All the Beautiful Sinners. Stephen Graham Jones

All the Beautiful Sinners

could hear it, couldn’t you?” the old man said, and when Jim Doe didn’t get it, the old man dropped to one knee, dipping his ear to the ground, the tips of his grey hair brushing the snow.

Jim Doe left him like that. Turned back to the car. With one of the teeth of his truck key he hissed the air out of all four of the Impala’s tires. The snow crunched as the radials settled down over it. They were all brand new, a matching set. At the front bumper, where the overflow hose ran, was a green-crusted hole. Radiator fluid, very clean. At the rear bumper, the tailpipe was cold, the inside scorched black.

But the trunk. Jim Doe looked at it for a long time, the wind swirling around his legs, then turned his face up to the gym.

He was here, the longhair.

Jim Doe palmed his wallet for a five—the seventeen hundred still bunched in the envelope in the truck—and gave it to the mother sitting her table at the door. She pulled hard on a cigarette, all the smoke rushing out of her mouth, into the haze inside.

“Who’s playing?” Jim Doe asked, nodding towards the stands.

“Funny,” she said, and gave him three dollars change. One of the bills had a sharp blue Colonel Sanders goatee drawn on George Washington. Jim Doe folded it into his wallet with the rest, let her stamp his hand with a red wagon wheel with one broken spoke, then stepped all the way in. The warm air stung his eyes and he blinked, blurring the crowd, smelling the dried saliva he always smelled at gyms, from people spitting on the floor, rubbing the soles of their shoes in it.

The longhair, though. That was all he was thinking, all he was trying to think.

He shook out a copy like the one he’d been taping up, but, as he was smoothing it, a group of four fifteen-year-olds slouched past, round-shouldered, their hands not so much buried in their pockets as thrust. Three of them had hair most of the way down their backs. The other was shaved bald, a tribal design tattooed into his scalp. He stared at Jim Doe, bared his teeth at the last possible instant, then passed. Jim Doe only flinched on the inside.

He turned back to the mother’s table.

“Yeah?” she asked, taking the flyer in in a glance, and not interested.

“Old man come through here?” Jim Doe asked. In defeat.

“He your grandpa?” she asked back, opening her till.

Jim Doe paid for the old man too. Didn’t ask why she’d let him through. To keep him out of the cold, probably.

The mother closed her metal box then pointed at the two doors leading up into the stands—where the old man had maybe gone. Jim Doe thanked her, walked across the cafeteria floor. For some reason he felt certain there was an institutional fork stuck in the ceiling tile thirty-four feet above him. Waiting for him. But if he looked it would fall into his eye, and then he’d have that to deal with.

He went back to the mother at the table again.

“There any other way out of here?” he asked.

“He’s probably just getting nachos or something, think?”

Jim Doe stood, scanning for a side door. Because the longhair was going to see the sheriff jacket, the pistol.

Jim Doe took the jacket off, folded it over his arm, on the side his pistol was on.

“What if there’s a fire?” he asked.

“I’ll come tell you personal,” the mother said back, and blew a line of smoke between them.

Jim Doe nodded thanks, eyeballed the one fire door in the cafeteria then made his way through the second set of doors with everybody else. The noise of the crowd rushed up the hall all around him. He stepped up onto the first ramp there was, to the gym floor, then stood against the rail like he was here for the game, nothing else. In Nazareth he would have tipped his hat back to show he was just him, not a Deputy. But he still didn’t have a hat.

The game was an Indian school and a white school. A replay of last year’s regional finals, the posters and signs said. There was fry bread in the air. During a free throw, when everybody was on the edge of their seat, leaning forward for him, Jim Doe turned around to catalogue faces but hadn’t gotten anywhere before they exploded up, screaming. He turned back to the game, felt more than heard the scoreboard click another Indian point up, and then, from the corner of his eye, an old Hysteria shirt eased past.

It didn’t even register for a full ten seconds—Def Leppard—but when it did he turned so fast he spilled a woman’s coke. It slung all the way into the first row. He tried to catch her popcorn, but there were too many kernels, too much space between his fingers. Everyone for five people deep was looking at them. At him. And Jim Doe just didn’t have time right now. He stuffed three dollars from his wallet into her hand and took long steps back down the ramp, made the fire door at a run. It was closed. He ran his fingers along the rod that drove into the cylinder, to keep it from ever slamming. It was cold, frosted over a bit, even.

Good.

And he wouldn’t have gone out the main door. There was a knot of white people there, real churchgoers, all going the other way with their foam hands and plastic hats. One of them had a balloon feather tied to the back of his head, even, and lipstick under his eyes.

Jim Doe turned away, back to the hall, followed it into the lightless bowels of the high school. His heart was hammering in his shirt; the catch was off the hammer of his pistol. Soon he was running across the low-pile carpet, rounding corners onto rows and rows of lockers. But always there was sound just ahead of him. And then it was all around.

He followed it to the practice gym.

The lights had been hit but weren’t warm yet, were still wriggling worms of heat far above.

Below them, at half court, was what looked like two people at first, but then it was just one. He was thrashing around on the floor like he was hurt. Or a seizure. He tried to stand but fell to his knees, tilted his head back, his hair touching his heels behind him, and screamed an animal scream, his voice ragged at the edges, booming over the hardwood.

Jim Doe held his hands over his ears, trying to make sense here, his mouth open too, like he was going to scream, or needed to. The only handle he could find on the situation was the handle of his pistol.

He drew it when the lights finally came on all at once, blinding him, and then held it loose before him, shielding his eyes with his other hand, angling the barrel in the general direction of half-court, and didn’t realize what a mistake that was until the folded, metal chair came up to meet his face, and the last thing he knew was his pistol, spinning on its side across the waxed floor, and then he didn’t know anything anymore. Just what a soft place the world was. How little it hurt to fall.

SEVEN1 April 1999, Kalvesta, Kansas

Walter Maines toed over a shingle lying by the gas pumps. There was nothing under it. He cut his eyes up to McKirkle, watching the street. Their dull Texas Ranger badges were flapped open on their shirts, in case anybody asked. But nobody would. You could tell they were law from fifty feet out.

The kid, Taylor Mason, had been discarded in the pit of the first bay. The slag hammer was buried in his forehead. There were no prints on the spring-handle, either. Taylor Mason’s eyes were open, as if locked on the hammer, still not believing it. “Love tap,” McKirkle had called it, the two of them standing in the dark of the bay. Maines had cocked his head over in agreement, spit down into the drain.

The blood on Tayler Mason’s face was already black. Little ants crawling across it, even though it was too late in the season for ants. This was Kansas, though. Fucking Wizard of Oz. Anything could happen.