by Ace Atkins
“Drug arrests stretching out more than five years,” Jessica said. “One arrest for solicitation.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Really? Are you sure?”
“Absolutely,” Jessica said. “But apparently she’s clean and sober now. She’s done some interviews over the last few years, talking about what she does here and how she has compassion for people of all walks of life. One guy interviewed, some local politician, joked she had a Mary Magdalene complex. You know who that is. Right?”
“Do you recall my last boyfriend?” she said. “Rob? And his super-Christian parents?”
“Oh, yeah,” Jessica said, flipping through her notebook. “Super-Rob. What a dick. I thought they were Catholic?”
“They were.”
“Big difference,” Jessica said.
“What do you mean?”
“Give it a few days,” Jessica said. “You’ll see. When I was living in Georgia, I can’t tell you how many people tried to save my soul. I kept telling them I was on their side. We just had a different interpretation of the same message.”
“Didn’t the blue hair scare them off?”
“Ha,” Jessica said. “And for the record, back then it was pink. Only my tattoos were blue. Maybe I’ll get one down here? There’s a tattoo shop on the Square right by the Mexican restaurant. What do you think about Willie Nelson and a big fat joint?”
Tashi parked the rental and they both climbed out and looked around. At the mouth of the barn, they spotted a woman in her early thirties, blonde hair cut pixie short, dressed in blue jean cutoffs and a white tank top. She had on a pair of cheap sunglasses, which she pushed up on her head as she knelt down to talk to a little brown-skinned girl. The woman was lanky and sort of muscly, with a pointy nose, sunburned face, and freckled shoulders.
A battered blue pickup truck was parked nearby, where a short Latino man with a big black mustache and cowboy hat was piling boxes into its bed.
As she and Jessica walked up close, Tashi hit record just as the woman pushed up to her full height, removed her sunglasses, and smiled. “Hello,” she said. “How can I help y’all?”
“I’m Tashi Coleman and this is my friend Jessica,” she said. “We’re from New York and have a few questions for you.”
“New York?” Caddy said, looking the two of them over. “You won’t believe this. But that’s just what I was thinking.”
* * *
* * *
“Pap’s is the best catfish you’ll ever eat,” E. J. Royce said as Don the barber snipped black hairs from his ears. “I guaran-damn-tee you. I can’t believe you ain’t never been to Pap’s, Don. I mean, where do you take your wife after church?”
“You know us,” Don said, really having his work cut out for him. Royce had more hair in his ears than on top. He’d already worked the spacer all over the man’s old shrunken head for the last five minutes. “We’re pretty loyal to the El Dorado. I get the chimichanga most days. My wife likes the taco salad.”
“I haven’t eaten there since I seen a rat in the kitchen.”
Quinn looked up from where he sat on a vinyl sofa under a television playing Days of Our Lives. He could tell the old man was lying, having some fun with Don, who was a good and honest man and often didn’t see the dark side in people. And E. J. Royce, former deputy sheriff under his Uncle Hamp, had plenty of evil about him. The man exuded an odor not unlike sulfur.
“You didn’t see no goddamn rat at the El Dorado,” Luther Varner said, cross-legged and black-eyed. The wiry old Marine sat across the room, with a burning cigarette ash that looked to be about a foot long. “You’re as full of shit as Christmas turkey, Royce.”
Royce lifted his eyes from where he’d buried his chin in his caved-in chest. “You calling me a liar, Luther?” he said. “Goddamn thing popped out of the dang nacho chips and run under the buffet. Made me so sick I didn’t eat for nearly a week.”
“What color was it?” Luther asked.
“The nachos?” Royce asked, Don returning to work, lathering up the old man’s neck and pulling out a straight razor. “Ain’t but one dang color.”
“No, the goddamn rat,” Luther said.
“I don’t know,” Royce said. “Fucking rat-colored. I didn’t take no Kodachrome.”
Don stopped with the razor and pointed over to the plywood walls. Nestled among the deer heads and mounted bass was a small sign saying NO PROFANITY OR TRASHY TALK OF ANY KIND.
“Son of a bitch,” Royce said. “Coming in here is worse than going to a Kool-Aid and cookie social. Then you and all these women you done hired to work at a man’s barbershop sit around watching these harlots on TV with their damn titties pressed out, jumping from bed to bed. How’s that any different?”
Luther Varner looked over at Quinn, ashing his cigarette in a Styrofoam cup, and shook his head.
“Would y’all please shut up,” Don the barber said. “Today’s the day we find out about Eric’s baby. I do think Jennifer is the right woman for him. He should get up and marry her.”
“Y’all have been neutered,” Royce said, Don scraping across his thick red neck. “I knew it the minute Mr. Jim kicked the bucket and y’all started hiring hairdressers. What in the hell is the world coming to?”
Miss Gayle and Miss Tammy looked up from the spinning chairs where they sat without clients, watching the soap opera. They just leveled a hard look at the little man and then turned their attention back to the TV perched on top of the Coke machine. Before Don had even finished cleaning the shaving cream from his neck, Royce pulled off the barber’s cape and stood up, reaching into his pocket and fishing out two five-dollar bills. No tip.
He handed it to Don and then walked toward the rack to retrieve his red MAGA ball cap. Quinn stood up.
“What the hell do you want?” Royce said. “You don’t need no haircut. You always look like I did right out of boot camp.”
“Came to talk to you, Royce,” Quinn said. “Fellas at the VFW said I could find you here.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Royce said, screwing up his face like he might spit. “’Course they did. If you’re coming to make some kind of trouble about them parking tickets, you can just stick it, Quinn. I worked my damn ass off in this county as a lawman before you ever popped out of your momma’s coot.”
Luther stood up quickly. Royce craned his head toward the big man with the silver crew cut, shrinking a bit. But he relaxed as Varner turned toward Don and ambled over to take a seat in the barber chair. The two hairdressers both exchanged looks with eyebrows raised. Luther was an old man, but nobody in Tibbehah County wanted to mess with him. Back in Vietnam, he’d been a top-tier sniper with more kills than he ever cared to remember.
Quinn walked into the hot parking lot with Royce toward the man’s Chevy truck with mismatched wheels and tires, the gold paint rusted and dull. In the back of the truck, he had a Walker hound chained up to a cinder block.
“Little hot for the dog.”
“You ain’t one of them PETA folks, are you, Quinn?” he said. “I heard you done got married to some hippie woman.”
Quinn widened his stance, turning down the radio on his hip, so they might talk a little in private. The old man’s eyes were bloodshot and his breath smelled like a cheap-ass pocket whiskey.
“Came to ask you a few things about an old case.”
“Should’ve known,” he said. “That’s the only time you come out and see me. Me and your uncle were thick as thieves.”
“You may want to work on your choice of words.”
“Shit,” he said. “What is it you want? I done told you all I know about that nigger them bikers kilt.”
“I don’t like that word,” Quinn said. “And you won’t use it in my presence.”
“Has the whole goddamn world gone crazy?” Royce said. “Everyone wants to be politically correct these days. Christ Almigh
ty.”
“I want to talk to you about Brandon Taylor,” Quinn said. “The boy you and my uncle found dead up in the Big Woods.”
“The damn kid who ate his gun?” Royce said. “Who the fuck wants to know about that?”
“Me,” Quinn said.
“It was a hundred years back.”
“Twenty.”
Royce opened his mouth and then thought better of it, opening the door to his truck and leaning against it. He spit on the ground and lifted his tired old eyes to Quinn. “That was a hell of a goddamn thing,” he said. “I walked them woods so long, I wore off the soles of my boots. Never thought we’d find that kid.”
“I need to know who y’all were looking at,” Quinn said.
“We weren’t looking at nobody,” Royce said. “Christ. If we was looking at someone, we woulda found out what the hell happened.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said you’re a liar, Royce,” he said. “I need you to shake the cobwebs out of your busted old head, even if it means finishing that pint on your front seat. I need to know what you heard from Hubie Phillips. You and Uncle Hamp brought him in before y’all found the body.”
“That old queer?” Royce said, cackling. “Just where’d you hear some bullshit like that?”
“Lillie Virgil.”
“Oh.”
“Now, you want to tell me what you know?”
Royce reached into the car and grabbed the small bottle of Fighting Cock. He took a long swallow and wiped off his white-whiskered chin with the back of his hand. “She ain’t still around,” he said. “Is she?”
* * *
* * *
“Is this about us feeding workers here?” Caddy said. “Did Old Man Skinner send you out to make trouble about taking money away from hardworking Americans?”
Tashi shook her head. Jessica said, “No way.”
“Because folks around here have gotten scared to use vouchers,” Caddy said. “Some fool has passed a regulation saying if you’re a legal immigrant and you try and get government-assisted food, even for WIC, you might get in trouble with the Feds. Can you imagine? New mothers who can’t feed their babies are afraid to go out and get the food they need. Do you have any idea what that does to early development? Sometimes I can’t even keep track of the evil set loose in this world.”
“We met with Skinner,” Tashi said. “But only to hear about his plans to build the big cross on the highway.”
Caddy Colson stood there, in cutoff jeans and a tank top, mud boots up to her knees, hands on her hips. “Did you women just drive out here to make me puke or do y’all have something to discuss?”
“We know who you are and what you do,” Jessica said. “But this has nothing to do with The River or your charity work, Miss Colson. We just need a little bit of your time to talk about your uncle. Hamp Beckett.”
“My uncle?” Caddy said, pushing her hands in her pockets and lifting up on the toes of her boots. “He’s been dead for almost ten years now.”
“We’re working on a podcast about the disappearance of Brandon Taylor,” Jessica said, smiling. “We’re trying to learn anything we can about Brandon before he died. Your uncle didn’t leave many files or notes behind.”
“He never did,” Caddy said. “Maybe y’all should talk to my brother. He’s the sheriff. If he can help, he will.”
“I have,” Jessica said. “And he said he knew about as much as we did. He told us most of the files were lost.”
“Well,” Caddy said. “If y’all spoke to Quinn and he can’t help you, I sure can’t. I mean, I was just a kid when Brandon got lost. That was a lifetime ago. I was only fifteen.”
“Did you know him?” Jessica said.
“Not very well.”
“But you went to the same school?” Tashi asked. “In the same class.”
Caddy looked at them both and nodded. It was kind of a solemn nod, Caddy with pursed lips like she was contemplating the whole thing. “Y’all want to get out of this heat?” she said. “My office has AC and we can get something to drink.”
They followed her up the wooden steps of a nearby trailer, basic white and industrial-looking, and headed inside. There was a Latina moving some files from a table into some large boxes. Caddy whispered something to her and she disappeared out the front door. Caddy walked over to a mini fridge and pulled out three Cokes and set them by a half-dozen chairs set in a semicircle. Little pamphlets for AA waited on the seats.
“Yeah, I knew Brandon Taylor,” she said. “But we weren’t close friends or anything like that.”
Tashi asked if she minded them continuing to record and Caddy shook her head, popping the top of her Coke and leaning toward the women with her elbows across her thighs. She was flushed with sun and sweaty. A simple silver cross on a thin chain dangled from Caddy’s neck.
“What do you recall about him?” Jessica said. “We spent some time with his sister Shaina this morning. But she was very young when he disappeared. Most of her memories were just of him being the big brother. We want to know all about him from people who knew him best.”
“Lot more folks knew him better than me,” Caddy said. “He was kind of an odd kid. He kept to himself. About the only thing I recall is he drove this cool old truck. A black Chevy Apache . . . Did y’all really come all the way from New York to talk about Brandon?”
“We did,” Tashi said. “The Taylor family has never been satisfied about what happened to him.”
“And how long do y’all plan to stay?”
Tashi looked to Jessica and shrugged. “As long as it takes.”
Jessica shrugged. “Pretty much.”
“That’s something,” Caddy said. “I thought people had forgotten all about Brandon. It was a really big deal when it happened. We had news people here when he went missing, always hanging out at the high school or on the town square. But when they found him and learned he killed himself, they pretty much packed up and went home.”
“I understand your brother got lost in those same woods,” Tashi said. “A few years before Brandon.”
Caddy looked up from where she’d been rolling the cold Coke can between her hands. “I thought y’all wanted to talk about Brandon and my uncle?”
Something in Caddy’s face, a fierce look, made her know it was better to keep to Brandon. “Can you give us an overall impression of Brandon at the time?”
“I think he was fifteen, sixteen,” Caddy said. “A little bit older than me. We were in a few of the same classes but never really hung out. I know he was close to a girl named Maggie Powers who visited during the summers. After he died, she didn’t come back. Until a few years ago.”
“And then married your brother?” Jessica said. “She’s Maggie Colson now.”
“Two days and y’all already know a lot.”
Tashi smiled. “We do our best.”
“As far as Brandon goes,” Caddy said, “damn, I don’t know. What was he like? What made him tick and all? I know he was really into music. He played country songs on his guitar. I remember one night on the Square. Y’all know it’s where most of the kids meet up on the weekends? He played ‘Friends in Low Places’ and ‘Shameless’ exactly like the record. That and he was real into working for the school newspaper. He took yearbook pictures for Mr. Phillips. I think he was serious about photography. I was a cheerleader back then, if you can believe that. He was always on the sidelines at the JV games.”
“What about his personality?” Jessica said. “How would you describe him?”
“Goofy,” Caddy said. “He was funny, but really goofy, too. I mean when you’d see him in the halls, you just had to smile and laugh. He always had kind of a silly look on his face, kind of a smirk, like he knew all this was some kind of cosmic joke.”
“What was the joke?” Tas
hi said.
“High school,” Caddy said. “Life. Church and ballgame grind down in Tibbehah County. I think he was like most of us, couldn’t wait to get the hell out of here.”
“Did he ever seem depressed?” Jessica asked. “Like a kid who might wander off one day into the deep woods and kill himself?”
Caddy shook her head. “I knew him and didn’t really know him,” she said. “Jericho is a small town, but, believe it or not, we don’t all know each other’s business. We didn’t run in the same crowds.”
“Did your uncle ever mention his death?” Jessica asked. “Or about finding him in the woods?”
Tashi lifted her eyes to Jessica, who was watching the readers on the recorder, sliding the mic slightly to the left, closer to Caddy. Tashi took a deep breath and swallowed. The inside of the trailer smelled like an old classroom, all musty books and disinfectant. “I understand you were close to your Uncle Hamp.”
“True.”
“Would you call him a father figure?” Tashi asked.
Caddy shrugged and leaned back into the folding metal chair. “Sure,” she said. “Quinn and I didn’t have much of a father to speak of. At first, he was just gone. And then he came back for a while just to get divorced.”
“And Uncle Hamp filled in?” Tashi asked.
“He did more than that,” she said. “He and Aunt Halley pretty much helped my mother raise us. He took me and Quinn hunting and fishing. I worked in Aunt Halley’s garden, worked with the cattle. I had the number two beef heifer in the state one year.”
“I understand a lot of people in this county like him.”
“I’m sorry,” Caddy said. “I don’t see what my uncle has to do with Brandon’s suicide. If you’re looking into something about the investigation, you need to keep talking to Quinn. I don’t know a thing about it.”