Authors: Ace Atkins
The Broken Places (40 page)
“I guess the entire town is waiting for me to turn to shit,” Caddy said. “Again.”
“That’s an awful thing to say,” Jean said.
“But true.”
“Yes,” Jean said, blowing cigarette smoke away from Caddy. “I guess it is true. But I know you won’t.”
“I wish you’d explain it to me.”
They sat together on their normal bench, watching Jason at the playground on Choctaw Lake. Everything at the lake was the same, and on the days and weeks following the tornado, they’d come there almost every afternoon. Caddy thought it strange how you could get ten miles from town and it was as if nothing had ever happened, the grounds along the lake still dotted in old oaks with branches filtering the gold afternoon light.
There had been so many funerals in town. Nearly one a day. The skinned-up trees that remained were filled with black ribbons. Out on the lake, she could fucking breathe.
“If I said Jamey Dixon didn’t change you, that you were coming for a change all along, what would you say?”
“I’d say that’s a bunch of crap, that Jamey did change me. Not his guidance or him being a man, but he gave me a stronger sense of faith and purpose. I’m not about to start building a shrine or wearing a hair shirt, but God, Momma, I loved that man.”
“I know.”
“And it’s not like you and Daddy,” she said. “He’s gone. I think that’s what rips the shit out of me. I won’t see him on this earth. I haven’t made sense of it all yet. I’ve heard from so many people telling me this was all God’s plan for me. If that’s the case, why couldn’t He have done it without all the shooting?”
“Maybe it’s a test.”
“Jamey gave up his life to protect me,” she said. “But I don’t believe it was God’s will. My God isn’t that cold.”
“I love you, baby.”
“I’ll get through it.”
“I know.”
“I hate it,” Caddy said, taking the cigarette from her mother’s fingers and taking a puff. “But I can do it.”
“I know.”
Jason crawled onto the balance beam, trying to cross over the sand trap, keeping his arms wide like an airplane, the chains holding up the log rocking and wiggling, the little boy smiling but unsure if he should take another step. Caddy waved him forward with a big forced smile that hurt her mouth.
“So now I plan on running a ministry out of a half-burned barn with no minister, no music, but a decent bit of money if we can ever find where it’s been scattered?”
“Wasn’t that sweet for that Mills boy to bring in two hundred like that?”
“I think he kept a thousand.”
“You don’t know that.”
Caddy shrugged, took a puff of the Kool, and handed it back to her mother. “What’s Quinn say about us moving to the farm?”
“He’s the one who asked us,” Jean said. “He wants us all out there.”
“Might bust up his sex life a bit.”
“Caddy.”
“You do know?”
“Yes.”
“But won’t say it.”
“It’s all over.”
“I don’t believe that,” Caddy said. “I don’t think things are ever over for Anna Lee and Quinn. It’s a sex thing.”
“Lord.”
Caddy shrugged.
“And now Luke is the town hero, and people don’t know what to make of Quinn,” Caddy said. “Will they really put him and Lillie on trial?”
“Looks that way.”
“He should have never come back here,” Caddy said. “I don’t understand it. We love to build up our idols and then just rip them down.”
She took back the extra-long cigarette, feeling herself choke back those black, horrid thoughts, seeing how it must have been for Jamey to be beaten and broken down and still come back for her and Jason, not stopping till a bullet from a coward up in the hills laid him down into the earth. She shuddered in the warm wind.
“Don’t think on it,” Jean said. “Just let your mind rest a bit.”
“I’m too young to have a cold bed, Momma.”
• • •
Quinn took the nights,
Lillie back on the days.
Jericho had a bandage on it. Homes with blue tarps for roofs, whole neighborhoods now neat and tidy trash heaps with cleared streets and lights shining on empty blacktop roads. The Town Square was pin neat; the buildings that had been broken apart were as if they never existed, swept clean to the foundation, a five-foot wooden fence covering the spaces from the sidewalks.
There were funerals. There were town meetings. There was a lot of finger-pointing and whispers. Johnny Stagg told the local newspapers he was shocked that one lawman could so callously gun down another. Rumors cropped up again about Lillie’s possible sexual orientation, as if that were the root of the matter.
Quinn drove the nights, thermos filled with black coffee and shotgun loaded in the rack of the Green Machine. He took Hondo with him, patrolling the roads, the county returning to the Mayberry of domestic violence, drug use, child endangerment, and roadhouse brawls. Quinn liked it better that way. He was tired of seeing the town walk around half awake and shell-shocked. At least the violence felt real again.
As the summer heat replaced the thunderstorms and the cool evenings, the blacktop baking even after the sun went down, Quinn often would find himself driving by Anna Lee’s place, seeing the old Victorian coming to shape again, the bedroom and kitchen adjoining the rest of the old house, windows being installed, roofers adding cover day by day. Sometimes there was a light on in the kitchen, and there was Luke at the table across from Anna Lee, their baby daughter between them in a high chair. Sometimes it looked like they were happy.
Early in the mornings, there’d also be light on at the Bundren Funeral Home—serving Jericho since 1956—and Quinn would park his truck and walk inside, taking a seat and helping himself to fresh coffee that was always on. And Ophelia would emerge from the back room, Quinn never bothering her while she worked, and she’d join him and they’d laugh and talk for a while out under the portico by the hearse. A weird feeling of them being awake while the whole town was still.
Quinn didn’t care to talk about the federal charges against him and Lillie. But he’d talk to Ophelia if she asked.
“It’s going to be a long fight.”
“How could they believe Stagg?” she asked.
“When I was out at that airfield, there was a lot of equipment out there,” Quinn said. “Looked to me like Stagg was trying to reopen the field. He’s greasing things statewide.”
“This is a hell of a convenient county.”
“And with me gone.”
“You won’t be gone.”
“Even if charges are dropped, I run for reelection in the fall,” Quinn said. “Stagg’s making his play.”
“And you’ll beat him,” Ophelia said. “There’s more good here than you think. The way people pulled together after the storm? Everyone in this town reached out to help folks. I see it here. That’s the gift. I see everything at its worst. I saw Caddy. I saw what she went through losing Jamey.”
“You called him Jamey.”
“I worked on him,” Ophelia said. “Did you know that?”
Quinn shook his head.
“I had to put him back together, working from photographs, not memory,” she said. “He became something else.”
“But he still killed your sister.”
“I don’t know,” Ophelia said, sighing. “Sometimes I don’t think he did, either.”
Ophelia walked Quinn out to his truck. The temperature was up in the eighties even after midnight. She had on a thin white cotton T-shirt and faded jeans, her hair pulled back in a ponytail to work on dead folks.
“You got a full house now,” she said.
Quinn opened his truck door. “I do.”
“What are you going to do with your nights when you and Lillie switch back?”
Quinn rested his hand against the door frame of the truck, the funeral home’s neon sign buzzing in the hot summer night. He shook his head. “Have any ideas?”
Ophelia smiled. “Several.”
• • •
For a complete list of this author’s books click here or visit www.penguin.com/atkinschecklist
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author gratefully acknowledges the following people for their help during the writing of this novel: the Lafayette County Sheriff’s Office, Sheriff Buddy East, Deputy Art Watts, and Deputy Dave Cullison; Jay Johnson, former USMC recon team leader; Grace Fisher and Superintendent Ernest Lee, Mississippi Department of Corrections; and Kristina Goetz,
Memphis Commercial Appeal
, for her singular narrative of the Smithfield, Miss., tornado.
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