The Broken Places

by Ace Atkins

  “You know what your uncle used to say?”

  Quinn smiled. “I recall a lot that he used to say.”

  “He used to tip his hat at me on the Square and say if folks started locking their doors, then he wasn’t doing his job.”

  “My uncle and I have a different viewpoint on that.” Quinn nodded. “I prefer to plan for the worst.”

  “If a man plans for the worst, then won’t he get the worst?” Mrs. King said.

  Kenny turned to Quinn and waited for his answer, hands folded over his large stomach.

  “That’s not exactly my point of view,” Quinn said. “I just never have been big on surprises.”

  • • •

  They dumped the sweet Chevelle and the dead man in Aberdeen before heading back northwest toward Tibbehah County in the old Caprice Classic. They took the Natchez Trace part of the way, finding a public bathroom set back from some Indian mounds to use the toilet and clean up. Bones wanted to head over to Tupelo to buy some weed, but Esau convinced him to stay focused, and Bones said he was so goddamned focused that some weed would mellow him out. He settled for another pint of Turkey, and by one a.m., they’d hit the Tibbehah County line, dumped the Caprice Classic at a highway truck stop, and stole a Toyota Tundra. They decided to cruise a bit west, checking out spots around a hamlet called Dogtown for a solid place to hole up. Esau had smoked two packs of cigarettes already and was onto the third, Bones passing the whiskey over to him as they roamed the dirt roads up and over the hills, seeing signs for a national forest but staying on county roads, and riding through a cemetery until they found a nice stretch of woods with no houses and thick with trees. They drove with the windows partway down, the rain making the windshield fog.

  For a good mile, Esau kept seeing signs for the Vardaman Hunt Club and how there was NO TRESPASSING. Esau, getting curious about the club, slowed when he got to a locked cattle gate that shut off the private road on into the place. The gate was more of a message to people who wanted to drive up and have a look-see, but whoever had built the gates should have known there was plenty of space on each side of the posts for a 4×4 to get across. Esau hit the gas on the Toyota and dipped down into a little gully and then popped quickly out, spinning dirt and gravel as they raced past the gates and onto the hunting club land. Bones was so excited as he slumped in the passenger seat that Esau figured he might just fall asleep.

  Esau followed the dark road for maybe a mile through some old land with tall, old-growth pines. There were more and more NO TRESPASSING signs, Esau taking this to be a good omen because something was so damn good on top of the hill that someone wanted to make damn sure that the shitbirds weren’t invited. And sure enough as they crested the hill, a small gravel road broke to the right and they followed it straight up high and fast onto a thick, shadowed shape of a log house overlooking the forest and valley below. Esau got as close as he could and killed the engine. Bones stirred awake and stumbled from the car to the tree line, where he took a leak. The rain fell weak but steady, thunder sounding off far into the forest. The air smelled electric and piney.

  Esau grabbed the keys, his cigarettes, and a bottle of Wild Turkey with a fresh seal. He mounted the steps and made his way to the side door of the cabin, really more than just a cabin, a big-ass log house, and tried the door. And of course the door was locked, but it wasn’t much for his elbow to break the glass and for him to feel inside for the deadbolt. They were in the kitchen, which hummed with electricity and big silver appliances. Bones was coming on in behind him, yawning, and rubbing his eyes. He pulled open the refrigerator and whistled. “Holy hell.”

  “What they got?” Esau said.

  “What they don’t got?”

  Bones opened a beer on the side of a counter and passed it to Esau. He cracked another one open, helping himself to a block of good cheese, and the men walked side by side into a great room fashioned of big pine logs running high and wide, maybe thirty feet into a ceiling. Someone had tacked ducks and deer heads and a stuffed wildcat or two on the wall. There was the biggest television Esau had ever seen, as flat and wide as one in a movie show, and when Bones punched it to life, he quickly recognized an old film he used to watch with his stepfather, 7 Men from Now, with old Randolph Scott. Esau finished the beer in three sips and cracked the seal on the Wild Turkey. The room was filled with a lot of thick leather furniture and lamps fashioned from antlers, a bar stocked with Scotch and bourbon so good that Esau handed the rest of the Turkey to Bones. He made himself a Glenfiddich neat and walked toward the far wall, finding a ten-foot section of glass set into the pine beams. He counted out twenty-two shotguns and rifles shining as bright and beautiful as the day they came from the smith’s hands.

  “Ain’t bad,” Bones said. “Ain’t bad at all. Yeah, this’ll work.”

  Esau nodded. “Tomorrow, we find Dixon.”

  It was nearing 0100 and the next wave of storms was blowing across Tibbehah County. Quinn had stopped at the sheriff’s office to refill his thermos and to check the storm online. It looked like they might have some flooding, but on a night like this, you could always bet on the accidents. Quinn drove his F-250 north of his farm onto the road that ran from Fate to Providence, beyond the hills and the National Forest. He got maybe a mile and a half down Horse Barn Road when he saw the lights on Kenny’s cruiser. Kenny’s yellow slicker worn over his thick and squat body flashed on the roadside, next to a couple flares lit on the road. Quinn slowed softly directly behind Kenny’s cruiser, since there were no shoulders on the rural roads.

  He stepped out into the wind and rain, wearing a tobacco-colored rancher and his official cap. He had an unlit cigar in his teeth, the nicotine keeping him sharp as he ran the roads.

  “I thought he was dead,” Kenny said. “Gave me a jump when he snorted.”

  A small white pickup truck had run into a tree, not hard enough to dent the hood but just enough to stop at a crazy angle off the hill. Quinn walked up with Kenny and opened the passenger door. The smell of urine and alcohol overwhelmed them. A man lay passed out across the bench seat.

  “Damn.”

  “I told you, Quinn,” Kenny said. “You know this son of a bitch?”

  Quinn looked at the young man’s gaunt, unshaven features. “Nope.”

  Quinn shook the man’s shoulder. His mouth was wide open, eyes rolled up into his head. In the full light of the cab, the man had at some point pulled his blue jeans down and exposed himself.

  “Don’t you wish Lillie had this call?” Kenny said.

  “Why’s that?” Quinn said.

  “Funny is all,” Kenny said. “Man flashing his junk to the world. Didn’t want to reach for his wallet. I’ll go get a stick or something.”

  “Got some rubber gloves in my truck.”

  “Guess he wanted to take a piss but couldn’t stand up.”

  On the driver’s-side floorboard was a pint of flavored vodka, the kind that tasted like cough syrup mixed with rubbing alcohol.

  “You look around for anyone might’ve been with him?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Quinn nodded and rubbed the comatose man hard on his breastbone. The man stirred for a moment and then turned back to sleep. He left the passenger door open and met Kenny at the edge of the truck, where Kenny was putting on some rubber gloves. “Call dispatch,” Quinn said. “Get an ambulance. They get him up, do a DUI test.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And then let’s get this thing towed,” Quinn said. “You can call Boom, but I wouldn’t advise it this late. Who’s working?”

  “Someone at the Rebel.”

  “Wake up Johnny Stagg himself if you have to, or even if you don’t.”

  Kenny wandered up the hill to get a better signal on the cell. The rain was falling at full slant now, the flares still burning bright on the dark curve. Quinn walked around the truck, canted at an angle, and looked inside the tailgate. The entire space had been loaded down with piles and piles of turnip greens. A whole garde
n’s worth of them, muddy and unwilted, fresh from the ground.

  “Kenny?” Quinn said, yelling. “Bring your camera. I think we found our thief.”

  Kenny nodded, pocketed his phone, and made his way back to the truck. He took a dozen or so pictures in the dark and rain, inside and out of the cab. When he’d finished, Quinn rolled the young guy over to his side and reached for his wallet. Thankfully, the back of his jeans was dry and he took the wallet to his truck to run the plate inside his cab. The man had twenty-three dollars, an EBT card, a worn self-posed photo of a nude woman looking in a mirror, an expired Mississippi driver’s license, and a U.S. Army ID. Quinn studied the military ID in the small overhead light and read that the turnip thief had been assigned to 82nd Airborne in Fort Bragg. He learned the man had reached the rank of E-3, was twenty-four, and lived about two miles down the road.

  Quinn got out of the truck. Kenny was back on his phone, busy explaining his location to dispatch. He said they needed a wrecker from the Rebel Truck Stop.

  Quinn held up his hand.

  Kenny squinted his eyes into the rain and headlights of his cruiser.

  “We got it,” Quinn said. “Call off the wrecker.”

  “Call you back,” Kenny said to dispatch and pulled the phone from his ear. “What’s that?”

  “I’ll pull my truck down to the next road,” Quinn said. “You pick me up and take me back here. I’ll be driving this man’s vehicle home.”

  “You know him?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Sorry, Sheriff,” Kenny said. He tilted his head in the light rain. “I don’t understand.”

  “Let’s get him out of the road and back home,” Quinn said. “I don’t think either of us wants to spend the rest of the night doing paperwork.”

  Kenny shook his head in confusion as Quinn turned and headed back to his truck. He cracked a window and relit his cigar, staring out into the dark and rain buffeting his truck.

  • • •

  “You just let him go with nothin’?” Boom said. “That’s mighty white of you, Quinn.”

  “Yeah, I always let white people go,” Quinn said, working on the second half of the cigar. “Got to look out for my own.”

  “He ever come to?”

  “I used some smelling salts,” Quinn said, enjoying the last bit of the La Gloria Cubana. “Helped walk him inside to his house. He lives with his parents in Carthage. Now, that was a scene.”

  “I hope you washed your hands.”

  “He was embarrassed he pissed himself,” Quinn said. “His mother was yelling, praying, and crying, and not helping the situation.”

  “Not like you not to lean on a drunk driver.”

  “He wasn’t driving when we found him.”

  “And what about the stolen turnips?”

  “I told him he needed to address that with Mrs. King,” Quinn said. “And if it’s not to her liking, she’s welcome to press charges. I’m betting he’ll try and work it off through her church.”

  “You never that easy on me,” Boom said.

  “How would you have responded if I’d gone soft?”

  “Better to never know.”

  It was five a.m. at the County Barn, the shed where Boom maintained the police cruisers for the SO and the heavy equipment for the road crews. An early gray light fell through the open doors, and the shed smelled of fresh grease and of Quinn’s cigar. There were several long metal benches and Peg-Boards lined pin-neat with Boom’s tools. Each piece had its slot; a current Playboy lingerie calendar hung on the wall alongside an 8×10 of Boom’s Guard Unit taken before he’d lost his arm. Boom had on his prosthetic that morning, fixing a screwdriver into place and dipping back under the hood of an ancient Crown Vic.

  “Did the man thank you?” Boom said.

  “In his way.”

  “And what did Kenny say?”

  Quinn looked at the end of his cigar, smoldering down to the nub. “You know Kenny,” Quinn said. “He doesn’t question much. I think he was relieved he didn’t have to write more reports and show in court.”

  “And if you catch the guy driving shithouse drunk again?” Boom said.

  “That’s another deal.”

  “Mmmhmm,” Boom said from under the old car’s hood.

  Quinn tossed the cigar butt and walked over to a small coffeepot set atop a tool bench. A small radio played the Drake & Zeke morning show out of Memphis, the hosts talking about overnight damage across the mid-South and the endless bad weather. But the morning smelled fresh and new to him, and there was a terrific gray-gold light breaking from the east.

  “Notice las’ night you didn’t even flinch when Caddy said that about Ophelia Bundren.”

  Quinn nodded.

  “So, you hittin’ that?”

  “That’s a pretty crude question,” Quinn said. “You been talking to Lillie?”

  “Are you not the sheriff of this county?”

  “Yep.”

  “And well known?”

  “Yep.”

  “So it stands to reason that if you are in frequent company of an eligible young lady, people start to talk. I don’t give a shit if the woman sometimes acts strange and embalms folks. She’s got a fine little body.”

  “Thanks, Boom.”

  “So, are you?”

  “If I were,” Quinn said, “wouldn’t I tell you?”

  Boom lifted his large self from under the hood. He removed the screwdriver from his hand and fit in a socket wrench. He nodded and smiled as he replaced the tools. “Damn if I ain’t become Inspector Gadget,” Boom said, screwing in the wrench. “You know, you hadn’t had a date since you were seeing that agent from Oxford. And everybody knows that didn’t work out too great.”

  “She tried to get me fired,” Quinn said. “Did you know that? I just found out she wanted the local special agent in charge to make a case I’d helped with that gunrunning down to Mexico.”

  “Mean, mean woman,” Boom said. “Just stay away from redheads and women who pack heat.”

  “Solid advice,” Quinn said.

  “Just looking out for you, man.”

  Quinn smiled. Boom offered his prosthetic hand, and Quinn lightly bumped it with his fist.

  • • •

  Quinn had been home for an hour, and to get comfortable, he’d removed his Beretta’s leather rig and khaki sheriff’s office shirt. He wore a simple white T-shirt and his jeans, feeling almost weightless and naked, with boots set by the back door, as he fried up some bacon and made some coffee. He stared out the big window over his kitchen sink, watching the cows and many new calves playing in the half-sunlight shooting from the broken slots in the clouds. The window was open, and the air smelled strong and earthy, of tilled soil and cow manure. He never grew tired of the color back in Mississippi. Even in the winter, things were brighter and more vibrant than any inch of Afghanistan. The landscape there was a colorless void of purgatory, where it seemed a sensible day when a man or woman or child would strap on a bomb and decide today was it. Quinn still had a six-inch scar across his forearm where a suicide bomber had shot him square in the chest, the bullet whizzing off his breastplate and into his arm. He’d fought for six hours in that Takhar Province compound before they sealed him back up with needles and staples. After thirteen tours, that became the new normal.

  The grease popped and Quinn wiped up some splatterings with a hand towel, forking the bacon from the skillet. He cracked open three eggs and set aside a loaf of Texas bread and some butter. It was after eight now and he was tired. But being on the night shift made early morning his only personal time when he could read and feed the animals, watch the day start up from the long porch of his old farmhouse.

  Just as he lifted the eggs from the skillet, he heard the familiar-sounding car drive up into his driveway and shut off the engine. Quinn could almost count the seconds from door slam to front screen door creak and boot thumps down his hallway.

  Quinn didn’t even turn as he set the bread in
the skillet to brown and felt the familiar arms around his stomach and soft head against his neck. His stereo playing the new CD from Bryan Ledford, country and bluegrass, love, heartache, and revenge. She smelled of fresh powder and a light perfume, her hand pressing down onto his scarred forearm, turning him around and kissing him full hard on the mouth.

  Quinn turned off the flame and reached his arms around her waist, hands across her lower back, mouth on hers and then down on her neck and feeling under the light silk of her top, bra strap snapping off, over her smallish breasts and then lifting off her shirt and bra, now with her only in dark blue jeans and dirty cowboy boots. He lifted her up and onto a cabinet as she kissed his face and chest while he pulled off his T-shirt and started working on his belt, barely getting it unbuckled as her legs wrapped around his waist and he carried her through the kitchen and the hallway, the door wide open, the screen door showing deep across the road and into the pasture, sun beating on the hay bales, steam rising in the morning cool. He laid her down roughly on the bed and slipped her from her jeans and boots and pulled out of his, both of them not even fooling with the covers in Quinn’s bedroom. The room was dark, with a thin spindle of daylight cutting through the lace curtains and over the solitary, almost monastic iron bed in the center. The only other furniture was an armoire and an Army footlocker where he kept several of his guns at the end of his bed. She reached out strong and confident below him, gripping the thick iron headboard and holding on as he kissed her harder across her neck and over her body, hating every minute they couldn’t be together, loving her but resenting it all the same. He held her up off the bed as she arched her back and held on, white-knuckled, to the bed as it shook and shuddered with so much intensity that the feet skipped and scraped hard against the wood floor.

  When it was over, Quinn moved to the edge of the bed, feet touching the floor. He tried to catch his breath, the sunlight shifting from the floor to across the bed and keeping his face in a half-light. He breathed slow and tried to steady his heart the same way he did when shooting a pistol or rifle, but everything felt uneasy and off-kilter. She was behind him now, her body pressed behind him, chin on his shoulder, her skin moist on his back and breath hot in his ear. The old house was calm and easy except for the country music playing muffled from the kitchen.