All the Beautiful Sinners. Stephen Graham Jones
walked past the car like it wasn’t his, like he could trick it, then crept up again, on the driver’s side. The same. He settled into the seat. In the cardboard back of the glove compartment were two things: a black comb, with the teeth getting thinner and thinner towards the end, like piano keys sound, and a set of keys tagged WHITE. They fit the door and the ignition and the trunk. He wired the ignition back in for them—because it looked good to have keys, especially with out-of-state plates—and screwed the backrest of the backseat in all the way too, because he could just use the key on the trunk lid now, not have to go in the back way anymore.
It took forty-two minutes to get it all done, and then the on-ramp for 20 was right in front of him. He took it, flew across the flat land, to 87 heading north.
South of Plainview, though, he saw the sign—Nazareth—and then the fireman rising up from the yellow stripes in his rearview. He was chasing him, his footfalls heavy enough to send great clumps of asphalt up into the night, where they became birds.
“I’m White,” he said into the mirror. “You don’t know me.”
Maybe it would work.
He had found him before, though.
But Castro County. It was historical, where it had all started.
He walked through its stores, looking for something. He wasn’t sure what. Just looking. It was almost familiar. He smiled at the girl with the normal teeth as he lifted the chocolate bar. Not that he would eat it, of course. Do that to his teeth, his gums. He just wanted her to see him take it, was all. Because then she wouldn’t see the bottle of Nyquil tucked into his rear pocket, upside down.
She smiled back.
“You kin to that deputy?” she asked.
He narrowed his eyes at her, started to tell her she didn’t know him, that he was White, but then walked out the front door instead. The children were waiting for him in the car. Just staring.
“Soon,” he told them, and closed it again, and then on the way out of town he passed a border patrol going the other way, and watched in his rearview for the sick-green car to turn around, follow him. Call the helicopters in and describe him on their radio. He slowed down for it to catch him. Out at the church, one of them finally did. It was a sheriff car. He smiled. This had been coming for four states now—all the cops gathering in his rearview, finally balling themselves up into one fat one, with heavy hands.
On his shirt, the brass plaque on his shirt pocket: Gentry.
“Got some ID?” he said, because he somehow couldn’t hear the children through the metal, chanting A-mos, A-mos, A-mos.
It was his first time to kill in two years.
He pulled the trigger again after the cop was dead, just to dance him around, and the shadow he threw dying like that had coattails, a helmet, and this was so right.
Pulling away, he leaned down to his side mirror, to see his teeth.
They were all there. He was Amos again, Amos Pease.
He smiled, turned the radio up with both hands, the right dragging the left across the dials, the handcuff chain glinting between. By Oklahoma his front passenger side tire was throwing sparks. He could see it reflected in the shiny sides of cars he passed at night. He liked it.
THREE25 March 1999, Dimmit, Texas
Gentry’s funeral glittered with badges. Jim Doe hid behind his sunglasses for most of it, like everybody else, and tried not to look in the part of the cemetery that held his sister’s headstone.
It should have been him here, instead of her.
And now it should be him instead of Gentry.
And everybody knew it.
Maybe it could have all played out different, even, with another Indian on the stop. Maybe it wouldn’t have exploded into Gentry being dead.
Agnes, Gentry’s widow, sat in the front row, her hands in her lap. Her two daughters were to either side of her. The sky above them was empty. If he tried—and it was the only good place to go, really—Jim Doe could remember driving back from the station house finally, after twenty-eight hours, how in each driveway along Bedford there had been a person standing, watching the clouds surge, the leading edge wisping up the grey face, to where it was darker still. They didn’t know about Gentry yet, then. Jim Doe had waved, his hand slight against the chrome of his mirror.
And the blue Impala. Its junk plate had turned up in a trashcan in Dumas. Dumas was in a straight line north from Nazareth into the panhandle of Oklahoma, all thirty-seven miles of it. Then the road opened up onto the flat grasslands of Kansas, the corn and the wheat and the sorghum swaying like a single, beaten sheet of gold.
The highway patrol had ferried two grim-faced Texas Rangers—Bill McKirkle and Walter Maines—up to the Texhoma, where 54 crossed, and Jim Doe could almost see them standing there on either side of the blacktop, the butts of their rifles angled into their thighs, their helicopter pilot sitting his bird down in the pasture behind them, waiting for the show, his toothpick rolling from one corner of his mouth to the other. It never came, though, the show. The longhair slipped them, had maybe sidestepped off the Llano Estacado into Oklahoma proper, where his skin and hair wouldn’t give him away.
After the funeral, Jim Doe stood, first on one leg, then the other, rolling the brim of his hat and letting it out again. Agnes was still there, the girls gone back to the house. Through the chain link of the cemetery, framed by the white brick of the school, third-graders were sliding on their slides and rushing through the air on their swings. Jim Doe didn’t remember ever looking over here when he had been in elementary.
“I’m sorry, Agnes,” he said.
She was standing at the edge of the grave.
When she didn’t turn her head up to him, he finally just left, hating that his truck was so loud, that he couldn’t at least give her some peace out there. She still wasn’t crying, was the thing. It scared him.
Five hours later he was on the other side of the school, dribbling a basketball into the slick concrete, shooting free throws. They made sense. But then Gentry’s oldest daughter Sarah was there.
“If you make ten in a row this time, will none of it have happened?” she asked. It wasn’t really a question, more just her showing him that his skull was made of glass, that she could look right in. She’d learned it from her mother.
Jim Doe looked over at her. She was four years older than him, had been in the homecoming court when he was still waiting to get his learner’s permit.
“Hey,” he said.
She nodded, took the bounce pass.
“They say he’s gone,” she said—the longhair. “Just . . . poof.”
Jim Doe chased her rebound down, held the ball between his hands.
“What about the video?” she asked.
“You can’t see anything.”
“Not now,” she said. “No. Not like it is.”
He shot. “You’ve been seeing too many movies, Sare.”
“They have to be based on something.”
“This is Castro County.”
“Jim.”
He looked to her. She had the ball now.
“It won’t bring him back either, you know,” he said, trying to use her line against her.
“It’s not him I’m worried about,” she said back, chest-passing the ball at him, hard, her thumbnails clicking together on the follow-through, her eyes fixed on him already.
He said it again after she was gone—it won’t bring him back—but