The Redeemers

by Ace Atkins

  “So that’s the plan?” Caddy said. “Just sit on the front porch in a rocking chair, smoking cigars and drinking whiskey? Maybe something will come to you from some old Lefty Frizzell record. And, right then and there, you’ll know.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Doesn’t work that way,” Caddy said. “I take this shit one day at a time. I do believe in a Higher Power and I hand that smoldering crap of problems over to him every morning. I know what I can take on and I send on the rest.”

  “Next time you talk to Jesus, ask him about the election,” Quinn said. “I’d like to know my chances.”

  “You bet I will,” Caddy said. “Have you talked to Anna Lee?”

  “No,” Quinn said. “Haven’t been home that long.”

  “You been home long enough,” Caddy said. “Y’all left it pretty rough last time.”

  “She wants me but doesn’t know what to do with me.”

  “Hard to leave alone,” Caddy said. “You want to leave it, know you should, but you just can’t.”

  Quinn turned to look at his sister’s face. Small and delicate under short blonde hair. Little scars along her jawline and on her thin arms and wrists. “How’d you know that?”

  Caddy smiled and patted his arm. “Addiction is a hell of a thing, brother.”

  • • •

  The letters had come even while he’d been gone, stamped from the federal prison camp in Montgomery, Alabama. Quinn had gotten fifteen of them from “Johnny T. Stagg,” with his inmate number and new address far away from the Rebel Truck Stop. The truck stop shut down a year ago, with plywood over the windows and shopping bags over the pumps. Stagg wanted Quinn to come see him. He said they needed to talk person-to-person. Man-to-man. The phrasing of it depended on the letter.

  After being back home, Quinn was in no hurry to drive over and see Stagg. He helped Jason plant corn, peas, tomatoes, and peppers. He happily awoke at dawn to feed the cattle and the horses. There were fences to mend and a lot of runs to Jericho Farm & Ranch for fertilizer and dewormer. Anna Lee and Shelby spent more and more nights at the farm. On Sundays, Caddy and Jason would join them for dinner. Little Jason and Shelby loved to climb the old oak in the backyard, play on the tire swing and run wild, reminding everyone of Quinn and Caddy as kids.

  No one spoke of the Big Woods. No one really concerned themselves with the trial last year in Oxford. A new pizza shop had opened up on the Jericho Square. The old movie house had been refurbished and was ready for opening night soon.

  On a hot Sunday in June, Quinn got up early, ran five miles along the dirt roads around his property, fed the animals, checked on the watermelons, and drove east on Highway 82 over to Maxwell Air Force Base and the federal pen, where he’d agreed to see Stagg.

  A guard brought him into a mess hall with long dining tables and hard metal chairs and told him to wait. Ten minutes later, out came Stagg, wearing comfortable-looking prison blues and a big shit-eating grin. Outside the windows, men took their exercise among manicured grounds landscaped with blooming white gardenias and purple crape myrtles. It all had the air of a good Holiday Inn.

  “Appreciate this,” Stagg said. “I wanted to talk straight. You know these people read your mail?”

  “It is prison, Johnny.”

  “Oh, hell, I know,” Stagg said.

  Quinn sat at the table on the same side of Johnny, legs crossed and waiting to hear whatever shuck Johnny was about to lay out.

  “Maybe you figure I’ve been reformed,” Stagg said. “That I had some kind of secret pill-popping addiction and now I’ve changed? Or that maybe I got me one of those Gideon’s Bibles and got reintroduced to the man from Galilee?”

  “No,” Quinn said. “I don’t.”

  “Long drive from Jericho.”

  Quinn waited.

  “It ain’t so bad here,” Stagg said. “I get three meals a day. Work some in the chow hall. Taught them how to fry chicken. I exercise every morning. Supper by four. I watch television. Been watching Days of Our Lives and working through those books by Bill O’Reilly. He done killed Patton, Lincoln, and Jesus Christ. Guess a lot more folks he can kill, too.”

  “Johnny, I don’t give a shit,” Quinn said.

  Stagg laughed, scratched his cheek. He looked odd, for some reason, and then Quinn realized it was the hair. The high preacher hair with the ducktail had been barbered down a good bit. His hair had always been a deep brown but now was stone white.

  “I didn’t want you killed.”

  “Appreciate that, Johnny.”

  “I know you don’t believe me,” Stagg said. “But that wasn’t my doing. That was the fucking psychopath, the trooper captain you killed to protect your sister. How is she? And your momma and them, too?”

  “Just fine,” Quinn said. “Is that it? Is that what you wanted to tell me? Because I think you wanted me to see how nice things were over here at federal camp. That however many years that you stay here, it won’t change you one goddamn bit.”

  Stagg smiled, preacher-like, shaking his head. “You’re a hard man, Quinn Colson.”

  Quinn started to stand. Stagg shook his head. “Hold on,” he said. “Hold on. I guess everything’s done, then? Them federal people ruined my name, my business, and shipped me off to this place. They got two county supervisors sent to Parchman, Larry Cobb’s fat ass over at Morgan County in Tennessee.”

  “Maybe you’ll learn golf.”

  “Already know how to golf,” Stagg said. “They got me, and all those damn morons who kicked over the anthill are dead. Every last one of ’em. You seen what happened to that one boy? The nineteen-year-old who broke into Cobb’s place? I saw it on that YouTube. They got him in a traffic stop outside Nacogdoches, still driving Mickey Walls’s Hummer. What did he say when he pulled that gun and got himself shot?”

  “Roll Tide.”

  “Right,” Stagg said, laughing and laughing. “Roll Tide. If that don’t beat all.”

  “Long ride back, Johnny,” Quinn said. “Are we straight?”

  “Almost,” Stagg said. “I just wanted to look you in the eye and let you know how you done fucked all of Tibbehah County.”

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “You really don’t see things,” Stagg said, “do you? Don’t you realize I was the one who kept the fucking order, kept everything from turning to hell on this earth. The bikers, the fucking Mexicans, the goddamn politicians who want to shake us till we bleed. I kept the barbarians at the gate.”

  “Last time I heard a speech like that, I was over in Baghdad.”

  “You think them people are better for it?” Stagg said. “Y’all waved the flag and hoisted Saddam high. What’d we get now?”

  “International politics with Johnny Stagg,” Quinn said, standing. “Holy shit.” He did not offer his hand.

  “I never wanted you dead.”

  “Hard for me to believe.”

  “Maybe at the start of it,” Stagg said. “When you come home. But I’d like to think of us as friends. Like that ole sheepdog and the coyote from the ole cartoon.”

  “Be seeing you, Stagg.”

  Quinn turned and walked out of the mess hall, hearing Johnny Stagg’s words the whole drive back to Jericho. “If you go back to being sheriff,” he said, “watch your damn back, son.”

  • • •

  Two men rode up to the Rebel on Harleys, stopped in front of the closed-down truck stop, and walked to the corrugated-tin building behind it. The BOOBY TRAP signs had been taken down some months ago, replaced with FOR SALE signs and flyers for local fish fries and dance parties. The men were muscled and bearded, both wearing sunglasses and leather vests over their sweating, hairy chests. The back of their vests read BORN LOSERS MEMPHIS, TN. One of the men, a man with a prominent tattoo on his neck, moved up to the front door of the old strip club while the other man handed him a
crowbar.

  A woman in a silver Lexus watched all of this from her front seat, window rolled down, checking her watch and seeing that the bastards were two hours late. Not even waiting for her to greet them.

  She got out of the luxury car, slammed the door, and walked across the parking lot in a pair of black Ferragamo pumps made of soft calfskin. She had a Burberry trench coat belted tight around her waist and a light touch of Chanel Gardenia sprayed on her neck. Smelling the men under the overhang trying to bust through the door, she wished she’d put on more. Or at least on her Hermès scarf to dab under her nose.

  “Didn’t I say to wait?”

  “I just want to see what’s in there,” said a grown man who called himself Rabbit. She didn’t know the other man but had seen him. The tattoo on his neck said FUCK IT. Even if that wasn’t his name, that’s what she’d call him from now on.

  Rabbit leaned on the crowbar, popping off the clasp and lock, and the three of them stepped inside. The room was dark and hot. It smelled of sweat and cheap perfume, coconut and cherry. The nasty red carpet would have to be ripped out and the horrible-looking black bar with mirrored panels removed. But the place had a reputation and a good location. A lot better than running girls down on Indian land, where you got squeezed on both sides. No white person should have to work with a Choctaw.

  She reached into her pocketbook, a gold Prada, and took out a cigarette. FUCK IT tried to light it but she shooed him away, lighting the damn thing herself. Taking it all in, the titty bar, the truck stop outside, and all the business in north Mississippi and on into Memphis.

  “Open the goddamn doors,” Fannie Hathcock said, spewing a stream of smoke from the side of her mouth. “Let some fucking air and light into this place.”

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