The Revelators

by Ace Atkins

  “Might’ve tipped me off those ole boys were headed our way,” Skinner said, swallowing a bit. “I don’t care to be awoken at first light with news from the sheriff.”

  “How’s the new one working out for you?”

  “I figured the boy to be an ideal prospect,” Skinner said.

  “And?”

  “Well,” Skinner said. “I’d like to see him doing his gosh-dang job. That redheaded woman’s barnyard act out by the highway seems to be having a banner year. She’s even building some kind of pleasure palace out on Choctaw Lake. Members only and that kind of thing. Lord knows the kind of immoral activities she has planned.”

  “You may not like her methods,” Vardaman said. “But she brings in more money than those Mexicans cutting up dead chickens.”

  Skinner pursed his lips and nodded, feeling the crown on his Stetson. The last few weeks had made the sweat ring even more pronounced. “Almost sounds like you support that kind of activity, sir?”

  “I don’t make the laws in your county,” he said. “You do.”

  “And you told me—”

  Governor Vardaman held up the flat of his hand and shook his head, letting him know that previous discussions and private deals were not to be discussed. Skinner nodded, being a longtime player in the political arena, and knowing that sometimes you took a loss on the road for a win later at home. Skinner bit at his cheek, feeling that tic jumping under his left eye. He swallowed again, hands starting to shake on his prized cowboy hat.

  “For how long?” Skinner asked.

  “We’ll let you know.”

  “Those workers spent a lot of money in Jericho,” he said. “And that plant has stabilized our little old town. What are we supposed to do now?”

  “Last I heard, there wasn’t a shortage of Mexicans,” Vardaman said.

  “But what about the plant?”

  “It’ll be open before Christmas.”

  “Got your word on that?”

  Vardaman didn’t answer. Only stared back.

  “Let me ask you something, sir,” Skinner said, lifting his eyes to the governor. “I heard you may have called in some favors with old friends up in Washington to make this here raid happen. Any truth in that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Vardaman said, grinning. “Maybe a little.”

  “Ain’t no white man gonna take those jobs for what they’re paying,” Skinner said. “Even the durn blacks turn up their noses at that low pay.”

  “And why wouldn’t they?” Vardaman said. “With government handouts and vouchers, they’ll never be hungry enough to hitch up their damn britches and put in an honest day’s work.”

  “Lots of folks been asking me just who owns that plant,” Skinner said. “And how come they trucked in those folks from all over the South and Texas if they didn’t have papers.”

  “And what do you tell them?”

  “I tell them the plant’s owned by a big holding company down here and I’m not really sure who’s on the board.”

  “And that’s all they need to know,” Vardaman said. “We straight on all this?”

  Skinner stood up tall and looked down at Vardaman. He placed the Stetson on his bald, liver-spotted head. “I do a heck of a lot for the good of my county,” Skinner said. “But I’m getting sick and tired of telling my own people lies.”

  “Skinner, you been licking boots for as long as I’ve been alive,” Vardaman said. “Don’t tell me you never got a little shit on your tongue.”

  Vardaman scratched at the edge of his leathery cheek just as the side door opened. Miss Smarty Pants ducked her nose into the office and told the governor about a meeting he had over in the Capitol in ten minutes. Vardaman stood from his desk and pointed to the door. “Mr. Skinner was just on his way out.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Quinn met up with Deputy Reggie Caruthers out on County Road 412, taking the long, winding road through Blackjack and Burnt Oak not far from the sheriff’s office gun range. There was an old general store with a gas pump, long abandoned and left to rot, with a small white house down a short dirt drive that had alternately been both a karaoke bar and a Pentecostal church. A sign for the church placed out along the roadside had been made from plywood and bright green spray paint.

  “When’d they go back to being a church?” Quinn asked.

  “Family had to close down the karaoke place,” Reggie said. “They were serving moonshine on Monday nights.”

  “We never stopped them before.”

  “Brock Tanner wants all the moonshine out of the county,” he said. “Didn’t you see him on the news last week?”

  “There’s not enough moonshine in this county to fill a bathtub,” Quinn said. “Trust me. The production all but stopped when my uncle shut down my grandfather for good.”

  “Gives Brock something to do,” he said. “Makes him look good shutting down the juke joints. You saw they closed down the Club Disco 3000?”

  “No, sir,” Quinn said. “I didn’t.”

  “Brock locked the doors in June,” Reggie said.

  “All these businesses black-owned?”

  “What do you think, Sheriff?”

  Reggie was a compactly built black man in his mid-thirties with a neatly trimmed afro, thick biceps, and a winning smile with dimples that drove the women at the courthouse wild. He had a cool, easygoing way about him but could turn hard fast. Quinn had seen many prisoners try and one-up Reggie and be shut down with a mean look or a hard word. Since Brock Tanner had been sent up from Jackson, Reggie was one of only two deputies who’d remained. Their dispatcher Cleotha had walked off the job when she heard Quinn had been placed on temporary leave.

  “What’s he say about Vienna’s Place?”

  “Official word is to keep clear unless there’s trouble,” Reggie said. “Last time I got called out to Vienna’s was with two dancers fighting over tips from a big spender who’d come down from Jackson.”

  “Who won?” Quinn said.

  “Big fat corn-fed girl from Starkville who worked under the name Sunshine. She beat that other woman senseless with the heel of one of those big old stripper shoes. Took me a week to get all the blood out of my vehicle.”

  “You’re doing God’s work, Reggie,” Quinn said. “Don’t you ever forget it.”

  “When you coming back, Sheriff?” Reggie said. “I mean, damn. I don’t know how much longer I can take this shit. From the first day, Brock’s been talking like he’s the man in charge and sent by Jesus Himself to clean up the vice of this county. But that’s all it is. Talk.”

  Quinn leaned against his truck. A white minivan sped by the old general store, kicking up grit and dirt, sending a Styrofoam cup twirling in its wake. A logging truck rambled by, strapped down with shorn pine logs, jostling on the long stretch of bad road.

  “Who’s Tanner been meeting with?”

  “Mainly keeps to himself,” he said. “Closes the door when he talks with those boys who followed him up from down south. To be honest, Sheriff, he doesn’t really do much of nothing. Only thing I can recall is he got into some kind of fight with Ole Man Skinner two weeks back. I could hear them yelling from outside your office and tried to listen. Don’t know what was being said, only saw Skinner leave the office and slam the door behind him.”

  “That tracks.”

  “On what?”

  “Skinner came to see me a week ago,” Quinn said. “Hat in hand and wanting to be my friend.”

  “Shit,” Reggie said. “Something’s messed up about that picture.”

  “Yep,” Quinn said.

  “They can’t shut you out forever,” he said. “Folks here elected you to serve. This state investigation is bullshit. Like I told you, some folks interviewed me about you and connections to folks on the Coast. I gave them a piece of my mind and hadn’t
heard from them since.”

  “Be patient,” Quinn said, clasping a hand on Reggie’s shoulder.

  “Want to tell me more?” Reggie said, grinning. His dimples wide and deep, smile big and bright.

  “You really want to know more?”

  “Not sure,” Reggie said. “Maybe I don’t want you spoiling the surprise.”

  “What about Fannie and Tanner?” Quinn said. “Has he said anything about that new place out on the lake?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Or the trucks they’ve been cutting up behind the Rebel?”

  “Everyone in town knows about that shit,” Reggie said. “’Cept him.”

  “Is he a bad cop?” Quinn said. “Or a dirty one?”

  “You mean is he stupid or crooked?”

  “Yep.”

  “I’d figure he’s a little bit of both.”

  Quinn looked up beyond Reggie’s shoulder as one of the new Tibbehah County Sheriff SUVs sped past and then came to a slow stop past the church. The SUV made a sweeping U-turn and headed back to the old general store, bucking up from the asphalt onto the gravel and moving past the old pumps. The window came down slow to reveal a sleepy-eyed man with pouches under his eyes. His hair looked like the kind you’d see on a third grader, bangs cut in an even line across his forehead. He wore a tan county uniform and silver star, but Quinn had never seen him before.

  “Y’all doing all right?”

  “Just fine,” Reggie said.

  “Figured you might be having some car trouble, Deputy,” the man said. “Given that you was supposed to be patrolling down in Sugar Ditch.”

  “Oh, no, sir,” he said. “Doing just fine here. About to head that way.”

  The sleepy-eyed man looked Quinn up and down and nodded. He lifted a Styrofoam cup to his lips and spit. “Oh, hell,” he said. “Didn’t you used to be Sheriff Colson?”

  He hiccuped up a laugh, raised the window, and turned back toward the road, accelerating back toward town.

  “Who’s the shitbird?” Quinn asked.

  “Mitchell Danbury,” Reggie said. “Chief deputy. Spends most of his day tending to Tanner’s business. Must’ve been Tanner sent him out to follow me.”

  “They know we’re friends.”

  “Danbury’s been looking for an excuse to let me go,” he said. “Been riding my ass all summer long.”

  “Where’s he from?”

  “Hattiesburg,” Reggie said. “Says he served in the Army with Tanner. But when he got down to specifics, his story didn’t make much sense. I looked him up and saw he’d been let go from a police department in Louisiana. No charges, but I found a story where a teenage girl had accused him of rape.”

  “I’ve been doing some digging on Brock Tanner, too,” Quinn said. “Made some calls to some buddies that are still active.”

  “And?”

  Quinn shrugged. “Doesn’t look like Captain Tanner spent much time off the base,” he said. “The one time he went out on patrol, he nearly got killed in a friendly fire incident. The report I read indicated that two of his own men may have tried to shoot him.”

  Reggie laughed, nearly doubling over. “Where the hell do they find these folks?” he said. “True honor and duty.”

  “How much time do you spend talking about what you did over in the Sandbox?”

  “None,” Reggie said, holding out a fist. “Please tell me y’all at least got some hooks on the line?”

  Quinn bumped fists with the deputy. “A whole mess of ’em.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Jason met Ana Gabriel after third period under the bleachers of the football stadium. She looked scared and worried they’d get caught as she stepped under the support beams, the aluminum seats throwing slatted shadows across the ground. The girl had on a white shirt with lace at the neck and the sleeves, her black hair in twin braids, and a purple backpack over her shoulder.

  “What’s the matter?” Jason said.

  “I’m leaving tomorrow,” she said. “I don’t know when I’ll see you again.”

  Jason felt a rock form in his throat. He looked at Ana Gabriel and nodded, the neatly folded note she’d slipped into his locker still in hand.

  “There is an older boy named Angel.”

  Jason looked away from her face. He nodded. “I understand.”

  She reached for his right hand, placing it in both of hers. She looked into his eyes. “No, you don’t,” she said. “You need to listen. And whatever you do, you must promise to tell no one. Not even your mother.”

  The girl’s hands felt steady and warm. The underside of the bleachers looked like a garbage dump with paper cups, empty popcorn sacks, beer cans, weeds, and trash of all kind. A place too ugly for a girl like Ana Gabriel. The only people who seemed to use this place were the boys from the middle school to play war games or the older kids who liked to hide and smoke weed before school.

  “Angel is driving some of us to Louisiana to try to see our parents,” she said. “We are leaving after school. Sancho can’t go. He’s too young. I need you to look out for my little brother. Would you do that for me?”

  “He’ll be safe at The River,” Jason said. “Lots of good folks will be watching him.”

  “But I need you to watch Sancho,” she said. “He’s such a funny little boy. His mouth gets him in trouble with the other kids. He might cause trouble. Or worse yet, he may try to run away and follow me. You have to keep him safe. I will come back for him when I can.”

  She hadn’t let go of Jason’s hand. He didn’t want her to let go. Her eyes were so large and black, looking at him as if he were an adult and pleading for his help. Jason would never tell Ana Gabriel’s secrets. And he’d share all of his. Anything she wanted to know. Anything she wanted to do. His momma always said to help the less fortunate, people in need. If this wasn’t that kind of situation, he didn’t know what was.

  “I’ll come with you,” Jason said.

  “No,” Ana Gabriel said. “There’s no room. And I need you here. To look out for Sancho.”

  “I’ve made up my mind, Ana Gabriel,” Jason said, pulling his hand free. “And there’s nothing you can do about it. I’ll just say I’m going to walk over to my grandmomma’s house. No one will even notice I’m gone.”

  “The drive will take us seven hours,” Ana Gabriel said. “We plan to sleep in the truck overnight and ask to see our parents in the morning. I can’t promise when we’ll be back. I can’t risk people looking for you, thinking that we’ve done a bad thing. We’re already not wanted in this town.”

  “That ain’t true.”

  “You hear things,” Ana Gabriel said. “Even more than me.”

  The air seemed even hotter in the shade, under all that silver metal. Jason looked away behind the bleachers and into the teachers’ parking lot to make sure no one had seen them. He turned back, tasting the grit from the wind on his tongue, and slid his hands down into his Wranglers and toed at the spinning trash with his work boot.

  “When do we leave?” Jason asked.

  “That is a very bad idea,” Ana Gabriel said.

  Jason shrugged.

  * * *

  • • •

  Quinn felt like he knew every inch of the county, from high up north and into the Big Woods to down in the soggy, flat bottom land of the Sugar Ditch. He drove with little purpose and no direction in Boom’s secondhand Ford, heading out past the old Confederate cemetery where the dead from the Battle of Jericho were buried, headstones tall and skinny and lined up like busted teeth. Most old folks still called it the Second Battle of Jericho, having to give credit to the fight from the Old Testament. The whole county, no matter how many people turned their backs to him, still seemed like a wild, mythic place. He recalled his grandfather, his daddy Jason’s daddy, telling him stories of buried treasur
e from a train robbery still hidden in the hills around Carthage. But when he and Boom went out there digging as little kids, they found only remnants of the Confederate holdouts who camped there for months after Appomattox: bullets, buckles, and buttons buried deep in the hard-packed earth.

  If you looked even closer along the creek beds or down into the upturned soil of the field, there were shells and sharks’ teeth from when all of Mississippi had been covered by an ancient sea. Forests had been logged out, new ones had started to grow, old homes had been razed and plowed under, entire stretches of farmland covered in spindly pine trees that were planted and cut down like cornstalks. Somehow Tibbehah didn’t give up. It was so wild and fertile, you couldn’t kill it. Tibbehah was too damn strong.

  Quinn kept moving, driving back into JERICHO, POPULATION 1,280, the city limits sign pocked with bullet holes no matter how many times they replaced it. The Square still and quiet in the heat of the day, Quinn circling and passing the old movie theater where he’d once seen Fievel Goes West with Caddy and years later a militia leader had crucified a gold-toothed preacher named Brother Davis. He headed on past the old Jericho Dry Goods store, now a logging museum, and by the Tibbehah Monitor, where old Betty Jo Mize still put out two editions a week, covering everything from the county supervisor meetings to the winners of the latest recipe contests. Beauty queens and football stars, births, weddings, and all those who had gone on to “enter the gates of heaven.”

  He drove south again from the Square, toward the bottomland, passing the VFW Hall with the old Patton tank parked outside, the Tibbehah County Farm Supply, Annie’s Soul Kitchen, and then knocked the truck in a higher gear and shot up County Road 121 past the Traveler’s Rest Motel, still advertising heat and cool AC, Wi-Fi, and bass fishing at their private pond. Quinn had stayed there for a few nights when he’d first come back after his Uncle Hamp killed himself. And just last year, two journalists from New York City had made it their home as they looked into the cold case death of Brandon Taylor. Only fifteen but murdered for peeping into windows of J. K. Vardaman’s hunt lodge and taking pictures of gray-headed men with their trousers around their ankles.