The Forsaken (8 page)

“Come on in,” Stagg said. “We can fix you up a plate of whatever you like.”

“No, sir,” said the man. “I got to get home to Oxford. My wife would chew my ass if I get in too late.”

“How’d it go?” the Trooper said.

The man shrugged, wiping the rain off his short-clipped mustache. His receding hair plastered down on his head. “You got it?”

“Yes, sir,” the Trooper said. “Fuck, it’s why I’m here.”

The Trooper wandered off to a green Dodge pickup truck, saying he would never take an official vehicle off-duty, and opened up a passenger door and reached inside.

“Appreciate you making the trip,” Stagg said.

The man looked nervous and unfocused in the bright hot lights of his car. “I got to go.”

“Hold on, hold on.”

“Who’s inside?” the man asked.

Stagg just placed a finger to his lips and smiled.

The Trooper walked back to the men, carrying a rifle in a camouflage cover. He held it out in both hands as if presenting an official gift and waited for the other man. The other man hesitated for a bit, then took a breath and reached for it.

“Y’all got a warrant to search that dyke’s house?” the Trooper asked.

“Almost.”

“But y’all will take inventory of all them guns she collects?” Stagg said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Good deal,” Stagg said, grinning. “Sure is good seeing you.”

He shook the man’s hand and walked back to the hunt lodge to finish the second half of his sandwich.

W
hen Quinn walked into Mr. Jim’s barbershop the next morning, Luther Varner looked up from his copy of the
Daily Journal
and pronounced that rain was expected that afternoon, Ole Miss had screwed the pooch in the second half, and this country was still in the shitter. Mr. Jim was cutting the hair of Jay Bartlett, the esteemed mayor of Jericho, who was only six years older than Quinn and whose father had been mayor before him. Mr. Jim, a portly old man who’d served in Patton’s 3rd Army, glanced up from his work and wished Quinn a good morning. Bartlett didn’t say anything, looking to Quinn and then staring straight ahead at the TV on top of the Coke machine, the men checking out
The Price Is Right
, a special on celebrating Bob Barker’s ninetieth birthday.

“Barker must be doing something right,” Mr. Jim said. “Still got his own hair. Got good color and sense about him.”

“You know he works with all them animals?” Mr. Varner said, spewing smoke from the side of his mouth. “I heard he paid a million dollars to save an elephant.”

“Y’all ever watch anything else?” Quinn asked.

“Sometimes we watch
Days of Our Lives
.”

“Sometimes?” Quinn said. “Y’all been watching it every day since I was a kid.”

Luther Varner was rail-thin in dark jeans and a black T-shirt, his long, bony forearm proudly displaying a
Semper Fi
and laughing skull tattoos. He ashed the cigarette into his hand and walked over to the trash can to empty it. On the way back he shot a look at Quinn, tilting his head to Bartlett, before sitting back down.

“How you doing, Jay?” Quinn asked.

“Good.”

“How’d it go yesterday on the Square?”

“Fine,” Bartlett said, eyes never leaving
The
Price Is Right
. A screaming fat woman had just been given the chance to win a small economy car.

“Damn,” Luther said. “Don’t think she could get in that car. What you think, Jim?”

“Part of her could get in,” Mr. Jim said. “But the rest of her gonna have to hang out the window.”

Bartlett kept on staring at the television. Mr. Jim put down the scissors and picked up a set of clippers, taking the hair off Bartlett’s neck. Bartlett touched the part in his hair and fingered it off to the side, not being able to stand a moment that his hair wasn’t spot-on. Mr. Jim put down the clippers and removed the cutter’s cape from Bartlett’s chest, dusting the hairs off his shoulders and neck. “Ready to go.”

Bartlett reached into the pockets of his khakis and paid Mr. Jim. “Appreciate it.”

Quinn hadn’t moved. He simply nodded to Bartlett as he walked out, Bartlett only slightly returning the nod, something off and nervous about the man, as he passed and the door shut behind him with a jingle.

“That boy is sorrier than shit,” Luther said.

Mr. Jim motioned for Quinn to take a seat. He fit the cape around his neck, finding the number 2 spacer he always used for the top of Quinn’s head.

“He’s a politician,” Mr. Jim said. “It’s in his blood. Them people don’t think like decent people.”

“Guess I won’t expect his support this spring,” Quinn said.

“Hell with him,” Mr. Jim said, turning on the clippers, running the spacer over Quinn’s head. Luther Varner shook his head at the sorriness of the whole situation, as he lit up another long smoke and turned his head to see if that fat woman had picked out the right numbers for the car. Mr. Jim finished up with the spacer and adjusted the clippers for the back and side of Quinn’s head. Before he started, he launched into a coughing fit, turning his head and putting his hand to his mouth. Quinn and Luther didn’t mention it, as Mr. Jim didn’t want to discuss his illness.

He returned to the spinning chair as if it had never happened.

“I wasn’t asked to attend the ceremony on the Square yesterday,” Quinn said.

“Maybe they forgot?” Mr. Jim said, looking a bit more pale, breathing ragged.

“Bullshit.”

“The supervisors got down on me early,” Quinn said. “But I have to say I’m surprised by Jay Bartlett. His father was a decent man.”

“Oh, hell no he wasn’t, Quinn,” Luther said. “Bartletts always do for the Bartletts. Ain’t none of them ever stood for what’s right. They stand for what people want to hear.”

Mr. Jim held the clippers in his hand but hadn’t turned them on yet.

“You think that’s what people want to hear?” Quinn said. “You think it’s gone that far?”

Luther squinted his eyes in the smoke and shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice weathered and cracked like a good Marine. “I try and not listen to bullshit.”

“And if any of ’em bring it in here,” Mr. Jim said, “my hand gets a bit unsteady.”

“No one would have the guts to talk shit here,” Quinn said. “Not here
or at the VFW. What this town likes more than anything is standing back in the shadows and pointing fingers and talking about things they don’t know a damn thing about.”

“Ain’t that always the way?” Luther said. “When I got home in ’72, nobody was on the Square with a marching band and the damn key to the city. People who ain’t been in it, been in the shit flying around them, can’t wrap their heads around it.”

“The worst of it,” Quinn said, “is them stringing this thing out. They know exactly what they’re doing.”

“You deserve better than this county,” Luther said. “I hate to say it. Jericho is my home. But hell, man, you know it’s true. I know why you come back, glad to be a part of it, but I hope you’ll find your own place. Somewhere that people deserve a good man.”

Mr. Jim turned on the clippers and worked to keep Quinn high and tight. The whole haircut took less than three minutes. Quinn got up, reaching for his wallet, and Mr. Jim said there was no charge.

“How come?”

“’Cause you’ll go broke keeping that hair that short,” he said. “You know now that you’re out of the service, you can grow it any way you like?”

Quinn grinned at the old man who’d been a friend to his uncle and to his father and had given him his very first haircut. He shook his liver-spotted hand. “I appreciate what works,” Quinn said.

“You don’t say . . .” Mr. Jim said.

“Shit,” Mr. Varner said. “I hadn’t cut my hair different since ’65.”

“These days, you got more hair in your ears than on top.”

“Don’t bother me none,” Mr. Varner said. “Just pleased every day to see that old sun come up and not be among the dirt people. I hadn’t forgotten what that goddamn twister did to my truck.”

Quinn nodded at Luther. He’d been with the old man, helping the poor down in Sugar Ditch, when it hit.

Quinn grabbed his hat and coat from the rack and made his way to the glass door.

“It’s good to see you, Quinn,” Mr. Jim said, cleaning off his clippers and dropping his comb into the Barbicide. “Let me know when you get the new election posters. I’ll post them bigger than shit in the front window.”

•   •   •

“Did you
talk to him?”
Hank Stillwell asked.

Stillwell had stopped by the Jericho Farm & Ranch that morning, sitting out on the loading dock while Diane arranged sacks of feed, topsoil, and mulch. Wouldn’t be long until the spring planting would start and people would be buying their seeds and small plants. Winter was tough. People didn’t buy much when it was cold.

“We rode out to the site,” Diane said. “I told the sheriff everything that I recalled. He knows everything I know.”

Stillwell nodded, breathing in deep and hard through his nose. “Thank God.”

“Did you want something or did you just stop by to talk?”

“I could use a new union suit.”

“Inside,” Diane said. “Go down the third aisle, with the work pants. They’re down there.”

“You got honey?”

“From Tibbehah bees.”

“I’ll get that, too,” he said. “Y’all got a bit of everything here, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I appreciate what you did,” Stillwell said. “I know it was painful. Reaching back into those memories, that time. But I feel we owe it to Lori. Don’t you? Her having no end to her story. No sense of knowing. Don’t you want to know? I can’t die and leave this earth without knowing why and who. I feel like my insides are done eaten away.”

“Go on in and see if we got that union suit,” Diane said. “I’ll meet you inside. I got to finish stacking all this shit.”

“You’re a tough woman, Diane Tull.”

“I’ll meet you inside, Hank.”

The store was nearly out of Diamond dog food, the premium, not the stuff for the pups or the old dogs. They were overstocked with topsoil and nearly out of manure, although most people around here scoured the cow fields for their own manure. Not buying your manure being kind of a point of pride for most folks who worked their own land.

Diane finished stacking the sacks on wooden pallets and checking the inventory. She needed some more wheat-straw bales and could do with some more sacks of corn for deer, people loving to get those animals close and captive, square and dead in their sights. Diane wore an old Sherpa coat with Marlboro Lights in one pocket and all her keys in the other. All the keys she owned: to her home, to her farm, the Farm & Ranch, to the cattle and chicken houses, feeling like it weighed a ton.

Stillwell lay down a small bottle of honey and an XL union suit, bright red with buttons down the front and an opener for the backside. Diane added the purchases to the register. “You mix this stuff in your coffee and tea and you won’t get allergies come spring,” she said.

“What do you think he’ll do?” he asked. “Sheriff Colson?”

“He said he’d look into things.”

“That don’t mean shit,” he said. “How long people been saying that? God damn.”

“Maybe,” Diane said. “But it’s more than we had. You said you’d talked to Sheriff Beckett five years ago and he told you the whole thing was done and gone. Quinn Colson is an altogether different man.”

Stillwell’s face looked drawn, maybe more drawn than when he was drunk and hollow and passed out on her porch swing or slumped down in the seat of his old car. She finished ringing him up, and after he handed
back the change, she put his stuff in a sack and walked out with him to the loading dock. It was bright and cold. She could see her breath, and the cold air felt good on her face and down into her lungs. Everything kind of clean and new that morning.

“It ain’t right,” he said. “It ain’t fucking right. We got to make sense of things. Me and you.”

“You’re talking thirty-seven years ago.”

“You’re telling me that someone don’t know?” he said. “Someone saw something. Someone knows something. This county ain’t that big. Cowards keep shit to themselves.”

Diane put her hands in her coat pockets, feeling the keys deep on the right side. She gripped the heft of them and nodded to Stillwell, wanting the old man to just go the hell away. She’d done what she’d promised. What else did he want of her? She wished he’d just leave her the hell alone and let them both go back to living their own lives, down their own paths. She never invited him.

“Do you want to talk to Sheriff Colson?” Diane asked. “Maybe that would help you and him.”

“No, ma’am.”

“But what you told me,” she said. “Those are things he should know.”

“If there comes a time when that’s important,” he said, “I’ll do what’s needed.”

Diane lit up a cigarette and blew smoke into the crisp wind. “Can I ask you something?”

The old man spit and turned to her, waiting on the loading dock. A pickup truck turned in from the gates and drove up toward the Co-op. She wondered if Hank Stillwell had a job, had a woman, had anything in his wretched old life other than thinking about what happened to his daughter. It had seemed to become his main occupation, beyond any kind of obsession a normal person might have.

“What do you want to know?”

“Is it the truth you’re hoping to find?” Diane asked.

“Goddamn right.”

“Or is it what came later that bothers you?” Diane asked.

Stillwell swallowed hard, spit again, and seemed to stand up straighter. His breath came out in clouds as his face turned a bright shade of red. “I don’t study on that time much.”

“You don’t?” Diane said. “What happened doesn’t bother you?”

“Decisions were made and things were done,” Stillwell said. “People were upset. Things just got set in motion. I couldn’t stop it. Nothing I said could stop it.”

“It wasn’t right.”

“No, ma’am,” he said. “It was one of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen. I never wanted that. Never.” Stillwell held the brown paper bag tight in his arms, hanging there on the loading dock, as a black woman crawled out of the pickup and asked if they had any collard greens. Diane smiled and yelled back for her to come on in, before turning back and whispering to Hank.

“You know it will come out,” she said. “You can’t bring up one without the other.”

“If it helps learn who did this to you and Lori?” the old man said. “Fine by me.”

He hobbled down the loading dock step and walked over to an aging Harley. He threw a leg over the seat, kick-started the engine, and roared out of the gravel lot. Diane squashed her cigarette and went inside the loading dock to help the woman.