The Innocents (20 page)

“We’re making inquiries.”

“You ask me and I’d look at those damn Born Losers people,” Wash said. “Folks say that them and Fannie Hathcock are thick as thieves. I’d raid that damn place and put that bitch in jail till she done repent.”

“Good to see you, Mr. Jones,” Lillie said. “Sorry for your loss.”

“Get that bitch,” he said. “Y’all go get that fucking bitch.”

Lillie opened the Jeep door and Rose called out, wanting to know who that weird man was talking to Mommy. Wash Jones took two more steps forward, his heated breath hell on earth.

“You didn’t think I could do that to my Milly,” Wash Jones said. “Did you?”

•   •   •

A
nna Lee had been painting when Quinn came over, getting the old Victorian ready to sell, since eight bedrooms and six baths was a little too much house for a single woman and a three-year-old girl. She’d been in love with the house since they were kids, Quinn always calling it the old spook house, the place reminding him a great deal of the mansion on the
Addams Family
.

“My mom has Shelby in Tupelo for the day,” Anna Lee said, wiping the flecked paint from her eyelashes. “They were going to the Buffalo Park to see the zebras and then have lunch at the mall. Any excuse for Momma to leave Jericho.”

“What’s your excuse?” Quinn said. “Three days in Memphis is a record.”

“Getting Shelby settled,” she said. “You know Luke got her a spot at Hutchison?”

“And who’s paying for that condo in Germantown?”

“It’s best for everybody,” Anna Lee said. “We’ve agreed to rotate custody every week. Shelby gets to live in the same place. When he’s there, I’ll be back in Jericho. It’ll really keep any ugliness away from her and away from us.”

Anna Lee had opened all the windows and the back door of the
house, the smell of paint fumes still pretty strong from the old master bedroom she’d shared with Luke. It was hot without the AC and she wore a pair of small cutoff jeans and an old
Dukes of Hazzard
T-shirt. She’d cut off the sleeves and hemline, showing off her coppery skin and tiny blonde hairs along her arms and stomach.

“I haven’t slept in a while,” Quinn said. “Hard to think straight.”

“Y’all got anything new?” she said, walking up to him, placing her long arms around his neck. Her skin smelled of sunshine and sweat.

“You know, the bikers bonded out.”

“But you still think they did it?” she said. “Or were at least involved?”

“With their history in this town?” Quinn said. “You bet.”

“But they’re younger,” she said. “Not the ones your dad used to run with.”

“Couple old-timers left,” Quinn said. “I think they drink more than make trouble. And, to be exact, Jason never rode with the Losers as much as he was coerced.”

“His Peter Fonda phase?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Something like that.”

Quinn kissed Anna Lee hard and long on the mouth. She was a strong kisser and dug her long nails into the back on his neck. She let go after a long moment, paintbrush dripping mineral spirits on the floor, and walked off to shut the back door. Without a word, she passed Quinn as she stripped off her T-shirt and tossed it on the landing, walking upstairs to one of the many bedrooms.

Quinn followed.

It was rough and sweaty for a long while until they both lay on top of the pressed white sheets, cooling off, a fan spinning overhead while they caught their breath. She lay her head on Quinn’s chest, the strawberry blonde hair now loose from the bun and splayed across him.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “After I finish up the master and hand over the keys to the realtor, it will be my week in Memphis. OK?”

Quinn didn’t answer. He took a long deep breath, watching the ceiling fan spin, rocking and squeaking off balance.

“I knew what you’d say,” Anna Lee said. “You’d offer us the farm, maybe even moving in with your momma for a while, if it didn’t look right to people. But that’s too hard. Doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. And Hutchison is a great school for Shelby. Tibbehah County isn’t the best place to get an education.”

Anna Lee’s arm crossed over his stomach, Quinn listening while he smoothed down the golden hairs and felt her breathing against him. She had lots of tiny freckles across her back and shoulders.

“It’s not forever.”

“But Luke’s paying?” Quinn said.

“He offered,” she said. “And I wasn’t in a spot to turn him down.”

“I don’t like it.”

“You do what you can for your kids,” Anna Lee said. “Someday that’ll make sense to you.”

Quinn carefully pulled away her arm, stretched his legs, and got up from the bed. He found his pants, belt still through the loops, and his pair of cowboy boots. Anna Lee was silent, reaching for the covers, pulling them over her naked body.

Quinn slipped into his jeans, and boots, walked to the dresser for his gun and his badge. He left without saying another word.

P
ull off right over there,” Coach Mills said.

“Where?” Nito asked.

Coach Mills, not feeling comfortable in the passenger seat, pointed to a dirt road off the main highway that led up to a muddy pond and an old barn falling in on itself. Nito turned, dust kicking up behind them, hard sunlight crisscrossing through tree branches growing wild and untouched. Nito pulled into the little space by the barn and parked, the hot engine making ticking sounds. It was nearly one, cicadas making so much damn noise it was hard for a man to think. Coach Mills wiped his sweaty face and wondered why the hell did he have to look out for every damn soul in Tibbehah County.

He’d already taken off fourth and fifth period to get all this shit straight. He’d have to be back by three, get to a meeting with the assistants, and then on the field for warm-up and stretch by three-thirty. He
had three days to prep for Holly Springs. He didn’t come home with a goddamn V and the season just might be shot. You had to get your mind right, focus on what was important.

“OK,” Nito said. “Ain’t no one gonna see us now. We straight? What’s up?”

“Ordeen’s worried someone may have seen you riding around with that Jones girl.”

“So what?”

“The police are gonna try and fry your ass for that,” he said. “They’re looking for someone—anyone—and Nito boy, you ain’t exactly chamber of commerce president these days.”

“I didn’t do nothin’,” Nito said. “I was ballin’ the bitch. But, hell. So what? Since when’s that illegal?”

“Just don’t look good, son.”

Nito leaned back in his driver’s seat, this car a lot plainer and less flashy than the blue one Coach always saw him drive. This one just a plain old high-polished white with standard wire wheels and bad tires.

“I just got one of you boys out of trouble and don’t want to see you getting mixed up in this shit,” Coach said. “This ain’t something I can just make disappear like I do for my other boys.”

“You and Ordeen sure getting tight,” Nito said, grinning with those silly-ass gold teeth, a big gold cross hanging on his neck encrusted with fake diamonds. “You done tole Ordeen that I was some kind of mental defect. Crazy as Kanye.”

“Boy.” Coach stared at him, tilting his head. “What the fuck you talking about?”

“Nothin’, man,” Nito said. “Shit.”

Coach Mills felt a little tic under his eye, trying to keep it all together with all Nito’s too-familiar talk, calling him ‘man,’ back-talking, and
not doing what he said to do. Maybe that’s why Nito never made it as a starter. Coach had been trying to get his mind straight all week, keep focused on the task at hand, the damn game this weekend, and not worry about distractions. It was just like Vince Lombardi said: “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.” He just wished he could help Nito make the right moves. Coach had been mentoring the boy since he was nine years old.

“You remember how I took care of you and your momma?” Coach said.

“Yeah.”

“You say, ‘Yes, Coach.’”

“Yes, Coach.”

“Y’all didn’t have two sticks to rub together,” Coach said. “Who bought you groceries? Got your momma out from working that life down at the Golden Cherry? Got you into that football camp at Ole Miss when you weren’t even ten?”

“Coach Bud Mills.” Nito lolled his head on the headrest and looked right in his eye. “Jericho’s Citizen of the Fucking Year.”

Coach snorted, folding his arms over his big belly, ketchup stains from lunch dripped all over the blue golf shirt. “What we discuss between us is personal,” he said. “Remember that. Make jokes, but what we say is between us.”

Nito grinned. “Just like the old days.”

“What the hell’s that mean?”

“Don’t try and play me, Bud,” Nito said. “I’m not that cute little boy no more. I’m a grown-ass man.”

The cicadas went wild again and Coach felt a coldness spread across his back and up his neck. He knew that feeling, his damn mind messing with him, working on that distraction like it was a piece of meat in
his teeth, that fatigue that could make him start making mistakes, keep his mind off the game. The will to win was nothing, it was the will to prep that won the damn game. Distractions. Lazy-ass kids who didn’t have any appreciation or respect. They didn’t know what it’s like to be a man, the pressures and tension that can build up in you like a gosh-dang Hawaiian volcano.

“You just keep yourself out of trouble, Nito,” Coach said. “Maybe go on up to Memphis for a while. Leave town till everything gets right. I only want the best for you, son.”

Nito leaned forward, cranking the car, taking a few times before the engine turned over. “Ain’t no making this right, man.”

“Just take me back to my car,” Coach said. “And don’t you ever ‘Hey, man’ me again. I’m Coach Mills, not some damn black you jive around with down in the Ditch.”

“Yes, sir, Coach.”

“Did anybody at all see you with that girl?” Coach said. “’Cause I don’t want to see your black ass end up in jail like Ordeen. Folks would try to make something of it, like they did with that Arab boy.”

“Naw, man.” Nito reversed the Impala, hit the dirt road, and knocked it into drive, kicking up lots of dust. Shafts of light and darkness scattering across his deep-black face. “Only Milly knew we knock boots. Unless she bragged how good she got it.”

“Better be damn sure,” Coach said. “Wild talk can kill a man faster than a bullet.”

•   •   •

D
id you really have to drag him behind y’all’s bikes?” Fannie said.

“You said you wanted a show,” Lyle said. “So, what the hell. You got a fucking show.”

“I wanted a distraction,” Fannie said. “A little protest of scooters. I guess I can’t complain. It worked for a while. The damn vultures stayed camped out at the Gas & Go for a week and left us alone. But now they know where the girl worked. And some damn idiot at the sheriff’s office told the
Commercial Appeal
that I was absolutely a person of interest. I can’t get a helluva lot of horny truckers to walk past those live cameras to see some nice young snatch.”

“What’s the world coming to, Fannie?”

It was midday, hot as hell outside but cold and dark in Vienna’s. Two girls in bras and panties sat on the stage checking their cell phones. Fannie looked up from behind the bar and snapped her fingers. “Dance,” she said. “Get up there and shake your asses.”

“Ain’t no one here,” said a white girl with purple hair. She popped her gum.

“Do I look like I give a shit?” Fannie said, shaking her head. The music from the unseen DJ filling up the big, barnlike room. The girls dropped their phones and started to circle the poles as Fannie leaned forward into the bar and Lyle. “You know what happened to that Muslim boy? Sammi?”

“Don’t know,” he said. “Don’t care. I still think he’s guilty as hell. How does it look that Sam the Sham was the last one to see that girl alive? You know, this country is filled with terrorist cells just waiting for the damn Ayatollah-Assahola or whoever to start jabbering on about Allah’s Will. Am I right?”

“Just how far did you get in school, Lyle?”

“Fuck you, Fannie,” Lyle said. “How about we just don’t talk about this mess and you pass me a cold beer? I’ve been riding all day and the inside of my mouth tastes like a dirty cat box.”

Fannie reached into the long cooler and brought out a cold
Budweiser, cracking the top and laying it down. Without him even asking, she poured him a shot of Jack on the side. “If I were you, I’d just get on my bike and keep on riding,” she said. “This shit show can’t last forever.”

“That’s what I should do,” he said. “But how often do I ever do what I should?”

“They don’t want you anyway,” Fannie said. “That bull dyke sheriff won’t sleep until they get me before a grand jury making me seem like a goddamn Jezebel Lizzie Borden. You know, she wants her entire case to lead back to me. You should’ve seen the way she looked at me when she busted down the door to Vienna’s. The top of her lip was slick with sweat, she was so damn excited, heated up with the idea.”

“All I know is that I never touched that little girl,” Lyle said. “How about you?”

Fannie reached for her gold butane lighter and fired up the three burners, turning that cigarillo around in the flame. “Does that really seem like my style?”

“This coming from a woman who keeps a steel hammer in her purse,” Lyle said. “Christ Almighty.”

•   •   •

E
very day Nikki woke up, she prayed that it had all been some kind of rotten dream, some kind of bad liquor or fever from eating the fish tacos at the El Dorado. But, instead, she’d walk the trailer half-asleep, fetching Jon-Jon his bottle and turning on the news to find Milly Jones just about everywhere. There wasn’t an hour went by that some news crew didn’t come knocking on her door, wanting to know the inside story of Milly, their friendship, and who might have set her best friend in the world on fire like that. Nikki would refuse to talk and try and
close the door, but, damn, if they didn’t get tricky, push that microphone in her face, realizing they’d been taping her the whole time. They’d say they only wanted to know the real Milly, make their viewers understand the tragedy that had taken place in Mississippi. They even had a graphic for it.
TRAGEDY IN
MISSISS
IPPI
on Fox News, the morning news blonde downright giddy when a new piece of the puzzle slipped out:
Bikers Rally Against Muslim Suspect
,
Strip Club Owner a Person of Interest
,
Dead Girl’s Father Speaks
. It went on from that, day to day.

Milly had it right. Run, run, run until your car didn’t have no more gas.

She’s been so damn struck by the horror of what happened that it took her a week to go through the mess Milly had given her. Most of it didn’t make a damn bit of sense. A lot of her journal pages seemed like something out of a ninety-nine-cent romance novel, names changed to protect the guilty. She’d written the thing like a movie of the week:
Young Cheerleader Hits the Skids
,
Young Brother Takes His Own Life
, both growing up in a
House Filled with Violence
. But what got her was the continual mention of a man Milly just called The Devil. The Devil had entered Brandon’s life. The Devil forced his hand on that twelve-gauge that day, making sure that he left the earth with the shame he felt. But who was The Devil? What had scared Milly so damn much that she wouldn’t tell her best friend? Nikki had tried and tried to get that old phone, the one Milly said was Brandon’s, to work. But if she found out what Milly had known, what the hell would she do with it? Nikki didn’t care to be doused in gasoline and left to walk some lonely old road.

So day to day, she’d stayed in the dark house with her baby. It was cool out from all that heat. At night, she’d go to the Piggly Wiggly and get some groceries. Sometimes, her momma would stop by, her face
showing shame for the filth her daughter was living in, begging her to come on back home and take her sister’s room. She said these trailers weren’t meant for any decent white person to live in. Damn, she was sick of it.

After she tucked Jon-Jon back in for his nap, she returned to the chair by the television. Wash Jones himself on CNN standing at the foot of the bridge close to where Milly had been set on fire. He wore one of those T-shirts she’d seen around town. A high school picture of Milly with photoshopped angel wings and the dates of her birth and death. “I just want to thank everyone for the kindness and love they shown our family. And I want to thank the sheriff’s office here for all the hard work they’ve done on Milly’s case. But it’s been two weeks now since my daughter got set aflame and I don’t believe we’re any closer to getting justice than the night she died. I beg that if anyone knows anything to please speak out. My daughter can’t rest until we get out the truth.”

Nikki shut off the television, sitting in silence, the hum of the AC unit buzzing under a cracked window. Everything was so dark. The room a strewn mess of baby clothes and bags from Sonic, open cartons of Chinese from Panda Express. Nikki didn’t know the last time she’d taken a shower, wearing the same cheerleading camp tee from two days before.

She had to get up.

She had to do something.

The slam of a car door startled her. She heard footsteps crunch on the gravel outside, and the loud knocking started her heart racing. The baby started to cry.
God damn it.
When the hell would these people leave her alone?

She peered through the blinds into the white-hot light and saw the face of Nito Reece. Nito tilted his head, knocking harder, smiling with
his big gold teeth. “What’s up, Nikki girl?” he asked. “You gonna let me in or what?”

•   •   •

Y
ou can stay here as long as you like,” Caddy said, letting Sammi into one of the minicabins behind the barn. “There are fresh towels in the bath. You can wash what you like in the machines right next door. We have a breakfast in the barn every morning. Help yourself to what you need in the commissary.”

“What’s that?” Sammi said.

“Big metal building where we keep the pantry.”

The boy looked terrible. One of his eyes had swollen shut, there were bandages over both arms and deep cuts and scrapes across his neck and face. When he spoke, there was a slight wheezing sound from the two broken ribs. Those bastards had really worked him over.

“This is a church?” Sammi said.

“Of a kind.”

“You people aren’t going to try and make me a Christian,” Sammi asked. “Are you? I go to mosque every week in Oxford.”

“Nope,” Caddy said. “That’s not what we do. We’re not those people.”

“What people?”

“People who make judgments,” Caddy said. “The man who founded The River wanted it open to everyone. We had a Buddhist family from Vietnam stay here for the last six months. They arrived Buddhists and they left Buddhists. Although they really did seem to like some of the old-time gospel music. It was a real kick to hear them sing ‘Blessed Assurance’ with those accents.”

Sammi followed her into the one-room cabin, a small bathroom in
the rear. A bed, a dresser, an old school desk, and a bookshelf loaded down with Christian books and paperback novels. She’d also stocked the shelf with books from C. S. Lewis, Thich Nhat Hanh, Zane Grey, and Eudora Welty. Sammi laid a gym bag down and took a seat on the edge of the bed. “I’m not a villain,” he said. “A bad guy.”