All the Wicked Girls

by Chris Whitaker

  It’d been his grandfather’s car. She wouldn’t sell it, said she could still smell the old man in it. Noah took it out most nights, had done so for six months now, the thrill an even match for the fear of getting caught.

  He kept the speed down as he drove along Elba, passing the barren fields. A scarecrow stood, head bowed and dropping a shadow of crucifixion.

  He turned off, passed the Kinley place, and ducked low in case Rita was looking out, then drove the track for half a mile before he saw a pickup in the distance, parked lazy in the red dirt.

  He caught sight of Raine; recognized the light hair and the long legs. For a moment he sat still, searching for courage, then he eased the gas pedal down and trundled toward her. He drew up short, killed the engine, and got out.

  She had her eyes closed, her head tilted up as the sky turned iron above. She wore shorts cut high on her thigh, the last smoke from a cigarette rose from the dirt by her foot.

  “Raine.”

  Her eyes snapped open and she turned to look at him.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said.

  “You didn’t. I ain’t the type that scares easy.” She had a rough edge to her voice, maybe ’cause she smoked and drank.

  “Do you need help?”

  She met his eye, cocked her head, and stared so long he wanted to say something else, anything else.

  “Storm . . . she’s a comin’.” Anything but that.

  She smoothed her vest down, pulling it tight over her chest.

  He swallowed dry.

  “I need water,” she said. “For the truck.”

  “I could fill you up –”

  “I doubt that.”

  His eyes widened. “Shit, that came out . . . I could get you some water.”

  She wore a half smile that rolled his stomach. She tucked her hair behind her ear then spit her gum in the dirt.

  “You know who my sister is?”

  He nodded.

  “You seen her about?”

  He shook his head.

  “I gotta find her. I was headed for the houses on Chapel Lake Drive. I figured she might’ve headed that way . . . everyone reckons she followed the Red.”

  “I could drive you there? Right now, wherever you need to go.” He tried to keep the eager from his voice.

  She looked around like she was weighing options, then walked at him.

  He stepped to the side and she got in the Buick and he followed.

  “Smells like old man in this car,” she said.

  “That’ll be my dead grandfather.”

  “He ain’t in the trunk is he?”

  She reached for the radio and found something loud and angry. She kicked off her sandals and put her bare feet on the dash, then pulled a bottle of Barton from her bag and drank. Vodka and smoke and cheap perfume, Noah’s head was light.

  *

  They drove down roads with arched trees that cut the sky to nothing but a dying strip. They passed a couple double-wides and they saw the blue green of television light blinking in the box windows. He made a right onto Chapel Lake Drive, took it wide, and ran the grass but she didn’t say nothing and he was glad.

  “I can’t see a lake,” he said.

  “Ain’t no chapel neither.”

  Chapel Lake Drive was once grand, maybe fifty years back when the land was rich with cotton and Grace was something more than run out.

  He pulled up. The gate was wrought iron, hanging loose at the top hinge. There was a long driveway that wound its way up to a big house. The fascia was carved and might’ve been beautiful but for the dark mold crawling from the soffits. The roof was half covered in tarp and steel scaffolding rose to it. A sign hung, the lettering fancy but faded. BOWDOIN CONSTRUCTION.

  Both knew it was the Lumen house.

  They left the Buick by the gate and followed the gravel, thinned and torn with broadleaf weed.

  “It’s gettin’ dark,” Noah said, looking up. “And Pastor Lumen scares the shit outta me.”

  “Maybe you’ll get lucky and the Angel will come to the door,” she said.

  The Angel. Everybody knew him ’cause he had fluffy white hair and snow-white skin and eyes ringed with the lightest pink. Most knew he was albino, ’cept for Samson’s momma and the pastor, who were quick to declare him an angel when he was born. Raine’s momma said they didn’t ever take him to the doctor.

  She banged the door with a closed fist, shaking the timber frame and loosening citrine paint.

  She pressed her head against the window beside. There were paintings on the wall, winged women with their tits showing and horses with ringlets of white hair. She saw a bowed shelf and a photo frame with a pressed pink flower behind the glass. Raine reckoned it looked like an Alabama Pink even though you weren’t supposed to pick them. The flowers were so rare no one knew where to find them. Rumor was, if you held them to the light they’d cast a colored glow.

  She stood there a long time, then felt dark crawl the roofline and snatch daylight away. She turned and saw Noah standing in the grass watching her and he jerked his head away quick like he’d been checking out her ass or something.

  They moved on to Merle’s place next door. The farmhouse roof bowed so bad that Merle slept in the barn behind. Nobody answered at either when Raine banged the doors. Merle ran the auto shop on Sayer Street, and he ran poker games and sold jars of moonshine.

  Merle’s ’shine was known far ’cause it was so charged that lighting a smoke within fifty yards of it would likely start a fire. It happened once before. Wilbur Orr and his part-timers put it out before it reached the barrels, otherwise half the town would’ve been buttered on the fumes.

  They tried another couple houses but didn’t get nothing.

  *

  Samson Lumen dressed the same no matter the season; pale skin covered, hat pulled low and dark shelled glasses that shielded his eyes from a sun too ruthless. His momma once said he was an angel and angels flew at night, like that explained away the questions he asked.

  He worked at the school and the church and at both he did those background jobs most reckoned beneath them. Sometimes the kids pissed on the floor then hollered for him and laughed.

  With his daddy, the pastor, in the hospital he lay with fearful eyes each night, thinking every noise was the noise he’d been waiting on. He locked the doors and windows but the roof of the old house was open to the night and to dark creatures like Ray Bowdoin.

  Ray looked at him like he was soft and strange and ripe for picking. At first it was money, the money Ray said the pastor owed for the work he was doing, but now it was more.

  Ray had a gun in his truck and a switchblade in his pocket and the kinda eyes that told Samson he was close with both. Samson was afraid of death and of Ray Bowdoin, but most of all Samson was afraid of his daddy, of the damnation the pastor said would visit them if Samson didn’t prove himself worthy and right of the Lumen name. Though his daddy was sick with an ailment that drooped his eye and his arm like they were being tugged from beneath, the hatred still burned. The pastor didn’t care for his only son, not since he was born and not since he’d found the pornographic magazines Samson bought from Lucky Delfray when he was fifteen. He remembered that day clear; the heat of his daddy’s hand and the cold ache of the Red River, and his momma’s panic as she ran for the house and the telephone.

  There were worse things than sins of the flesh his momma had said, but she didn’t get it, not none of it ’cause his daddy saw to that. Sweep it away and bury it deep.

  Samson had his head pressed to the window when the girl knocked at the door, the pretty ghost girl that stole all his breath. He wanted to answer, to call her in and maybe talk to her and the boy, the boy with the cop badge. Samson didn’t have no friends. But then he’d seen what they brought, the heavy dark cloud that ate the Alabama sky like summer weren’t ever coming back. So he dropped to his bed and he curled fetal, his head beneath the pillow ’cause that’s how cowards hi
d.

  *

  Raine rolled down the window, hung her arm out, and opened her hand to the breeze. “You ever pretend your hand is a bird?” she said.

  Noah shook his head.

  “When I’m in my daddy’s truck I put my hand out the window and pretend it’s a bird. I sweep it up and down in the wind. You try it.”

  “I ain’t sure I should take my hand off the wheel.”

  “You always such a pussy?”

  He rolled his window and stuck his arm out, and he swept his hand up and down and cupped slate air between his fingers.

  The Buick veered across the double lines and knocked down a mailbox.

  “Shit,” he said, jerking the wheel.

  She laughed, so he smiled like his heart weren’t pounding out.

  He pulled into the gas station on Highway 125 and filled a container with water, then drove back toward the Kinleys’ fields.

  “I don’t see you at school no more,” he said.

  “You go to my school?”

  He took the hit well.

  She rubbed her eyes ’cause she’d got in late the night before. She’d seen the note straight off, then climbed the stairs and changed her clothes, woke her parents and watched their world dim.

  “She’ll be okay,” he said.

  “I ain’t worried.”

  She threw the empty vodka bottle out the window and heard it smash. She liked the sound, so high and jarring.

  The Buick bumped along the track and she frowned like Noah should’ve known how to ride the ditches better.

  He popped the hood of her truck and filled the empty coolant tank.

  She stood by the tall crops and thought about her sister, and though she didn’t believe as Summer did, she said a quick and quiet prayer that when she got home things would be right, ’cause she couldn’t handle her momma getting on her over nothing else.

  “I could drive you again,” he said, head under the hood. “If you need help, come find me at the station.”

  “So you’re a cop?” she said, glancing at the badge, an eyebrow raised.

  “Yeah,” he said, straight. Then added, “kinda.”

  She laughed and he blushed, then she climbed into the truck and pulled away.

  She saw him in the mirror standing still and watching her go till dust ghosted his face. She kept the window down. Her hand was a bird and she made it fly as the crickets sang their night songs.

  *

  The sweats came and went but sleep did not. Chief Black sat in a high-backed chair in the center of the living room and stared at a large map of Briar County and at the faces of the stolen girls. The Briar girls.

  Home was a small clapboard close to one of the many backwaters that fed the Red River. The walls were papered with all they had on the Bird. The link was there, the churches of Briar County, but of them there were many and second-guessing weren’t even close to possible.

  He’d worked murders in his years as a trooper, domestics and rapes and men that touched kids. They left prints on him so deep he knew he weren’t cut out for the job. Mitch Wild used to tell him a good cop was a cop with heart, but then Mitch could say that ’cause purpose fit him like a second skin, a skin he’d slip from as he headed home each night. Noah looked so much like Mitch it carried Black back every time he saw the kid.

  The Briar girls case was unmatched in scale, from Briar County Sheriff Ernie Redell to the state cops, and they’d turned up nothing.

  “The Bird.” He said it loud with a slight slur.

  The press cooked that one up. The only sighting with girl number four, Coralee Simmons. Twenty minutes after she got taken, by a track she used as a shortcut to the Green Acres Baptist Church, a couple kids playing soldier had seen someone walking through Hell’s Gate. He was big they said, big like a monster and feathered like a bird. He had a girl on his shoulder, hanging limp like she was sleeping. And the bird smiled at them, then brought a finger to his lips.

  It was well outta Grace but Black was nearest, got there and headed in lone. He backed Ernie and Ernie backed him, there was a lot of land in Briar and not nearly enough cops. He’d been walking maybe a mile when he glimpsed something. He’d drawn, called, and followed. The shape, that’s all it was, was big and moved quick. The ground was leaves and mud, the trees tight and close. Black was sloppy, drunk, but he’d gained a little before he fell hard. The shape turned and Black had raised his gun ’cause the shot was clear no matter what he’d told Ernie and the state cops. He’d missed by a head. That miss . . . sleep didn’t come, the blood on his hands wouldn’t ever dry.

  He poured a measure of Evan Williams. He had pills—Phrenilin and Nembutal and Halcion. When he mixed them with booze they guided him to lucid dreams where he aimed a little left and took the shadow off its feet. And where he made the call to Jasper Stimson, and Mitch Wild didn’t walk that dark trail alone and take that bullet to the chest and leave a widow and a child to claw at Black’s soul.

  He weren’t old but felt tired, weren’t fat but weight dragged on him. Sometimes he was amazed what the human body could endure. He surfed close to the divide, never more so than when girl five got taken.

  He wouldn’t chase that Baphomet shadow again, not a chance. No, he wouldn’t chalk up another loss. She’d show up soon. Summer Ryan would be all right.

  5

  Summer

  When Raine’s done somethin’ bad she stands there, hand on hip and nose turned up like she’s about ready to bare her teeth. Same every time, don’t matter if she’s been caught with a boy or caught smokin’ or caught stealin’ liquor from Ginny’s, she’s always ready to throw first.

  Daddy was sent to Holman for eight years a month before we were born. We ain’t never allowed to speak of it ’cause Momma said the past is just that, but from what I got he could’ve served just a couple but wouldn’t roll on nobody. Maybe an ounce of loyalty is really worth a pound of cleverness, but then maybe Elbert didn’t have to raise twin daughters alone like Momma did. So I forgive her sins, and they ain’t really sins, she’s just tough on us ’cause the fear kept pace with her every night without Daddy.

  Momma looked at Raine and saw the long road of age-old mistakes, saw missed periods and clandestine trips to the hook doctor somewhere outside Mobile so he could claw at her womb, and an eternity of that frantic kinda prayer to keep everyone involved from burnin’.

  That kinda worry all day and all night from this life to the after. Kids. Best case is they make you proud, but pride comes before a fall so you’re fucked either way.

  Momma worked two cleanin’ jobs and she didn’t never complain. Raising girls, especially a girl like Raine, it takes the patience of Jude just to keep her aimed right. Some days Raine would dress all black and loop Stained Glass till Momma shut the power off.

  I always saw Raine though. The shit she did, the trouble, it didn’t make her grow up fast, that ain’t how it works. Innocence lost ain’t lost at all, it’s just buried down in some people. She’s got her own fears, that she’s headed someplace that ain’t never gonna be different to where she’s been, just more and more of the same. Grace and boys that don’t care, grocery store jobs and three kids by three different deadbeats.

  Welfare checks, cigarettes, and booze, and soft looks that harden with each knock.

  And faith.

  There’ll be faith. And there’ll be me, ’cause loyalty, like faith, is blind. I’d do it though, I always knew that, no matter what talent they reckoned I got I wouldn’t never leave my sister behind. And when I said that once to Momma, she slapped me hard across my cheek. My hair fell and my eyes blurred ’cause I hadn’t never been hit before. Scared as she was for Raine, maybe her biggest fear was me livin’ a life empty of all that might’ve been.

  *

  Bobby lives in a house at the top of Jackson Ranch Road. It’s a nice place with a big yard and wood shutters that get painted every couple years. I ain’t sure if the church owns the place or if they bought it, but cost
ain’t a worry for them ’cause Bobby’s wife is the oldest of money. Savannah. She wears flower dresses and pearls even when she ain’t going out nowhere. She’s beautiful in the kinda way that can’t be denied—ain’t my type don’t apply.

  The first time I went to their place it was spring and the mandevillas were that shade of blush that only lasts a blink. The pretty streets in Grace, they’re a sight come spring.

  I was nervous ’cause it was Bobby and Savannah and I’d only seen them at church, and they had this glow about them. Savannah told Momma how she used to teach cello back in Maidenville but stopped once she fell pregnant. They ain’t got children, though. Momma told her how the school said I was smart and that I oughta try playin’ an instrument, so Savannah said she’d teach me for free.

  Momma made me bring a bunch of asters and I held them tight as I stood on the porch. I peered through the window and saw a vase filled with a big bunch of fancy flowers so was about to toss the asters when Bobby opened the door.

  “You bought me flowers,” he said, face straight.

  “They ain’t for you.”

  He stepped to the side.

  The floor was cherrywood, polished so I could see sunlight bouncin’ off. Bobby was wearin’ a T-shirt; he looked different without his collar, kinda like he was naked or somethin’.

  “Where should I go?” I said.

  He gently took hold of my shoulders, turned me the opposite way, and pointed.

  “That’s Savannah’s room. I’m not allowed in there in case I break somethin’,” he said into my ear.

  He patted me on the butt.

  I smiled. My cheeks were hot.

  I could feel Bobby’s eyes on me as I walked the hallway, my footsteps tappin’ the kinda echo that stripped the place bare.

  I knocked and Savannah opened the door, led me inside, and closed it behind. She took the flowers and set them down and said I was sweet.