All the Beautiful Sinners. Stephen Graham Jones
Agnes, the act of cooking would remind her of Gentry, remind her that she was just cooking for herself now. So people weren’t going to let her cook for a while.
“I should have been there,” he said.
Agnes was still studying the food. “Tom carried a gun, Joe. Because he expected somebody to shoot at him someday. He always used to say that. I’m just glad it wasn’t anybody from town. Anybody we know.”
Jim Doe nodded.
“He won’t get away with it,” he said. “I won’t let him.”
Agnes smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “But, Joe. Let the state police handle this. Walter Maines said—”
“Tom never hired Walter Maines or Bill McKirkle when it was that or the Air Force, Agnes. Or worse.”
“He told your dad he would take care of you,” she said.
Jim Doe didn’t say anything. His mouth was too full. And then a pair of headlights washed across the back of the kitchen curtains, and for an instant he’d never expected, he saw Agnes as she must have been when Tom Gentry married her. As a bride. A young woman waiting for her husband to come home again, like at the end of every other normal, ordinary day. It was the way she held her head to the window. Like those were his headlights. Like none of this was real, like everything was going to be all right.
It wasn’t Walter Maines at the door, though, with a trophy. Or Bill McKirkle. Either would have been better.
It was Benjamin Donner. Terra’s father.
There was just a screen between him and Jim Doe now. And they weren’t at the station anymore.
Jim Doe looked back at Agnes, held his hand up for her to stay there, then stepped out onto the porch.
“Ben,” he said.
His hat was back on his head already.
“How’d I know you’d be out here?” Benjamin Donner said.
Jim Doe shrugged. “It’s not what you’re thinking,” he said.
“You mean you and my underage, only daughter?” Benjamin Donner asked.
Jim Doe nodded like he had to, and when Benjamin Donner came back it was with the backside of his thick forearm. It caught under Jim Doe’s chin and pressed him up against the weathered clapboard of the front of Gentry’s house.
He could have stopped him, probably. But he didn’t. His pistol was still on his hip.
“Ben,” he said as best he could, one of his hands on Benjamin’s sinewy wrist, the other on his elbow. So his chin wouldn’t have to support all the weight.
Benjamin was just staring at him.
Jim Doe’s hat was brim-down on the porch. The wind pushed it to the edge, then it cartwheeled off. Benjamin looked up at Jim Doe’s hair. It wasn’t regulation. By about three months.
Benjamin laughed again.
“Just like him,” he said.
The longhair.
“You probably knew him, right?” he said.
And then Jim Doe saw it, over the padded shoulder of Benjamin’s coveralls: the dome light of Benjamin’s truck glowing on. The cab was milling with people, three at least. And there were more shapes muttering in the bed. In Texas. Where they’d chased all the Indians out a century ago, and killed all their horses just to make it stick, then sent the great-grandsons sons of the cavalrymen out a century later, to collect the bones on the weekends, sell them in town by the truckload, for soap to wash themselves with.
“Ben,” Jim Doe said, no breath. “You don’t—Terra. It’s not what you thi—”
Benjamin pushed forward, choking off the rest.
“Don’t you goddamn tell me what I think,” he said, his lips not involved at all.
Jim Doe made himself breathe, breathe, but still: his hand found the butt of his gun.
“Listen, you’re assaulting a—” he started, then Agnes cut him off.
She was standing beside Benjamin, holding the screen door open with her hip. Gentry’s quail gun was nestled behind Benjamin’s ear. A Browning 16 gauge.
“Ben,” she said. “Go home.”
Benjamin stared at Jim Doe for long moments, then finally let him slide down the wall.
“Agnes,” he said. “You of all people—”
“Ben,” Agnes said. “I’m saving your worthless life here. For Magritte.”
She hadn’t taken the gun off him yet.
When Jim Doe slid the leather catch off his hammer, Agnes shook her head no.
“You too,” she said. “Inside.”
Jim Doe looked out into the darkness, at the truck, the men waiting for him, all the dry, abandoned places they knew where nobody would ever look, and then he backed inside.
Agnes came in when Ben’s truck was gone.
She was crying. Finally.
She went to the cigar box Gentry had always kept on the shelf, by the outdated encyclopedias Sarah and Lisa had plagiarized for all their book reports. She brought it to the table. There was seventeen hundred dollars in it, in an envelope with her name on it, an envelope she was using again, now.
She held it out across the table for Jim Doe.
“Take it,” she said. “You’re right. The only way they’ll . . . not be like that is if you catch him. And you know if Bill and Walter find him, God. Tom would have wanted him to stand trial, Joe. James.”
“I’ll pay it back,” Jim Doe said.
Agnes smiled.
“No you won’t,” she said. “Just come back alive. For Tom.”
Jim Doe looked back at her once, not saying anything, then pushed the door open onto the night, stepped out into it.
FOUR30 March 1999, Kalvesta, Kansas
He was throwing up in the ditch now. Amos. The half-digested pills rolling in the dust like punctured ticks, spilling his blood. He was screaming too, a thin line of snot connecting him to the ground, trying to pull him in, under. He raised his head, held his hands over his eyes, but the yellow jacket was there, burned into the backside of his lids. The man in it was holding a long metal pole.
He set a fire in the ditch with the lighter from his dashboard, and he drove. Maybe the fire would slow the fireman down. Maybe all of Kansas would burn. He poured his Nyquil out the vent window and it clung to the side glass for as long as it could, beading thick against the felt weather-stripping and finally clumping over, into the void behind him. Texas. Oklahoma. Kansas.
What was the metal pole for? He’d never had a metal pole before.
He had to find a drugstore. This far gone, even straight morphine would do. He would shoot it into his tearduct if he had to, then let the numbness spread out from there. It would be the opposite of crying.
He drove, and drove, and then on one of the turns on 156 the front passenger side tire went for the second time in two states and that was almost it, he was almost over, but then the road on the passenger side of the car banked up for him suddenly, so the car could lean against it instead of shooting off into the ditch, the telephone poles, the fences. Something always saved him.
But the spare. He couldn’t get it—the children were lying on it. It would interrupt them to open the trunk. To see him frantic like this. It would scare them.
So he drove on the rim again, one side of the car hooked