All the Beautiful Sinners

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Jim Doe looked back to his sister to explain, and he could see her mouth, knew she had to be screaming, that she was screaming with her whole entire body, but for some reason, he couldn’t hear her.

  He smiled a little bit, cocked his head over to try to understand what she was doing, why she would be acting like she was screaming if she wasn’t, and then the front wall of the attic disappeared, crumbled away all at once.

  Jim Doe stepped back to keep from falling, and both his legs went through their floor—what was usually the ceiling—and then he was down to his armpits but it didn’t hurt.

  And then the whole house fell down on itself, the roof somehow holding mostly together, and all the sound caught up and Jim Doe tried to scream with it, to let his sister know where he was, and then suddenly, like he’d blinked it away, all the sound was gone. And the wind.

  Outside, he could hear things drifting down from the sky, like the sky had just decided to let them go. Like it was done with them for now.

  He said his sister’s name but she didn’t answer, and then he kicked his feet like swimming. His right foot was maybe touching the couch, or his dad’s chair. Or somebody’s stomach.

  He pulled it back, cried, called louder for his sister, fell asleep twice and four times heard somebody walking past. But they never came to his house.

  Until the fireman.

  Jim Doe watched him pick his way through the rubble, touching the head of his axe to this broken fence, that lost-forever birdbath. Once, a dog that flapped its tail against the ground to be petted, and then didn’t flap its tail anymore after the fireman left.

  The fireman was how he knew it was going to be all right.

  Except he didn’t come straight to him, but instead went to the other end of the house.

  When Jim Doe saw him again, he was leading Gerry Box away by the hand. And Jim Doe’s sister, half her face slick with blood.

  “Hey,” Jim Doe called, “me too,” but his chest was still hollow from crying and they didn’t hear him, and, later, when he told about it, all the firemen shook their heads no, sorry, kid, and when the two police asked, who were there for the dead fireman, Jim Doe couldn’t even speak, they were so tall, their voices so deep, and finally he only told the sheriff, who told him he’d imagined it, that anybody would have.

  And maybe he had.

  Except his sister and Gerry Box never came back, and never came back, were dead like everybody said, and for most of his sixth grade year, the kid starting the fires all around Nazareth, Texas, he wasn’t doing it because he thought the flames were pretty, or because he wanted to burn anything. He did it to bring the fireman back, so he could ask where his sister was. And Gerry Box.

  And then the sheriff found him one day fanning some kindling on the playground, and helped him put it out, and didn’t tell anybody, kept it between the two of them, and that was the last tornado Nazareth had seen for nearly twenty years.

  TEN1 April 1999, Kansas

  Amos got a new car in Holcomb, from another garage. Honest Injun’s. In the daytime, Mr. Honest Injun in his Honest Injun coveralls bleeding out slow behind the Honest Injun tire-balancing rig, an Honest Injun fan belt wound tight around his throat to keep him from calling anybody over, his cut-out tongue in his hand in case he wanted to throw it at anybody, or to a dog, do one nice thing. The belt left little grooves for the mouth blood to run around his neck in. In trade, Amos left the Impala he’d driven out of Garden City. The new car was a 1981 LeMans.

  At the first halfway truck stop, nervous without any music, the road too full of sound, he found a plastic-wrapped Royal Scam, thumbed it in, turned it up. Drove. The miles melted away behind him. He was fixing the world. Making up for everything. All it had taken was one ambulance left parked on the street like a gift for him, two bottles of Dilantin in the cage. He mixed it with some Percocet and Xanax and baby formula.

  Once it hit his system right, he tied his hair high up on his head and became a woman he’d seen in Garden City. He could feel the truckers looking at him from their high seats. He waved his fingertips at them.

  In Kendall, his hair under a cap now, a clerk asked what his name was. He recited from the newspaper he’d seen in the ambulance: Jim. Jim Doe. The one that got away. He stood around then, letting the camera get him from all angles but making it look accidental too.

  No cops pulled him over. Because they’d heard about Texas. And there were no fireman anymore, not since the Dilantin. Or maybe it was the baby formula.

  The back of the LeMans was squatted down on the springs, so sitting behind the wheel was like sitting in the water, on a boat.

  From a payphone he found himself at in Coolidge, almost to Colorado—the road had been so smooth he’d overshot his turn north—he placed a call. His fingers knew the number without him, had been dialing on the dashboard for miles already. It was just a matter of time before they found a dialpad.

  The phone on the other end rang the usual fourteen times before somebody lifted it. Amos could almost hear the cardigan, sweeping across the room.

  “Mr. Rogers’s house,” the man on the other end said, the voice cheerful, false.

  “Um, yeah,” Amos heard himself saying.

  “Oh, it’s you,” the chipper man said. “Yes?”

  On the screen in his mind, Mr. Rogers walked to the closet, hung his cardigan up in it then turned around just fast enough for Amos to make out the look in his eye.

  Amos made his hand hang the phone up, went back to wipe it down, then crossed the state line.

  In Hartman, Colorado—it was on his list anyway, was just out of order now—he sat in the LeMans cleaning his teeth until dark, then rolled the headlights on, eased through the outskirts of town, to the cemetery. They were all the same: unguarded. Like the dead didn’t matter. But they did.

  He didn’t have to look at a list for the two names. He’d known them, could still see their faces in the darkness of the basement, even, when he didn’t want to.

  The ground was soft, and the names of the children carved into the headstones matched the parents buried to either side, all dead the same day, the same storm, except the mom was named Jane, and Jane was supposed to be married to Tarzan, and Tarzan was a town in Texas, near Nazareth, where Jesus wasn’t born.

  It didn’t matter.

  The ground was soft, and fertile. Not the hardscrabble Amos knew from Nebraska.

  But he couldn’t think about Nebraska yet.

  He grubbed for the Dilantin, crushed the tablets on a headstone, inhaled them from the crook of his thumb.

  It made him dig faster into the two smaller graves, not thinking about it, not letting himself think about it, his radiator-burned palm bloody with blisters. It was worth it, though. There were the coffins. Amos nodded, retreated to the LeMans, cracked the trunk open. The children were still there, staring up at him. One of them—the girl, always the girl—raised her arms for his neck, and he bent down, pressed his face into her shoulder as he lifted her from the ground, cradled her small form to the new grave. Because her family was gone. But this would do, this was close enough.

  His hair had grave dirt in it by the time he got the boy into his coffin. He laid tobacco ties on each of the children’s chests, at the point where the turkey foot carved into their torsos branched out into toes. Like the turkey had been what pressed them down into the ground. They put their hands over the tobacco in thanks. Because it was right, proper. And things had to be proper.

  Amos closed the trunk, looked back east, and turned the great car around, for Kansas, doubling back on the same blacktop, which he’d promised himself not to do. He was fixing the world, body by body. It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

  ELEVEN2 April 1999, Deerfield, Kansas

  From a payphone at the turn up to Lydia, Jim Doe called Castro County. Not Monica at Dispatch, to check in, but Agnes. It was pushing dawn.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  Jim Doe looked around, shivered. “Kansas,
” he said.

  “You should come home.”

  “I’m going to pay you back.”

  “I don’t care about the money.”

  “I’m going to pay you back for Tom, Agnes.”

  “Joe.”

  “Jim,” Jim Doe smiled.

  It was good to hear her voice.

  “You’re not calling just to tell me that,” she told him.

  Jim Doe switched ears, watched a car flash past, its driver lit up by his own dome light at the last moment.

  “The fireman,” he said, cupping his hand around the phone to say it. “He was real, Agnes. Did Tom know?”

  The way she hesitated was all the answer he needed.

  “It’s something with the—with all the towns that got hit by a tornado, I think.”

  “Joe, no.”

  “I can find her,” he said then, quieter, with his eyes closed.

  “Come home,” Agnes said again, the defeat there in her voice, and Jim Doe made it easy for her, just hung up.

  To the south there was an outflow boundary, a shelf cloud moving low across the land. In the parking lot he was in, three of the six cars had feathers dangling from their mirrors. The thread wrapped around one of their spines was a military pattern, for Vietnam. Green and white and red. Jim Doe knew the colors from his father.

  He got in the truck, lowered his face into his sunglasses, and closed his eyes for what he told himself was just going to be two seconds, woke to a man knocking on the window. He was Indian, tall.

  Jim Doe cracked the window.

  “Smells hot,” the man said, touching the hood to show what he meant.

  Jim Doe blinked, managed to focus in on his gauge. Two-twenty. He’d fallen asleep with the engine idling, the doors unlocked. His hand not on his gun. Nothing hanging from his rearview.

  “Shit,” Jim Doe said. “Thanks.”

  “You okay?” the man asked. “Not shot or anything?”

  Jim Doe looked at his stomach, his chest.

  In his side mirror, the man’s tall kid was placing his hand in the handprint on the back fender of the truck. The print was more brown now than red. Like a scab. The kid’s hand seemed to fit. Jim Doe watched him do this and watched him do this and then reached beside his seat for the nightstick he still carried, wedged it against the accelerator to cool the engine down. He stepped out into the midday glare. The man towered over him. The kid too. Basketball. He had probably played in the game two nights ago, even.

  “Who won?” Jim Doe asked.

  The man hooked one side of his face into a smile, said, “Who do you think?”

  The tall kid’s hand did fit. He backed off with Jim Doe’s approach. Jim Doe told him it was all right. He placed his own hand there. It fit too. The kid smiled. Jim Doe bent down to the print, took his sunglasses off one ear at a time, not wanting to mess anything up here.

  There in the hand shape, where the longhair’s hand had been, were four fingerprints and a thumb, dried into the paint.

  Jim Doe smiled.

  The basketball-playing family was gone when he turned around, their car not receding down any of the roads in any of the directions. Jim Doe looked up—because this was Kansas, where people get lifted into the sky—but they weren’t there either.

  He backed inside, to the store, bought two cups of coffee, a disposable camera, and a newspaper, then shot the whole roll on the handprint—close, far, every angle, some lit with his Maglite, some not, one with a quarter by it, for size, another with the newspaper, for the date—then packed it into a padded envelope, addressed it to Sheriff Debs, Garden City. The clerk knew the zip. Then Jim Doe showed him the flyer of the longhair. The clerk looked from it up to Jim Doe, then back again, like this was a joke, and Jim Doe looked away.

  As he was walking out, though, suddenly aware that the emergency brake in his truck wasn’t even set, the door unlocked, so that anybody could pop it into gear, the clerk called after him.

  “This about the gas run?”

  Jim Doe closed his eyes, didn’t turn around. “Yes,” he said.

  “I never saw him,” the clerk said. “Did they tell you I did?”

  Jim Doe turned around now.

  “When did you not see him?” he asked.

  “When he made the gas run,” the clerk said. He was all of sixteen.

  “Yesterday?” Jim Doe said.

  “Last night,” the clerk said. “Comes out of our check, you know? Ever since Arthur.”

  “Arthur?” Jim Doe said.

  The clerk smiled. “Arthur,” he said. “He was selling premium to his cousins at regular price. Real philanthropist.”

  Jim Doe looked above the clerk to the security camera.

  “But you’ve got tape,” he said.

  The clerk nodded. “Damn straight,” he said. “I saved its ass, too.”

  Jim Doe took the tape to the supply room with the manager’s television on the desk. His truck was still running, idling high with the nightstick, the plate glass at the front of the store pulsing with the exhaust. After the clerk left, he moved a stray brick over to the doorjamb of the supply closet, so it wouldn’t close. So nobody could close it on him. And then he watched.

  It was black-and-white and grainy and distant, but still, there he was, the longhair, keeping his new LeMans between him and the camera. You could tell it was new to him because he couldn’t find where to put the gas at first, had to walk around the car twice. While he pumped, you could see his hair, whipping above the ragged top of the car. His face just dark, determined.

  Jim Doe ejected the tape.

  “Show this to Sheriff Debs,” he said.

  “Is he coming here?” the clerk asked, but Jim Doe just nodded.

  “They all should be,” he said, and left the clerk standing there with the paperwork his manager would want filled out.

  Standing by his truck again, his car beside him, was the tall Indian man. Like he’d been there all along. His tall son was dribbling a basketball beside the store, passing it to himself off the wall. The rain was almost on them now, already sweeping the trash into the air.

  The man nodded down at Jim Doe’s right hand.

  “Gonna pay for that chocolate?” he asked.

  Jim Doe looked down at his hand and there it was, a candy bar. One he couldn’t explain. He offered it to the man but the man held his hands up, palms out. They were both red.

  The last thing Agnes had said to him on the phone was come home.

  It was too late now, though. He was too far gone.

  He got into his truck, moved the newspaper out of his seat, dislodged the nightstick and pulled into Lydia three hours after sunset, one hour ahead of the rain. It already smelled like it, though. There were people stationed in the driveways of each house, watching it approach. Jim Doe slowed, like he was recognizing them, their stance, and then it came to him all at once, so hard that he almost stumbled—what had been getting louder and louder since Debs and Garden City, since Deerfield: the insurance man.

  The one who had come to pay for Jim Doe’s sister.

  By that time, just a week out from the storm, Jim Doe had already been calling her Dorothy in his head, because the wind had taken her, and because she was going to come back again. It was his secret deal.

  And then the insurance man came to pay for her.

  Jim Doe never even saw him. He had still been hiding behind the one standing wall of his bedroom, then. Pretending. But then the car pulled up, its dust plume settling over the remains of Horace Doe’s house, coating everything with a fine layer of caliche. Another fine layer of caliche. Jim Doe made himself smaller behind the partial wall, closed his eyes, and listened. It was the insurance man’s voice he would remember. How he’d talked to his father, calling him Mr. Doe at first, then moving on to Horace, until that became something different too: Horse.

  They were sitting on the couch his father had dug out. Or, his father was. Maybe the insurance man was standing, walking, pacing like a teacher
. Looking out the windows as he spoke. The whole house was a window.

  The insurance man was saying how he was here as an extension of the company. To show how much they cared in this, Horse’s time of loss, of grief, and grieving. That he knew Horse wasn’t thinking about money yet, of course, but it was his job to. His duty in times like this.

  “Just tell me what I owe,” Horace Doe said, his voice flat.

  His wallet had blown away along with his daughter.

  The insurance man didn’t say anything for a long while. It was just his feet on the broken glass of the floor. Then he said it: “Nothing, Mr. Doe. Horse. We owe you.”

  Jim Doe could hear his mother in the other room, sweeping. The walls around her were two feet tall, maybe. The broom was makeshift, rags and a stick; her real broom was stuck in a locustwood fencepost three acres away, like it had been shot there by a giant, inconceivable bow. Birds were already sitting on it, bobbing up and down, waiting for the straw to cack in half so they could weave nests out if it.

  The insurance man said it again: Nothing.

  And then he extended the check to Horace Doe. Twenty-two hundred dollars.

  Jim Doe could hear his father looking up, could hear the insurance man smiling, the check fluttering. The burial insurance that wasn’t included in Horace’s premiums was paid out on the check, listed on the stub. The amount was real. Horace looked from it to the insurance man. The insurance man said it must have been an oversight at the main office. That it happened all the time. That he understood what it was like to lose someone. To just cash it.

  After that, silence. So long that Jim Doe put his hands over his ears, started humming to himself. It was the same quiet now as it had been right before the circle vent sucked out of the wall. A roaring silence. His hands at eight weren’t thick enough, though. He could still hear the insurance man talking in low tones—private tones, like this wasn’t for everybody. It was a joke. An Indian joke, one Jim Doe would never be able to remember, just that it made his father laugh, sitting there on the couch. Made him laugh for the first time in days. The sound of his laughter spilled through the house and out into the grass, and for a moment his wife stopped sweeping, and his son stood up, and the three of them looked at each other, and started getting better. Started becoming three instead of four. The insurance man was already a car pulling away, back into Nazareth. Jim Doe waved, wanted more, please, more—make us laugh—but that was all.