Holding Smoke

by Steph Post

  “So, what you going to do ’bout it?”

  Judah’s mind was racing a mile a minute, but he spoke unhurriedly, trying to make sure he fully understood the situation.

  “Are you telling me that Levi robbed you, too?”

  “I’m telling you that your cracker-ass brother stole ten thousand dollars from me, fractured two of my grandnephew’s ribs, and told Toby that from now on we do business with the Cannons and no one else or we don’t do no business at all.”

  “For Christ’s sake.”

  Sukey’s scowl jumped to Ramey, kicking the toe of her boot into the dirt with her hands on her hips and her head bent down, muttering.

  “Oh, and you’re a lucky thing, Miss Priss. You owe me more than you know. I tell all these boys ’round here what happened to Toby and I can’t imagine what they’d do to a pretty little white girl just to send a message.”

  Sukey’s eyes were flashing as she whipped them back to Judah.

  “But blood don’t always turn to coin. And I’m getting too old to let a bunch of hot-head, trash-listening hooligans with their rims and their spinners and their pants just ’bout down to their ankles like they ain’t even knowed they’s flashing their tails just asking for it, come up in here and start a war. Tear down what I spent a lifetime building. You understand me?”

  Judah nodded.

  “I understand. You’ll get your money back. And keep what you were bringing us from the fight. Give it to Toby or something.”

  Sukey crossed her arms over her chest and raised her head proudly.

  “All I got to do is let it slip what Levi done…”

  Judah was in no mood to haggle. He just wanted to get out of there and get his hands around Levi’s throat.

  “Double, then. It’s the least I can do. And then we sweep this under the rug for good. Go back to doing business like always. Good for us, good for you.”

  Sukey sniffed.

  “The damned least. I’ll take it, but I want your brother on a leash. Things is changing ’round here, Judah Cannon. My daughter’ll be sheriff next month. You know that, right?”

  “I’ve seen which way the wind is blowing.”

  “Tiffy might not be on this side of the family business, but she still from this side of Red Creek. She ain’t going to forget who her mama is.”

  Judah had been clenching his jaw for so long his face was starting to hurt. He spoke stiffly, through gritted teeth.

  “I’ll take care of Levi. You’ll get your money.”

  Sukey uncrossed her arms.

  “I better. You know, some folks, even after all this time, they look at me and they feel bad. Everybody knowed ’bout Herbert, what he was like, but no one done nothing. Oh, some folks prayed for me. Some men’d hold the door open so I could limp on through, carry my groceries when my arm’d be up in sling. Some ladies’d bring over ambrosia or a casserole when my face’d be so swolled I couldn’t go out to the store. But no one did nothing ’bout Herbert himself.”

  A devilish sheen glazed over Sukey’s beaded eyes.

  “Until I did.”

  *

  Shelia waited until she was sure the laundry room was empty before cautiously peeking through the ripped screen door. Though she hadn’t seen them, their voices had come to her loud and clear while she had stood frozen, dollar bill still in hand, just on the other side of the wall. Dinah’s voice, slightly gravely, weary, but insistent. Elrod’s booming laughter toned down, but his earnestness still straining through. And Levi, sullen and demanding, his part of the conversation taking place mostly in grunts. She hadn’t needed to see his face to know that it had been set in a scowl. Shelia swung open the screen door and stomped loudly, just in case Dinah or one of the boys was standing out in the parking lot. She crossed the room and peered around the corner of the doorway. There was no sign of them. A black Bronco was spinning its tires as it growled out onto the highway and she heard one of the motel room doors slam, but that was all.

  Shelia ducked back into the laundry room and breathed a sigh of relief. She stood in front of the snack machine and smoothed out the sweaty, crumpled dollar bill she’d been clutching tightly ever since she’d been sitting out in the back smoking area near the woods and decided she wanted something salty. Shelia inserted the bill and listened to the machine whirr and hum as it made up its mind whether to take her cash or spit it back out. Shelia tossed her head in frustration as she repeatedly mashed the buttons for C 3 and tried to sort out what she needed to do. Who she needed to tell. What the consequences of each action or inaction might be. Shelia ran one hand through her stringy blond hair as she waited for the cellophane package to drop.

  “Well, shit.”

  A horse heist. A betrayal. And all Shelia had wanted was a pack of Lance crackers.

  5

  Ramey didn’t flinch when Judah’s fist connected with the dash. She’d been staring out the F-150’s rolled-down window, one knee drawn up to her chin, hair snapping around her face in a billowing swarm, waiting for it. She didn’t take her eyes off the longleaf pines and red oaks flickering past in a watercolor blur, the loops of Spanish moss, spindling down to the earth like torn ribbons fluttering in a storm. She didn’t speak a word. Beside her, Judah let out a short, strangling sound, leaned forward and punched the dashboard again. The truck slipped off the crumbling shoulder of the highway as Judah shook out his hand and overcorrected with a hard spin to the wheel. They bobbed across the faded yellow line as Judah struggled to regain control of the truck, and himself, but still Ramey said nothing.

  Despite her silence, Ramey could feel it building up inside of her, too. The indignation, the needling thorn of resentment. But Judah had beaten her to a release of emotion and now her instinct fell to checking herself, holding herself back so she could balance them both out. Be the counterweight to Judah’s impetuous abandon. As always. After another mile, Ramey slid her leg down the maroon vinyl and twisted around in her seat until the curve of her back fit against the passenger’s side door and she could study Judah’s profile fully. His jaw was a vice, cheeks gaunt and grazed with stubble, the hollows beneath his gray eyes sunken into bruises. Maybe it was the two months in jail, maybe the clacking jaws of the shadow, or maybe it was something else entirely. Judah’s eyes were firmly fixed on the road, but she could read that little hiccup at the corner of his lips. He was waiting for her to say something comforting, to make a joke or a wry observation. Ease the tension and make everything better. Yet when Ramey finally spoke, she didn’t hold back and the words she spat out were spurred with bitterness and scorn.

  “Not what you were expecting?”

  Judah’s head swung around. The sting behind her words carried volumes more than their meaning and Ramey could see that her aim had been true. In a way, she was surprised at her own callousness, but not disappointed enough in herself to assuage the situation. Judah had a look on his face like he’d eaten something spoiled and he hung his head as he turned back toward the road.

  “If you say ‘I told you so’ about Levi, I swear to God…”

  It seemed they both had poisoned arrows in their quivers this morning. Ramey mirrored Judah, turning away, crossing her arms tightly over her chest. One of them was going to have to break through to the other, but Ramey was damned if it was going to be her this time. Judah hadn’t been the only one standing in front of Sukey with a line of shotguns aimed at his back.

  The miles dragged on, they crossed over Jackson’s Bridge and skirted the edge of Lake Rowell, until, just before taking the turn east toward Silas, Judah yanked the wheel and bounced the truck onto an overgrown 4-wheeler track leading off into the scrub. As soon as they were surrounded by trees, Judah hit the brakes and killed the engine. The keys in the ignition swung and jangled as Judah closed his eyes and leaned his head back. When Judah finally exhaled, it sounded like he was ripping apart at the seams.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Judah scrubbed at his face w
ith his palms as Ramey shifted around to face him again. Now she was waiting—for that half smile, a sheepish grin, the self-deprecating briar of a laugh—but it never came. Judah only dropped his hands limply into his lap and stared down at his open palms as if searching for answers in the calluses, in the fine lines and weathered trails of skin.

  “And, no, this wasn’t what I was expecting.”

  Ramey could tell his mind was spinning off in a thousand different directions, already leaving her behind. She set her mouth, pulled back and launched one last Hail Mary.

  “We could walk away, you know.”

  Judah cocked an eyebrow and glanced sideways at her. This was obviously not an option he’d been considering.

  “What?”

  And Ramey knew it. Ramey knew he’d left those parroted promises, the ones about “getting out” and “going straight” and “just a little while longer,” on the concrete floor of his jail cell. Or maybe back in the pines, mixed in somewhere with the brush and the slick needles and the spilled blood and brains of the man he’d shot in the face, only inches away from his own. She knew it, saw it reflected back at her every time she now looked at Judah. If she was truly being honest with herself, she’d known it since the very beginning, since that night he’d come back to her apartment in the rain, no longer simply Judah, but a Cannon once more.

  Ramey took a deep breath and leveled her voice, draining it of all emotion.

  “If Levi wants to make stupid decisions, and it’s obvious that he does, let him deal with the consequences. Hell, let him have it.”

  Judah’s head snapped toward her as if he’d been slapped.

  “Have it?”

  Ramey stared back at him.

  “If Levi wants to step into Sherwood’s shoes, if he wants to take over the mess Sherwood left behind, why not let him? You never wanted this. You kept saying that we had to, that there was no other way to safely get out of the world your father built up around him.”

  Ramey was stumbling and she knew that everything she was saying was falling on deaf ears, but she felt driven to keep going. Even if everything she was saying existed as only a reverie.

  “Well, here’s our way out. Turn everything over to Levi, and we just walk away. He can have whatever retaliation he’s due. The county can bleed white for all I care, we just leave it behind in the dust. We could go back out to Hiram’s, dig up the money we hid, and just disappear. Start a new life. Start over. Like we said we would. Like…”

  She stopped herself before adding “you promised.” Promises meant something different to Judah now. She watched warily as Judah thought through what she was proposing. It didn’t take him long.

  “You want to just give him everything? All our business deals and connections? All the arrangements we worked to make? And all the risks, everything we faced?”

  He took a deep breath, trying to control himself.

  “Lesser? And Weaver…”

  Suddenly, he exploded.

  “I mean, are you crazy? You want to just give Levi the Cannon family?”

  “The Cannons are people, not deals or arrangements. Not the money or the guns or the connections that made them. People. Levi, Benji, you.”

  Judah snarled.

  “But not you, right?”

  “And me, fine. You know I’ve been in this, right beside you, every step. You know that.”

  Judah turned away, his fury ebbing as quickly as it had surged, replaced by a wormwood dagger.

  “Sometimes I wonder.”

  Ramey felt its slash. She reached out, grabbing Judah’s arm, almost clinging to it.

  “What about us? What about you and me? Just you and me. When did ‘we’ become ‘the Cannons’?”

  Judah’s eyes were cast down and he was shaking his head.

  “Maybe we always were. Maybe thinking there could be more, that we could be more, was nothing but holding smoke.”

  He wrenched himself free from her. Ramey watched as Judah drew himself up, bracing his hands against the wheel, already putting the conversation behind them, already slamming and locking the door. Swallowing the key.

  “So, let’s focus on what’s in front of us. Levi and that money. We get it back, get things straight with Sukey, and then we move on from there. We get the cash flow up again, we get ahold of the county, we get our place back. We might have to do some things we don’t want to do, but it will be worth it in the end.”

  It was the same line as always, his words empty, shadowgraphy with a flickering candle. She wondered if Judah could hear himself. She wondered if it even mattered. Ramey stared out the windshield and whispered.

  “But, Judah. We’re not criminals.”

  He cranked the truck, slammed it into gear.

  “Then what the hell are we?”

  Ramey refused to look at him. Though she should have felt no surprise, the finality of it was a bolt through the heart all the same. Judah had crossed over. There was nothing more.

  *

  Zechariah, Menahem, Shallum, and Elah. Sister Tulah’s mouth sank into a frown and she tapped the eraser of a freshly sharpened pencil on the cover of the green, leather-bound ledger in front of her. The ledger had carried over from the tiny office in the back of the original church building to the cramped and moldy back room of the furniture store—used as a haunt by the Elders and as a temporary base of operations while the church was undergoing repairs—and was now the centerpiece of Sister Tulah’s new desk, a modern, mammoth piece of mahogany varnished to a mirror shine that Tulah had picked from a showroom floor. It was part of the Executive Line. The matching bookcase and file cabinet set were lined up against the wall, and, behind the row of Elders, standing still and silent with bowed heads and clasped hands, squatted an imposing, oxblood leather couch that no one dared sit on aside from Sister Tulah herself. The new office of the Last Steps church, with its spotless windows, plush cream carpet, and plastic plants dangling in the corners, looked like the perfect backdrop for a series of framed motivational posters, but Sister Tulah had left the white walls bare.

  Tulah pursed her lips and jabbed the pencil back into its holder beside the gilt table clock in front of her. She folded her hands on the ledger and tilted her chin down as she took in the line of ancient, identical men standing like hunched soldiers, awaiting their battle orders. Tulah hated talking to the Elders all at once like this, mainly because it was so hard to tell them apart. Elah bore a faint harelip scar that sometimes shimmered in the right light, but otherwise it was often impossible to know which of the men who had been serving her family since her grandfather’s time she was speaking to. They all rasped in the same gravely monotone, dressed in dark suits, their faces crumpled like tissue paper, eyes hidden as always by black, wraparound sunglasses, expressionless, their words without a mote of inflection. Still, Tulah knew that if she handed one of them a butcher knife and told him to kill the others, the one with the knife would do so and the ones at his mercy would not flinch. They were as loyal as wolves, as cunning as magpies. Yes, there was the irritating taboo against speaking anything other than the words handed down by the Lord, but it was a small price to pay for such extreme devotion.

  She cleared her throat and nodded to the men, indicating that she was ready for their weekly report. The Elder at the far right of the lineup stepped forward. He unclasped his slender, near-translucent hands, gnarled thickly with blue veins, and let them hang listlessly at his sides.

  “Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made.”

  Tulah’s thin lips turned down. With all of the other pressing matters at hand, she had almost forgotten about the Elder’s ongoing, and so far fruitless, search for her wayward nephew, Felton. Just thinking about his disappearance sent a flash of anger rippling in pinpricks up and down her arms. These four men had accomplished acts of revenge, of sabotage and terror, for which even Sister Tulah was in awe. It seemed unfathomable to her, the
n, that they couldn’t manage to locate one bumbling, blundering clown, who, if on the odd chance an idea did pop into his brain, would live to see it shrivel up and die of loneliness. The fact that Felton hadn’t actually managed to betray her to the ATF didn’t take away from the fact that he had tried. Though she had never before doubted their allegiance to her, Sister Tulah had to wonder just how hard the Elders were really trying.

  “Yes, I am aware that Brother Felton has proved difficult for you to locate. The question I have, however, is why.”

  “As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away: so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more.”

  Sister Tulah snorted, swiveling her leather chair.

  “I assure you, Felton is not dead. Hiding somewhere dark and dank like the coward he is, perhaps, but I am certain he is still alive. I would know if he had given up his pitiful little ghost.”

  The Elder at the other end of the group slowly raised his head, though he did not step forward.

  “And he went his way, and communed with the chief priests and captains, how he might betray him unto them. And they were glad, and covenanted to give him money.”

  Tulah shook her head.

  “No, no. Felton has the spine of a jellyfish and all the wits of a sawed-off stump. He has never lived on his own. He has never been out in the world and he did not give himself over to the ATF. A silly, childish letter was all that he could manage. No, he is out there somewhere, sniveling in the shadows, and he shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

  Tulah brought her palm down hard, smacking the top of the desk. Even just having such a conversation about Felton curdled a rancid taste in her mouth. It made her want to vomit into her shiny new wastepaper basket.

  “So find him!”

  The Elder who had spoken bowed his head. Sister Tulah took a moment, adjusted herself carefully in her chair, and then ran her stubby fingers along the edge of the desk.

  “And the other matter? How is that coming along?”

  One of the two Elders who had not yet spoken stepped a pace forward. Tulah thought she could detect the glistening of a scar.