by Ace Atkins
“I think of Adelaide every day,” Ophelia said. “It hurts less. But you never stop thinking of it.”
• • •
Caddy dressed in front of a long oval mirror, slipping into a pair of weathered jeans and a slim-cut cowboy shirt. She brushed her hair to the left, the style easy to wash. Just about right for who she’d become. Two months ago, she’d walked right into the Mane Attraction, sat down in April’s chair, and said take all this shit off. April, cocked hip and cigarette in hand, asked if she wanted it like that ’do Carrie Underwood had been sporting. Take it all down as short as a boy’s. Caddy had smiled the whole time as her old self had been lopped off, ten-inch bleached strands falling onto the ground, April cutting up over the ears, nice long bangs and cut up on the neck.
Best part of the hair was that people looked at you differently, taking a moment to decide on if you were who they thought. And that long pause was sometimes all it took to be reconsidered.
She walked out of the bedroom and found Jason watching cartoons, already thirty minutes late for bed. Full dark and rainy outside. She turned off the television to groans and pushed him on into his bedroom. Jamey had gone back to The River, installing some amps and more strands of lights for tomorrow’s service and laying out the bulletins in the makeshift pews and on hay bales. They’d be up at five a.m. to make sure that first service was a special one. They planned to watch the sun rise.
She helped Jason change into his pajamas and turned on a lamp by his bedside table. The wind rattled the shutters of the old bungalow, and rain tapped at the glass. She picked up a copy of King Arthur’s Very Great Grandson and lay next to him, reading about a boy who’d just turned six going out to fight dragons and Cyclops and a great manner of mythological beasts.
A car drove past, headlights sweeping through the house at the turn. The car idled for a long minute. Caddy got out from the bed and pulled back the curtains. The car idled for a moment longer and pulled away. She replaced the curtain.
Jamey would be home soon.
By the second book, Jason was asleep.
She turned out the table lamp and closed the door with a tight click. She tried Jamey, but he didn’t answer, and when he didn’t answer, she checked the window again.
The rain was steady as she walked back to her bedroom and reached for the 12-gauge she kept at the top of her closet. She checked the load—as her Uncle Hamp had taught her when they went hunting—and jacked in a round.
There was cold coffee, but she heated it up. Caddy sat on the couch in silence with the gun and the rain, waiting for Jamey to get home soon.
• • •
Esau wrapped Dickie Green’s hand with some torn cloth from Becky’s shirt. Becky was almost glad she got to contribute something as they sent Dickie back in the water with the chain and the hook. He came back a minute later, and Bones handed him the second chain and the second hook. This time it took only twenty seconds and Dickie walked back to the edge of the pond in the spotlight of the cars and said, “Done. You know how many people used to watch me clean them tanks at the pirate caves? I mean, I wasn’t even the star; the star was the gator we kept in there, Captain Crunch. But folks couldn’t believe a kid like me could hold his breath so long. They called me fish boy.”
“Ain’t that somethin’,” Bones said. “Never heard this before.”
“I ain’t lyin’,” Dickie said. “Made the papers and everything.”
“Hmm,” Esau said. “Mr. Fish, you want to go ahead and get that dozer going so we can get the hell out of here?”
Dickie shook his head, still in nothing but the tighty-whiteys and the blue swim mask he’d pushed up to the top of his head. He looked kind of like one of those little monkeys who dance for a quarter as he scrambled up that big CAT and cranked it up. He pushed a button and the dozer started to move, heading up and over some little bumps, rolling on its track, pulling that chain behind it until it yanked hard and tight. The dozer stopped cold, Dickie working it into another gear, belching that diesel until the track started to spin in place in the muck. The thing finally caught and moved slowly away from the light and toward the big open field.
Esau was smoking another cigarette. Bones stood by him, with Becky opposite. All three of them were backlit in the Tundra’s headlights, watching the pebbled surface of that fishing pond and the spot where the tight chain reached and disappeared, link by link coming on out of the water. Esau flicked some ash and squinted into the darkness. The dozer was straining in a high gear, whining and belching, and the surface bubbled a bit, chain coming out slow and hard. “Come on, motherfucker,” Bones said. “Come on.”
“How y’all gonna open it up?” Becky said. “Figure it’s gonna be locked.”
“Cut that fucker open with a blow torch,” Bones said softly.
“You got one?” Becky said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Esau said. “We’ve had some time to think this thing through.”
First the top of the armored car appeared and then the whole rear end, coming out brown and mucky and slick but still reading clear as hell WELLS FARGO. He and Bones were grinning, Becky doing a little dance like she had to pee, until they noticed that the back doors were loose, water sloshing from them, as most of the car was above the surface now, rolling backward up out of the pond and onto the banks. Esau walked to the thing almost like he was in a trance, not hearing whatever Becky was yelling to him, just seeing that big slick metal car from his dreams. The car hit the stiff bank and found solid footing, Dickie somewhere out in the dark still driving like hell, two of the driver’s-side wheels lifting up, the back of the car turning, ready to topple over. Bones ran for Dickie to shut the damn thing off.
Esau glanced up at the windshield slick with green, knowing there were two men locked inside and not giving a good goddamn. Two men who’d gotten blamed for maybe pulling the robbery themselves. There was a time when he first got to Parchman that he could recall their names and took some kind of pleasure in knowing they’d become famous as thieves, not as two unfortunate bastards who might’ve spent eternity at the bottom of a bass pond. He circled the side door and walked to the half-open back, Becky not needing a bit of instruction about looking for money. She jumped in front of them and threw open both doors and walked on into the back of the armored car.
The headlight bled on in just a bit, but enough to show them all the car was empty.
“Y’all robbed a fucking empty truck?” Becky said.
Esau clamped down on his jaw, both hands resting on the edge of the rear of the car. He shook his head, feeling that old familiar rage, vision narrowing as he walked to the driver’s door and tried the handle. Through the glass he saw the pickled white shape of something that might’ve been human at one time. Everything was still locked.
Dickie was with them now, big shit-eating grin on his face, slapping Esau’s back and talking more about being a kid fish.
“It’s empty,” Becky said. “They robbed an empty fucking truck.”
Esau shook his head. Bones slammed one of the two doors and kicked at the dirt.
“I thought y’all saw the money?” Dickie said.
“We watched the guards load it,” Esau said. “We followed them from their last stop.”
“Maybe the fish took it,” Dickie said. He started to laugh, grabbing his belly, thick smears of mud down his arms and legs. “I think I seen a few down there driving little fish Cadillacs and sporting some little fish jewelry. Real little gold chains.”
Esau shook his head, pulled the .357 from his belt, and shot Dickie in the chest.
Becky screamed and ran for where Dickie lay on the ground, open-eyed and openmouthed and real dead.
“What the hell?” Becky said. “He didn’t do nothing. What the hell, Esau?”
“He fucked us,” Esau said. “That motherfucker.”
“Dickie?”
“Jamey Dixon,” Bones said. “Esau shot Dickie just ’cause.”
“Y’all are both crazy,” Becky
said. “Fucking crazy. Let’s get the hell out of this county.”
“I ain’t doin’ jack shit till the preacher gets me my due,” Esau said, trudging up to the car. Rain coming full tilt, washing mud off the little hill and down into the pond. Becky held Dickie’s head in her lap and cried. Bones just stood looking into the empty truck, shaking his head. God better help that son of a bitch.
They came. Hundreds of them from all over Tibbehah and as far as Tishomingo and Lowndes County. Caddy knew it might not last, but they were curious about the convict-turned-preacher and his message of redemption and the transformative power of God’s grace. They parked the cars end to end up on the rolling pastures of knee-high grass where cattle had grazed just a season before. The music started early, coming out of the open barn doors and filling the bright day with old hymns and Johnny Cash songs and even one Jamey had picked from The Band. Uncle Van and J.T. and a mandolin player from Jackson made the old barn shake and become alive. This was more of a church than some sad old place where people sat stock-still, checking out their watches, or raised their hands in praise to a high-definition projection screen. All of ’em mostly worried about what their neighbors thought about them. Not here. She could feel His presence. She felt it every time Jamey took to telling his testimony.
Caddy couldn’t really say if there was a certain kind of person who came to The River that morning. Some folks looked like they maybe came for the free meal after the service. Other people looked like they had plenty of money, nice shoes and haircuts, but wanted to experience something real. Real being the word she kept on hearing that morning. People were thirsty to hear a story that wasn’t unlike those two men flanking Jesus on the cross. Two thieves being bled of life, only one coming to understand He still loved them.
“He’s a fine man,” Uncle Van had told her.
“Proud to be a part of this,” said Fred Black, a local welder whose ex-wife and daughter had been mixed up in a shit-ton of trouble lately.
She’d picked out a simple dress for the occasion. Light cotton dotted with tiny flowers with her nice pair of boots. She was glad she’d worn the boots. The field around the barn was a true muddy mess.
Jamey had on jeans and a neatly pressed black shirt. Before the service, Caddy had cut his hair into a neat straight line above the shoulders and made sure his boots were free of mud before he started to preach. The sermon on the Model Church brought on more amens than she could count, people wanting something authentic and real and beyond all the judgments and forced expectations and silly traditions. Jamey just resonated peace, and everyone could feel that he walked with God.
At the altar call, just seconds after delivering his sermon, more than forty people came forward to dedicate or rededicate their lives to God. Caddy lost count. Jamey placed his hands on each one of them, praying over them as the band played “Ain’t No Grave.” When I hear that trumpet sound, / I’m gonna rise right out of the ground / There ain’t no grave can hold my body down. People cried, almost shy and unwilling to come before the altar but somehow being pulled up to Jamey. She joined them all below the homemade cross with some of the men and women who’d be the church elders, almost all of them no more than thirty. They fell to their knees and hid their faces until Jamey touched them, prayed over them, and then they’d throw their heads back, looking up to the cross, tears flowing, and say everything they felt right in front of Jamey and the church and God and the band, even if sometimes it didn’t make sense. One teenage girl really broke her heart, coming there and standing alone without a parent or her friend, not seventy pounds in a Walmart dress and tennis shoes, crying and praying and wanting redemption at fifteen. Caddy whispered to her that everything was going to be just fine.
She had never felt such a part of something.
After the final song, Caddy stood at Jamey’s side as he shook hands and met the congregation as they left the old barn. Long picnic tables had been set up outside and covered in red-and-white checked cloths lightly blowing in the wind. Everyone remarked that this was the first time they’d seen the sun in days, it looking like a true miracle, shooting through the scattered clouds as plates of barbecue and beans and coleslaw and soft white rolls were laid out. “Ain’t it pretty?” Caddy said to Jason.
She wished her mother and Quinn could have come. Why won’t they open their eyes?
She and Jason sat at the table with Jamey and Uncle Van and Bobby Pickens, one of the county supervisors, and a waitress from the Fillin’ Station who’d been seeing her uncle at the time he’d decided to kill himself. Black families and white families ate side by side, which wasn’t unusual at all for Jericho except at church time. Reaching out to the black community, many of them coming from the hardscrabble Sugar Ditch, was key for Jamey.
“Y’all have such a beautiful family,” said an old woman who had paused by the table, complimenting Jamey on the sermon. Caddy turned for a moment, not sure who she was talking about, and then her face colored when she realized the old woman was talking about the three of them. The woman with fuzzed cataract eyes placed her hands on Caddy and Jason’s shoulders, saying family was everything in this world.
Jamey looked up from his plate and thanked the old woman.
“Yes,” he said, winking at Caddy. “I do have a wonderful family.”
Caddy swallowed and looked back at her plate, holding tight to Jason’s knee under the table.
• • •
Lillie called Quinn at the sheriff’s office.
She was headed on duty. Quinn was headed off.
“Can it wait?” Quinn said. “I heard about this thing called sleep and I’d love to try it out.”
“Not really,” she said. “Better tell Jean you won’t be making church, either. We got ourselves a first-class clusterfuck this morning.”
“I’ll make sure to use those exact words.”
Quinn was rolling onto Highway 9 five minutes later. He’d brought Hondo with him that morning, the dog’s head hanging out the window as Quinn crested a long, flat hill right where the road made a T with Horse Barn Road. Lillie’s Cherokee and the cruisers of Kenny and Ike McCaslin were parked up into a pasture set back from a large bass pond. Quinn turned onto a narrow dirt road leading up to the pond. As he drove closer he saw the large, mud-slimed truck and a yellow bulldozer at the pond’s edge.
Hondo jumped out the window as he slowed. A light warm wind blew over the water and deep into the rolling fields. Yellow light shot from the clouds and down onto the armored car with back doors wide open.
Lillie led him around the side of the truck to where a little skinny man with a bald head and tattoos lay dead on the ground. Hondo sniffed at him, and Quinn told him to back up. The man’s eyes and mouth were wide open, as if he were about to scream but was caught in the act. “You already call the techs in Batesville?”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “Got a couple more tracks running from here. Be careful, this road is a mess. Supposed to stay dry enough to make some molds. Maybe this sun will dry it out a bit. And we got some clear tracks closer to that CAT, look like some mud tires.”
Quinn twisted his head and studied the dead man’s face. He was as ugly in death as he’d probably been in life.
“Our boy from Parchman?” he said.
“Richard Green,” Lillie said. “Friends call him Dickie.”
“What’s that tat say?” Quinn said. “On his chest.”
“CELTIC PRIDE beside the swastika and another one that reads PISS ON IT.”
Quinn stepped back. “How long you think that Wells Fargo truck’s been down there?”
“Tennessee tag. I’m sure the bank noticed it missing. But I don’t recall a truck going missing here. Looks like a couple years before my time.”
Kenny and Ike McCaslin were unspooling some crime scene tape around the truck tracks and footprints on the muddy banks right by tracks for raccoons and deer. The breeze felt warm and sluggish. Overnight there had been a chill. A push and pull of currents that left you
hot and cold within the same hour.
The bright light was gone for a moment and then back on them, shining in a long slanted curtain across the greening hills.
“I didn’t open the door,” Lillie said, “but I’m pretty sure we got the two guards still up front. The condition of the bodies doesn’t look pleasant. I’d just as soon have the state techs deal with that mess.”
“I’ll call the Marshals in Oxford,” Quinn said. “I’m sure they’d like to hear about the convicts.”
“You know they’ve got to be long gone now,” Lillie said. “Looks like they got what they came for.”
“Doesn’t mean they’re still not close,” Quinn said. “Anyone see or hear anything? Hell, that dozer must’ve made some noise. I wonder who owns it.”
“The land belongs to the Hardins,” Lillie said. “You call Mrs. Hardin. I’d just as soon not deal with her, too. She is batshit crazy. You remember when she thought some young man was looking into her windows? I still say it wasn’t worry, more of wishful thinking.”
“Go ahead and get as many photos as you can,” Quinn said. “Just in case we get more rain. I’ll head back and check in with the Marshals’ service and Wells Fargo. And I’ll tell Mrs. Hardin to call you at home if she has any questions.”
“Appreciate that,” Lillie said.
Quinn stood on a little hill as McCaslin and Kenny tied off the scene with some wooden stakes Kenny pulled out from the trunk of his cruiser. He whistled for Hondo, and the dog headed straight for Quinn’s truck. Lillie walked at Quinn’s side. “You leaving me here?”
“You’re in charge,” Quinn said. “Why? You think I could do better?”
“Nope.”
“That’s what I figured,” Quinn said. He opened the passenger door for Hondo and walked around to the driver’s. He wondered just when he might get some sleep, federal people coming to the town, state people coming to run the crime scene. He’d need to call Parchman, too, and update their superintendent.