All the Beautiful Sinners

by Stephen Graham Jones

  When he woke, the girl was gone.

  “Jennifer,” Jesse James said, her name. “Now say thanks.”

  Hari Kari threw up into his own lap. It was warm, like peeing.

  Jesse James laughed.

  “She wasn’t that bad,” he said. “Shit, man.”

  They drove on, into Utah, Idaho, Montana, then turned south again.

  Don’t Worry, Hari Kari said to his mother.

  Don’t come look for me, he said to his dad.

  Not now.

  South Dakota was dry, Indian. Jesse James raced all the trains, pretending to be plowing through three-mile herds of buffalo, their endangered gore sloughing up onto the windshield.

  Hari Kari couldn’t control his pupils anymore. The chloroform. The skin around his mouth was red, peeling.

  “America,” Jesse James said, holding his thin hand out over the dash.

  Hari Kari nodded.

  They were going home. Jesse James liked to say Tinker. It made his upper lip curl back off his teeth.

  Hari Kari had lost count of the small towns, the junior high girls impressed by the black El Camino.

  They stole a whip antenna off a tractor-trailer, and Jesse James wired it into their CB. The air was crawling with voices. Jesse James lowered his mouth to the mike, talked like movie stars to them, made up huge, illegal payloads for him and his sidekick to carry: elephants, Chinese vases, spongy metal from Roswell.

  Hari Kari smiled. It made his face crack.

  “And grasshoppers,” he said. “For the reptile industry. Tell them what it sounds like. About that time the trailer broke and the sky went brown with them, like a plague.”

  Jesse James keyed off, leaned forward so his chest was almost to the wheel, and watched Hari Kari.

  “What are you going to do when you grow up?” he asked.

  “What did you think you were going to do?”

  “This,” Jesse James said.

  Hari Kari looked at it, or tried to.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  That night—Kansas, maybe, or still Nebraska—when the bartender wouldn’t serve him, he sulked back to the car. It was pointed right at the roadhouse. Jesse James walked out on the stilts his legs were becoming. In his shirt was a beer he’d smuggled out, in a glass.

  “For my partner in crime,” he said, then faded away like he could.

  Hari Kari sat with the beer in both his hands, staring into it.

  A couple walked by, the woman hanging on the man. Somebody in a Chrysler had left their headlights on. If he held his breath, the music would almost make it to him. There was a storm coming, too—low pressure system, up from the Gulf. He could feel it.

  He raised the beer to his lips, held the first drink in his mouth until it was warm, then forced it down, made it stay. Over and over, until it was gone. Because it was one his father hadn’t given him.

  It felt like he was going to fall into the sky now.

  He smiled, held onto the dash just in case, and caught one of his fingers tracing the line around the glove compartment.

  It opened.

  In it were snapshots—him and the girl Candace, from Colorado, naked, entwined. And the rest of the girls too, him with each of them. A whole stack of Polaroids. He couldn’t stop looking at them, at him, himself. Doing that. It was like stories he’d read of people who recorded themselves snoring, so they could tune back in to the sound, wake up when they started. Only some of them talked during the nights. And hearing yourself when you’re not yourself like that. They didn’t snore anymore because they didn’t sleep.

  “Try the chloroform,” Hari Kari said, nodding with the alcohol—everything funny—then laid his head on the side of the door so that his hair hung out. He was growing it long now, like Jesse James. An outlaw cut.

  He put back just enough pictures that Jesse James wouldn’t be sure if any were gone or not, and the rest he held inside his shirt, wet against the skin of his ribs, black side out.

  The tower was the first thing they saw of Tinker. For three hours Jesse James had been talking nonstop, constructing Hari Kari’s story for him—how he’d been camping out in the old gas station the whole time, eating birds and stuff. It was a lie, though: Hari Kari couldn’t eat anything anymore. His legs were thinning down too, like Jesse James’s. He felt spindly, immaterial.

  “Okay,” he said, standing from the passenger side.

  “Good old 3O1JN,” Jesse James said.

  “GB4HK,” Hari Kari said back.

  His veins were black now, no emotion. Something else: seeing himself in the pictures. He thought now that maybe the girls had been dead. The ones he was lying with, arranged with. In.

  Jesse James kept it in reverse, backing up in the same tracks. It was one of his tricks—making the car look like it just got sucked up into the sky.

  Hari Kari felt his way into the gas station, for the details of his story, but there was nothing. Just broken display cases, old calendars with slogans about Korea.

  He left, dragging his bag, holding the pictures to his side like he was hurt there, and made it back to the MP gate without collapsing, or screaming, his mouth open wide enough that the lips curled back over his head, turning him inside out until there was nothing left. Just 3O1JN.

  The guard in the booth was different.

  “Oh,” he said. “They’re looking for you.”

  “Where?”

  “Colorado.”

  Peterson.

  Hari Kari nodded.

  “Want me to call your dad?” the guard said.

  “No,” Hari Kari said. Yes.

  The guard’s arm had a black stripe over it.

  “Who died?” Hari Kari said.

  The guard shrugged, looked overseas, to Vietnam or wherever. “Everybody,” he said. “Mitchelson. You knew him?”

  “Mitchelson,” Hari Kari said.

  “Tall, like me?”

  “An MP?”

  The guard nodded.

  The one who’d told Hari Kari to be careful.

  Hari Kari turned away.

  “I’ll call your dad,” the guard said.

  “What’s your name?” Hari Kari said.

  “Roberts,” the guard said. “Why?”

  “You’re going to die too, aren’t you?”

  The guard looked down at him.

  His face was already exploding over a landmine, his hand a skeleton, the flesh burned off, his girlfriend crying, but relieved too.

  The dirt by the asphalt looked baked, like it had been rained on eight days ago, ten.

  A jeep was straining somewhere close, the teeth of its grill set. Father.

  “He’s going to make you trim that mop,” the guard said.

  Hari Kari smiled: Jesse James’s brown, medicinal bottle was in his bag.

  “No,” he said. “I think he’s going to like it, really.”

  TWENTY-ONE18 April 1999, Kansas

  Amos was throwing up in the ditch again.

  When he was done he peed on the splattered vomit. The urine would degrade the biological matter faster, would invite coyotes to mark it as well, hide it forever.

  There was blood in it too, though, so they might just lower their mouths to it, keep their eyes on the road, their tongues in the grass.

  Either way.

  Amos climbed back in to the driver’s seat. The maroon Monte Carlo was a real live Z-28 now. It was easy to identify, but the family he’d got it from in Sabetha—he liked to say that name—they weren’t going to be telling anybody soon. And anyway, it had been sedan, sedan, sedan for weeks now, so the pattern was set. None of the roadblocks would even care about a car with t-tops.

  The reason for the sedans had been trunkspace, of course.

  But he was only carrying two children now.

  They sat side-by-side in the backseat, seatbelts on for safety, the rearview adjusted down so Amos could talk to them, see what mischief they might be trying to get up to.

  Gina and Russell.
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  While he slept, they’d braided his hair for him, because they didn’t want him to get caught. Three braids, even, so he wouldn’t have to be a movie Indian. There were flakes of their fingers in the braids, but that just made the braids more Indian.

  Amos pulled up onto the road, poured the gas on, the traction bars slapping up so the Camaro launched forward, planting Amos in the seat.

  “Yeah?” he said to the kids in the mirror, but they were just trying to breathe, or not breathe, however it worked with the dead.

  Amos smiled, shifted.

  He’d found them right where they’d been for the last eight years: welded into a derelict propane tank bolted to a concrete pad in the corner of a field where the circle system never reached. Because Father always liked to leave them in almost-plain sight like that. The Blue Kettles had spent their time in a tractor tire that had then had an inner tube set into it, inflated with pink air so it would stay inflated until the first stage of decomp was gone, and after that the weeds and the dirt and the isolation would keep them safe, curled like beans in all that sunbleached rubber, their joints dried into place, locking them there.

  Those had been field trip days, disposing of all the ones that didn’t work out. Learning adventures. And none of them ever worked, not like Amos had. They just kept screaming, like they wanted Father to have to put his rag over their face. They never knew that Father just wanted to save them, make them like him, in his own image. They never knew that Father just wanted to make them perfect.

  The Chamberlains had been the first Amos had got to hide on his own. It was why they wound up in the morgue, as evidence. He hadn’t planned on the birds.

  But now he knew.

  And other things as well.

  How you can take the large intestines from a fresh body, stuff it with a whole bag of apples so it looks like a pearl necklace, just with mucous or afterbirth all over it, then you can leave it on a lake, floating just under the surface. The perch will nip at the stretchy wall of the intestine, and finally nip enough for an apple to escape, and then two will bob up, then all of them, but the fish won’t eat the apples, and the birds are too scared of the shiny surface of the water, so you can collect the apples, sneak them in your sleeve into the produce section, trade them for other apples, and they’ll taste just the same, even though they’ve already been in some body’s digestive tract.

  Or how a human ear will always fit in its owner’s tongue, if you’ve taken that tongue out, sucked the meat from inside it, and that one white cord.

  Or how, in confinement, a human finger will, if forced through a hole in the opposite palm, become part of that hand over the course of two or three months, so long as you’re careful to keep feeding the person, and putting open on their hands.

  Or how, if you’ve been tasked to keep someone in a chair in the kitchen, that you’re only finally going to get to eat if you can do this, and all you’ve been given are a handful of twist ties—Father had been so proud, that time.

  There was no way to twine them together, of course, not if the girl in the chair in the kitchen wasn’t drugged into submission or otherwise incapacitated or intimidated—and that would be cheating, anyway—but there are ways. There are always ways.

  Amos had built an elaborate crown with the twist ties.

  It was simple but brilliant, had proved to Father that Amos was the proper inheritor: the crown ran one set of ties down to the eyes, the stripped and ground-sharp metal tips resting on the whites, and had another pair running far into the ears. It took nearly all of them. Amos had been breathing so hard, his hands shaking from hunger. But he’d remembered what he’d been taught: not all restraints are physical.

  The remaining two he’d tied from the back of the crown to the back of the chair, then whispered into the girl’s ear—he didn’t know yet about how the tongue can be a pouch—that if she moved the slightest bit, if she even fell asleep on accident, then the delicate line of ties she could feel on her neck, running down to her wrists, they would tighten all at once, and she would be blinded, and deafened, and not able to balance either. And then he wouldn’t need the ties anymore, would he?

  She’d stayed awake forty-two hours, crying, shaking, never knowing that there was no pulley system of twist ties on her head, to properly retract the metal into her eyes, her ears. But she couldn’t see up there. That was the thing.

  Some restraints are psychological.

  Amos had gone to the head of the class that day. Father signed all his field trip permission slips, and let him do whatever other experiments he could think of on the girl, for the rest of the month, even though she wasn’t as impressed with the tongue-ear discovery as Amos was.

  He’d left her floating in the high tank of a windmill. And also stuffed into a dead dog on the road, to be run over and over. And also in the biological waste dumpster behind the funeral home. All it had on it was a padlock, like they wanted Amos to use it.

  Some things you can’t learn in school, though.

  Like how hard it is to walk down the cereal aisle of the grocery store and not collapse, have a seizure.

  How the fenceposts on the side of the road are hardly ever exactly the same distance apart from each other as last time.

  How seeing yourself on television, on a news bulletin, a bat in your hand, it can make you go to the store, eat all the apples you can carry.

  Or, how real children stopped growing if they weren’t with their real parents. All they did when separated like that was lay in tires and in the bellies of steel tanks and stare, waiting for somebody to remember them. Amos’s hypothesis was that it was a species defense mechanism—a way for the children to hit the pause button like spores, wait until the climate was more favorable.

  It would have happened to him too, probably, if he’d let it.

  Except somebody needed to know where they all were, to bring them back home.

  When Amos had figured out it was him who had to do that, he’d started shaking with delight. Luckily it had been night time, though, and Father had been watching the weathe report. By the next day, Amos had turned himself into a secret robot, his brain processing data at an impossible rate, so it hadn’t been hard to keep his discovery hidden, because robots don’t show any emotion on their faces. Robots just do the task at hand, complete the next assignment, then turn off until the next day.

  Two years can pass like that.

  At the end of them, Amos had so many gold stars he wouldn’t even have floated in a lake, had anybody throw him there.

  At the first roadblock, just one state car parked at an angle away from the sun, Amos eased the machete out from under the seat, told the kids he wouldn’t be a minute, but then the trooper kept never getting out of the car. It was a standoff.

  Finally Amos revved the little 350 up into the sky, jumped it forward, the nose coming down two feet from the trooper’s door.

  Nothing.

  Amos rose from the car, the machete low and behind his right leg, and stepped up onto the trooper’s hood, squatted down, shook his braids out of the way and tapped on the windshield with the blade.

  Nothing.

  Amos stepped down onto the hot asphalt, inspected.

  When he nudged the trooper in the shoulder, the trooper’s head lolled off, was just held there by the windpipe.

  Amos fell back, the machete clattering to the ground, and pulled away so fast he scraped the whole side of the Camaro on the state car, then had to dive back, collect the machete.

  Two loud minutes later he hit 145 on a straightaway, both hands tight on the wheel, his leg locked against the pedal for more more more, but then Gina leaned forward, tugged at his sleeve, asked him to slow down. That he was about to miss their turn.

  Amos locked the Camaro up, slid for what felt like a mile, the nose just diving at first but then the back end trying to come around so that the passenger tire in back caught the shoulder, and then it was just around and around, a teacup ride to hell.

  They c
ame to rest in the center of the road. The center of Locust Street or Avenue or Highway or whatever it was.

  A stupid name for a road.

  Three car lengths up was 88, the turn.

  Amos breathed in, breathed out. Wanted to just keep driving, now. Wanted to be states away already.

  “Sure?” he asked the backseat, trying to keep his voice in check.

  Russell shrugged, but Gina nodded yes for both of them. It was always the girls who knew best.

  Amos leaned down to the ashtray, emptied the ash into his hand and rubbed it over his face.

  When he breathed out, his breath was grey, like he was dead too.

  And alive people can’t see the dead so well.

  He started the engine, eased up 88 into Vermillion. Not Indian Vermillion, like South Dakota, but just plain old nothing-Vermillion. It was just like Verdon. Like the storms knew what letter the towns started with.

  Yeah.

  Don’t be stupid, Amos told himself, and gunned the Camaro forward, playing with Gina.

  She rocked against her seatbelt, came disconnected at the shoulder.

  Amos breathed in, breathed out.

  Russell directed them the rest of the way to their house, made Amos stop at the mailbox down at the corner first, because Russell and Gina’s dad was on a cane, from work, from a backhoe that fell over once. The mailbox was stuffed to bursting, like a cartoon mailbox you just had to pull one postcard from to make the whole thing explode.

  Amos piled the mail on the passenger seat, was telling himself in his head to remember not to look at Russell and Gina’s dad’s withered leg like he knew he was going to want to the whole time, but then he looked up to where they were going and he made a little chirping noise with his mouth, that he didn’t even recognize as coming from himself at first.

  There was a police car already at Russell and Gina’s house, parked right on top of a long rectangle of tall yellow grass. Waiting for him. Because it knew all the places he was going.