The Broken Places

by Ace Atkins

  “It’s open.”

  “I’m going to crawl in on the passenger side, and lay crossways on the seat,” Quinn said. “Which window was shot out?”

  “The back.”

  “Hold Jason tight,” Quinn said. “When the shooting starts again, I want you to throw open that door and I’ll get inside. You got that, sis?”

  “He’s dead,” Caddy said. “Isn’t he?”

  “Think of Jason and hold tight,” Quinn said. “You ready with that door?”

  The shooting started up again and Caddy yelled “go,” and Quinn crawled on his back, kicking off for traction on Esau Davis’s body and off the weedy concrete, and scrambling out sideways, rolling free from the truck and jumping up into the cab. A rifle shot took out the rearview mirror as he slammed the door shut.

  The cab was quiet, and he could hear Caddy and Jason breathing down in the broad space of the floorboard. Quinn lay on his back on the bench seat, which was covered in material like an old Indian blanket. He slipped the key in the ignition, winked at Jason, and said, “Ain’t this fun, buddy?”

  Jason rubbed his nose and nodded.

  “Stay down,” Quinn said. “And I’ll let you drive us home.”

  He cranked the truck. The engine wouldn’t turn over.

  He cranked it again, revving it, the alternator trying to bring to life a weak battery, Quinn turning it and turning it and knowing if he didn’t quit the son of a bitch would flood. The front window exploded, the man shooting through the cab now from the rear, glass falling down on them, just as the engine sparked and caught. Quinn slid as far down into the seat as possible and yanked the shifter into drive, heading straight down the broken and worn tarmac, Caddy and Jason bumping up and down, Quinn not being able to see shit but feeling his way, the truck rolling hard over something or somebody. Quinn didn’t give a damn as long as they moved forward. He felt for the spot where he’d parked his own truck, raising up just a bit over the wheel to catch a glimpse, turning hard to the right to avoid smashing into it, and kept on rolling. The shooting continued.

  Quinn drove, raising his head up more as they hit the edge of the tarmac.

  Caddy held Jason in the floorboard. She was crying harder now, knowing for certain nobody was left behind.

  “Did you kill that red man?” Jason said, crawling up into the seat, keeping low like Caddy had told them. Quinn drove as fast as the old truck would move out and away to the dirt road and then stopped hard where the woods started.

  “Why’d you stop?” Caddy said, getting up into the seat beside Quinn. The wind broke through the open space of the windowless cab. There was glass in Jason’s hair and blood on Caddy’s face. “Why are you stopping?”

  Quinn opened the driver’s-side door and brushed away all the glass with the flat of his hand. Caddy rocked Jason and kissed the top of Jason’s head.

  “I’m sorry,” Quinn said. “I’m truly sorry.”

  “He loved us.”

  Quinn wasn’t sure what to say.

  “He was true and real.”

  “I know.”

  “Who?” Jason said, looking up at his mother. “Did Uncle Quinn kill that bad man?”

  Lillie emerged from the woods with her rifle, out of breath, her face shining with sweat. Without a word, she tossed the rifle in the backseat and crawled in after it. Quinn got back behind the wheel and they hightailed it up and away from the old airfield. “Jesus, who was that?”

  “That wasn’t an amateur,” Quinn said.

  “Hell no, it wasn’t.”

  “And now they’re gone?” Quinn said.

  “Sniper quit working as soon as you knocked that truck in gear,” Lillie said. “I was worried for a second that this piece of shit wasn’t going to turn over.”

  More glass broke free of the windshield frame as they jostled over the gravel road and then turned toward the main highway. Lillie reached her hand from the backseat and touched Caddy’s shoulder.

  Caddy dropped her head into her hand and started to cry hard.

  Wind and leaves rushed through the open car as they fishtailed onto the main highway. Quinn pulled Jason into his lap and pretended to let him steer the truck.

  Lillie was on her handheld radio, calling in to Mary Alice for all available to meet them at the roadside. “Four dead,” Lillie said. “And we got a shooter loose in the hills. We need guns and some dogs.”

  • • •

  Johnny Stagg pulled his maroon El Dorado off to the southbound shoulder of Highway 45 and took a leak. He walked back to his car, burned down a cigarette, and looked up ten minutes later to see a man dressed in black come out of the woods with a long black gear box that he carried by a handle.

  The man got into Stagg’s car and shut the door. Stagg took one final puff off the cigarette and tossed it from his window as he drove off the shoulder and followed the 18-wheelers moving on down to Meridian and Mobile.

  “It’s a mess.”

  “Are they dead?” Stagg asked.

  “They’re dead, but so are your boys, too.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “Dixon brought the sheriff with him,” the trooper said. “And he had a sniper up in the hills. You should have studied the situation a little bit more. How’d Dixon connect with the fucking sheriff?”

  “He was fucking the sheriff’s sister.”

  “Been good to know.”

  “Is the sheriff dead, too?”

  “Nope.”

  “Who’d he kill?”

  “I don’t know who killed who,” the trooper said. “I took down Dixon and Davis just like we had agreed.”

  “And they killed how many?”

  “Two.”

  “What about the three other boys?”

  “When the shooting started, they hauled ass,” the trooper said. “If I were you, I’d be looking into hiring some more quality folks, Mr. Stagg.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Stagg said. “Did they see you?”

  The trooper didn’t answer him, Stagg knowing the question was dumb right as it came out of his mouth. But then he started thinking about Leonard and whoever had walked with him being dead, too, and caught in some kind of situation with Quinn and the sheriff’s office. That whole mess ain’t gonna look good to anyone, no matter how you try and explain it.

  Stagg took the exit for the Rebel Truck Stop. That old neon mud-flap girl kicking her legs up and down, welcoming and servicing all those who would be coming down to save the soul of Jericho, Mississippi.

  Stagg slowed and lit another cigarette. “I got me an idea,” he said.

  But the trooper had already opened the door and was walking across the lot to his black patrol car. He slid the case in the trunk and walked around the driver’s side, peeling out of the parking lot with the sirens and the light bar flashing.

  Headed to some kind of emergency.

  • • •

  “This doesn’t look good, Lil.”

  It was midnight. They sat across from each other in Quinn’s office, a dull light coming from the lamp on her desk.

  “I told those agents they could go fuck themselves.”

  “Probably doesn’t forward our cause,” Quinn said.

  “They think we fired on Leonard and Joe Ed’s dumb ass to protect Jamey Dixon?”

  “They called into question who shot Dixon and Esau,” Quinn said. “They saw all those hundred-dollar bills scattered all over the place and think maybe we started shooting to keep the spoils of two convicts.”

  “That’s pretty sorry.”

  “It is.”

  “What’d they say about Stagg helping Dixon with his pardon?”

  Quinn scratched his cheek. “They wrote it down. You?”

  “They asked me how a woman got to be so good with a gun.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I let them know I was captain of the Ole Miss rifle team and would challenge them on the range. Any time. Any day.”

  “It ain’t easy being the good
guys.”

  “They’re going to talk to Mary Alice,” Lillie said. “She’ll try to cover for us, but there’s nothing on dispatch showing what we were doing.”

  “I explained all this.”

  “And they still don’t believe there was a sniper?”

  Quinn shook his head. “All that money and those dead people are thickening their skulls. They got to wait for the state lab to run a test on your rifle and try to match it to the bullet that killed Jamey and Davis. Then they’ll still try to prove it was connected to us.”

  “You know this puts us head to head with Stagg,” Lillie said. “This working-separate-in-the-same-world shit is done.”

  Quinn nodded. “It’s a mess,” he said. “All of it.”

  “I feel for Caddy,” Lillie said. “God.”

  “Yep.”

  “Where is she?”

  “They took Jamey’s body to the Bundrens’.”

  “God.”

  “Where else could they go?”

  “And did the Bundrens accept it?”

  Quinn nodded. “Ophelia tried to console Caddy,” Quinn said. “Caddy is as busted up as I’ve ever seen her. She and Ophelia talked. About what, I don’t know.”

  “I can’t believe the Bundrens allowed it.”

  “What’s left to discuss?”

  “All I know is that I don’t have time to be asked a bunch of stupid-ass questions about why I shot two of the most worthless, evil men in this county,” Lillie said. “Did you know Joe Ed Burney was so God-Almighty stupid he once got his dick stuck in an intake valve of a Jacuzzi? You think I’m mourning their loss?”

  “And they tried to shoot me.”

  Lillie grinned and turned toward the door. She shrugged. “You really blame ’em?”

  Quinn stood up and reached for his hat.

  “Where you going?”

  “We got the lights back on some streets,” Quinn said. “More houses to be cleared.”

  “When have you slept?”

  “Hell,” Quinn said. “I can’t sleep.”

  “Me, either,” Lillie said. “But today sure made me miss my daughter.”

  “Go.”

  “I guess the entire town is waiting for me to turn to shit,” Caddy said. “Again.”

  “That’s an awful thing to say,” Jean said.

  “But true.”

  “Yes,” Jean said, blowing cigarette smoke away from Caddy. “I guess it is true. But I know you won’t.”

  “I wish you’d explain it to me.”

  They sat together on their normal bench, watching Jason at the playground on Choctaw Lake. Everything at the lake was the same, and on the days and weeks following the tornado, they’d come there almost every afternoon. Caddy thought it strange how you could get ten miles from town and it was as if nothing had ever happened, the grounds along the lake still dotted in old oaks with branches filtering the gold afternoon light.

  There had been so many funerals in town. Nearly one a day. The skinned-up trees that remained were filled with black ribbons. Out on the lake, she could fucking breathe.

  “If I said Jamey Dixon didn’t change you, that you were coming for a change all along, what would you say?”

  “I’d say that’s a bunch of crap, that Jamey did change me. Not his guidance or him being a man, but he gave me a stronger sense of faith and purpose. I’m not about to start building a shrine or wearing a hair shirt, but God, Momma, I loved that man.”

  “I know.”

  “And it’s not like you and Daddy,” she said. “He’s gone. I think that’s what rips the shit out of me. I won’t see him on this earth. I haven’t made sense of it all yet. I’ve heard from so many people telling me this was all God’s plan for me. If that’s the case, why couldn’t He have done it without all the shooting?”

  “Maybe it’s a test.”

  “Jamey gave up his life to protect me,” she said. “But I don’t believe it was God’s will. My God isn’t that cold.”

  “I love you, baby.”

  “I’ll get through it.”

  “I know.”

  “I hate it,” Caddy said, taking the cigarette from her mother’s fingers and taking a puff. “But I can do it.”

  “I know.”

  Jason crawled onto the balance beam, trying to cross over the sand trap, keeping his arms wide like an airplane, the chains holding up the log rocking and wiggling, the little boy smiling but unsure if he should take another step. Caddy waved him forward with a big forced smile that hurt her mouth.

  “So now I plan on running a ministry out of a half-burned barn with no minister, no music, but a decent bit of money if we can ever find where it’s been scattered?”

  “Wasn’t that sweet for that Mills boy to bring in two hundred like that?”

  “I think he kept a thousand.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  Caddy shrugged, took a puff of the Kool, and handed it back to her mother. “What’s Quinn say about us moving to the farm?”

  “He’s the one who asked us,” Jean said. “He wants us all out there.”

  “Might bust up his sex life a bit.”

  “Caddy.”

  “You do know?”

  “Yes.”

  “But won’t say it.”

  “It’s all over.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Caddy said. “I don’t think things are ever over for Anna Lee and Quinn. It’s a sex thing.”

  “Lord.”

  Caddy shrugged.

  “And now Luke is the town hero, and people don’t know what to make of Quinn,” Caddy said. “Will they really put him and Lillie on trial?”

  “Looks that way.”

  “He should have never come back here,” Caddy said. “I don’t understand it. We love to build up our idols and then just rip them down.”

  She took back the extra-long cigarette, feeling herself choke back those black, horrid thoughts, seeing how it must have been for Jamey to be beaten and broken down and still come back for her and Jason, not stopping till a bullet from a coward up in the hills laid him down into the earth. She shuddered in the warm wind.

  “Don’t think on it,” Jean said. “Just let your mind rest a bit.”

  “I’m too young to have a cold bed, Momma.”

  • • •

  Quinn took the nights, Lillie back on the days.

  Jericho had a bandage on it. Homes with blue tarps for roofs, whole neighborhoods now neat and tidy trash heaps with cleared streets and lights shining on empty blacktop roads. The Town Square was pin neat; the buildings that had been broken apart were as if they never existed, swept clean to the foundation, a five-foot wooden fence covering the spaces from the sidewalks.

  There were funerals. There were town meetings. There was a lot of finger-pointing and whispers. Johnny Stagg told the local newspapers he was shocked that one lawman could so callously gun down another. Rumors cropped up again about Lillie’s possible sexual orientation, as if that were the root of the matter.

  Quinn drove the nights, thermos filled with black coffee and shotgun loaded in the rack of the Green Machine. He took Hondo with him, patrolling the roads, the county returning to the Mayberry of domestic violence, drug use, child endangerment, and roadhouse brawls. Quinn liked it better that way. He was tired of seeing the town walk around half awake and shell-shocked. At least the violence felt real again.

  As the summer heat replaced the thunderstorms and the cool evenings, the blacktop baking even after the sun went down, Quinn often would find himself driving by Anna Lee’s place, seeing the old Victorian coming to shape again, the bedroom and kitchen adjoining the rest of the old house, windows being installed, roofers adding cover day by day. Sometimes there was a light on in the kitchen, and there was Luke at the table across from Anna Lee, their baby daughter between them in a high chair. Sometimes it looked like they were happy.

  Early in the mornings, there’d also be light on at the Bundren Funeral Home—serving Jericho sin
ce 1956—and Quinn would park his truck and walk inside, taking a seat and helping himself to fresh coffee that was always on. And Ophelia would emerge from the back room, Quinn never bothering her while she worked, and she’d join him and they’d laugh and talk for a while out under the portico by the hearse. A weird feeling of them being awake while the whole town was still.

  Quinn didn’t care to talk about the federal charges against him and Lillie. But he’d talk to Ophelia if she asked.

  “It’s going to be a long fight.”

  “How could they believe Stagg?” she asked.

  “When I was out at that airfield, there was a lot of equipment out there,” Quinn said. “Looked to me like Stagg was trying to reopen the field. He’s greasing things statewide.”

  “This is a hell of a convenient county.”

  “And with me gone.”

  “You won’t be gone.”

  “Even if charges are dropped, I run for reelection in the fall,” Quinn said. “Stagg’s making his play.”

  “And you’ll beat him,” Ophelia said. “There’s more good here than you think. The way people pulled together after the storm? Everyone in this town reached out to help folks. I see it here. That’s the gift. I see everything at its worst. I saw Caddy. I saw what she went through losing Jamey.”

  “You called him Jamey.”

  “I worked on him,” Ophelia said. “Did you know that?”

  Quinn shook his head.

  “I had to put him back together, working from photographs, not memory,” she said. “He became something else.”

  “But he still killed your sister.”

  “I don’t know,” Ophelia said, sighing. “Sometimes I don’t think he did, either.”

  Ophelia walked Quinn out to his truck. The temperature was up in the eighties even after midnight. She had on a thin white cotton T-shirt and faded jeans, her hair pulled back in a ponytail to work on dead folks.

  “You got a full house now,” she said.

  Quinn opened his truck door. “I do.”

  “What are you going to do with your nights when you and Lillie switch back?”

  Quinn rested his hand against the door frame of the truck, the funeral home’s neon sign buzzing in the hot summer night. He shook his head. “Have any ideas?”

  Ophelia smiled. “Several.”