All the Beautiful Sinners (13 page)

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.

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 came 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.

GARDEN CITY SHERIFF.

Amos made another chirping sound, had to clap his hand over his mouth.

Because it was too late to turn around, he crept by, idled through what of Vermillion there still was since the storm, then parked down the road, had to do this, had to figure out how.

Right?

But no no no.

Stealing ice from the cooler of the grocery store, then, a bagboy watching him but pretending not to, Amos saw the flyer. It was faded orange. Not one of the ones of him, but one that was like a message for him:

CLAREMORE POW-WOW

CLAREMORE, OKLAHOMA

APRIL 20TH, 1999

He raced back to the car, shuffled through the Shoots Twice’s mail, and yes yes yes, there it was: a letter from Claremore.

Amos ripped it open with his teeth.

It was a confirmation for a booth, and an application for a vendor’s license.

Yes.

The long square of yellow grass was where the frybread RV had been parked. But now it wasn’t.

It was in Oklahoma.

“I know where they are,” Amos said to Gina and Russell.

Indian Territory.

They went the speed limit all the way out of town.

It was another thing Father had taught him.

It worked.

Jessie Wiggs was Burt Reynolds dressed up like Rod Stewart, ducking out incognito for a little rest and relaxation. It was long overdue: he’d been an absolute choirboy now for three and a half years. He wore the Jackie O shades all the way out of Oklahoma, keeping the speedometer nice and legal. The car was candy apple red—a bad idea, he knew, but it was the only one in the yard with t-tops. They made the girls who walked over from the sidewalks feel less threatened. Like he didn’t have anything to hide. Like they could get out whenever they wanted.

School had started last week.

Jessie knew because he’d found himself taking the long way back to his mother’s place, found himself brushing his hair for the drive, sitting far down in the seat, one arm stabbed up at the windshield, slung casual over the wheel. There were newspaper clippings of him on the telephone poles, though. His face, the three kids he’d fathered so far, only one of the mothers legal, now. The other two would be in a year, though. Soon he’d have his own James Gang. He laughed, dialed it back to a smile, then just pursed his lips, kept his right hand on the floor shifter, his left on the wheel. Fuck Enid, then. It brought the smile back, thinking of Enid as female, a woman. Oklahoma slipped away faster and faster.

In the tachometer housing was the snapshot. His ticket; the carrot.

It had turned up in his mother’s mailbox two days ago, taped between two of the same postcard. Of Pueblo, Colorado. They’d been glued back to front, so they looked like just one. It was too thick, though, uneasy to bend. Jessie opened it standing at the mailbox, and the nostalgia washing up from the snapshot had been so thick he’d had to grab onto the shaft of the red flag to stay standing: it was Candace, or Christine, maybe. From Colorado, anyway. Her skin was grey in the picture, but she’d coughed herself awake at the end, he remembered. Candace, yes. With the healthy set of lungs. Twined in there with her was John13, or Hari Kari, or Bodhisattva, Whoudini, or whatever the kid had been trying to get everyone to call him after that.
Deflowered
would have been Jessie’s suggestion.

Initiated
.

Broken
in
.

But fuck him too. He was dead now anyway. Jessie’s mother had showed him the article before work one day: the kid swallowing pounds of birdshot then walking out into the reservoir, his hair a spoked disc on the surface of the water for a few steps, then not anymore. Four people had watched him do it, raised their beers to him. They only told the cops about it because they’d built their fire too big that night again. They traded the kid’s suicide for a warning citation. Jessie had nodded to his mother, touched the paper with his middle finger, told her
See
? You
can
work with the law.

The note on the back of the second postcard said simply HAVING FUN IN PUEBLO. WORKING AT SCHLESINGER’S NOW.

Candace. It had definitely been Candace.

Jessie pulled into and out of the diner parking lot all afternoon, suddenly frantic about the snapshot: was it an angry boyfriend? big brother? father? husband? But how would they have
gotten
it? That was the thing. Candace shouldn’t even have had it—nobody should have. They were gone, used up. Except for the one the kid took. Jessie clearly remembered looking for that one, in every crevice of the car, for weeks. It was from when they’d swung through Enid, just before Tinkerbell Base. Angel. He’d wanted to show her that one. Wait for her to get older then show her, see if she remembered.

The only answer was that, now that the kid was dead, he had become Jessie’s helper. Was doing things for him from the other side. Helping him out. Reminding him of the good old days.

It felt good, but he didn’t want to see him, either, his stomach distended with lead, his skin flaying away from his face.

Before he went into the diner where she worked now, Candace, he made up a system of hand signs he could talk to the ghost kid with. Most of them just meant
thanks
, and
yes
, and
I
remember
. He could do them all under the table without anybody seeing.

Inside, he recognized her immediately. Smiled. Had to adjust.

“Smoking?” she said, just that. Her voice flat.

“Sure,” he said. “Yeah, smoking.”

It was like it was all meant to be.

“You know you’re parked in handicapped,” she said, taking his order, and Jesse James shrugged, was back. At least for today.

“Well, I’m an outlaw, see,” he told her, trying to remind her. It was the same line he’d used last time, when the car had been pulled up against a red curb.

She stared at him over her pad, like it was almost clicking.

He sat there the rest of the afternoon, eating, walking the line of booths to the bathroom, to throw up in the urinal. He’d never taken a grown woman like this. Even if it was Candace. Should he say some line? Maybe if she could just see him in his car.

It took him two more hours to decide, and then he said it: “Boone, right? Out past the chemical depot?”

She nodded, poured.

“You?” she said back.

“Once upon a time,” he said. “I think we used to play you in football or something.”

It was like he was invisible to her—like in her head she’d cut a Jessie Wiggs-shaped stencil out of corrugated cardboard, sewed a couple of elastic straps to the back for her forearm, then used it as a shield, so that anybody who looked like him now just wouldn’t exist. Or maybe it was just that he looked like Rod Stewart these days.

“Christine,” he said to her, guessing.

She smiled.

“Candace,” she said.

“Candy,” he said.

He asked her if she’d ever ridden in a silver Trans-Am. She looked out at the parking lot, back to him, and that was all it took: she was the same junior high girl who’d crossed the sidewalk to him thirteen years ago, because his hands were too big to get the pocket comb he’d dropped between the seats.

Candace.

Her shift was over at six, and he walked her out of it, to his car, to the hotel, and when it happened—when she saw him in the cheap mirror, recognized him—it was all okay, because she just went limp, pliant. Like she remembered. Had been conditioned.

Jesse James smiled, laid her back on the bed.

She was too old, but he made do. He could close his eyes, and, if he pushed hard enough, reach the girl still inside her.

Candace Crocker.

She was number one.

He left her in the room, her clothes opened around her like when you butterfly a shrimp, and at the last moment he looked back, took a picture of her in his mind for later, then just walked away like you had to, sat in the car. There was another snapshot under the wipers, on his side.

Two days later, he was in Utah, reading about Candace.

She was dead.

He made a hand sign under the table—
please
—then chatted up MJ Harrison. Her earrings had gotten her kicked off the junior high cheerleading squad. Jesse James had liked them, though. Wanted to see them up close. But that was 1966. She was married now. With children. And he had to tell her over and over that he wasn’t who he was, and still, she wouldn’t serve him, so he had to wait for her in the parking lot. It was the same, though; in the motel room her body remembered what her head didn’t want to.

Jessie tried looking back at her like he had Candace, but MJ was balled up, sobbing.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it.

She didn’t look up.

After that, he decided to make it better, nicer for them, so he scored some Tuinol, tapped it into their drinks. Jesse James rides again.

MJ turned up dead too, though.

Jessie drove faster. Quit bathing.

The next snapshot that shouldn’t have still existed was Jennifer Korell. He shook his head no, no no no, then holed up in a truck stop diner for two days, until he started seeing himself out at the pumps, his long blond hair lifting in the wind, his hands in his pockets. He was waiting out there. For himself to come out. He made a hand sign under the table. When he got to the car, there was a belt-CB waiting for him.

It was the kid, talking to him from the afterlife.

“Her name was Jennifer Korell,” the kid said.

“I don’t want to,” Jessie said.

“Her shift starts at eight.”

“But you died.”

“I can’t die, Jessie. Don’t you know that?”

After that, they were in contact always. Jessie never even talked into the radio anymore. He just wanted to be back in his mother’s garage, or in the shop, scraping gaskets, or anyfuckingwhere, please.

Jennifer Korell.

He held her down by the wrists and cried as he did it to her, then stood, saw himself crossing the parking lot to this room, the blade flashing by his leg.

“You can’t do this!” Jessie yelled.

The kid just kept on coming.

“I’ll tell,” Jessie said.

“Your mother?” the kid said back, from Jessie’s belt.

Jennifer Korell was already dying. Slow.

Jessie Wiggs shook his head no.

That night he wrote all the letters all at once, addressed them to the newspapers of the different cities he’d been in already—
you
zombie
,
be
born
again
my
friend
,
won’t
you
sign
in
stranger
—and all the cities he thought he was going to. The next day he bought a fabulous red top hat, sat in a booth to have his picture taken, and, when the hat blew across the parking lot, slipped the letters into a drop box. He’d written like the kid would have, if he were still alive. He was telling. All the hand signs he made were to himself, now.

The next girl was Wanda Richardson.

Jessie got a mannequin from his trunk, dressed it up like her, left it in a motel room.

It didn’t work, though. Nothing did.

He drove, and drove, then read one of the letters he’d written on the front page of a paper, circled it in red, left it in Wanda’s diner,
P
L
E
A
S
E
spelled out beside it.

Nobody was listening.

The next picture was Angeline Dougherty. Back in Colorado.

Jesse James stood at an island of pumps at some sprawling truck stop, filling the car up, the weight of his thirty-four years heavy on him now, like car batteries tied to his neck, but then a twelve-year-old girl stepped out of her father’s sedan one island over and Jessie watched her cross the slick concrete for the restaurant, stretching her legs as she walked, and he smiled, relaxed his hand on the pump, so he wouldn’t finish before she was gone, so she could stay like that forever, for him.

Two weeks later he was dead, cornered in a motel room with a dead girl, the big shoot-out with the police that made all the papers, all the textbooks.

On the motel telephone he’d cried and begged them to believe he hadn’t killed those girls, to tell his mom that he hadn’t, that there was this ghost kid out there setting him up, this kid who could hear the weather, that they could talk to him on the CB if they wanted.

It was a classic case.