The Broken Places

by Ace Atkins

  “Esau?”

  “Who the hell’s this?”

  “You came to me.”

  “Dixon?”

  “I’m sorry about Bones,” he said. “I didn’t want this to happen.”

  Esau worked himself up to his knees and then used a two-by-four ledge to stand, wind and rain shooting on into the house. It was tough as a son of a bitch to hear what Dixon had to say, and he screwed his ear down into the phone.

  “I ain’t got time to play,” Esau said.

  “You’re the one who wants to meet,” Jamey said. “You tell me where to go.”

  “I want what is fucking mine.”

  “I understand what you want.”

  “And you got it?” Esau said.

  He didn’t say a word for a long while. “I got it.”

  Esau nodded and reached for the last bit of whiskey. “All right, then. This how’s it gonna go.” But as he spoke and turned to look out of the open patch of roof, a border of blackness swept in from the west, reminding him of stories of frogs and locusts and creatures that would cover the sun and devour the earth. In his drunken mind, for that moment, Esau wondered if Dixon wasn’t conjuring the whole thing or if the Wild Turkey hadn’t just busted a blood vessel.

  “Where?” the voice said on the phone. “I can’t hear you. I can’t hear nothing.”

  “I’m here,” Esau said, yelling. “I’m here, goddamn you.”

  Mr. Jim’s barbershop was just as Quinn had left it. Mr. Jim trimming some fella’s hair while Luther Varner sat on the waiting bench thumbing through Field & Stream. The television atop the Coke machine should have been playing The Price Is Right or Days of Our Lives, the old men loving that stuff, but the local station had interrupted it all to run down the weather reports, bad night across Oklahoma and Arkansas, more bad weather for most of the mid-South. “They had two tornadoes touch down in Clarksdale, and I’m hearing about one over near Oxford,” Mr. Jim said, working the snippers to trim away a few stray hairs from a man’s bushy eyebrows. “What do you know, Sheriff?”

  Quinn still wore his slicker and ball cap. He’d ducked into the barbershop just to see what the local news was reporting. He’d been checking the weather all morning after the events at dawn. “Sugar Ditch is a mess, and the Big Black is about to crest up off Cotton Road.”

  “Memphis says we’re under a tornado warning,” Luther said. “Figured if I’m gonna get killed, might as well be at Jim’s barbershop. That way, when they find the body, I’ll be all ready for the suit.”

  Quinn nodded, listening more to the news, watching a band of green and big spots of red rolling in from the west. The radar showing a thousand crosses on the screen for lightning strikes and talking about conditions being ripe with this cold front. Rain hit Main Street hard, falling diagonally, street signs twisting back and forth.

  “Aren’t you glad you went ahead and chased those fellas?” Mr. Jim said, not smiling, just easy talking, in his old brown shirt and comfortable shoes. “Just been getting worse all day. Y’all had any luck with that other convict?”

  The tornado warning was for most of north Mississippi but went on to name every county, including Lee and Tibbehah. Quinn turned to Mr. Jim as he was lathering up the old man in his spinning chair. “Nope,” Quinn said. “But it’s not a good day for him to be roaming the woods unless he found some shelter. He’s injured. When this shitstorm clears, we’ll start beating the bushes.”

  “How’s your truck?” Luther said.

  “Hooked the winch to a big old oak,” Quinn said. “Lifted her out of the ditch and set everything straight. I dropped the truck with Boom and I’m using his. I admit the front end is a bit out of alignment. Boom’s trying to get the windshield replaced this morning, too.”

  “How bad is it in the Ditch?” Mr. Jim said, easing that razor off the man’s neck and wiping it clean with a rag.

  “Bad,” Quinn said. “I got the ag building cleared for those who been flooded out. We got a school bus sent down there, but I’m headed to do some door knocking and try to reason with some of the more stubborn folks.”

  “It’s shameful we got people living down there like that,” Luther said. “Ain’t no difference between that and some villages I saw on No Goi. People cook outdoors in pots, got clothes hanging out down off that nasty creek.”

  “And to think they got to pay rent for it, too,” Mr. Jim said.

  Luther shook his head, turning back to the television on the Coke machine. Quinn leaned against the wall. All the decorations in the place had been the same since he was five years old. The big bass, the trio of deer heads, Mr. Jim’s state barber license, and a local newspaper clipping with a photo of himself and one of George Patton.

  “You shoot that convict on the run?” Luther said.

  “Nope,” Quinn said. “Lillie.”

  “She’s a hell of a shot.”

  “Coming from a Marine sniper, that’s a real compliment.”

  “Boom still driving that little Ford?” Luther asked.

  “Yep.”

  “That thing doesn’t have four-wheel drive,” he said.

  “No, sir.”

  Luther nodded and looked behind Quinn at the street scene behind the glass. Everything outside started to turn black, as if night had fallen early. It was only three in the afternoon.

  “Come on,” Luther said, stretching out his long legs and pointy-toed cowboy boots. “I’ll drive you. Ain’t nobody wants to get stuck in this shit. Maybe I can help a bit, too.”

  Quinn nodded. The old man with the skull tattoos on his forearm reached for a hat that read DA NANG and hobbled toward him. Rain beat against the barbershop picture glass, sweeping along Main, with all the cars and trucks driving slow with their hazards on.

  “Something just don’t feel right today,” Mr. Jim said, pulling away the apron from his customer. “I think something real bad is about to happen.”

  “Shit, I just hope the cable don’t go out,” Luther said, tugging on his hat and following Quinn out into the elements. “Then we’ll have to have some authentic conversation in this place and discuss our feelings.”

  • • •

  Jason had stayed home from school on Monday on account of Caddy not really being sure how much his teachers would know about Jamey, not wanting to face them. The whole town knew about the service and the “Model Church” sermon, but she was pretty sure they were more aware of his attendance at the Booby Trap Shootout, as they had called it on the morning news. Much was made that Jamey had been one of the former governor’s pardons, not a single one of those news dipshits taking the time to know Jamey had been kidnapped and was a victim, too. She blamed Quinn for that. He could have kept his name out of the mess.

  When she walked into Jason’s room where not five minutes ago he’d been curled up reading a book, now she found him on his knees, praying. She stood in the doorway listening, the light outside changing weird and dark, the only light in the room from a little cowboy lamp by his bed, making it seem oddly like bedtime. “Help us, Jesus. Help us, Jesus. Help us, Jesus.”

  Caddy came on in and got down on her knee beside him, seeing that he was crying. She used her shirtsleeve to dry his eyes and told him, “Don’t worry about anything. Mr. Jamey is fine. Maybe we can go and see him for supper? He’s just fine, baby.”

  She gave a reassuring smile but saw in Jason’s face that he wasn’t talking about Jamey. He clung to her neck and whispered, “Momma, I don’t want to die.”

  Caddy laughed a little, an involuntary laugh of relief. She rubbed his back. “Oh, baby. Nobody is going to die. What are you hearing? Who has filled your head with all that stuff?”

  He shook his head and wiped his nose on her shoulder. The thunder crashed again and shook the house hard, and he hung on tighter. She’d been so damn wrapped up in Jamey and that crazy woman and what they would do about Esau Davis that she hadn’t even considered the storm and rain, wind beating the hell out of the house. “We’re just fine. We got a
nice room and a comfy bed with all your sleep friends. You want me to read to you?”

  Jason nodded. A neat row of stuffed animals lined his pillows.

  “Are you hungry?” she said. “I can make some cookies.” But he didn’t hear the last of it, Jason turning toward the window and the closed curtains, everything shaking and vibrating the old bungalow.

  Both of them turned, Caddy running to the bedroom window and seeing what looked like a wall of soot and dirt a mile long swirling toward them. Far off, it didn’t sound like a train. It sounded like a big, rolling beat of thunder with no beginning and no end.

  She reached for Jason and pulled him up into her arms. The lights flashed on and off and then off. The room was black, still and quiet except for all the noise of that rushing, horrible sound just getting closer and filling her ears with tension and pressure. Jason was sobbing and screaming as they ran for the back of the house.

  “Help us, Jesus,” Caddy said. “Help us, Jesus.”

  Jason stopped screaming for a moment and prayed along with her as they sought shelter.

  • • •

  “You blame ’em?” Mr. Varner said about a mile back from Sugar Ditch, where they’d spent the last hour trying to convince five families to leave their houses and come into town. Varner drove, Quinn in the passenger seat.

  “Not especially,” Quinn said. “Hard to leave everything.”

  “Reason I don’t keep a lot,” Mr. Varner said. “You?”

  “What I can carry,” Quinn said. “And some special books and guns. Old records and photos that belonged to Uncle Hamp. I prefer to travel light.”

  “Even when you ain’t goin’ nowhere,” Varner said, nodding as he drove.

  The men didn’t speak for a few miles, everything dark as midnight, street signs twisting back and forth, traffic signals jangling from chains. Two of the families had agreed to leave; the other three politely declined help, worried about their stuff getting waterlogged or people coming back early—even though the Ditch had been closed off by the sheriff’s office—and stealing their shit. Quinn left them ankle-deep in water, sandbagging their front doors and praying the rain would stop.

  Quinn stared out the passenger-side window at the trailers and faded shotgun houses situated along what had been the old railroad line. A skin-and-bones dog ran across the street, tail between its legs. A haggard man in coveralls emerged from the transmission shop, mouth open. The American flag behind his fat body popping tight on the pole.

  “Shit,” Mr. Varner said, staring into his rearview. “That don’t look too good.”

  Quinn stared out into the darkness, everything blocking out the sun. “Sir?”

  “Look behind you, Sergeant,” Varner said. “I think we got some incoming.”

  Quinn turned around to see a black swirling wall of debris and dust a half mile wide coming up the highway. In the passenger-side mirror, the twirl and force of the thing was enough to make Mr. Varner mash the accelerator, running flat out for downtown Jericho. The Dodge’s hemi engine growled, RPMs redlined. Varner turned the wheel this way and that to get around downed trees and electric lines snapping like whips.

  “You think we can outrun it?” Quinn said, holding on to the door.

  “We sure as shit gonna try.”

  Quinn hit auto dial on his cell phone, reaching out for his mother, the phone going straight to voice mail. Goddamn it. He tried Caddy, the line busy. Behind them, the long ribbon of blacktop was being devoured by that cloud, electric poles that ran along the highway broke off like matchsticks, electric lines sparking bright red and white in the wind and dust.

  “Goddamn,” Varner said.

  “Sheriff’s office,” Quinn said. “Try and make the sheriff’s office.”

  “Then what?”

  “Get inside,” Quinn said. “Hide and pray.”

  All at once, Varner turned the truck’s wheels hard to the right, tires squealing, blackness coming up on all the windows. The back window in the pickup exploded as the entire back end lifted off the ground, and it felt for a moment like the truck would flip end over end. A hard whirl of dust blew from the east, opposite from the clouds, blowing out Quinn’s window, and then the whole windshield spewed glass in their faces. The tail of the pickup crashed to the ground, and just as the men crawled onto the floorboard, the whole truck started rolling and rolling, the thing slamming the entire truck down hard on the passenger side. Quinn’s face burned as if touched by fire, wind and mud like a sandblaster in his ears and across his closed eyes. He was a million miles away, back in Iraq, Trashcanistan, the Cole Range in Georgia, the swamps in Florida, an RI screaming into his face telling him die, motherfucker, die. Fight it. Hate it. Get up. Dying is too fucking easy. Quinn’s ears were filled with screams and tearing sheets of metal. His eardrums exploded. He tasted blood in his mouth.

  There was a storm shelter in Betty Jo Mize’s backyard, Miss Mize being the owner and operator of the town’s newspaper who had never forgotten what had happened to Jericho back in ’81 before Caddy had even been born. Caddy’s house was on the opposite street from Miss Mize’s, and she and Jason had to rush through a chain-link gate and run over a small stream, shoes sloshing into the water, till they got to the big open space at Miss Mize’s house. Caddy knew she shouldn’t but had to look behind her and see that black, massive, shapeless wall twirling and spinning, breaking with lightning and coming up on south Jericho now, blowing straight for them, the sound of it all something terrible mixed with the rain and the wind and the tornado siren. That siren just now coming on, not even giving people a proper goddamn warning. Jason was a big kid but felt light in her arms as she ran over Miss Mize’s tomato plants, all set in neat rows, and her large bottle tree shaking and shuddering in the wind. That sound of endless thunder filling her ears, more trees shattering and breaking and now what smelled like ozone and fresh-cut timber, and she was to the shelter steps, trying for the door and knocking like hell, screaming, “Open up, it’s Caddy Goddamn Colson and Jason. We’re about to die. Open the fucking door, Miss Mize. Please.”

  Her ears started to fill and the wrecking and crushing strength of the thing was on the city, shit flying everywhere. Limbs and shingles and plastic bags from the Dollar Store and the Pig. Glass breaking. “Open the door,” Caddy said, yelling. “God, please open the door.”

  Jason’s face was firmly buried in her shoulder, her clutching him tight, pressing herself against that steel door, knowing that Miss Mize was gone. As they were about to be sucked up into the air and nothingness, she wondered why God would create such a terrible monster. She prayed some more, making themselves small in that little scoop of earth by the door. “Please, God.”

  The door opened. A man’s hand yanked them inside, door shutting hard and locking behind them. Miss Mize’s son, Wade, and an elderly couple she’d never seen in her life huddled inside. No one spoke. Wade, who had never been at a loss for words, since he was the Jericho Chamber of Commerce president, had his eyes closed. The old couple held on to each other, the woman in a flowered housecoat and the man in sweat pants and a T-shirt for Pap’s Catfish in Ackerman. She cuddled Jason and whispered lies into his ears about everything being just fine, just a little storm outside, and look at Miss Mize’s neat little playhouse. The room was just a little cinder-block space in the ground, maybe five by five, with two-by-fours fashioned into benches on each side. On the wall, Miss Mize had hung a plaque for Outstanding Community Journalism 1989 in some sort of joke that would be funny and private to the wry old woman.

  The thing was passing over them. Caddy held Jason. She prayed.

  That thunder mixed in with what sounded like a giant jet engine being fed with sticks and wood and eating up everything that passed through its sharp blades. The low rumbling shook the entire shelter, and cinder blocks fell off the wall. One of them fell and broke on the old man’s shoulder, but he didn’t pay it any mind, holding his wife tight. Caddy had seen them before, knew them when she was a kid, and they
weren’t so old. Wade Mize didn’t say shit, just stared at Caddy and smiled, Caddy not giving one single shit for a look that said to her, “We’re fucked to hell.” She’d take her chances on Jesus, not the Chamber. She rocked Jason back and forth, ground shaking, the jet engine from hell eating the town, thunder shaking the entire earth like the eight-headed beasts and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the final judgment on this world.

  Dear Jesus. Dear Jesus. Protect us. Keep us safe. Protect this child. Our Lord, please have mercy and grace upon this child. You may suck me into the next world, but keep this boy safe. Door rattling and shaking. All the adults looked to one another, because this wasn’t a human hand trying to get them, this was the beast seeking and ripping and tearing and destroying everything it touched. Dear Jesus. Wise Jesus. Good Jesus. Jesus, please save our asses.

  “Momma?”

  She had her eyes shut tight.

  “Momma,” Jason said. “What happened?”

  Her ears wouldn’t pop. She was breathing hard and sweating, with a heart jackhammering in her chest. “Where are we?”

  “Miss Mize’s playhouse,” Caddy said. “Isn’t it fun and neat?”

  Wade looked down at his hands. He was thinking of his mother.

  “It’s gone,” Wade said, Caddy just realizing all the noise and shaking had left them alone. The silence was so absolute it was electric.

  “Where did it go?” Jason asked.

  “It’s gone, sweetheart,” Caddy said, hugging Jason close and kissing his face. But her thoughts turning dark and worried, wondering about Jean, Quinn, and Jamey, and the whole damned town.

  Wade took a breath, wiped his sweating face with a rag. Caddy only just noticing he wore a pair of blue jeans and no shirt or shoes. She’d never seen him in town without a coat and tie while he ran his downtown bank or the Chamber meetings. He patted Jason’s head and gave a sad smile as he turned the lock and the door opened with a pop.

  A strange, hot white light filled the room. “God help us,” Wade said, and began to help them from the shelter.