All the Beautiful Sinners (12 page)

Maines’ hat was gone forever, he knew.

“Serves your ass right,” McKirkle said, dusting his jeans off, his chin strap cinched tight.

Chin straps catch on your mustache, though, when you have one. And if you keep it waxed at the ends, that just complicates matters.

“Want some sun lotion?” McKirkle said then, unable not to smile.

Maines shook his head, looked away. He was bald under his hat, was the thing.

He palmed his pale scalp, surveyed Verdon.

This would kill it, for sure.

Town like this, the people still there pray for a storm to knock it down, give them the insurance checks they need to buy in somewhere else, somewhere better.

“Hey,” McKirkle said, packing a new wad into his lip, pointing with his eyes across the street.

The truck hadn’t rolled over.

“Good thing I set the brake,” McKirkle said.

“I’m sure that was it,” Maines said, falling in with McKirkle.

The bed was empty now, too.

McKirkle looked from up into the sky, like the kid deputy was going to fall out of it, back into the bed of the truck.

“Not on us,” he said, when that never happened.

“Storm came back for him,” Maines said.

McKirkle didn’t disagree, shook his keys from his pocket.

They picked their way up Cherry Street.

They’d been there for the Chamberlains, to sit on the place in case any headcase Indians traipsed through, delivering bodies.

Now, though. There would be too much traffic, too many news cameras. Only a suicide would try to sneak in with a dead kid on each shoulder, and the Indian, for all his sloppiness, seemed to have better self-preservation instincts than that. In the Lincoln morgue, even, where every surface was stainless steel, he’d managed not to leave a single print.

So now it would on to the next family, then. To ask them about their kids, dead for however-many years. To tell them they might be showing back up here soon, return-to-sender, though there was possibly a better way to phrase that.

McKirkle braked the truck so they could inspect a merry-go-round set up in the road like a balanced coin. No playground in the area.

At the edge of town bordered by the road, there were already sirens.

“It spit him out somewhere,” Maines said.

McKirkle leaned over the wheel again, eased them forward.

The kid had to have come back down. The sky just borrows people, it doesn’t keep them.

Ten minutes later, two blocks over, they found him.

McKirkle cocked the front of the truck up on the lawn nobody cared about anymore, stepped down with his heavy pistol drawn, and Maines came around his side of the truck, his 30-30 pointed at the ground, the back of his hand already set against the lever.

It wasn’t the kid.

Somebody, though. Emergency personnel, a first responder. The garage door had come down on him like a guillotine, it looked like.

“Kind of staged, wouldn’t you say?” McKirkle offered, checking the sky to see if there was a line between it and where the body was.

“I’ve seen worse,” Maines said.

Directly behind them, the truck was idling steady, drowning their words in diesel exhaust.

Maines stepped closer, nudged the guy’s boot with the end of his carbine.

The boot just nudged over, stayed.

Maines looked over to McKirkle for the plan, then did it: pulled the guy out by the foot, McKirkle tracking with his pistol, the hammer already thumbed back.

There was no need.

The guy’s chin caught on the rubber underlip of the garage, and the head stayed there for six or eight inches, the chest collapsing, the windpipe pulling it down. It was shiny, and white, corrugated just like a deer’s, and almost as big.

“The pants,” McKirkle said then, and Maines took notice.

Not just emergency personnel, but fire department issue.

“He took the jacket,” Maines said, breathing harder than he meant, turning fast to scan every likely place.

“But he’s retired,” McKirkle said. “It’s been what, seven years?”

“Six,” Maines said, levering a round in, his bare scalp prickling in the wind. “Big comeback tour, I guess.”

“Or he just ran out of toys,” McKirkle said, pointing with his eyes at a fire-yellow jacket four houses over, emerging from a house, cradling a small body.

The fireman looked up at him through his face-shield, and Maines nearly had to smile.

After all this time, all these years. From Nazareth to Nebraska.

He shouldered the carbine, buried a slug in the porch post two feet in front of the fireman.

The fireman stumbled back like he was meant to, and by then McKirkle was already ghosting across the lawns, keeping close to the houses, leading with his pistol.

Maines planted another slug in the front door the fireman had left open, slamming the door back, strips of paint in the air now.

The fireman ducked forward, half-dropped the kid he was carrying, and then McKirkle, like the all-state linebacker he’d been, laid him out.

“Damn straight,” Maines said, and made his way up the sidewalk, chambering another round as he went.

By the time he got there, the fireman was mostly unconscious, his lips mashed to his teeth, his nose flat. His helmet hadn’t helped at all.

McKirkle stood, the knuckles of his right fist raw.

“Want a piece?” he said to Maines.

Maines didn’t say yes, didn’t say no, just looked to the kid the fireman had thrown to the side as the last moment.

He was tow-headed, blue eyed.

And there were more fireman coming up the street now, drawn by the gunfire. All the same jacket as this one.

“Shit,” Maines said, cocking the lever open on the 30-30, resting it back on his shoulder. Thumbing the shell into the front pocket of his brushpopper.

“What the—” McKirkle said, the kid not scrabbling to get back into the house like he should have, but darting out from the bush, to lay backwards on his dad’s chest, hold one hand up, keep him alive.

Maines closed his eyes, fucking hated Nebraska. The whole useless Midwest.

And, because he was listening harder, maybe, could hear better with his eyes shut, he caught the one sound in this afternoon that didn’t fit: their truck, lowering into reverse.

He turned back to it.

The truck was backing up slow and careful.

McKirkle shifted onto the balls of his feet, the leather of his boots scraping the concrete, but Maines lowered his hand to McKirkle’s forearm, kept him there. Not because McKirkle couldn’t cross the forty yards in a blink, especially with his truck at stake, but because the volunteer fire department of Verdon was there to collect their man, and McKirkle would have to fight through them first. And they were already chocking up on their their prybars, their axes, their steps more urgent the more they were seeing.

“Not now,” Maines hissed to McKirkle, his arms up, his 30-30 not in play.

“When,” McKirkle hissed back, but hoisted his arms back up as well.

As the kid passed in their truck, just idling along, his hands still cuffed over the wheel, he nodded once to them through the dark glass, stepped half up onto the opposite sidewalk to make it around a large plastic duck that had fallen from the sky, and then he gave it some gas, was gone.

An hour later, badges shown, calls made, mistakes explained—to the fireman’s son especially—Maines and McKirkle were standing in the driveway that was a crime scene now, the dead fireman still stretched out on the concrete, his head mostly disconnected.

“Not that easy a thing to do,” McKirkle said, about saving the windpipe like that, cutting through everything else.

“Guess he’s had practice,” Maines said, and spit into the turned-over grass, keeping his eyes to the south, where it had all started.

At the MP gate Hari Kari stood at one end of the striped wooden arm, staring along it at the guard on duty. In fatigues in a concrete and steel booth.

“I’m leaving,” Hari Kari said.

John13 was dead. Long live baseball, now.

The guard looked over at him.

“Again?” he said.

“Don’t tell my dad.”

The guard stared at him, looked down the road into the base, back down it to civilian America. He stepped out. He was twenty-two, maybe. Eight years ahead of Hari Kari.

He stopped so that his shadow almost touched Hari Kari’s feet.

“But we might need you,” he said, narrowing his eyes at the sky, the weather.

“There’s nothing coming,” Hari Kari said. “I already listened.”

The guard shrugged, chewed his cheek, adjusted his helmet.

“I can’t stop you,” he said.

“I know.”

“Well then.”

“Well.”

Hari Kari turned, already walking away.

“Be good,” the guard called behind him.

Too
late
, Hari Kari said back. In his head.

He didn’t want the guard to see him smile: three-quarters of a mile down, Jesse James was supposed to be waiting. Jesse James from the all-night radio sessions. The old gas station was the place. It was shaped like a big A, all the windows shattered. The two at the top looked like eyes. Hari Kari thought about them a lot.

The note he’d left his mother said simply DON’T WORRY.

He stood at the abandoned pumps of the gas station a long time before stepping around, his eyes ready to take in the Chevy II Jesse James was supposed to be borrowing from the garage.

He wasn’t there.

Hari Kari sat on the back stoop, in the sun, and waited. Like a little kid. It was something John13 would have done, if John13 would have risen from the lake, the baptismal waters shimmering off him, the air black with gunpowder. But he hadn’t, couldn’t. It took somebody like Hari Kari to live through that, his veins blue with emotion, with the sound of a single, impossible baseball rushing through the wires, into his head. His grandfather, his namesake, leaning back in his chair, clutching the air, screaming.

It meant to kill yourself, hara-kiri. Hari Kari just spelled it different because he’d killed himself and lived—rearranged the letters.

He sat behind the gas station until his skin was red, his nose blistered, and didn’t eat the sandwich he’d brought, and when he woke it was dark and there was a rail of a man standing over him, the ragged ends of his hair lifting on the wind.

Jesse James.

Hari Kari held his hand up for him to take, and he did, and Hari Kari rose into the night with him, settled into the bucket seats of the El Camino Jesse James hadn’t told him about because he didn’t want anybody to be expecting him.

“That’s the trick of it, man,” he said. “Moving undetected, like.”

Hari Kari watched Jesse James shift, steer, check the rearview.

He was real. Not even as old as the guard at the gate, either.

The CB radio under the dash rattled as they drove, had just been installed.

“Hari Kari,” Jesse James said, placing his hand on Hari Kari’s knee.

The car had fins like the Batmobile.

“Jesse James,” Hari Kari said, and they leaned north together, left Oklahoma.

#

Hari Kari woke again in Colorado. The skin around his mouth was tight, dry. He touched it. Jesse James watched him touch it.

“Hungry?” he said.

Hari Kari nodded.

They rolled into a grocery store in some town nobody knew the name of, walked in, and Jesse James lined Hari Kari’s shirt with strips of jerky and bags of chips and other bags of peanuts, then stood by him at the register, buying a pack of gum.

They ate it all in the parking lot, and it was the best food ever.

“What’d you tell your mom?” Jesse James asked.

“Not to worry.”

“That’s pretty much like saying please worry, you know?”

Hari Kari chewed, chewed. He’d told the guard not to tell his dad, too.

There was a junior high girl walking across the parking lot. Jesse James saw him looking.

“Like that?” he said.

“No.”

“Yeah.” That smile.

Jesse James turned the engine over, rattled the pipes. The girl looked over.

“Me first,” he said, watching Hari Kari, like he was gauging his reaction. Hari Kari tried not to have one. The food was swelling in his mouth. The girl’s name would be Candace. Jesse James would say, about her, that it was like taking Candy from strangers, right? Right.

It was three o’clock, maybe. Hari Kari wasn’t sure which day anymore. How long did it take to get from Oklahoma to Colorado?

“Sorry, pard,” Jesse James said, then, like he was talking down a long tube, and Hari Kari looked over to his side of the car. The sky behind him was black again. They were driving.

“Colorado?” Hari Kari said.

“Colorado,” Jesse James said. “ I can’t get pulled over here.”

The mountains were cool, like when Hari Kari would stand in front of the open refrigerator, his mother napping, Father at work. The smoky cold air billowing out.

The cuffs of his pants were rolled wrong, though.

He looked at them as if they were betraying him.

In Colorado Springs Jesse James ran out of gas money, so Hari Kari called the Peterson PX. Where his friend RW’s mom worked.

“Your cute mother come up to see me as well?” RW’s mom asked.

“She’s outside . . . carrying stuff in. Is RW around?”

She gave him the address of their house. RW opened the door, looked up Jesse James’s long legs to his unmilitary hair.

Jesse James smiled.

“Don’t look,” he said to Hari Kari, and then palmed a white cloth over RW’s mouth and nose. It left him sleeping on the tile behind the front door. Jesse James set him down soft.

“I told you not to look,” Jesse James said, already moving through the house, touching lamps and ornamental plates.

Hari Kari stood over RW, felt his own mouth.

They were off-base in twenty minutes.

“Utah,” Jesse James kept saying. “Idaho.”

Right before they got there they drove through a small town during the daytime hours, Jesse James taking pictures of all the honeymooners, explaining to Hari Kari what they were going to be doing to each other that night, and how. But then school was letting out. Jesse James smiled, nodding. Slung one wrist over the wheel, let the other fall to the side mirror, so he could lift the fingers, wave to the kids walking their sidewalks home. To the girls.

This time he put the white cloth in the center of a map, so that the girl who walked over to help was leaning down
to
it, asking for it almost.

Hari Kari helped put her in the bed of the El Camino, under the tarp that was already there. He was feeling like John13 again. Like James, even, which was worse by a thousand. His chin wouldn’t stop trembling.

“Got something there, killer,” Jesse James said, spanning the distance across the console to flick something from the corner of Hari Kari’s mouth, and, too late, Hari Kari saw the white cloth approaching, tried to hold his breath. Jesse James’s other hand was already at the base of his skull though, pushing him forward.

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.”