He followed the side of the car around to the open hood. The station attendant was trying to see through the steam. He looked up, the brim of his dingy brown hat framing his eyes. They were blue. The stitching on his shirt read TAYLOR.
“I’d say she’s one hot bitch, yep,” Taylor said, pushing his hat back on his head to see under the hood better.
“You don’t know me,” Amos croaked, shaking his head no, please. “I’m White.”
And now Taylor was studying him, it felt like.
There was only one thing to do.
Amos reached under the hood and placed his bare palm against the radiator cap. The skin sizzled, curling back from the heat, and he fell to his knees, mouth open in a scream, just no sound.
“Holy—” Taylor said, didn’t get to finish because the water was pressuring out from under the cap. It was like a sprinkler head now. In hell.
Amos backed off, holding his hand—his hands, chained together—close to his stomach, staring his eyes wide.
Taylor dove for the water hose, pointing Amos inside, to the garage. Something about a first-aid kit on the wall.
Amos turned, stumbled into the cool, dank air of the garage, and stood among the tools. His hand didn’t hurt anymore, never had. Not really, not him. He became Indian again and slowly removed the Def Leppard shirt from the chain of the handcuffs and straightened it on the hood of a Cutlass. It was his favorite shirt, the one concert he’d ever been to.
The chain he set on a vise. The vise was welded to a three-inch pipe, the pipe set in concrete poured into an old seventeen-inch Ford wheel. There were probably bolt cutters here somewhere, a torch even, but the vise would work. He took a slag hammer by the very end of the handle, to make the most of the six inches of motion he had, then fixed the chain in the vise and tried to hit it with the hammer, missed, came down on the table instead, throwing sparks.
Right next to the vise was a bench grinder, with a foot pedal. Amos smiled. He wasn’t White. He held the leading edge of the slag hammer under the grinder until it was shiny sharp, a flat point, then worked it between one of the links of the chain, started twisting, passing the handle of the hammer from one hand to the other. After three revolutions, the chain snapped; his hands fell free. And then he looked at the hammer, past it to Taylor, the Impala.
Kalvesta. This was Kalvesta.
Maybe they wouldn’t mind if he stayed here an hour or two.
FIVE30 March 1999, Gove, Kansas
The old man was standing in front of the convenience store. It was six o’clock maybe. The fluorescents under the awning made the late, light snow look whiter than it was. The tires of Jim Doe’s Bronco crunched it down. He’d been in four-wheel drive for miles, now, the gas gauge diving. He’d been so alone in his lane that he hadn’t even had to pull over to lock the hubs. He’d just done it in the road. This was Kansas.
The old man looked up out of his pea coat collar at Jim Doe. The old man was Indian. Jim Doe nodded. His deputy jacket wasn’t thick enough for the wind. Opening the glass door, he lowered his head into the old snow whipping around the corner, but his hat was still in Texas and he got a face full of hair instead. His own. The tip ends bit into his eyes. The old man was still watching him.
“What town is this?” Jim Doe called out.
The old man looked around.
“Glove,” he said. Maybe. Or dove. Like the bird. His voice was clipped, from the reservation.
“What?” Jim Doe asked.
Love?
The old man pointed at the sign above the store. Between gusts of white it read GOVE QUICKSTOP.
Jim Doe nodded at the old man again, in thanks, and stepped in. Gove. It was up towards 70, on the map. Just west of Trego Center, where nobody’d seen the longhair either. There was no trail, just miles and miles of blacktop spooling out over the prairie.
“Usually snow this late?” Jim Doe asked the girl behind the counter.
She didn’t even look up from her magazine. “Weird year,” she said. “Like last one, y’know?”
The girl popped her gum to show she was done talking.
Jim Doe looked out at the old man, still standing there. The Bronco was idling, its exhaust curling up past the tailgate, the snow falling on the hood turning into individual droplets of water. But it kept falling there anyway.
“Who’s he?” he asked the clerk.
She still wasn’t looking up. “Who?” she said.
Jim Doe stared at her.
“Coffee’s there,” she pointed. At the side of the store, just past the fountain drinks. Her nail was perfect red. Joe followed it, poured one cup, then another, pressed the lids down onto the white foam lips.
At the checkout counter he asked if they got many out-of-towners this time of year.
The girl finally looked up at him. Just her eyes.
“You,” she said.
Jim Doe took out one of the flyers he’d made, unrolled it on the counter for her.
“Him?” he asked.
The girl looked down at the grainy face: the longhair looking back, into Gentry’s dash camera.
“This a joke?” the girl said.
“It’s not me,” Jim Doe said. He’d had to say it in Montezuma and in Jetmore and in Bazine already. He knew he should have gone to Oklahoma, too. That’s where everybody else was, working with the tribal police, stopping every blue Impala with an Indian driver, and hitting the barbershops too. Because maybe he’d changed his appearance. Become Jim Doe, to hide.
The girl was smiling now. “He supposed to have come through here or something?” she asked.
“Nebraska plates,” Jim Doe said.
“You’re from Texas,” the girl said.
Jim Doe nodded.
“But you’re Indian,” she said.
“Blackfeet, yeah.”
She laughed some. “Let me see your hands,” she said.
Jim Doe did, unsure, keeping his elbows close to his ribs. She pulled his hands the rest of the way across the counter, turned one over then the other. Shrugged.
“Yeah,” she said. “One of my boyfriends was from Browning. It’s something about the fingers with you Piegan”—she rolled her eyes when she said it, like she’d been trained to say it like that, pay-gun—“how they look at certain angles.”
Jim Doe looked at them, his hands.
“What are you doing down here, though?” she asked. “Long way from Montana, cowboy. Yeah?”
Jim Doe flattened the copy of the face on the counter.
“This isn’t about Montana,” he told her. “It’s about Texas. Listen, just—have you seen him?”
She looked down. Shook her head no.
“I should have xeroxed his hands, right?” Jim Doe said, refolding the flyer.
She rang up his coffee and he held both cups close to his stomach and opened the door with his back, nodding bye to the girl at the last possible instant. He was glad to have the coffee in his hands, too. Because she would have been looking at them.
In the parking lot, the old man was standing there, switching from foot to foot.
Jim Doe tried walking to his truck. He could feel the old man watching him, measuring his steps. Finally he turned to him.
The old man was smiling.
Gove. Somebody should have warned him about this Gove.
He offered one of the cups to the old man, already shuffling across the parking lot, taking it in both hands. The steam from the coffee caressed the old man’s face. He said something in some kind of Indian to Jim Doe.
“No problem,” Jim Doe said, lifting his cup—you’re welcome.
The old man looked over at the idling Bronco.
“Where you going?” he said. In English.
Jim Doe lifted his cup to his mouth.
“You?” he asked.
One side of the old man’s mouth hooked up into a smile. “North,” he said. “Home.”
Jim Doe looked north.
“Sorry,” he said to the old man.
<
br /> The old man shrugged, raised his cup in thanks for the coffee.
Alone in his truck, Jim Doe sat there taking small, hot sips.
The old man was just standing by the ice machine again. Waiting for Jim Doe to go south. The way he had to have seen the Bronco just come from.
The girl was reading her magazine.
Jim Doe backed out, slid to a slow, drifting stop, and crawled the Bronco to the front of the parking lot.
He’d already been south, was the thing.
He shook his head, said to himself what the hell, clipping the words in his head, and reached over for the passenger side door handle. The wind opened it, flung it as far as the hinge went, but the old man didn’t step in. Jim Doe looked in the rearview mirror—empty?—so he turned around, to look through the back glass. Nothing.
“Old Indian trick,” he said to himself, smiling—it was an Eastwood line, maybe—then popped first gear to close the door, and had to slam the brakes before he could even get the clutch back down.
The old man was standing right in front of him. Still holding his coffee.
The truck was dead, the headlights paler for it.
“That face you’re looking for,” the old man said from the passenger seat, two miles closer to 70. “He’s Indian, enit?”
Jim Doe nodded. “My brother,” he said, half a joke.
The old man looked hard at the shotgun locked in place between them, aimed up at the sky, then raised his cup, took a long drink.
“Only one place to be if you’re Indian tonight,” he said, and winked at Jim Doe. “Put your ear to the ground, man, you can hear it.”
SIX30 March 1999, Garden City, Kansas
Three hours after letting him into the Bronco, Jim Doe and the old man pulled into Garden City. It was back to the south, towards 156. The wrong way. There were already flyers of the longhair in the windows of some of the stores. Jim Doe had taped them there. The high school the old man directed them to was circled by probably eighty cars. They were Indian-issue. Hardly any of the fenders matched, and the only speed they had was leaning forward all the way, somebody’s hands on the wheel at one and eleven, just wide enough for them to set their face, see. Jim Doe had heard some joke like that. People were always bringing them to him, Indian jokes, like he was supposed to laugh. He never could remember them until it was too late, though—until whoever’d brought it was leaned back, launching off into the punch line. Then he’d get it, Jim Doe, dread it, turn away because he’d always thought the side profile of his smile was less insincere than head-on.
Garden City. Like Eden.
Jim Doe trolled up one aisle of cars and down the other, and suddenly, impossibly, close enough that it had to have gotten there early, there it was: the Impala. Different plates, but the pattern of rips in the rotted vinyl top was burned into the back of Jim Doe’s retinas. And there was a ragged dog nosing around the trunk, already slinking off.
The old man looked behind them and beside them when Jim Doe killed the truck right behind the Impala. He looked over to Jim Doe.
“You sure?” he asked.
Jim Doe nodded.
Jim Doe climbed down into the parking lot. He’d parked close enough to the Impala that he had to leave his door open for the old man to come out his side. He didn’t wait for him.
The car.
He ran his hand over its lines, the tips of his fingers not even touching the snow enough to mark it. He wanted to call the DPS, the FBI, an airstrike. And Agnes. But bringing a white cop in an Indian place like this. Or, cops. All the men would fold themselves into lockers, spin the locks from the inside, stay there as long as they had to. And he wanted to bring him in himself, anyway, the longhair.
The rear door was still dented where Gentry had thrown him into it.
The steering wheel was rubbed shiny across the horn, right where your palms would rest if you were wearing handcuffs.
There was no rearview mirror.
Jim Doe looked up, remembering he wasn’t alone here. Not quite. The old man was standing off, one car over.
“Thanks,” Jim Doe said.
“You could hear it, couldn’t you?” the old man said, and when Jim Doe didn’t get it, the old man dropped to one knee, dipping his ear to the ground, the tips of his grey hair brushing the snow.
Jim Doe left him like that. Turned back to the car. With one of the teeth of his truck key he hissed the air out of all four of the Impala’s tires. The snow crunched as the radials settled down over it. They were all brand new, a matching set. At the front bumper, where the overflow hose ran, was a green-crusted hole. Radiator fluid, very clean. At the rear bumper, the tailpipe was cold, the inside scorched black.
But the trunk. Jim Doe looked at it for a long time, the wind swirling around his legs, then turned his face up to the gym.
He was here, the longhair.
Jim Doe palmed his wallet for a five—the seventeen hundred still bunched in the envelope in the truck—and gave it to the mother sitting her table at the door. She pulled hard on a cigarette, all the smoke rushing out of her mouth, into the haze inside.
“Who’s playing?” Jim Doe asked, nodding towards the stands.
“Funny,” she said, and gave him three dollars change. One of the bills had a sharp blue Colonel Sanders goatee drawn on George Washington. Jim Doe folded it into his wallet with the rest, let her stamp his hand with a red wagon wheel with one broken spoke, then stepped all the way in. The warm air stung his eyes and he blinked, blurring the crowd, smelling the dried saliva he always smelled at gyms, from people spitting on the floor, rubbing the soles of their shoes in it.
The longhair, though. That was all he was thinking, all he was trying to think.
He shook out a copy like the one he’d been taping up, but, as he was smoothing it, a group of four fifteen-year-olds slouched past, round-shouldered, their hands not so much buried in their pockets as thrust. Three of them had hair most of the way down their backs. The other was shaved bald, a tribal design tattooed into his scalp. He stared at Jim Doe, bared his teeth at the last possible instant, then passed. Jim Doe only flinched on the inside.
He turned back to the mother’s table.
“Yeah?” she asked, taking the flyer in in a glance, and not interested.
“Old man come through here?” Jim Doe asked. In defeat.
“He your grandpa?” she asked back, opening her till.
Jim Doe paid for the old man too. Didn’t ask why she’d let him through. To keep him out of the cold, probably.
The mother closed her metal box then pointed at the two doors leading up into the stands—where the old man had maybe gone. Jim Doe thanked her, walked across the cafeteria floor. For some reason he felt certain there was an institutional fork stuck in the ceiling tile thirty-four feet above him. Waiting for him. But if he looked it would fall into his eye, and then he’d have that to deal with.
He went back to the mother at the table again.
“There any other way out of here?” he asked.
“He’s probably just getting nachos or something, think?”
Jim Doe stood, scanning for a side door. Because the longhair was going to see the sheriff jacket, the pistol.
Jim Doe took the jacket off, folded it over his arm, on the side his pistol was on.
“What if there’s a fire?” he asked.
“I’ll come tell you personal,” the mother said back, and blew a line of smoke between them.
Jim Doe nodded thanks, eyeballed the one fire door in the cafeteria then made his way through the second set of doors with everybody else. The noise of the crowd rushed up the hall all around him. He stepped up onto the first ramp there was, to the gym floor, then stood against the rail like he was here for the game, nothing else. In Nazareth he would have tipped his hat back to show he was just him, not a Deputy. But he still didn’t have a hat.
The game was an Indian school and a white school. A replay of last year’s regional finals, the posters and sign
s said. There was fry bread in the air. During a free throw, when everybody was on the edge of their seat, leaning forward for him, Jim Doe turned around to catalogue faces but hadn’t gotten anywhere before they exploded up, screaming. He turned back to the game, felt more than heard the scoreboard click another Indian point up, and then, from the corner of his eye, an old Hysteria shirt eased past.
It didn’t even register for a full ten seconds—Def Leppard—but when it did he turned so fast he spilled a woman’s coke. It slung all the way into the first row. He tried to catch her popcorn, but there were too many kernels, too much space between his fingers. Everyone for five people deep was looking at them. At him. And Jim Doe just didn’t have time right now. He stuffed three dollars from his wallet into her hand and took long steps back down the ramp, made the fire door at a run. It was closed. He ran his fingers along the rod that drove into the cylinder, to keep it from ever slamming. It was cold, frosted over a bit, even.
Good.
And he wouldn’t have gone out the main door. There was a knot of white people there, real churchgoers, all going the other way with their foam hands and plastic hats. One of them had a balloon feather tied to the back of his head, even, and lipstick under his eyes.
Jim Doe turned away, back to the hall, followed it into the lightless bowels of the high school. His heart was hammering in his shirt; the catch was off the hammer of his pistol. Soon he was running across the low-pile carpet, rounding corners onto rows and rows of lockers. But always there was sound just ahead of him. And then it was all around.
He followed it to the practice gym.
The lights had been hit but weren’t warm yet, were still wriggling worms of heat far above.
Below them, at half court, was what looked like two people at first, but then it was just one. He was thrashing around on the floor like he was hurt. Or a seizure. He tried to stand but fell to his knees, tilted his head back, his hair touching his heels behind him, and screamed an animal scream, his voice ragged at the edges, booming over the hardwood.
All the Beautiful Sinners Page 4