All the Beautiful Sinners

by Stephen Graham Jones

  “Kind of doubt it, now that it’s famous,” Debs cut back, his hand stabbing up to keep his hat on his head.

  “It’s coming,” the woman said, hooking her chin across the next pasture.

  Jim Doe looked, and it was: a wall of pressure, black and roiling, threaded with lightning.

  “So you taking me in or what?” Jim Doe said, then, to the woman: “There a reward? That why you called him?”

  “She called because she knows what I’m interested in,” Debs said, standing. “As for you, just stay right here. Think what’s coming’ll solve both our problems.”

  It was a joke. Debs smiled about it, stepped off with the woman, and minutes later Jim Doe, alone again, watched her string of cars and trucks loop around to try to get behind the storm, where the action would be, and then—it was majestic, biblical—he watched the storm develop in time-lapse: the anvil forming; sheets of hail in the distance; the rows of mammatus hanging onto the belly of the cloud like eggs. In the new humidity, the windows steamed with his breath, showed long, clear lines in them that had been pressed there two weeks ago. From long hair.

  The lights of Pawnee City were strung on the horizon, or what was left of it.

  And the horse was still watching him, its tail blowing in the wind.

  Jim Doe stepped out, threw it a frito, then threw the whole bag.

  Animals need salt. Especially ones about to be sucked up into the sky, spit out miles away.

  At least, if Jim Doe knew anything about storms, that was what was about to go down out here.

  If only people were as easy to figure.

  Debs, for one.

  Out here doing exactly what he said Maines and McKirkle were doing? Taking personal time to chase a legend, one who probably hadn’t even been active for ten years?

  It made zero sense.

  And the longhair, shit. He’d killed Gentry, he’d killed a kid in Kansas, gutted a mechanic just down the road from that, then brained some people in Lincoln, was definitely that batshit kind of crazy, on some mad dog kind of spree here, but he was also the same one the Blue Kettles had helped. The one they’d hid, given bandages too.

  The same way they’d helped him?

  It was all Jim Doe could think about.

  That and the bodies in the trunk in Gentry’s video.

  Wallace and Dot?

  Why, after all this time?

  A truck blasted by, rocking the LeMans. It had a mural on its forty-foot trailer, a stagecoach. The Old West. Jim Doe almost smiled: maybe when the trucker made it up to South Dakota, there’d be some Indian-muraled trucks waiting for it in ambush, the feathers outlined in chrome on their grills.

  About three utility poles down the road, the truck pushed seven white birds up into the air before it. They had been in the ditch too. Probably something dead there. To sleep in. The birds rode the truck’s air up into the grey sky, and then the wind from the storm caught them, flung them back lower.

  “Thanks for the information,” Jim Doe said to horse, and lowered himself back into the front seat, turned the ignition, the longhair’s tape starting up again, stuck forever in the deck, looping over and over. Jim Doe had been listening to it or to nothing for days, knew every song inside out, like he’d lived them. I crossed my old man, don’t take me alive. Clean this mess up else we’ll all end up in jail.

  It meant nothing. It meant everything.

  He eased the LeMans up onto the blacktop and Pawnee City rose up out of the haze to meet him. Minutes later he was huddled by another ice machine with a microwaved burrito, watching the sky develop.

  He had no idea where to go next, but knew it was too late to go home, anyway. Pulling out of the Blue Kettles’ a week ago, he maybe could have—turned back to Nazareth, rolled into town with his trophy LeMans, whatever forensic goldmine might be in the trunk—but there had been another option too: stay out here in the badlands, let his hair grow out, get it long enough that he could just turn himself in. Because they were both the same person, now. They’d both killed Tom Gentry. Maybe that was why the Blue Kettles had helped him.

  Five minutes after the clerk who’d served him the burrito put the closed sign in the window and split for lower ground, Jim Doe pulled the black receiver of the payphone to his face, deposited his quarters, let Agnes’s number ring and ring.

  When she finally picked up, Jim Doe just said her name.

  “Joe,” she said back.

  That she didn’t say come home right off meant that his truck had made it there already. That Nazareth knew about his graveyard and shovel activities.

  That’s not what he was calling about, though.

  “Was Tom friends with that—with Debs? From Garden City?”

  “He said he got you out of, out of your . . . troubles. Yes.”

  “What do you know about him? Where’s he from?”

  “Ronald? Well, just—why?”

  “Did he used to be skinnier?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “Tom knew about him, didn’t he?” Jim Doe said.

  “About Ronald?”

  “The Tin Man.”

  “What are you . . . Joe, I’m sorry, I don’t—”

  “He should have told me, Agnes. This all could have—”

  “Joe, Joe, please, she’s not going to—” Agnes started, and Jim Doe squinted, knew what the rest of it was going to be: not out there. His sister.

  Instead, the phone just went dead, the lines pulled down by the storm.

  Jim Doe’s change fell deeper into the phone’s belly.

  The LeMans was rocking on its springs in the wind, the first of the rain pelting clean spots in the dust.

  Jim Doe ducked across the parking lot, climbed in, and, pulling back up onto the highway, nearly got flattened by an RV, barreling east, into the wind, its passenger window shattered white already, some of its plastic fairing dragging. What looked like the remains of a barbed-wire fence clinging to the exhaust.

  Tambourine Sky.

  The rest of the ragtag band slipped past after it, their hoods cratered from a hundred thousand hailstones.

  After the last car was past—a three-quarter ton, each antenna more ill-conceived than the last, and no Garden City cruiser pulling up the rear—Jim Doe turned the Steely Dan up to fall in, go where they were going, but, waiting for a sheet of corrugated fiberglass to scrape across the blacktop, find the fence where it was going to live the rest of its life out, become shelter for generations of rabbits, he looked back to the west just long enough to see the only thing left in the world: the thick, black grill of a tall truck, almost to him.

  He opened his mouth to say something and then the truck hit, spun the LeMans in lazy, curiously silent circles across the parking lot.

  It didn’t make any sense, and even as he was thinking it he knew it was stupid, but all Jim Doe could think, his upper body flapping from the seat to the door to the steering wheel, was that he was dancing. That the tape stuck in the deck had finally infected him all the way, was turning him into the longhair once and for all.

  And then the LeMans lodged against two of the four poles connecting the industrial-sized propane tank at the edge of the lot.

  A newspaper insert blew up against the passenger side window and then that window collapsed under it, the safety glass going half in the door, half onto the seat.

  It had been a grocery ad. Broccoli was on sale.

  Jim Doe turned around slow, to look back to where he’d been, and the truck that had hit him—Ford, king cab, the grill definitely Ranch Hand—it was still coming.

  Jim Doe tried to push back, away from the door that was about to crunched in over him, but then the truck slid to a stop with maybe two feet to spare.

  Two doors opened, shut, a napkin sucking off the dash, hitting hyperspace.

  “Yeah, well, thank the lord for the small things,” the driver said, still hidden by the front of the truck.

  The passenger stepped in front of the grille, h
is pistol loose by his leg, a smile on his face.

  Maines, his handlebar mustache whipping in the wind, his eyes flat.

  “Hunh,” Jim Doe just managed to get out.

  The Texas Rangers were here.

  Wonderful.

  SIXTEEN4 July 1965, Tinker AFB, Oklahoma

  His mother was talking to him again. In her voice. It was 6:43am, the sun just cresting through the window over the kitchen sink, the world out there starred and striped, full of flags.

  “You haven’t been up all night, have you?” she was saying, the ash of her cigarette long and impossible.

  John13 looked up as if trying to organize her face into one he could recognize, know how to respond to: mother, post-toothbrush, pre-coffee. On holiday.

  He smiled a smile he knew she knew, looked back to his receiver, waited for her shadow to fade back into the house, leaving only his, the outline of his headphones against the white utility wall crisp and necessary. He’d been up for thirty-six hours now, dialed-in, on-air. Not bad for a thirteen-year-old. He smiled. John13 wasn’t his real name, of course, just an anagram of his ham call sign: 3O1JN. But John13 sounded better, fit better. He’d even looked it up in the Bible. It was about Judas—another J. The first verse was about Jesus knowing he had to leave this world now, go to his Father. But the end of 27 was his favorite: “Do quickly what you have to do.”

  John13 lived and breathed above thirty megahertz, in the two-meter band. The Mosley CM-1 receiver had been a gift his father bought him so he could stay in touch with his friends in Big Springs, or Corpus Christi, or Peterson, whatever base their fathers were moving to now. None of them knew enough Morse to get their general class license, though. John13 hardly remembered their names anymore.

  His mother made him keep his radio in the utility just off the garage, so she could monitor who he talked to while she cooked. She’d even read his ARRL Radio Amateur’s Handbook, to see what the fascination was, but then had given it back in defeat. John13 had held his headphones out to her that day, but knew she wouldn’t take them. Because of her hair, set every Monday at the parlor, and dyed once a month, away from the métis black she was ashamed of. It made John13 think of her underwear, whether she was still Indian there, and then he just had to make noises in his head, to not think anymore.

  From the stove, she could monitor what he said, but not what he heard. Not who he talked to. And there was always Morse, and the various Pig Latins of Morse.

  Back when John13 had just been technician class, dodging Vacation Bible School with the rest of the sixth graders, the thing to do was tune in the tower on base, cross his fingers for a drill. When they came, he could hear his father barking orders. It was a thrill to hear him like that—intense, as if each of their actions was important. It was nothing like when he got home, stepped out of uniform, turned back into a man.

  That was when he was a child, John13. Before he put away those childish things.

  Now he was general class, could go cross-country on HF.

  Some nights he only got as far as Enid. GB4HK. It was the call sign of Jesse James. They talked in dots and dashes in the silence when the rest of the radio operators in Oklahoma were listening to Hurricane Donna, the Florida operators relaying messages up and down the coast, their voices urgent and frantic.

  “How many you think?” Jesse James asked, in Morse.

  Died was the missing word. Two dashes, seven dots: -•• •• • -••.

  Jesse James was always asking questions like that.

  “666,” John13 typed back.

  Last night, all the people from base furtive in the dark, trying to get their flags up first, be the most patriotic, Jesse James hadn’t come on until three in the morning. He’d had his repeater on.

  “Where were you?” John13 asked.

  “Out.”

  “With a girl?”

  Radio silence: yes. Jesse James was supposed to be nineteen, trolling the junior highs after three-thirty, when they let out, his pocket full of dime store wedding rings, because twelve-year-old girls always want their first time to be special. John13 had been taking notes for three weeks now. Jesse James was teaching him anatomy, and methods of approach, and what books at the library had what pictures. John13 kept those notebooks in Morse code, so his mother couldn’t read them. His father knew it, though—Morse. Sometimes John13 left his notebooks out on the kitchen table, daring his father to read them, to know him, but it never happened.

  In the kitchen, his mother was explaining how he’d been up all night again. The static at two meters was hard to tease apart from her bacon, sizzling in the pan. John13 waited for his father’s response: “Want me to do something?”

  “You got it for him.”

  “I know.”

  “Well.”

  “Okay.”

  Usually they never even got that far. John13 checked his leads again, and the legs of the table. Opened and closed his notebook. His mother was still talking.

  “Maybe he’ll forget about it when school starts.”

  “I shouldn’t have given it to him.”

  And then he was there, right after his voice: Father.

  “Brushed your teeth yet, Scout?” he asked, a hand dropping to John13’s hair.

  Scout.

  He could feel his mother staring at his back too, could remember one of the games he used to play: tracking his father on base all day, praying for a drill, please, and, if there was one, then waiting for him to get home, to ask him what he did that day.

  “Work,” he would always answer. Just work.

  “Nothing special?”

  “You know, the usual. Why?”

  “No reason. Just thought I heard something.”

  It was like his father was hiding it from him, the drills. Like he was having another life that he couldn’t bring home. One that mattered.

  His mother knew about the game somehow, too. Would apologize, offer John13 a second, secret coke. To make up for everything that wasn’t there.

  In September he was going to meet the rest of the base kids.

  It would be better then. His mother said so. It would be better.

  John13 shook his head no, he hadn’t brushed his teeth yet, then pressed the leather headphones down tight, so they cupped his ears even harder. So he could hear.

  Jesse James was gone by now, of course, at the garage he worked at between other jobs. Now it was just FD98I, out of Minneapolis. He was trying to loop around down through Atlanta, find something out about milk. John13 had missed the first of the conversation, didn’t know what “milk’ was supposed to mean. He dialed deeper, listening for that one voice he knew he was going to hear, inarticulate and uncontrolled, but so full of emotion.

  Harry Cary, his father had said when they’d dialed it in on accident, as if the name itself were magic. Harry Cary. That was four years ago, that first crystal radio kit: a diode, a coil; a brass ball for tuning; some caps. John13 knew nothing about baseball then. Just Harry Cary. The tone of voice his father reserved for it, for him, like it brought him back to him and his father, arcing a ball back and forth across some 1940s lawn, one of them too old for the war, one too young, everyone between their two ages dead or dying.

  The crystal radio set was supposed to have made up for one of the dogs they’d had to leave behind, rather than pay to have transported.

  John13 watched his father and grandfather in the tall, sepia-tone grass, and held his hand up for his father to throw him the ball, then ran away before he didn’t throw it to him again.

  But if he could just hear that voice again, find it.

  Sometimes John13 would pretend Harry Cary was his grandfather. That somebody in his family had been able to feel like that.

  He fell through the hash marks, listening for him.

  His parents were still talking in the kitchen.

  He closed his eyes, held his hand around the shape of a ball for a shameful moment, then closed it.

  July Fourth was the one
night of the year his father would drink. The only military holiday he wouldn’t spend with the other officers. Because they couldn’t see him like this.

  John13 had spent the whole day on the air. He was a ghost, no sleep for two days now.

  “Who were you talking to?” his father asked.

  They were walking out the door, carrying the big cooler between them.

  “Nobody,” John13 said.

  “That Jesse James again?”

  John13 shook his head no, didn’t look up.

  Their new dog Bert jumped up against the cooler, pulling John13’s side down. He was Bert number four now, reborn in another pound after his father shot number three in the backyard, to teach it a lesson. This Bert couldn’t come in the house.

  “Back by ten?” John13’s mother called out, through the screen door.

  “What time’s the show?” his father asked back.

  “Dark,” she said. “What, quarter of?”

  “Make it eleven,” John13’s father said. “We might be tipping a few back or something . . .”

  He made eyes at John13 about it, drinking. John13 felt his face try to smile.

  His father’s excuse for making him see the fireworks show was that he needed someone sober to drive the boat. It was supposed to be a thrill, to sit in back, the outboard’s throttle in your hand, the nose lifted up against the water. It wasn’t. Jesse James would know how to get out of it, if he were here. John13 didn’t, so he rode with his father to the lake, their fourteen-foot boat trailing behind.

  They got there an hour early.

  “Why?” John13 asked.

  They didn’t have any rods or reels. The high-schoolers were skiing on the lake, holding the bar with one hand, their bodies bronze in the dying light.

  “Why what?” John13’s father asked.

  “Why are we here so early?”

  “To get a good place, son.”

  Son.

  They did, out where it was deep. His father had an old pumpjack gauge. They dropped the metal tape down to seventy-five feet, reeled it back in.

  “That should do it,” he said.

  “What?” John13 said.

  “You’ll watch your tone, soldier.”