The Sinners

by Ace Atkins

  Beckett reached for his radio to call Royce. This was more goddamn pot than he even knew how to calculate.

  “What you got there, Sheriff?”

  “Tell Pritchard to wipe that grin off his hick face and tighten up his asshole,” Beckett said. “Parchman Farm ain’t no county-line beer joint. He ain’t gonna get to choose his own dance partner.”

  2

  “Everything was done with secrecy,” Jean Colson said, frying bacon on the old gas stove as her son, Quinn, watched her and drank his morning coffee. “Elvis and some of the boys in the Memphis Mafia snuck over the fence of his house in Palm Springs to throw off the press. Frank Sinatra even let him use his private plane to Las Vegas, where Priscilla was waiting.”

  “We don’t plan on getting married in Vegas,” Quinn said. “And I’m not Elvis. And Maggie’s not Priscilla.”

  Quinn was a hard-looking man, not yet forty, tall and lean with a face made of bone and sharp angles. He was clean-shaven as always, with his dark hair cut less than an inch on top and buzzed short on the sides. He wore Levi’s and cowboy boots, the tin star of the Tibbehah County sheriff pinned to his khaki uniform shirt and the Beretta 9 he’d carried on thirteen tours as a U.S. Army Ranger on his right hip. His mother was in her mid-sixties, wide-hipped and blue-eyed. Her hair was the color of copper and she had a smallish nose and a wide mouth. She wore an old apron over a faded denim dress. The apron read I LIKE PIG BUTTS AND I CANNOT LIE.

  “He and the Colonel kept it to just fourteen guests,” Jean said, removing the bacon and setting it on a paper towel to soak up the grease. “George Klein and Charlie Hodge acted as his best men. His tuxedo was designed by his friend Marty Lacker. Marty sketched it himself, black with paisley designs. Some man who worked at MGM made it for him. I can’t recall his name. But did you know that Priscilla’s wedding gown was just off the rack? You might tell Maggie that. She went to the Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills and found the perfect one.”

  “Next time we’re in Beverly Hills, we’ll make sure and check out the Neiman Marcus wedding department, Momma,” he said. “We only need family and some good friends to get hitched. Right now, I’m thinking fourteen may be a little too much.”

  “Fourteen?” Jean said. “Elvis invited a hundred folks to join him and Priscilla at the Aladdin Hotel for the reception. They had a four-tiered wedding cake made of yellow sponge cake and filled with apricot marmalade. The frosting was some type of Bavarian cream on account of them meeting over in Germany. Did you know Elvis brought her to Memphis to finish out her senior year of high school until she came of age?”

  “I always found that part kinda little creepy,” Quinn said. “Some good ole boy from Tupelo tries to pull that in Tibbehah County and I’ll put his ass in jail.”

  Jean shook her head, calling for her grandson Jason and her soon-to-be stepgrandson, Brandon. Quinn’s nephew Jason was nearly ten now and Brandon had just turned seven. They’d become good buddies over the summer break. Jason had shown Brandon all the back paths and secret hiding places out on the old Beckett farm. They ran wild in the woods. They fished for bass and bluegill. They shot cans with a .22 rifle with Quinn when their grandmother wasn’t around.

  The boys ran down from upstairs and took a seat on each side of Quinn. Jason smiled up at him. A good-looking boy, with the eyes and smile of his once-famous grandfather and the dark brown skin of a father that his sister never acknowledged. Brandon was lighter, towheaded, with Maggie’s bright green eyes and freckled face. Quinn didn’t see a bit of his father in him and hoped to God that he never would.

  “I heard Miss Maggie won’t let you smoke in the house,” Jason said.

  Quinn nodded.

  “My momma hates smoke,” Brandon said.

  “You keep that up, Uncle Quinn, and you’ll give Hondo the cancer,” Jason said. “I saw it on television. You shouldn’t smoke around children or pets.”

  “I’ll keep it outside,” Quinn said. “Where is Hondo anyway? You boys seen him?”

  The boys pointed out the front door. Quinn picked up his coffee mug and headed out to the front porch, where he lit up his first Liga Privada of the day. The farmhouse was an old classic tin-roof job, built in pieces by his great-grandfather starting back in 1895. His mother had been raised there and came over most Saturday mornings to make breakfast and talk about old times or, most often, Elvis Presley. The front and back doors were wide open, screen doors shut over the openings, creating a cooling shotgun effect even on the hottest days.

  After a few moments, his mother came out to join him. “Why do you continue to smoke those nasty old things?” his mother said.

  “I get shot at for ten years and you never say a word,” he said. “I get back home and you don’t want me to relax?”

  Quinn whistled for Hondo, the rangy cattle dog soon trotting in from the cow pasture, holding a deer bone in his mouth. He was a patchwork of blacks and grays with two different colored eyes. Shaking his dusty coat off on the porch, he set the bone down at Quinn’s boots.

  “Did you find a band yet?” Jean asked. “Time’s growing short, son.”

  “Working on it.”

  “Working on it ain’t gonna get it,” she said. “You yourself said there’s only three weeks until the big day. And unless you want me to buy one of those karaoke machines at Walmart and start practicing ‘Can’t Help Falling in Love,’ you better get going.”

  “What about Uncle Van?”

  “Good Lord,” she said. “Your Uncle Van would just show up with a guitar and a pint of Wild Turkey, singing some off-key Merle Haggard about how tonight the bottle let him down.”

  “I heard about a good bluegrass band out of Oxford,” he said. “Some man named Ed Dye who used to play with the Nashville Jug Band. Don’t you remember that version of ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’ that has kind of a reggae beat? They put out a record of it. Maggie has a copy.”

  “Son,” Jean said, placing a hand on her hip. “There’s only one version of that song.”

  “Momma,” he said. “Before you say anything else, you really need to know something.”

  Jean looked over at her son with some concern, waiting for him to ask some delicate question or relay some bad news she didn’t want to hear. Quinn tapped the end of the cigar and smiled at her. “Elvis ain’t coming back.”

  Jean frowned and opened her mouth just as Quinn’s cell phone started skipping and skittering on the porch railing. Quinn saw it was Reggie Caruthers, now his number one deputy since Lillie had left for a better job in Memphis a year ago. He picked up the phone and read his text. He stood up, placing the cigar on the rim of his coffee mug.

  “I gotta go,” he said, kissing his mother on the cheek.

  “Music,” she said. “A wedding has to have music.”

  “Working on it, Momma.”

  “Are you’re absolutely sure Boom will be back?” she said. “We can’t miss the music and the best man.”

  “Boom said he’ll be there,” Quinn said, walking down the front steps, heading toward his new F-150 and whistling for Hondo. “Nothing could make him miss it.”

  * * *

  • • •

  You a goddamn inspiration,” the man said. “People out here be mopin’. They ain’t got no job. They ain’t no opportunity. But here you are, driving the ass crack of America in an eighteen-wheeler with one goddamn arm.”

  Boom was a big man, six foot six and two-sixty, bearded with dark brown skin and built like an Abrams battle tank. People didn’t often approach him at truck stops for a handout or a hand job, so when the two boys ambled up to the diesel pump in Meridian, he knew they were about to talk about the prosthetic arm. Everybody wanted to know about the arm.

  Where’d you lose it?

  Iraq.

  Were you in a big battle?

  Nope. Delivering water north of a Fallujah and hit an IED.
>
  Did you get a medal and shit?

  Purple Heart. If you’re wounded, you get a Purple Heart.

  And then folks, mainly kids, wanted to know how he grabbed things with the hook.

  Takes practice.

  One dumb son of a bitch at Club Disco 9000 wanted to know how he still jacked his monkey without his right hand. Boom didn’t answer that. He just coldclocked the motherfucker and knocked his ass out. But that was back when he was drinking too much.

  “Yes, sir,” the man said. “You an inspiration. You know that?”

  “OK, man,” Boom said. “OK. It was good meeting you.”

  He gripped the billy club in his hand and started a slow, steady walk around the truck to thump tires and check the pressure. As he made his way, the man and his pal followed. Both of them black. The one doing the talking was a stocky little shit, wearing a wifebeater tee and saggy-ass jeans. His friend was just a teenager, skinny, wearing a blue tee that advertised THE PITTS FAMILY BBQ 2010. WHAT IT’S ALL ABOUT.

  “Zero excuses. Zero,” the man said. “Ain’t none in the world. You mind if I video you working? I got to throw this shit up on YouTube.”

  Boom shrugged and kept walking around the trailer, thumping the tires, waiting to hear a dull thud and not that tight thwack of the proper inflation. The two men followed, one praising Jesus as he filmed, telling everyone how this no-excuses man was getting it done.

  It had hit ninety-two degrees at the truck stop pumps and Boom paused and wiped his forehead with the bill of his CAT hat. He had on a pair of khaki pants with work boots and a blue mechanic’s shirt cut off at the sleeves, hot wind billowing up off the roadside ruffling the material.

  “Just doing my job, man,” Boom said.

  “‘Just doin’ my job,’” the man said, laughing. “Damn. Ain’t that some real old John Wayne shit? ‘That’s just my job, sir.’ Look at you. You giving me some real joy today. The Lord done brought me some joy at the motherfuckin’ Magnolia Truck Stop.”

  Boom thumped a big ole tire behind the passenger side of the cab. The two watched his every movement, the older one walking backwards to get the whole scene in the frame. “Out there, working a Kenworth, with one goddamn arm.”

  “It’s a Freightliner,” Boom said. “Classic XL. With a 515 Detroit engine.”

  The man looked over at the younger kid, hands in his pockets, head down. “What’s your excuse, man?” he said. “You see this shit? You see what this man’s doin’? The Lord put him here for you to see. A living example.”

  Boom reached up with his hook, grabbed the door handle, and hoisted himself to grab the logbook. He stood by the pumps, writing down with his left hand the mileage, hours, and the weight he was hauling. In Amarillo, he’d picked up a refrigerated trailer full of produce he’d drive back to the docks in Tupelo. All the paperwork was a safety; he’d have to reload the same shit into the computer and GPS on his dash.

  “You own that truck?” the kid asked. “That’s a big-ass truck.”

  “Naw, man,” Boom said. “I work for a company. I just drive.”

  “But could you own your own truck?” the kid asked. “Someday, you make enough money?”

  “Yeah,” Boom said. “Someday.”

  “Who’s that you working for?” the kid said. “Sut-pen?”

  “Yeah,” he said, looking at the hand-painted name on the semi’s door. “Sutpen Trucking. They based out of Tupelo but roll all over the country, mainly down South.”

  “What y’all haul?” the kid said.

  “Every damn thing,” Boom said.

  “You get your own truck,” the stocky man said, “make sure you get a bunch of flashing lights, neon and shit. Women go crazy for that stuff. You get a tricked-out truck and you get some pussy at every stop.”

  “Pussy at every stop?” Boom said. “Yeah. OK. I’ll keep that in mind.”

  The man fist-bumped his hook and the young dude nodded at him, heading back to their car parked outside the truck stop diner. The stocky man was praising Jesus the whole time. The fuel pump clicked off at one hundred and fifty gallons, the other tank still full. Boom moved around to the back of the trailer to check on the load, make sure the boxes hadn’t shifted too much and the temperature was still under seventy. They’d told him not to worry about it, but his own AC had crapped out back in Shreveport and he wanted to make sure he was straight.

  Boom unlatched the back door and hefted himself up into the trailer, where hundreds of boxes had been stacked nearly to the roof with only narrow spaces to walk between. Everything felt cool and good inside the dark trailer, the thermometer showing seventy on the nose, but as he was about to hop down he spotted the names on the long, narrow boxes: SONY. TOSHIBA. VIZIO. LG. When he opened up a large box by the doors, he found a fat stack of PS4 game consoles. Another box had some drones, computers, and tablets. The more he looked, the more Boom felt like he’d picked up a truck headed for a Best Buy.

  “I think something got messed up,” Boom said, calling to the Sutpen dispatcher. He told him all about the trailer. “This ain’t no avocados.”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” said the dispatcher, a gravelly-voiced country man. “Don’t worry your pretty little head about it. Just don’t fuck up your delivery, Mr. Kimbrough. You got two hours.”

  “‘Pretty head’?” Boom said. “Hey, man—”

  The line clicked off and Boom got back up into the cab. He looked all around the truck stop to see if anyone was watching, rolled down the windows, and cranked that big engine, the seat shuddering under his ass.

  He drove careful and slow all the way back to the Tupelo city limits.

  * * *

  • • •

  What’s he on?” Quinn asked, driving and talking on his cell.

  “Not really sure,” Reggie Caruthers said. “Man’s just been hooting and hollering, sitting there, dragging his ass down Jericho Road like a dog with worms. You can’t really talk with him or reason with him. He’s making some weird sounds. It’s hard to explain, Sheriff.”

  “What’s he sound like?”

  “Well,” Reggie said. “The man kinda sounds like Michael Jackson. No other way to say it. Lots of high-pitched screams and moans, grabbing his pecker ever so often. Dude is definitely way messed up.”

  “You know him?” Quinn asked, turning off the Square and now heading west toward Choctaw Lake.

  “Never seen him before in my life,” Reggie said. “I don’t think he’s from Tibbehah. Maybe he scooted his ass down from Lee County. Hard to know, on account of the limited communication.”

  “Just what’s he saying?”

  “Don’t really know,” he said “Lots of hee-hees and ‘Sha, mon’ and all that shit. He told me he was the light of this world when I brought out the cuffs. That’s when he started moving on me, real aggressive-like. Tried to bite my damn ankle. May have to tase him.”

  “I don’t like to tase,” Quinn said. “Unless we don’t have a choice. Especially on the King of Pop.”

  “Kenny said to talk to you before we did anything,” Reggie said. “Man’s not armed and not dangerous other than stopping traffic. Kenny said it’s pretty much the same when we get a cow loose and got to call animal control. You think that’s maybe something we could do, get animal control to slip that wire over this man’s head and give him a tranquilizer?”

  “Y’all just hold up,” Quinn said. “Almost there.”

  “Good,” he said. “Might need a few more hands, too.”

  “You don’t think me, you, and Kenny can control one man?”

  “He ain’t feelin’ much pain,” Reggie said. “You’ll see when you get here. Dude is flying on those eleven different herbs and spices.”

  “Roger that,” Quinn said, hitting the siren and the lights on Jericho Road. Since the spring, they’d been getting more and more wild calls about fol
ks being strung out on drugs. When Quinn had first come home it’d been bathtub meth, then bootleg prescription pills, and lately folks had been dipping into some mind-corrosive crap called bath salts. You could inject it, smoke it, snort it, or all three. The bitch of it all was that you could buy the shit at your local convenience store in the pharmacy aisle. The stores knew what they were selling and didn’t give a good goddamn, except for Luther Varner at the Quick Mart, who ran folks out of his store just for asking about it.

  Quinn got about six miles out of town when he saw the gathering of patrol cars on the side of the highway. He pulled in behind Kenny’s vehicle, which he’d parked sideways with the lights flashing, and walked toward Reggie Caruthers. Dave Cullison had taken a position on the far side of the road to direct traffic around the man, who, true to Reggie’s word, was indeed dragging his ass down the road and making sounds not unlike Michael Jackson, with a few more grunts and growls in there.

  “How we doin’?” Quinn said.

  “Man tried to bite my damn leg again,” Reggie said.

  “You up on your rabies?”

  “Not funny, Sheriff.”

  Kenny ran up, red-faced and sweating, as Kenny still hadn’t dropped the thirty extra pounds he’d been carrying for several years. He was a chubby, plain-faced country boy with a brownish crew cut and a constant dip in his lower lip. Reggie Caruthers was a few years younger, in his late twenties, lean and baby-faced, with light brown skin. Like Quinn, his ticket out of Jericho had been the U.S. Army, and, exactly like Quinn, family had brought him back home. Both deputies were hard workers and loyal to a fault. He needed a few more like them, with Lillie, his former assistant sheriff and trusted friend, now up in Memphis working with the federal marshals.