All the Beautiful Sinners (5 page)

Jim Doe opened his eyes and nothing changed. The world was still black and painful, and then a bell rang. Of a school? Wait—the gym, yes. Basketball games, they’re at gyms, and gyms are in schools, and schools have bells.

A closet, then. Jim Doe had been stuffed into a supply closet. A janitorial closet.

He tried the door but it was locked, leaned against it but it was solid, kicked it but it was tight. He reached for his pistol, found it minutes later in a gallon can of warm turpentine. He slung it dry, the pistol, patted it down with the tail of his shirt, touched the end of the barrel to the doorknob that wouldn’t turn, backed off two steps; fired. There was a half moon of students waiting for him on the other side. They were all wearing plastic safety goggles. From shop.

The gunpowder was a harsh tang in the air. Everybody half-deaf, now.

“Officer,” one of them said.

“Deputy,” Jim Doe corrected.

He was still blinking, trying to adjust to all this light.

“Is this going to be a shooting?” one of the kids asked.

“That part’s over,” Jim Doe said.

“April Fool’s,” a kid called behind him, as he was following the wall away, still not so sure about his ability to stand.

The first exit he found opened onto a courtyard. There was a girl there, sitting in a windowsill, smoking. He didn’t know what his face looked like. Hopefully not like it felt.

“Who won?” he asked her.

“Not you,” she said, taking him in all at once.

“The game last night.”

She exhaled, watched the smoke. Looked back to him finally. “Who do you think?” she said.

By the time he found the real exit, the law was there, with more screeching up. Because you’re not supposed to fire weapons on school property, on a school day. You’re not supposed to even have them. Or be there if you’re not a student. And especially if you’re not a resident of the state. Being Indian probably wasn’t going to help either.

Jim Doe surrendered his pistol, sat in the back of a black and white and watched the crowd disperse.

His truck was there, parked sideways to all the other cars. On the driver’s side now, half across the gas cap cover, there was a red handprint. It was the longhair’s, a coup, what it used to mean: touching the enemy while the enemy’s still alive. First blood. I can get to you and there’s nothing you can do about it.

A Sheriff Debs settled into the backseat with Jim Doe, didn’t fit very well.

“Hungry?” he said.

Jim Doe turned to him.

“I almost had him,” he said.

“You’re Tom’s punk deputy,” Deb said.

Jim Doe shrugged, pled guilty to the deputy part, anyway.

“Had who?” Debs asked.

“Same one you want,” Jim Doe said.

“I don’t want anybody, son,” Debs said, and made his cumbersome way to the front seat, took Jim Doe to a diner at the west edge of town. He said it was his sister-in-law’s place, and Jim Doe was to at least pretend to eat whatever got sat down on a plate in front of him, if he understood what Debs was saying.

At the diner, after they’d switched sides of the booth so Debs could hear the sister-in-law, Jim Doe just said another of whatever Debs had ordered.

“You were at the funeral,” he said to Debs, as a way to get this going.

“Tom was a friend,” Debs said back. “We went through together, back when it was still ball and powder”

“So this your town?” Jim Doe said, about Garden City.

Debs leaned close across the table. “What were you doing with that high school tail, son? While your sheriff was getting killed, I mean. Enquiring minds want to know.”

Jim Doe stared at Debs.

“It wasn’t like that,” he said.

Debs smiled. “I saw her,” he said, cocking his head in appreciation. “You tell me what it
was
like, then, how about? What were you really doing at
our
high school, Deputy? Looking for another girlfriend?”

Jim Doe leaned back. They were the only ones there. Ever, it felt like.

“She reminds me of my sister,” he said, no eye contact.

Debs’ frame shuddered with something like laughter. Or appreciation.

“Sicker than I thought,” he said.

Jim Doe came back to him, didn’t look away this time.

“I almost had him,” he said again.

“Correction,” Debs said. “You let him know somebody’s after him. There’s kind of a big difference, there.”

“So he’ll go faster, be less careful,” Jim Doe said. “I don’t think he’s exactly all there anyway.”

“Listen,” Debs said, unfolding one of Jim Doe’s flyers on the table between them. “And this is just because Tom trusted you enough to let you carry a big boy gun. Even if you do fire it on school grounds.”

“Speaking of that.”

Debs slid the pistol across to Jim Doe. It was wrapped in a handkerchief gone nearly transparent from the turpentine. Jim Doe peeled the cloth off, worked the steel with his napkin. The finish was coming off now, like a clearcoat.

“You’re not the only one on the trail, that’s what I’m saying,” Debs said.

Jim Doe put all the soaked cartridges in his shirt pocket. They were warm, oily. He didn’t know how they hadn’t all gone off at once, when he shot the door. How he was still here, with two hands he could open and close.

“There’s an APB out, right?” he said, setting the pistol down by his plate, to dry. “Isn’t everybody kind of looking?”

“I’m talking about the Rangers, son. Two in particular. A matched set.”

“Maines,” Jim Doe said. “He was at the funeral. And that other one, that’s even bigger.”

“McKirkle,” Debs filled in. “And you could say they’re real prideful about that ‘we always get our man’-thing. No matter who they have to wade through. I’m only telling you because I know Agnes has a stake in your coming back.”

Jim Doe nodded. This was better than going to jail, at least. He wasn’t this sheriff’s son, though.

Their cheeseburgers got there, on a bed of soggy fries.

Debs nodded thanks to his sister-in-law. She blushed, scuttled away. She was the cook, waitress, and cashier.

“How do you know Maines and that other one?” Jim Doe said, biting in. Not tasting it until it was time to swallow, then wishing he’d taken a smaller bite.

“They come through from time to time,” Debs said. “Storm season, like. Usually not this early.”

“Chasers?”

“Not like you’re thinking.”

“Then what?”

Debs studied Jim Doe, then studied him some more.

“It’s the one that
did
get away,” Debs finally said. “For them. The
only
one. If he’s even real, I mean. If you didn’t just make him up.”

“What do you mean?” Jim Doe said. “The Indian?”

He chanced another bite, immediately regretted it.

Debs chuckled.

“Indian who shot Tom’s too young,” Debs said. “No, this one—Nazareth’s the only time he ever came to Texas, as far as anybody knows. Nineteen eighty-two, I think it was. It’s when he got their attention. They were DPS out of Lubbock then, but still. They took it as a personal insult, I think, even if it was just Indians, no offense. Never even told the feds. They want him for theirself, if he’s even still alive.”

Jim Doe stopped chewing, stared right into Deb’s eyes.

“I don’t—”

“Eat,” Debs told him, the ghost of a smile at his lips. “And think, they wouldn’t even know about him without you, now would they?”

Jim Doe tried to swallow, dry-heaved instead, had to stagger for the bathroom, throw up into the urinal, which just made him throw up more.

Nazareth, 1982.

The fireman.

He had been real after all.

When the world stopped turning, Jim Doe looked across to his sister to see if she had felt it as well.

“What?” Gerry Box said, still smiling, a moth squirming under his black and white domino.

They were in the attic of Gerry’s house, were lining dominoes on top of the rafters, were going to knock them all down at once. And Gerry’s real name was ‘Caja,’ but everybody knew it meant box, just in Spanish. He was the only boy in Jim Doe’s sister’s grade who was as dark as they were.

“Yeah,” Jim Doe’s sister said, pulling her head down kind of like a turtle would, forgetting about her domino.

Ten seconds ago, the storm they were hiding indoors from had been pelting the clapboard, screaming through the trees, making damp spots on the underside of the roof they were having to duck to keep from hitting.

And now, now all of that was gone.

Jim Doe swallowed, licked his lips, let his domino clap down onto the wood, barely missing all the rest they’d already stood up on end.

He was eight, his sister ten.

“Oh,” Gerry Box said then, when the light coming through the circle vent in the side of the house changed, went powdery green.

Way down the street, somebody screamed, and didn’t stop screaming.

Jim Doe’s hand made its way across to his sister’s, and she let him, and, in a whisper of contact, all their dominoes fell over against each other.

“This is bad,” she said.

Gerry Box stood up too fast, hit his head, his moth escaping, fluttering up against the roof over and over.

They were supposed to be quiet, so Jim Doe’s mom wouldn’t hear they were up here. But now—it was all Jim Doe could do not to be calling her.

Something was wrong. Something even his sister couldn’t explain.

Walking on top of the rafters, she made her way to the circle vent, flipped the wooden slats open.

Her hair didn’t blow. There was no wind.

For the first time in ever.

“Let’s go,” Gerry Box said, holding his head where he’d hit it.

Jim Doe’s sister looked back to him, her lower lip gently bit between her side teeth, and then to Jim Doe, and then the slats she was holding open all slammed shut at once.
Sucked
shut.

She looked at them like they didn’t make sense, and then the whole circle vent was sucked backwards, flipped out like a coin into nothing. Into the sky.

And
then
they heard it.

The storm wasn’t over. It was just beginning.

For a flash, Jim Doe saw it, even, a winding black column connecting the ground to the clouds, like the finger of God reaching down, and then the roof shifted over their heads and the world was moving again. Fast, and hard.

Gerry Box screamed, one of his legs going through the floor where he wasn’t supposed to step, and Jim Doe’s sister dove for him, to keep him from falling through, and Jim Doe just looked outside again.

The whole sky was black.

Where they going somewhere else, now?

Jim Doe looked back to his sister to explain, and he could see her mouth, knew she had to be screaming, that she was screaming with her whole entire body, but for some reason, he couldn’t hear her.

He smiled a little bit, cocked his head over to try to understand what she was doing, why she would be acting like she was screaming if she wasn’t, and then the front wall of the attic disappeared, crumbled away all at once.

Jim Doe stepped back to keep from falling, and both his legs went through their floor—what was usually the ceiling—and then he was down to his armpits but it didn’t hurt.

And then the whole house fell down on itself, the roof somehow holding mostly together, and all the sound caught up and Jim Doe tried to scream with it, to let his sister know where he was, and then suddenly, like he’d blinked it away, all the sound was gone. And the wind.

Outside, he could hear things drifting down from the sky, like the sky had just decided to let them go. Like it was done with them for now.

He said his sister’s name but she didn’t answer, and then he kicked his feet like swimming. His right foot was maybe touching the couch, or his dad’s chair. Or somebody’s stomach.

He pulled it back, cried, called louder for his sister, fell asleep twice and four times heard somebody walking past. But they never came to his house.

Until the fireman.

Jim Doe watched him pick his way through the rubble, touching the head of his axe to this broken fence, that lost-forever birdbath. Once, a dog that flapped its tail against the ground to be petted, and then didn’t flap its tail anymore after the fireman left.

The fireman was how he knew it was going to be all right.

Except he didn’t come straight to him, but instead went to the other end of the house.

When Jim Doe saw him again, he was leading Gerry Box away by the hand. And Jim Doe’s sister, half her face slick with blood.

“Hey,” Jim Doe called, “me too,” but his chest was still hollow from crying and they didn’t hear him, and, later, when he told about it, all the firemen shook their heads no, sorry, kid, and when the two police asked, who were there for the
dead
fireman, Jim Doe couldn’t even speak, they were so tall, their voices so deep, and finally he only told the sheriff, who told him he’d imagined it, that anybody would have.

And maybe he had.

Except his sister and Gerry Box never came back, and never came back, were dead like everybody said, and for most of his sixth grade year, the kid starting the fires all around Nazareth, Texas, he wasn’t doing it because he thought the flames were pretty, or because he wanted to burn anything. He did it to bring the fireman back, so he could ask where his sister was. And Gerry Box.

And then the sheriff found him one day fanning some kindling on the playground, and helped him put it out, and didn’t tell anybody, kept it between the two of them, and that was the last tornado Nazareth had seen for nearly twenty years.

Amos got a new car in Holcomb, from another garage. Honest Injun’s. In the daytime, Mr. Honest Injun in his Honest Injun coveralls bleeding out slow behind the Honest Injun tire-balancing rig, an Honest Injun fan belt wound tight around his throat to keep him from calling anybody over, his cut-out tongue in his hand in case he wanted to throw it at anybody, or to a dog, do one nice thing. The belt left little grooves for the mouth blood to run around his neck in. In trade, Amos left the Impala he’d driven out of Garden City. The new car was a 1981 LeMans.

At the first halfway truck stop, nervous without any music, the road too full of sound, he found a plastic-wrapped
Royal
Scam
, thumbed it in, turned it up. Drove. The miles melted away behind him. He was fixing the world. Making up for everything. All it had taken was one ambulance left parked on the street like a gift for him, two bottles of Dilantin in the cage. He mixed it with some Percocet and Xanax and baby formula.

Once it hit his system right, he tied his hair high up on his head and became a woman he’d seen in Garden City. He could feel the truckers looking at him from their high seats. He waved his fingertips at them.

In Kendall, his hair under a cap now, a clerk asked what his name was. He recited from the newspaper he’d seen in the ambulance: Jim. Jim Doe. The one that got away. He stood around then, letting the camera get him from all angles but making it look accidental too.

No cops pulled him over. Because they’d heard about Texas. And there were no fireman anymore, not since the Dilantin. Or maybe it was the baby formula.

The back of the LeMans was squatted down on the springs, so sitting behind the wheel was like sitting in the water, on a boat.

From a payphone he found himself at in Coolidge, almost to Colorado—the road had been so smooth he’d overshot his turn north—he placed a call. His fingers knew the number without him, had been dialing on the dashboard for miles already. It was just a matter of time before they found a dialpad.

The phone on the other end rang the usual fourteen times before somebody lifted it. Amos could almost hear the cardigan, sweeping across the room.

“Mr. Rogers’s house,” the man on the other end said, the voice cheerful, false.

“Um, yeah,” Amos heard himself saying.

“Oh, it’s you,” the chipper man said. “Yes?”

On the screen in his mind, Mr. Rogers walked to the closet, hung his cardigan up in it then turned around just fast enough for Amos to make out the look in his eye.

Amos made his hand hang the phone up, went back to wipe it down, then crossed the state line.

In Hartman, Colorado—it was on his list anyway, was just out of order now—he sat in the LeMans cleaning his teeth until dark, then rolled the headlights on, eased through the outskirts of town, to the cemetery. They were all the same: unguarded. Like the dead didn’t matter. But they did.

He didn’t have to look at a list for the two names. He’d known them, could still see their faces in the darkness of the basement, even, when he didn’t want to.

The ground was soft, and the names of the children carved into the headstones matched the parents buried to either side, all dead the same day, the same storm, except the mom was named Jane, and Jane was supposed to be married to Tarzan, and Tarzan was a town in Texas, near Nazareth, where Jesus wasn’t born.

It didn’t matter.

The ground was soft, and fertile. Not the hardscrabble Amos knew from Nebraska.

But he couldn’t think about Nebraska yet.

He grubbed for the Dilantin, crushed the tablets on a headstone, inhaled them from the crook of his thumb.

It made him dig faster into the two smaller graves, not thinking about it, not
letting
himself think about it, his radiator-burned palm bloody with blisters. It was worth it, though. There were the coffins. Amos nodded, retreated to the LeMans, cracked the trunk open. The children were still there, staring up at him. One of them—the girl, always the girl—raised her arms for his neck, and he bent down, pressed his face into her shoulder as he lifted her from the ground, cradled her small form to the new grave. Because her family was gone. But this would do, this was close enough.

His hair had grave dirt in it by the time he got the boy into his coffin. He laid tobacco ties on each of the children’s chests, at the point where the turkey foot carved into their torsos branched out into toes. Like the turkey had been what pressed them down into the ground. They put their hands over the tobacco in thanks. Because it was right, proper. And things had to be proper.

Amos closed the trunk, looked back east, and turned the great car around, for Kansas, doubling back on the same blacktop, which he’d promised himself not to do. He was fixing the world, body by body. It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood.