The Lost Ones (16 page)

“Are you drunk?”

“I just got back from church, doll,” he said. “I don’t drink on Sunday. I’m too damn hungover.”

She agreed, because she knew he wouldn’t leave, and soon they were up and away, with a good view of the fair, this one being about five times as big as the one over in Byhalia, looking across downtown Tupelo and over at Highway 45. There was a little corral down next to the Scrambler, where they set monkeys on the backs of dogs and let them race. The sign read banana derby.

“Elvis grew up over on the east side of town,” Donnie said. “You want, I’ll take you over to where he was born.”

“We shut down tonight,” she said. “We work all night and leave in the morning.”

“Where?”

“Bruce.”

“God help y’all.”

The Ferris wheel stopped, and they hung there at the high point, rocking in that passenger car for a moment. Donnie leaned in and placed his arm around her, studying her mouth and dark hair. Luz put a hand to his chest. He could tell she wanted to speak but didn’t know what to say. She just studied the horizon and little buildings, the car finally steadied.

“You tell Alejandro we need to deal soon or else the price goes up.”

“Are the guns safe?”

“Sure,” Donnie said. “But I don’t know for how long. Sheriff’s been asking about you. He says y’all connected to this fella Torres and his fat wife. They were selling kids on the Internet or some crazy shit. You know something about that?”

Luz shook her head.

“As soon as we’re settled at the next town,” Luz said, “we’ll come for the guns.”

“I want to see you.”

“I’m here.”

“Away from this shit.”

“Why?”

“You kind of left me in a precarious state, darlin’.”

The Ferris wheel kicked back on and rolled back down to the ground, passing that crazy-ass teenage shooter who was at the controls now. He looked like he should be packing groceries at the Piggly Wiggly or pumping gas. He barely had a bit of fuzz over his lip.

“I’ll cook you dinner,” he said. “I’ll grill T-bones. We’ll drink some beer. Listen to some music and build a fire.”

Luz didn’t say anything, watching the brick downtown and a gathering of campers and trailers of all the carnival folks in a distant lot. The neon light clicked off and on, the sounds of the midway loud as hell even up in the air. The bells and whistles and crazy barkers screaming at the folks that filled the fairground. Everything smelled like burnt popcorn and cigarettes. Families with five dollars to their name and not a damn job on the horizon dished out two hundred bucks for screaming kids to win a fucking stuffed SpongeBob Square-Pants.

“You got a trailer?” he asked. Donnie rested his hand on her knee.

She removed it.

“God damn.”

“You shouldn’t have come here,” she said.

“Alejandro needs to mind his fucking business.”

“This is so much more than you think,” Luz said. She tucked her hair behind her ear, the blackness of it shining like a crow’s wing.

“I don’t care what y’all are doing with them guns,” Donnie said. “But we can’t do it in Tibbehah no more. You understand?”

They went up and over one more time, the car slowing to a stop on the platform. The boy still stood at the controls, but this time it was Alejandro’s bad self who unlocked the little gate. He didn’t say anything to Donnie, most of the weird horns and scrawls and numbers on his face saying it for him. Donnie just winked at him as he passed, waiting on the steps for Luz to join him.

“If you leave now,” she said, “I will call. We can talk.”

“About the guns?” Donnie asked and frowned.

“Whatever you wish,” she said.

“What about Alejandro?”

“This is none of his business.”

19

QUINN AND JASON WENT FISHING AFTER CHURCH. CADDY CAME OUT TO
pick him up a little while later, Jason passed out on the couch, tired from the sermon and lunch and catching bluegill and running wild at his uncle’s farm. Caddy still wore her Sunday dress, but Quinn was back into his jeans and khaki sheriff’s shirt. He’d been ready for her and had already fitted the gun on his belt as she drove up and met him on the path. The gravel road was rutted and muddy with the rains.

“Sacked out.”

“You carry him?” she asked.

Quinn nodded and went back into the house, returning with Jason over his shoulder. He helped Caddy fit him into the safety seat, and she closed the door, smiling at Quinn and squinting to watch him. He nodded back to her.

“We’re gonna have to talk sooner or later.”

Quinn nodded.

“My therapist wants you to join us,” she said. “She says that was a lot on a little boy.”

“I got to go to work, Caddy.”

“You want to pretend it never happened?”

“Nope,” Quinn said. “I want us to remember it happened when we were kids and it’s over.”

“Not over for me.”

Quinn leaned against her car, a beaten-up blue Honda that had taken her back to Jericho. He studied the two big pecans in his back acreage, a tire swing knotted over a big fat branch. Hondo was in the far field on his back, taking a nap, yellow grasses bending around him.

“Listen,” he said. “I’ll do whatever you want me to. If you want me to talk to your doctor and all, that’s fine. But there’s some places I don’t care to go back to. You need to respect that. Why don’t we make sure you’re churning this shit up for a reason and not just to make me uncomfortable?”

“I love you for what you did, Quinn,” she said. “You got to understand that. I want you to know it.”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You did everything.”

Caddy reached over and took his hand. She smiled at him. “Can we quit fighting?” she asked. “I’m not like you. I wish there wasn’t evil in this world. You’ve made friends with the idea. You think there’s something you can actually do about it.”

“Nope,” he said.

“You do,” Caddy said. “I just wish I hadn’t been eight years old when I learned that lesson.”

“I didn’t do nothing.”

“You saved me.”

Quinn turned his head. He spit on the ground. His cell phone went off in his pocket, and he was glad for the call, Lillie telling him some crazy-ass hermit on County Road 32 was telling his neighbors he was an instrument of God.

“Hold on,” Quinn told Lillie. “Is he armed?”

“Wouldn’t be interesting if he wasn’t,” Lillie said.

Caddy kissed his cheek before getting behind the wheel and driving off.

THE MAN WITH THE GUN
was a Vietnam vet named Nehemiah Davis, a white male, aged sixty. According to Lillie, he was new to the county, moved to Tibbehah about ten years ago and had parked his trailer on some logged-out land right off the road. Earlier in the day, he’d taken some shots at a woman who lived down the road. He said he’d been charged with protecting the land by God Almighty Himself.

“Who are we to interfere?” Quinn asked.

“He’s toting a .45 pistol.”

“God give him that?”

“I think the fella must be Catholic,” Lillie said. “Keeps on talking about the Holy Mother.”

“Thanks for calling.”

“Figured you’d need to be in on this one,” Lillie said. “Kenny thought we should just shoot him.”

“Who are his people?”

“I think he used to go with the Jessup woman, before she died. Like I said, I don’t think he’s from around here.”

Quinn placed his hands on the hood of Lillie’s Jeep and stared down the short dirt road to the trailer on blocks. A dog trotted out from below, and a white curtain moved in the far left window. “The reason I appreciated you calling is that Caddy wants me to meet with her therapist. She wants us to talk about when we were kids.”

“Couldn’t have been easy growing up Quinn Colson’s sister.”

Quinn shrugged as Lillie reached into the back of her Jeep for a shotgun. She thumbed in four shells as Quinn said, “What’s wrong with that?”

They walked side by side down the path. The windows to the trailer were closed. The dog ran up to greet them, a dirty red hound missing an ear and eaten up with fleas. A couple junk trucks, weight-lifting equipment, and various tools turned to shit littered the front path.

“Maybe Caddy’s trying to help you,” Lillie said.

“Come again?”

“I know, I know. She’s a real pain in the ass. But she’s your sister.”

“Caddy does for Caddy.”

The curtain in the window moved again. The brief lighting of a wild-eyed face and then nothing. Lillie saw him, too, and lifted the shotgun in both hands. The front door was closed, with a screen door in front of it.

“How was church?”

“Good sermon,” Quinn said. “Cain and Abel.”

“Never could figure out why Cain killed his brother.”

“Jealousy.”

“Over what?” Lillie asked.

“God didn’t appreciate Cain giving Him the dregs of his grain. Abel was a shepherd and sacrificed the best of his flock.”

“Pissed off his brother.”

“Yep.”

The dog circled away and trotted to the back of the property. A door or window creaked, and there was a thump. Quinn removed the 9mm on his hip and waited for Nehemiah Davis to round the corner and come tell them all about it.

“Also never did figure out how Cain met a wife,” Lillie said. “If he and Abel were born to the first man and woman, where’d they meet women?”

“Must’ve been a bar,” Quinn said. “Maybe over in Canaan.”

“See him?”

“Yep,” Quinn said.

Nehemiah Davis was little and skinny and wearing nothing but a pair of white undershorts. He hadn’t shaved in a while, and the top of his head was balding and sunburned. He waved a .45 pistol up in the air and told them to disperse from this Holy Place.

“What’s so holy about it, Mr. Davis?” Lillie asked.

“I’m the Angel Gabriel,” Mr. Davis said. “I am charged to protect this land.”

“You would’ve thought Holy Land would’ve called for a double-wide,” Lillie said under her breath. “Mr. Gabriel, would you mind putting down the weapon, seeing as how you’re an angel and all?”

“The Holy Mother is here.”

“In your trailer?” Quinn asked.

Davis nodded, frail and bony, with a chest and shoulders covered in fine white hair.

“Y’all got cable?” Lillie asked.

“Don’t push him,” Quinn said.

Behind the half-naked man sat an Oldsmobile Toronado. Maybe a ’69, silver with whitewalls, the top ragged and covered with a blue tarp. The back tires were flat, but the paint looked good.

“You get that car when you left the service?” Quinn asked.

Davis turned back, the memory of such a sweet vehicle a little too much for an archangel. Mr. Davis’s eyes grew smaller, and he nodded a bit, the .45 lowered in his hand. He used his free hand to scratch his butt. The dog came up and sat down on his haunches, yawning.

“You got a 425 under there?” Quinn asked.

Nehemiah scratched his butt some more. He turned back to the car. And then back to Quinn, and then looked down at the dog. He mumbled something.

“What’s that, sir?” Lillie asked.

“455,” he said.

Quinn grinned a bit. He whistled for the dog. The dog trotted over, met him halfway, and Quinn moved on up to Mr. Davis. He kept on smiling. His gun was drawn but hanging loose by his leg. Davis had the saber tattoos on his bicep of a man who’d served in Airborne.

“You miss jumping out of planes?” Quinn asked.

Davis cocked his head, confused.

“82nd?”

“I am Gabriel,” Davis said. “I am charged with protecting the Holy Mother.”

“Sure like that car, Mr. Davis,” Quinn said. “You kept it nice for a good long while.”

Davis dropped the gun loose again. Quinn stepped forward a bit and cut his eyes at Lillie. She nodded slow. Quinn stepped forward and snatched the gun from the man’s hand in a single breath. Davis looked at him, saddened, and dropped to the ground, where he buried his face in his hands and started to cry. The one-eared hound licked his face while Lillie called in the situation on the radio. She said they’d need some transport and a mental eval.

“You take the Holy Mother for a drive in that Olds?” Lillie asked.

Davis looked up. He nodded at her.

“I guess she would dig that ride,” Lillie said.

Quinn spun open the old man’s .45. The cylinder was empty.

20

QUINN DREAMED OF CADDY THAT NIGHT, AND THE BIG WOODS.

It was fall, as it was now, and the cotton had burst out in bolls as thick as his fists, the earth still warm and giving off heat on a chilled morning as he’d packed. He’d known the woods his whole life and hungered to get far into them, deep into the national forest, as Caddy trailed behind him. He could see the gentle roll of the green hills just beyond a forgotten tin-roofed barn, rusted and worn. The fields were choked with fog.

“Can we stop and eat?” Caddy asked.

“When we get to the forest.”

“I brought peanut butter cookies.”

“I got some dried peaches and jerky,” Quinn said. “Salt and pepper and shortening. Cornmeal for fish. I’ll catch us some brim for dinner.”

“You think he’ll follow?” she asked.

“You can bet on it.”

Caddy was little, with light hair and dark skin from the summer. She wore overalls and cowboy boots, kicking at the clumps of earth between cotton rows. Her hair had been tied in a ponytail with pink string.

“I don’t like that man, the warden,” Caddy said. “He’s got eyes like a pig. He looks at me strange.”

“How do you think I feel?”

“He told Momma he was gonna arrest you for those deer.”

“If he can catch me.”

“He won’t catch us,” Caddy said. “We can live in the forest forever. We’ll take care of each other. We don’t need nobody.”