All the Beautiful Sinners (7 page)

Jim Doe shook his head no.

This was a white guy. Not the longhair, and not a fireman either.

“
What
were
you
saying
?” the man screamed, so much more intense than the situation called for.

But he did have a pistol leveled on his chest.

Jim Doe narrowed his eyes, looked at the man, the plaque, then back to the man.

“Dorothy,” he finally said, too low to make it through the rain.

The man motioned for Jim Doe to lower his pistol. Jim Doe did, all fingertips and slow motion.

Under the man’s dark blue slicker was a uniform, a name tag. LOBICEK.

Jim Doe unfolded his own badge for him.

“I almost had to shoot you,” Lobicek said, lowering his own pistol, coming in close enough to talk now.

“I almost had to shoot you back,” Jim Doe said.

“What are you doing here?” Lobicek asked. “This isn’t Oz, y’know.”

Jim Doe nodded, chewing his cheek. “Just looking,” he said, shrugging, then two-fingered the flyer out, still moving slow. “For him,” he added.

Lobicek hooked his chin down the sidewalk. “Saw your truck,” he said, then, about the flyer: “What’d he do?”

“He’s wanted in Texas. Here too, now. I think.”

Lobicek studied the longhair’s face through his fogged glasses, handed it back.

“It’s not . . .
you
?” he said.

Jim Doe took the wet flyer back.

Lobicek looked around. “Why would he come here?” he asked.

“It’s complicated,” Jim Doe said.

Lobicek appraised Jim Doe. Jim Doe stood there, let him.

“He dangerous?” Lobicek finally asked.

Jim Doe nodded, said, “Very.”

Lobicek took the flyer back. “I keep this?” he asked.

For whatever it was worth, Jim Doe nodded again.

Lobicek shrugged. “I’ll keep an eye out,” he said. “It’s not a big town. As you can tell.” He looked back at Jim Doe’s truck then. “Got a place to stay?”

“I’m just here to get him,” Jim Doe said. “That’s all.”

Lobicek spit into the water they were standing in.

“Last time you slept?” Lobicek asked.

“I sleep,” Jim Doe said.

“Eat?”

Jim Doe thought of the candy bar, looked to his truck for it.

“Bad night all around,” Lobicek said.

It was. Lobicek left him alone with the memorial. To say
Dorothy
some more, and click his heels together. Jim Doe watched his cruiser pull behind the curtain of rain, disappear.

Lydia.

And Wallace, and Dot.

Jim Doe cruised the convenience store but didn’t stay, didn’t leave any flyers on the glass. The clerk was sleeping on the counter by the hot dog ferris wheel. It rolled over and over in the same place. Jim Doe started shaking, then. From the cold. From almost getting shot. From Wallace and Dot, taken the same way he should have been.

He turned the heater on and his clothes steamed. His wipers couldn’t keep up with the rain anymore. Or the defroster with his clothes. Soon the hail came, pinging off the roof, careening off the light bar. It was pea size. The Bronco’s tires collected it in the tread, slung it up into the wheel well. It sounded like birdshot.

Jim Doe drove, in a trance.

If he didn’t catch him here, then? He looked north. If he didn’t catch him here, then it would be Nebraska, or, if missed him there, more north: the Dakotas. Canada. He rubbed the heel of his hand into his right eye, imagined him in the arctic months later, chasing the longhair across the tundra. The cold not even touching the longhair’s smile.

On one pass through town, Jim Doe pulled into each driveway, washing his headlights into the carports, for anything LeMans shaped. It took two hours. Another thing he’d never told anybody, even Terra, was that part of him always knew his sister had just been set down in another town, in another state, after some other tornado. That she was out there.

At the cemetery, he shifted into neutral, coasted to a stop.

Her grave had been empty for the funeral. That was the thing. The school counselor said it didn’t mean anything, but it did. He had stood over it with Horace and his mom and they had sung like she was really there. Like she could hear. But they should have been looking up.

He stepped down from the truck, into the wet, through the gates, and into another world. An older one. In it there were people gathered around a grave—a pair of graves. They all looked to him as one, like he was the interloper here, in the middle of the night, in a graveyard. He was saying to himself
Blue
Kettle
,
Blue
Kettle
, to keep himself focused. It was going to be on one of these headstones, had to be. And then he stopped.

The people bundled around the pair of graves, they were Indian.

An old man, an old woman. And the longhair, one of his hands gauze-white, his face gaunt, wasted.

Jim Doe smiled, reached for them, and they splashed into the night. He ran after them, falling over headstones and over crosses and finally slamming into the tall iron fence. The pair of dim red bulbs was already feeling away. Jim Doe stood there until they kissed each other goodbye, disappeared, then he fell to his knees, then he pulled himself up, went back to the two graves. One headstone said
Dot
. The other was just gone. Jim Doe touched the name
Dot
again with the side of his finger, where it was tender and could feel, and then looked down at his boot. It was sinking into the ground, into the dirt. He fell back, away from it, and in the next jagged line of lightning, saw it: his sister’s plot, empty, fake.

He went to the groundskeeper’s shed for a shovel.

It was nearly Easter, and he was digging. In Lydia, Kansas. For two children who weren’t going to be there, a memorial service that couldn’t have just happened.

He didn’t stop until Lobicek made him.

Maines was sitting at the convenience store with the security tape balanced on its short end on the table before him. He tapped it against the table top like a deck of cards. He’d been rewinding through it for almost an hour, McKirkle having a sit-down with the clerk that the clerk wasn’t likely to forget anytime soon,

On the tape was the longhair, stealing gas. His sedan sitting low on its springs.

Maines watched it again, rewound, watched it again, the heads protesting more each time.

On the other tape the clerk had had to offer was the kid from Nazareth, palming a candy bar from the rack right by the register.

This had made Maines smile.

The kid was in a fever state in the Lydia jail right about now.

The charges were many, and wouldn’t be easy to shake. Agnes was already on the horn about it with some of Tom’s pallbearers, Maines figured.

He stood the tape on its other end again, considered it, then just collected McKirkle, nodded thanks to the shaken clerk, and drove the hell on up there, to Lydia.

The deputy was sitting on one end of his cot in his cell, his feet up on the mattress, his knees under his chin. To stay warm. He looked like every other Indian after a night in the drunk tank. Like every other Mexican, too.

He stood when he saw Maines, and McKirkle behind him.

“You,” he said.

“Us,” McKirkle said, and spit onto the concrete floor of the kid’s cell.

“I saw him,” the kid said. “He was—”

“—at the graveyard,” Maines said. “Yeah. We’re sure he was. Good work, deputy.”

They stared at each other.

The kid’s lower lip was raw and split. From Officer Lobicek. Who’d had to buy a new pair of sunglasses. Maines had heard it all on the way in, and then again at the front desk.

“I think that’s where he’s getting the corpses,” Jim Doe said.

“Ones that aren’t being reported missing,” McKirkle added.

“Can you get me out?” the kid said.

Maines looked around, at the jail. “They don’t care about the assault charges,” he said. “And nobody needs to know about the graveyard . . . if there aren’t actual bodies down there, it’s not as bad it could be” He looked back to McKirkle, had to try not to smile. “But those are just the Kansas charges.”

The kid closed his eyes.

Maines listed the Texas charges. Taking a county vehicle without authorization. Abandoning his duties there, when they were already short-handed. The statutory rape that pretty girl’s father was trying to file, was likely to make stick, with the defendant gone and all. In jail already.

The kid sat back down on his cot, pulled his knees up again.

“You should cut your hair,” McKirkle told him. “Starting to look like a blanket Indian there.”

“I know,” the kid said from his cot. “If I looked like you, everything’d be great, wouldn’t it?”

McKirkle shook his head, sidled up to the bars, looked along them each way before speaking. “And how do we know you didn’t just let him go? Don’t all you stick together?”

“Tom was like a dad to me,” the kid said.

“Yeah, well, then I guess I might just have to question his parenting style. Looks to me like there’s a little bit of punk kid left to beat out of you, you ask me,” McKirkle said, and like that Jim Doe was at the bars, his eyes hot, and not just with fever.

McKirkle didn’t flinch. Hardly even acknowledged.

“Well?” he said to Maines.

“He might be good for bait or something later,” Maines said after a contemplative bit. “Anyway, there’s Agnes to consider.”

McKirkle nodded, already knew that, Maines knew. All this out loud just for the kid’s sake.

But then McKirkle slashed his hand through the bars, pulled the kid hard against them, their faces two inches from each other.

“It’s a short walk from ungrateful to just plain ingrate,” he hissed, and Maines didn’t pull him off. “Now show me you appreciate what we’re doing out here, on our own time.”

The kid shook his head no so McKirkle popped it against the bars, opening the kid’s nose.

Maines looked away, to see who might be camped in the door, watching.

Nobody.

Good.

“Say it already,” he said to the kid, but it took two more pops against the bars for the kid to finally nod thanks, say it not quite out loud, but loud enough.

McKirkle let go of the kid’s scruff and the kid collapsed, didn’t try to get back up.

“You’re welcome,” McKirkle said, and turned for the front office.

“Take care now,” Maines said, and followed.

Ten miles out, McKirkle said, “Bait?” and Maines had to smile. “He’s too old now,” McKirkle went on. “He wouldn’t want him.”

“Wait,” Maines said, stabbing a hand down for the police radio.

Two bodies.

McKirkle slowed, turned wide in the ditch and swung back north of town, where it was happening.

The patrol cars and rubberneckers were arranged in a loose half moon just short of a stand of cottonwoods. Past them was a rise, high enough that most of the snow had melted off. A bald place. And in it, there they were, like the radio had said: two scaffolds, made the old way, with lodge poles and leather ties.

The bodies were eight feet off the ground, wrapped in sleeping bags. One had Saturday morning cartoons on it. The other was just blue, with ragged tears trailing fibers of unnatural white. They were adult sleeping bags, but the feet were wrapped back under the bodies. Children, then. And by the one hand they could see, there wasn’t much flesh left, if any. Old, just like the bodies in the trunk on Gentry’s dash recording. The birds weren’t even interested, and that was saying something.

“Shit,” McKirkle said, leaned up on the dash, the steering wheel in his chest.

Maines concurred.

“Indian shit,” he said.

“It doesn’t fit,” McKirkle said.

“I’m guessing we don’t know what fits anymore,” Maines said. “But I’ll say this for the kid. He was here before we were.”

McKirkle looked over to Maines, finally accepted this like he had to, and then they sat there while the locals tried to get the sleeping bags down without spilling the dead kids out, and finally Maines said it out loud, what they were both thinking: “The real thing’s, where’s he getting them after all this time?”

McKirkle started the truck, lowered it into gear but kept his foot on the brake.

“So it’s not about catching him so much anymore,” he said, “it’s about following him home to Dad.”

Though he didn’t need to, Maines nodded, then added, “There any of them still on ice, you think?”

McKirkle smiled, liked that.

There was leftover plastic grass on the counter at the Property window of the Lydia holding unit. It was Easter tinsel. The window was a lot of other things, too. It looked like it had originally been to pass food from a kitchen to a staging area of sorts. Like a restaurant, a breakfast place maybe.

Jim Doe was standing at it.

He had little idea what was happening. His fever was one hundred and three, leaning over to one hundred and four. His shirt was a second, wet skin, peeling from his back. He threaded his bangs out of his eyes, looking at everything again. Trying to understand. One moment, the two patrol officers had been there for shift change, milling around at the desks, looking sidelong over at him like he was a zoo animal, and the next, Sheriff Debs was there, looking like he didn’t want to be, saying something to Jim Doe about Agnes, and then he was gone as well.

The woman standing beside Jim Doe was Martha Blue Kettle. From the cemetery. The memorial service nobody believed had really happened.

The man was just Blue Kettle. Like the bow and arrow days, from the movies. He was talking to the rookie officer stuck on desk duty, the one counting Blue Kettle’s stack of ten-dollar bills and doing it slow, trying to raise somebody, anybody, on the radio. To know what to do here.

Jim Doe smiled.

The Blue Kettles were breaking him out, just doing it through the front door. It was the new Indian way.

Jim Doe lurched into the counter, playing it up. The officer looked over to him.

“He’s sick,” Martha Blue Kettle said.

The officer keyed his mike open, begged for somebody to pick up.

Finally, somebody did. It was Sheriff Debs, keyed into their frequency.

“Just let him go,” Debs said, disgusted, it seemed.

“Well?” Blue Kettle said.

The money was all there.

Martha Blue Kettle led Jim Doe out to their 1963 cat-eyed Chevrolet truck. He sat by the door, for the window. She sat in the middle, by her husband. Jim Doe let the air from the window rush into him, and wasn’t at all sure if the Blue Kettles were helping him escape or if they’d just bought him.

#

The next three days felt like more. Jim Doe’s chest was on fire. He was staying in Wallace Blue Kettle’s old room—he still remembered the name, from the plaque—in a trailer that had just been moved, it looked like.

Martha brought him cups of water and pieces of ice and changed his sheets while he was still in bed somehow, and the Indian thing she did to make him better was give him Tylenol for his fever, TheraFlu for everything else. They read the directions together, trying to get the maximum dose.

At night with his eyes closed he could see her and Blue Kettle again at the cemetery, the water stringing down through their grey hair, their eyes somewhere behind that hair, and he would almost wake screaming. Because the longhair was there with them, smiling his wolf smile across at Jim Doe. No, smiling his wolf smile at Jim Doe moments before Jim Doe had even known he was there. It made it worse somehow, to have been watched like that.

“Why are you doing this?” Jim Doe asked Martha on the third day, when he could.

She shrugged, chewing on her lip, and looked out the window.

Blue Kettle was in the door behind her, leaning on the jamb.

Later that day, he came back, stood in the far corner of the room.

“You shouldn’t be here, should you?” he said.

“Here?” Jim Doe said, looking around.

Blue Kettle smiled. “Alive,” he said.

Jim Doe shook his head. No, he shouldn’t be. He should be with his sister.

Blue Kettle nodded. Like he agreed. “But he didn’t take you, either,” he said.

“He?” Jim Doe said

“Tin Man,” Blue Kettle said.

Jim Doe cocked his head over, didn’t follow.

“Because he doesn’t have a heart,” Blue Kettle said. “Who else would take children away from their parents?”

Jim Doe said it in his head: Tin Man.

“Just an old Indian story,” Blue Kettle said. “Something about a lion, too. One guy made out of old rags.”

He was smiling.

Jim Doe closed his eyes.

“And Dorothy,” he said.

When he looked up again, Blue Kettle was gone.

The following morning, he was at the window in his blanket when Martha walked in with oatmeal. The glass of water beside the bowl was the glass that had come in the oatmeal container.

“What are they doing out there?” Jim Doe asked her.

She stood beside him.

A boy of maybe fourteen was setting rocks down on the coals of a fire he’d started three hours ago. In a pit.

“You want to get better, don’t you?” Martha said.

Four hours later, Blue Kettle waved to him in the window, telling him to come down. Jim Doe did. He came up to Blue Kettle’s nose, maybe. They were standing in front of a lodge half-buried in the ground. It was covered in old sleeping bags and deerskins and something with more hair, even, under the rest. Something older. Blue Kettle slung Jim Doe’s blanket off his shoulders, onto the lodge, then peeled his own shirt off, stepped out of his boots. Looked to Jim Doe.

“You can take your pants off or not,” he said. “Fuck if I care.”

He took his off, and stepped through the flap.

Jim Doe stood alone in the stomped-down grass for a few breaths, then, suddenly unsure where he was anymore—Lydia? Kansas? the twentieth century?—he stepped out of his jeans, into the lodge.

It was black in there like ink. And thick. And there were more people in there than just Blue Kettle and himself. The shapes of other old men glistened when the boy outside hooked the flap open, spooned another hot rock in. Blue Kettle had the water in a tall, plastic pitcher. There was a tin ladle in it. He used the ladle to drip water onto the rock. It hissed. One of the old men coughed and coughed. And then the tin ladle made the rounds, from right to left. Before the old men drank, they splashed some on the ground. Someone put a bundle of cedar or sage or something on the hot rock. Jim Doe held his mouth close to the ground, just to breathe. Four times he thought he couldn’t take it anymore, and four times, he did. On the fifth, though, he pushed open the flap, rolled out, into a pair of jeans. Maybe his own.

The boy was leaning on his forked stick.

“Pretty damn hot, yeah?” he said.

Jim Doe coughed, the outside air like ice in his lungs.

The boy shrugged, said that this was when they stuck the thermometer up his ass, like a turkey in the oven. “Indian Thanksgiving,” he said.

Jim Doe was looking at Martha in the window, though.

“You’re leaving now, aren’t you?” the boy said, behind him.

Jim Doe nodded.

The boy shrugged again. “They said you were,” he said. “That it was time.”

“I don’t know—” Jim Doe started. “How should I thank them?”

The boy smiled, straightened his arm into his loose pocket.

“Take this off their hands,” he said. “They don’t know what to do with it.”

It was a set of keys braided onto a piece of leather. Pontiac. The round one for the trunk was broken off.

The boy hooked his chin at the barn up by the road, then wouldn’t look at Jim Doe anymore. Just the rocks, the earth around them baked dry, cracking open.

Jim Doe walked to the barn.

In it, golden with hay dust, was the LeMans.

The key fit.

Jim Doe started it.

In a steel thermos on the passenger seat was chicken soup. It was still hot. There was a twist of tobacco hanging from the rearview by a red string. Like an air freshener.

Jim Doe touched it, set it spinning, then backed out, to the edge of the house almost. He leaned out the window to the boy.

“Which way was he going?” he said.

“Who?”

“The other one.”

“To hell if he don’t change his ways,” the boy said, smiling with his eyes, and Jim Doe pulled away, into Kansas, or wherever he was. He needed a shower, after the sweat. But it felt good, too. Clean.

He thumbed through Agnes’s envelope as he drove. All that was missing was three-ninety from the seventeen hundred. For bail. Which he was now jumping. He hesitated at the blacktop—north, or south—and then turned right. North. Into the clouds.