want to tell me how that’s fair?”
“Because it’s legal to run back a missed field goal.”
“Yeah?” Chase said. “Well, maybe. But when the other team don’t know it, I say that’s goddamn cheating. I cried like a baby that night. Felt like someone in my family had died. I seen AJ walking off the field with that smokin’-hot piece of ass. He probably didn’t even try and get himself some pussy after all that shit. She probably just held him and made him feel better. Those goddamn stupid Auburn people. Ain’t nothing but a cow college.”
“You go to college, Chase?” Mr. Walls said, leaning against the counter, nursing on his third Jack and Coke. He was a rich man, an accomplished man, and Chase could tell because of the V-neck sweater and Dockers. Only a rich man wears khaki-colored pants and clean shoes.
“You know, I thought about it,” Chase said. “But I’m learning everything I need to, on account of my Uncle Peewee. He’s teaching me shit that I can’t learn in schools, if you know what I’m saying. Hey, you mind if I look in your refrigerator for that Pepsi?”
“Only got Coke,” Mr. Walls said. “Are y’all headed back tonight?”
“I don’t know,” Chase said. “I guess we’ll ask Peewee when he come out of the shitter. Damn, that pizza tasted good goin’ down, but it sure did tear up my stomach. You think maybe it’s gone bad or something? You can’t keep food frozen forever. We had some deer meat that got rotten last summer and gave my whole damn family the squirts.”
The toilet flushed and Uncle Peewee walked on out, hitching up his big pants and wandering into the kitchen. “Y’all got any more beer?”
“Already asked him,” Chase said. “Mr. Walls said we drank it all.”
“Then you got a store around here?” Peewee said. “I can make a run for us. We got work to do. Hard to think sober.”
“You two can’t stay here,” Mr. Walls said, getting real serious real quick. “Your big-ass van is parked right outside my house. You want to keep it here all tonight and all day tomorrow? That’s not too smart. That’s not what we talked about. This ain’t the plan at all.”
“Shit,” Peewee said. “We can park it around back. Don’t see any reason for us to drive back to Gordo tonight if we’re here right now. That way, we can make a dry run over to that fella’s house and see what’s shaking. Lay it all out. Plan. Be smart. All of us get educated on what needs to be done.”
“What’s shaking,” Mr. Walls said, acting to Chase like some snotty Yankee, “is that they’re not gone. We agreed for you to meet my friend and y’all would take care of it. I’m not gonna be a hundred miles from here. I’m the first one the law will look to. This is y’all’s deal. And you get the cut and then get the fuck out of here.”
Peewee lifted up the bottle of Jack Daniel’s and poured some out into a red Solo cup. “OK,” Peewee said. “OK. I know this ain’t what’s planned, but it’s the deal we got now. I can pull my vehicle around back. Unless you got folks coming, ain’t no one can see it. And then me and you need to drive past the place. Ain’t no harm in that. But I need to know where me and my boy are headed tomorrow night. It may be a honey trap, like you said, but I ain’t getting fucked over in Mississippi. I want to get fucked, I’ll go over to Montgomery for that shit. I also need to know the make and model of the safe.”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t?” Uncle Peewee said. “Christ Almighty. But can you find out?”
“All I know is that it said ‘Bighorn’ on it,” Mr. Walls said, taking a deep breath like worried men do. “Had a drawing of a ram or something on it.”
“Yeah,” Peewee said. “I know it. Made by Rhino. How big?”
Mr. Walls put down his drink and leveled his hand at chest-high.
“Gun safe,” Peewee said. “Holds about twenty-five rifles and shit. Digital lock with a nine-volt battery. Thirteen cubic feet, with a three-spoke handle on it. Looks like an old-time bank safe. Right?”
“Yeah,” Mickey said. “Sounds right to me.”
“Damn thing weighs about five hundred pounds,” he said. “Door is about five inches thick, with external hinges.”
“Can you bust it?”
“I thought you had the combo?”
“If the combo doesn’t work,” Mr. Walls said, swallowing some more Jack and Coke. “That’s why I reached out, Mr. Sparks. I don’t think you’ve been listening.”
“Yes, sir,” Peewee said, Chase noticing his glasses had gotten a little smudged, “I have. Ain’t a safe made I can’t bust.”
“I told you,” Chase said, grinning wide. “I fucking told you! My uncle knows safes better than anyone. Now, that’s doing your goddamn thinking like a white man.”
Mr. Walls’s face turned sour, Chase wondering if he hadn’t gotten some of that bad pizza with rotten pepperonis. He turned and walked from the room and then out a side door, leaving it open and the cold air rushing inside like a son of a bitch. He looked to his Uncle Peewee and Uncle Peewee, being the smartest man he’d ever met, just shrugged and finished Mr. Walls’s drink.
10.
Quinn had walked outside his mother’s home, the inside getting too heated, too much talk, too many accusations, and Caddy jumping from being ashamed to pissed-off. Boom was outside, too, after saying his part to Caddy, and now leaning against Quinn’s truck, the one he’d rebuilt and refined as an answer to a brand-new monster Stagg had first offered Quinn as a bribe. Now all that seemed long ago. Quinn planned on driving it the final time tomorrow on New Year’s Eve before turning in the vehicle at the County Barn and heading on into whatever was next.
“How’s it coming?” Boom said.
“Terrible.”
“Who’s talking now?”
“Momma,” Quinn said. “Again.”
“That might take a while.”
“Ye
s, sir.”
Quinn reached into his old ranch coat and pulled out two cigars and offered one to Boom. Boom declined and Quinn trimmed the end of his and cracked open his old lighter. They sat outside, leaning against the Big Green Machine, not once lamenting the loss, worrying about where the old truck was going or where Quinn would go.
“I don’t like what I said,” Boom said. “I could have done better.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I tried to talk to her as one addict to another,” he said. “I tried to compare me being a drunk to her being addicted to whatever shit she’s on.”
“Heroin.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Didn’t sound right. I think she thought I was preaching to her. I’m no fucking preacher.”
“Neither of us are,” Quinn said. “Thank God.”
“But Caddy,” Boom said. “She got that in her. She was headed that way. Leading all those people, doing all those things at The River. She was good at it. Her ass fell hard.”
Quinn nodded. Ithaca Street, the road of middle-class houses off the Jericho Square, was still and cold. All the yards still decked out for Christmas, with lights on the houses, around the windows and doors, inflated reindeer and snowmen in front, light-up plastic Santa displays mixed in with ones of Baby Jesus. Sometimes it looked like Santa himself had been there at the holy birth. An old couple down the road had bright lights that winked on and off to the small sounds of electronic Christmas carols. The night was as cold as it had been so far, and Quinn’s cigar smoke drifted up and away without scattering or falling apart, twisting up over the colored lights across the road.
“How’d you do it?” Quinn said. “How’d you beat things?”
“That’s what I was trying to explain to Caddy,” Boom said. “Tell her she got to quit hating herself. I told her all of this shit comes from wanting to kill yourself. Some people do it fast and some do it real slow. I was on slow.”
“You hadn’t relapsed.”
“I got a purpose,” Boom said. “I got tired of feeling sorry for myself, on account of what happened. I had to buy into what you were saying, and my family was saying, even that woman I talk to up at the VA. You know?”
“What’s that?”
“Getting to that new normal,” Boom said. “Ain’t nothing going to jump back to what you want. You take what you given. That’s what Caddy facing. She kept on moving after the storm, kept busy as hell, so busy it would have killed some folks. She raised money, handed out food and clothes to the folks in Tibbehah, and she was fine until things slowed down. When things got slow, she had to look at her situation. And there she was, missing something, like I missed my goddamn right arm.”
“Dixon.”
“Yes, sir,” Boom said. “You know she was right about him. He took that bullet. He didn’t have to go, be there when you gone to go to get Caddy and Jason. That son of a bitch stepped up, owned up to what needed to be done for your sister. She probably loved him even more for that.”
“I shouldn’t have let him go,” Quinn said. “And I never even found out who shot him. That’s the least I could have done for her. I think it was the not knowing what happened, who pulled the trigger, that’s been pulling at her. I just never knew.”
“But we all know who called it.”
Quinn nodded, studying the end of the cigar, glowing red-hot. He ashed the tip, the electronic music playing soft down the street. Lights winking on and off. He could see the shapes and movements of family behind the curtains of the dining room, moving in and out. He waited for the sound of plates crashing, and maybe some yelling, but there was nothing, Jean probably still saying her piece, maybe reading that letter that Jason had written his mother earlier that day. Quinn had read it and the whole thing had ripped him up. He never wanted to read something like that ever again. How in the hell could his sister refuse to get better, why would someone want to stay in the swamp, not crawl out, not improve, not keep moving on. Caddy had been wounded bad time and again. She just never got the chance to heal without something breaking her apart soon after.
“I hate to see this truck go,” Boom said, patting the hood as if it were a horse. “Lots of hours, lots of work.”
“Rusty will get some good use out of it.”
“I don’t know,” Boom said. “I don’t think he wants it. Maybe you can make an offer to the supervisors. You can buy it from the county.”
“Maybe.”
“Take it to wherever you’re going.”
“Who said I’m going anywhere?”
“You ain’t sitting around Tibbehah with your thumb jacked up your ass,” Boom said. “And you ain’t no farmer.”
“I’m looking into some things.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Got to make a living.”
“Me, too,” Boom said. “I appreciate all you done to get me working again. I wish we could have done the same for Caddy. You can tell she feels like it’s all over. The River. Whatever life she had planned with Dixon. She loves Jason, I know that. But she’s all cracked-up, man.”
The front door opened and Jean Colson stepped outside. She waved Quinn forward. She was crying hard. But she was smiling.
Quinn looked to Boom. And Boom nodded back.
Caddy had agreed to get help.
• • •
Lillie Virgil helped clean up after the intervention with Caddy. Miss Jean was still in the living room with Caddy, Quinn, and Diane Tull, a family friend who’d taken over Caddy’s role at The River. Jason Colson, the old one, had been there, too, but didn’t say much. He only said he loved Caddy, as if that was all he’d been permitted. None of the family was doing much good until Miss Jean unfolded that letter little Jason had written in purple ink, only having to get two or three sentences into the thing, about how he missed his happy momma and was sad when she was gone, when Caddy started to cry. Caddy had broken down completely, Lillie knowing it was the place where someone like Caddy needed to be. To look at herself right in the goddamn mirror, nod, and admit she was truly and absolutely fucked-up and needed a hand.
She could go to Tupelo tomorrow. Quinn would take her.
“Who’s on duty tonight?” Anna Lee Stevens asked, both of them working elbow to elbow in the kitchen, Lillie rinsing the shit off the plates and Anna Lee loading the dishwasher.
“Kenny,” Lillie said. “Ike McCaslin. I’m headed back on in an hour. I got to check on Rose. Babysitter is watching her and Jason.”
“I better be getting on, too,” Anna Lee said. “My mom has been over at the house for three hours now.”
“Where’s Luke?” Lillie asked, but damn well knowing the answer. Playing dumb was sometimes the best way to find the truth.
Anna Lee opened her mouth and took a deep breath, holding a flowered plate in hand, and then closed it. “Working,” she said.
Lillie nodded and then scraped off some more of the food they had put out, no one really touching the food, not feeling like it was some kind of party, except for Quinn and Caddy’s Uncle Van. Life was a goddamn party for Uncle Van. First thing he did was walk over to the dining room table and make a big turkey sandwich with cheese on a little dinner roll. He looked stoned as hell, being the kind of individual who had a hard time facing the world with a clear head.
“This was good,” Anna Lee said. “I’m proud of her.”
“What else could she do?”
“Leave,” Anna Lee said. “Not face the truth. She’s done that before.”
Lillie nodded, finding it a little hard to wash dishes with a gun on her hip, the Glock knocking into the sink when she turned to hand a glass over to Anna Lee.
“I don’t know how this sounds,” Anna Lee said, “but Caddy has always seemed to be playing a part. The way she was in high school. You knew her better than I did. But you know what she was like. The things she did to shock peopl
e. She got off on that.”
“It was an act,” Lillie said. “If she can outshock someone, act like she doesn’t give a shit, then you can’t hurt her. That’s why she did what she did with boys. The reason she went up to Memphis and did the things she did there. She had to prove to everyone in this town how tough she was. But she’s softhearted. I don’t think she was acting these last couple years; who she became, who she was trying to be.”
“You don’t think all the religion, the good doing and all that, was all because of Jamey Dixon?”
Lillie rinsed a final plate. She heard Boom say something and heard laughter that she took to be a good sign, a family resolved to what they had and moving on. She shook her head. “I think that’s the real Caddy,” Lillie said. “Dixon was the one who found her.”
“The murderer?”
“I don’t know what he was,” Lillie said. “I just know what he did for my friend.”
Anna Lee didn’t talk for a while, finishing up with the dishes while Lillie wiped the counters clean. Lillie watched her as she pulled her phone from her purse, texting someone, and then turning back to ask if she could do anything else.
“No,” Lillie said. “It’s fine.”
“I didn’t mean to talk bad about Caddy,” Anna Lee said, standing there as perfect as she’d always been. Strawberry blonde, small-bodied, in a black sweater and jeans. Lillie bet her goddamn red purse cost five hundred dollars. She and Lillie had always wanted different things in life.
“I know.”
“I just want her to know herself,” Anna Lee said. “Her addiction is hurting everyone and she needs to admit it.”
“Is that a fact?”
Anna Lee pulled that red bag over her shoulder and pulled her bangs from her eyes, staring at Lillie as if she was bringing Lillie into focus. “Excuse me?”
“I just think honesty is a fine thing,” Lillie said. “I think it’s good to be truthful with kids. I think it’s also good to be truthful with your friends.”
“Of course.”
Lillie wiped her hands on a paper towel and tossed it in the garbage. “How about I walk out with you?”