The Lost Ones (20 page)

“Do you know what this woman did?” Caddy asked.

“Hello, Mrs. Shelton,” Quinn said.

Mrs. Shelton took a long breath and closed her eyes. Caddy launched into a story about how Mrs. Shelton had divided the kids into different groups yesterday and made a big deal about how Jason was an African. She even had him point out parts of Africa on the map. “Can you believe that shit?” Caddy asked.

Mrs. Shelton shook her head and closed her eyes. She kept shaking her head.

“This is a traffic issue right now,” Quinn said. “Let’s work on that family issue somewhere else.”

“I’m not moving my car,” Caddy said. She crossed her arms across her chest and clenched her jaw. Old Mrs. Shelton had walked away, talking to the parents who were waiting in line, trying to get out.

“This ain’t the best way to handle it.”

“What the hell do you know?” Caddy asked.

The keys to the Honda flashed in Caddy’s hand, and Quinn plucked them from her fingers, crawled inside, and moved the car off the road, parking along the shoulder of Main Street. Hondo watched him from the driver’s side of the truck, panting up a nice fog on the window.

“Don’t you care?” Caddy asked. “Don’t you give a shit what she called your nephew?”

Quinn kept walking. The cars moved on out of the way. Most of the parents knew him, and they knew Caddy, and passed with an apologetic wave. Caddy followed him inside the school, where Mrs. Shelton waited. The hall was cinder block and lined with finger paintings with a Halloween theme. Pumpkins, skeletons, a few bats.

“Your son offered the information,” Mrs. Shelton said. “He pointed out on the map that his family was from Africa.”

Quinn rubbed the back of his neck. His cell phone rang. Quinn saw it was his mother and turned it off.

“I can settle this,” Quinn said.

“I want an apology,” Caddy said. “He’s three years old, and if the children start seeing him as something scary and different it will change his whole life. He’ll be an outcast in this shitty little town.”

Quinn held up his hand.

“I told him his people were from Africa, Caddy,” Quinn said.

“What?”

“Hell, he asked. I have that big
National Geographic
map at the farm and I was showing him all the places I’d been. I showed him different spots in Iraq and Afghanistan, and over in Scotland where our people come from. He asked about his daddy’s people, and I showed him Africa. I didn’t see any harm in that.”

“You didn’t?” Caddy said. Her face had turned red. “What the hell were you doing?”

“I think they call it geography.”

“I don’t like this,” Caddy said. “I think he was made an example. It’s sick to do that with a child.”

Caddy turned, ripped the keys back out of Quinn’s hand, and hustled back to her Honda. She left the parking lot with a big screeching noise.

Quinn turned away. He smiled at the older woman.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Shelton,” Quinn said. “My family is sorry. Did Jason see any of this?”

Mrs. Shelton shook her head, walking Quinn into the daycare and letting him watch Jason sitting cross-legged in front of a teacher reading a story.

Jason looked very content with the tale, his eyes flashing up at the illustrations with a big grin.

“God love her,” Quinn said and left.

QUINN AND CADDY MADE CAMP
by the hidden pond at twilight. He’d fished for the last thirty minutes, not needing long to catch a mess of sunfish. He strung them through their gills and carried them back to the small lean-to where Caddy worked. She’d pulled branches off pine and oak to fashion walls.

“You don’t need to sweep a dirt floor.”

Caddy didn’t listen and continued to sweep using the end of a pine branch. She hummed along as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

“You’ve gone crazy,” Quinn said.

“So?”

“I’m gonna build a fire.”

“What about the warden?”

“He’s too fat and lazy to track at night,” Quinn said. “By morning we’ll be gone.”

“What about the camp?”

“We’ll build another.”

“But I like this one,” Caddy said. “It’s pretty, and by the lake.”

“We walk at a good pace and we can get out of the forest tomorrow, maybe make our way toward the interstate. We can hitch down to New Orleans. I can get a job there.”

“Can we call Daddy?”

“Hell no,” Quinn said. “You think he gives a shit about us?”

“That sounds like Momma talking.”

“He’s the big shot in Hollywood who thinks all that shit he sends at Christmas means something,” Quinn said. “I ain’t calling him for nothing. He can go ahead and live it up with that big-titty whore he’s seeing.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Nope.”

“Can I keep sweeping?”

“Sure.”

Quinn found some rocks and fashioned a little ring by the edge of the pine. He had a matchbook he’d taken from the Rebel Truck Stop and set fire to some pine bark and shavings from a birch tree. After the fire grew nice and hot, he collected some branches and cedar logs. The cedar would give the fish a nice taste.

He used a folding knife with a serrated edge to cut off the fish heads, gut and scale them. He washed the fish at the edge of the pond and threw the heads and guts way out into the water. The sun was almost done now, lights fading through the thick pine trees and oaks with yellow and red leaves.

Caddy sat next to him as the little skillet he’d packed heated in the fire. She leaned into his coat, and he stretched his arm around her. They watched the final light crossing the land, bleeding out until they were all in shadow.

A wind whipped fast and cold up across them, knocking down part of the lean-to. Caddy ran and picked up the branches and again made her wall. The wind was cold and brisk and made the woods seem even larger and more hollow than they were.

Everything was so quiet way up here, almost like some kind of holyplace.

Quinn loved it. But Caddy was scared.

He opened up the dried peaches and let her eat first while he turned the fish in the hot oil. The fire brought a nice comfort to them, smelling of sweet cedar and spiced cornmeal and fish.

The pines swayed in the night breeze as the fire popped and hissed.

The fish was crisp and delicious, and after he scrubbed the skillet clean in the pond, Quinn reached into his coat for some tobacco and he chewed a bit, spitting into the fire.

Caddy stayed and leaned against him.

“Can I read to you?”

“What did you bring?” Quinn asked.

“What was on your shelf.
Last of the Mohicans
and
The Tales of King Arthur.”

“You’ll like King Arthur.”

“I would have brought my own books but had to hurry.”

“Caddy, if there is trouble, I want you to run,” Quinn said. “Can you find your way home?”

“I think so.”

Quinn reached into his mackinaw and handed her a compass. She clutched it in her little hand and smiled, pulling her knees up to her nose and kicking her feet with excitement.

“There won’t be trouble,” Caddy said.

“Walk west and you’ll hit the interstate,” Quinn said. “Call Uncle Hamp, and he’ll get you. But if something happens, you run. Don’t stay on account of me. I got to settle this myself.”

“Why won’t you call Daddy?”

“He quit on us,” Quinn said. “Somebody quits on me, and I don’t have no use for him.”

“He still loves us.”

“Can you read to me?” Quinn said, spitting into the fire. “I like that story about Gawain and the Green Knight.”

Caddy thumbed through the pages, reading to the sounds of owls and wandering deer, night birds and bats. She smiled as she read, and kept smiling in her sleep.

Quinn pulled his mackinaw over her and watched the fire. He filled his rifle with .22 longs and waited.

26

THE BEAUTY OF OWNING YOUR OWN BUSINESS WAS ROLLING YOUR ASS
out of bed and walking straight down the hill to work. Donnie had three trailers he kept on his old family hunting land: the old Airstream, a single-wide he rented out to Tiny, and a double-wide he used as the gun store. In the gun store, he kept six old candy cases he’d taken from the movie theater downtown—before it had become that crazy church—where he displayed his pistols and automatics, handcuffs and mace. Behind the counter, he kept the rifles and assault weapons in a locked gun rack. Most folks just came by the range to buy some ammo and rent those assault weapons. Businessmen from Tupelo would bring a cooler of beer and shoot AK-47s into targets of Osama bin Laden or President Obama. Not that Donnie was political, that’s just what seemed to be selling that year.

He opened up at nine, unlocking the cattle gate at the end of his road. Tiny’s fat ass wasn’t even up yet as Donnie bounded up the wooden steps to the shop and turned on the lights and turned off the alarm. A lot of what he did at the shop was answering phone calls and taking orders off the Internet. He’d get maybe two people stop by on weekdays. Saturdays were his busiest time when it wasn’t hunting season or football season.

He ate a bowl of Frosted Flakes as he checked his e-mail and leaned back into his seat to fire up his first cigarette of the day. Someone was looking for a Smith & Wesson .38 with a six-inch barrel. Another fella wanted to know if he could get him a good deal on a Henry rifle. There was the daily devotional his aunt had forwarded, and a couple messages from a girl he used to date in Eupora. She wanted him to know she was getting married in the spring, saying it in kind of an ugly way. Tiny had sent him a pornographic picture of a woman having sex with a pickle.

Donnie shook his head and shut down the computer. He had a week to come up with another order of guns for Luz and her banditos. She said this would be their final order for a while, maybe their final order ever, because they all had to boogie on down the road to Louisiana and then back south of the border.

He’d asked her how they got the guns back in.

She just smiled at him.

He figured they did it with those carnival trucks. You could hide a mess of guns in those contraptions. And he imagined it wasn’t too hard to grease the wheels of the Mexican border folks. They weren’t looking for drugs coming into Mexico.

Donnie hadn’t asked her about Janet Torres and those kids.

He didn’t even mention them to Shane and Tiny. That wasn’t his concern or his business. He didn’t even think Luz knew about them. And if she did, that was something she’d have to make right with Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in the confessional. Donnie ran guns. Luz had ordered them. If he started trying to make judgments and getting involved in things that didn’t involve him, everything he’d worked hard for in Trashcanistan would come tumbling down. Shit, it took a five-grand investment to grease those wheels in the AFG.

Donnie didn’t have shit to come home to, and bringing them M4s with him was about the smartest thing he ever did. All those guns were supposed to be given to the goddamn local police. And what would happen to those guns? As soon as Uncle Sam’s ass pulled out of the armpit of this earth, those guns would wind up with the Taliban, al-Qaeda, or some other assholes with barrels aimed back at Americans. If he wanted to sell them to a bunch of Mexicans so they could kill one another, he figured he was doing this country a goddamn service.

Donnie walked outside, flicked his cigarette into the kudzu, and heard a truck approach from down the road. He thought it was probably Shane, wanting his cut from the truck run up to New Albany. He knew it wasn’t Luz, the girl just shining him on till she got what she wanted and could hit up the next dumbass with a nice arsenal for sale. He’d called her ten times since yesterday, not getting a voice mail or nothing.

Quinn Colson drove up and stopped not two feet from him. He waved and smiled at Donnie.

“You want to do some shooting?” Quinn asked.

Donnie smiled. “Shit, why not?”

Donnie rounded up a couple targets, basic bull’s-eye patterns he set out at fifty yards. Both he and Quinn were wearing guns. Quinn had a 9mm Beretta and Donnie had a Glock he’d brought down from the shop. It wasn’t his favorite weapon, but it was there and handy and loaded.

“I just nearly had to arrest my sister.”

“What did Caddy do now?” Donnie asked before squeezing off all seventeen rounds into a tight center pattern.

“She stopped traffic at her boy’s daycare,” Quinn said. “She wouldn’t move her car till she got an apology from Mrs. Shelton. Can you believe that shit?”

“What’d Mrs. Shelton do?”

“Nothing,” Quinn said. He stretched out his arm and unloaded his Beretta. “She was scared.”

Donnie watched Quinn unholster his gun. “You like that Beretta?”

Quinn nodded and squeezed off those rounds. The shots cracked through the wilderness. He was good. Better than anyone Donnie had ever seen. Quinn could always shoot like that, like he’d been born to it.

“It’s served me well,” Quinn said. “I guess I got used to it.”

“You might think about getting some new guns for the department,” Donnie said. “Your uncle used to carry that lever-action Winchester with him like it was the damn eighteen hundreds. I don’t think he ever updated even a pistol.”

Quinn nodded.

“I can get y’all a good deal,” Donnie said. “You can bid it out, but I’ll make it worth your time.”

“Might be a while before the county supervisors give me another nickel,” Quinn said. “I just got Boom hired to run a maintenance shed, and they acted like I was trying to rob them. You know we’re pretty much the only county in the state that doesn’t service our own vehicles?”