All the Beautiful Sinners (6 page)

From a payphone at the turn up to Lydia, Jim Doe called Castro County. Not Monica at Dispatch, to check in, but Agnes. It was pushing dawn.

“Where are you?” she asked.

Jim Doe looked around, shivered. “Kansas,” he said.

“You should come home.”

“I’m going to pay you back.”

“I don’t care about the money.”

“I’m going to pay you back for Tom, Agnes.”

“Joe.”

“Jim,” Jim Doe smiled.

It was good to hear her voice.

“You’re not calling just to tell me that,” she told him.

Jim Doe switched ears, watched a car flash past, its driver lit up by his own dome light at the last moment.

“The fireman,” he said, cupping his hand around the phone to say it. “He was real, Agnes. Did Tom know?”

The way she hesitated was all the answer he needed.

“It’s something with the—with all the towns that got hit by a tornado, I think.”

“Joe, no.”

“I can find her,” he said then, quieter, with his eyes closed.

“Come home,” Agnes said again, the defeat there in her voice, and Jim Doe made it easy for her, just hung up.

To the south there was an outflow boundary, a shelf cloud moving low across the land. In the parking lot he was in, three of the six cars had feathers dangling from their mirrors. The thread wrapped around one of their spines was a military pattern, for Vietnam. Green and white and red. Jim Doe knew the colors from his father.

He got in the truck, lowered his face into his sunglasses, and closed his eyes for what he told himself was just going to be two seconds, woke to a man knocking on the window. He was Indian, tall.

Jim Doe cracked the window.

“Smells hot,” the man said, touching the hood to show what he meant.

Jim Doe blinked, managed to focus in on his gauge. Two-twenty. He’d fallen asleep with the engine idling, the doors unlocked. His hand not on his gun. Nothing hanging from his rearview.

“Shit,” Jim Doe said. “Thanks.”

“You okay?” the man asked. “Not shot or anything?”

Jim Doe looked at his stomach, his chest.

In his side mirror, the man’s tall kid was placing his hand in the handprint on the back fender of the truck. The print was more brown now than red. Like a scab. The kid’s hand seemed to fit. Jim Doe watched him do this and watched him do this and then reached beside his seat for the nightstick he still carried, wedged it against the accelerator to cool the engine down. He stepped out into the midday glare. The man towered over him. The kid too. Basketball. He had probably played in the game two nights ago, even.

“Who won?” Jim Doe asked.

The man hooked one side of his face into a smile, said, “Who do you think?”

The tall kid’s hand did fit. He backed off with Jim Doe’s approach. Jim Doe told him it was all right. He placed his own hand there. It fit too. The kid smiled. Jim Doe bent down to the print, took his sunglasses off one ear at a time, not wanting to mess anything up here.

There in the hand shape, where the longhair’s hand had been, were four fingerprints and a thumb, dried into the paint.

Jim Doe smiled.

The basketball-playing family was gone when he turned around, their car not receding down any of the roads in any of the directions. Jim Doe looked up—because this was Kansas, where people get lifted into the sky—but they weren’t there either.

He backed inside, to the store, bought two cups of coffee, a disposable camera, and a newspaper, then shot the whole roll on the handprint—close, far, every angle, some lit with his Maglite, some not, one with a quarter by it, for size, another with the newspaper, for the date—then packed it into a padded envelope, addressed it to Sheriff Debs, Garden City. The clerk knew the zip. Then Jim Doe showed him the flyer of the longhair. The clerk looked from it up to Jim Doe, then back again, like this was a joke, and Jim Doe looked away.

As he was walking out, though, suddenly aware that the emergency brake in his truck wasn’t even set, the door unlocked, so that anybody could pop it into gear, the clerk called after him.

“This about the gas run?”

Jim Doe closed his eyes, didn’t turn around. “Yes,” he said.

“I never saw him,” the clerk said. “Did they tell you I did?”

Jim Doe turned around now.

“When did you not see him?” he asked.

“When he made the gas run,” the clerk said. He was all of sixteen.

“Yesterday?” Jim Doe said.

“Last night,” the clerk said. “Comes out of our check, you know? Ever since Arthur.”

“Arthur?” Jim Doe said.

The clerk smiled. “Arthur,” he said. “He was selling premium to his cousins at regular price. Real philanthropist.”

Jim Doe looked above the clerk to the security camera.

“But you’ve got tape,” he said.

The clerk nodded. “Damn straight,” he said. “I saved its ass, too.”

Jim Doe took the tape to the supply room with the manager’s television on the desk. His truck was still running, idling high with the nightstick, the plate glass at the front of the store pulsing with the exhaust. After the clerk left, he moved a stray brick over to the doorjamb of the supply closet, so it wouldn’t close. So nobody could close it on him. And then he watched.

It was black-and-white and grainy and distant, but still, there he was, the longhair, keeping his new LeMans between him and the camera. You could tell it was new to him because he couldn’t find where to put the gas at first, had to walk around the car twice. While he pumped, you could see his hair, whipping above the ragged top of the car. His face just dark, determined.

Jim Doe ejected the tape.

“Show this to Sheriff Debs,” he said.

“Is he coming here?” the clerk asked, but Jim Doe just nodded.

“They all should be,” he said, and left the clerk standing there with the paperwork his manager would want filled out.

Standing by his truck again, his car beside him, was the tall Indian man. Like he’d been there all along. His tall son was dribbling a basketball beside the store, passing it to himself off the wall. The rain was almost on them now, already sweeping the trash into the air.

The man nodded down at Jim Doe’s right hand.

“Gonna pay for that chocolate?” he asked.

Jim Doe looked down at his hand and there it was, a candy bar. One he couldn’t explain. He offered it to the man but the man held his hands up, palms out. They were both red.

The last thing Agnes had said to him on the phone was
come
home
.

It was too late now, though. He was too far gone.

He got into his truck, moved the newspaper out of his seat, dislodged the nightstick and pulled into Lydia three hours after sunset, one hour ahead of the rain. It already smelled like it, though. There were people stationed in the driveways of each house, watching it approach. Jim Doe slowed, like he was recognizing them, their stance, and then it came to him all at once, so hard that he almost stumbled—what had been getting louder and louder since Debs and Garden City, since Deerfield: the insurance man.

The one who had come to pay for Jim Doe’s sister.

#

By that time, just a week out from the storm, Jim Doe had already been calling her Dorothy in his head, because the wind had taken her, and because she was going to come back again. It was his secret deal.

And then the insurance man came to pay for her.

Jim Doe never even saw him. He had still been hiding behind the one standing wall of his bedroom, then. Pretending. But then the car pulled up, its dust plume settling over the remains of Horace Doe’s house, coating everything with a fine layer of caliche. Another fine layer of caliche. Jim Doe made himself smaller behind the partial wall, closed his eyes, and listened. It was the insurance man’s voice he would remember. How he’d talked to his father, calling him
Mr
.
Doe
at first, then moving on to
Horace
, until that became something different too:
Horse
.

They were sitting on the couch his father had dug out. Or, his father was. Maybe the insurance man was standing, walking, pacing like a teacher. Looking out the windows as he spoke. The whole house was a window.

The insurance man was saying how he was here as an extension of the company. To show how much they cared in this, Horse’s time of loss, of grief, and grieving. That he knew Horse wasn’t thinking about money yet, of course, but it was his job to. His duty in times like this.

“Just tell me what I owe,” Horace Doe said, his voice flat.

His wallet had blown away along with his daughter.

The insurance man didn’t say anything for a long while. It was just his feet on the broken glass of the floor. Then he said it: “Nothing, Mr. Doe. Horse. We owe
you
.”

Jim Doe could hear his mother in the other room, sweeping. The walls around her were two feet tall, maybe. The broom was makeshift, rags and a stick; her real broom was stuck in a locustwood fencepost three acres away, like it had been shot there by a giant, inconceivable bow. Birds were already sitting on it, bobbing up and down, waiting for the straw to cack in half so they could weave nests out if it.

The insurance man said it again:
Nothing
.

And then he extended the check to Horace Doe. Twenty-two hundred dollars.

Jim Doe could hear his father looking up, could hear the insurance man smiling, the check fluttering. The burial insurance that wasn’t included in Horace’s premiums was paid out on the check, listed on the stub. The amount was real. Horace looked from it to the insurance man. The insurance man said it must have been an oversight at the main office. That it happened all the time. That he understood what it was like to lose someone. To just cash it.

After that, silence. So long that Jim Doe put his hands over his ears, started humming to himself. It was the same quiet now as it had been right before the circle vent sucked out of the wall. A roaring silence. His hands at eight weren’t thick enough, though. He could still hear the insurance man talking in low tones—private tones, like this wasn’t for everybody. It was a joke. An Indian joke, one Jim Doe would never be able to remember, just that it made his father laugh, sitting there on the couch. Made him laugh for the first time in days. The sound of his laughter spilled through the house and out into the grass, and for a moment his wife stopped sweeping, and his son stood up, and the three of them looked at each other, and started getting better. Started becoming three instead of four. The insurance man was already a car pulling away, back into Nazareth. Jim Doe waved, wanted more, please, more—make us laugh—but that was all.

Dorothy
, he’d called out after him in gratitude, breaking his secret deal,
her
name
was
Dorothy
, and then his father had him around the middle and was lifting him into the air and his mother still wasn’t sweeping, and he never told anybody any of this, had held it too close, like a scab you keep peeling. All through junior high and high school and work he kept it inside, until one day, sitting out in a truck with a girl named Terra, not saying anything, it really started to bleed, and he hadn’t been able to stop it.

When the tall Indian man in the parking lot in Deerfield, Kansas had asked Jim Doe if he was shot or anything, Jim Doe had had to look down, because he wasn’t sure. He did have a hole in him, anyway.

Now, looking at the people of Lydia standing in their driveways watching the storm, he wanted to tell them to run, to get inside, to hide under mattresses in their bathtubs, to hold each other close. That maybe it would pass. But then he saw that he was bringing it with him. In his rearview mirror. Headlights.

#

He pulled over and waited for them, but they turned off two streets short of his truck. Into residential.

Jim Doe looked at his foot, his boot. It was hard on the brake, everything behind him washed red.

He should have just clicked his lights off, coasted to a stop. Waited. Not been stupid.

The headlights in his mirror had been dull, too. Like old bulbs. The kind a LeMans would have.

But he wasn’t a detective. He said it to himself like that. He probably wasn’t even a deputy anymore.

He held the steering wheel between his hands and counted the minutes, the hour, waiting for the car to ease back out of residential. It never did. And then the rain came, in great, winding sheets.

He rolled forward, to the dead-end at the courthouse.

There in the lawn, by the sidewalk leading to the double doors, was the plaque. For the dead. Angled up for the sun to glint off of in the daytime, its base granite, and planted deep, so at least
this
wouldn’t blow away. Jim Doe smiled. It was the only other one he’d ever seen outside Nazareth. But he hadn’t been looking, either.

He set the brake on the truck and stumbled through the rain to the monument. The names were all there. Thirty-seven of them. From a town of fifteen hundred. Their birth dates too. The other date, they all shared.

Jim Doe ran his finger down the ridges of the letters, saying the names in his head because he had to, and then stopped near the bottom, at two. They were side by side: a Wallace Blue Kettle and a Dot Blue Kettle. Brother and sister. Ten and twelve years, the girl older. He closed his eyes, left his fingers there, and then someone was behind him, his shadow on the ground, his shape outlined by a sharp branch of lightning.

Jim Doe turned, leading with his pistol, the rest of him trying to fall away from whatever was coming.

It was a man wearing chrome sunglasses. At night. Just standing there. And he had a gun too.

Jim Doe thumbed his hammer back. In the storm, no one would hear their shots.

Now that Jim Doe had drawn, the man was yelling for him to drop it,
drop
it
. His mouth was huge, full of harsh, white teeth. Jim Doe watched himself distorted in the twin lenses.

“You first,” he said.

They stood like that, feet set, elbows locked, and then the sprinklers came on all around them, the crowns of water they usually made getting perforated by the rain so they collapsed into themselves, just sputtered.