All the Beautiful Sinners

by Stephen Graham Jones

  But Father had promised. This was exactly why he’d taken Amos from his first home, he said. He could see this in him, that he could do this, that he someday would, all alone, out in the real world.

  They’d parked the van nine blocks away, legally, because a ticket under the wipers could be the one thing that gives you away, Berkowitz. Walking away from it they looked back, to map out all the angles, to fix the van in their minds, so that if it looked any different three hours later, they could just keep walking.

  But Def Leppard. It looked like it was really going to happen.

  Father put on his black wraparound shades, placed his hand on Amos’s shoulder. There was loose fabric there, enough to grab onto. And the jacket, it was a trick to unzip, hard to shrug out of.

  He would find you, though, if you ran. Amos knew better by now, didn’t even try anymore. Didn’t want to. Would never go back even if he could.

  The assignment part of the concert, the learning part, was that Amos was supposed to make it look like an accident. Nobody was ever supposed to know. That was the best trick, the best way not to ever get caught: blame it on something normal.

  It was how Father had been able to keep going for so long.

  But first, the actual and real concert, standing arms-up with thousands of other people. And the songs you already know. It’s like the shapes of the words are in your head already, waiting for the band to fill them with sound. And then the girl stands up from the audience, twice as tall as the rest—on a guy’s shoulders—and peels her shirt up over her pale breasts, the spotlights holding on her, and you realize you’re alone, untethered, no leash, no hand on your shoulder, Father melted back into the mass of people. You step forward. It’s not that you haven’t seen flesh before like this, had to take it apart in the long, narrow basement of the house then dispose of it in various ways, it’s that you’ve never seen it so willing. And so you step forward, and you step forward, entranced, and then the head between the girl’s legs resolves into a face, and he’s looking at you look at her, and you know who, now, just like Father said you would.

  He was right again. Like always. It is a love story every time.

  In your pocket is the bar of soap he’s told you to use. It’s the only thing you can use.

  Because you have to be ingenuitive. Have to be able to think, to use everything he’s been teaching you all these years.

  You lower your head, slip between the warm bodies to the wide, concrete hall, and from there to the bathroom that says it’s being cleaned even though it’s not.

  It’s empty, just leftover pot smoke up near the lights. Perfect.

  Fourteen minutes later, after a stream of other people who don’t care about the yellow sign either, the guy who was holding the girl up into the light walks in, has been looking everywhere for your brown ass, he says, like the looking’s made him even madder. He also says that it figures you’d be playing with yourself in here alone.

  You stand at the urinal not peeing, not playing with yourself, your belt open but your pants buttoned, and you wait, don’t want to rush this. Because you only get one first time.

  He’s behind you, leaned against the sinks, arms crossed, staring.

  “Like what you saw?” he says.

  You turn, look at him.

  His hair is long too, but dry and brittle. Because his father doesn’t wash it for him every other day in the sink, then sit him in the kitchen, inspect for split ends, take them off with a pair of professional scissors. Because his father doesn’t love him.

  “So you like white women?” the guy is saying now, talking himself up to wherever he plans to take you.

  You reach up to flush then step closer to him, closer, like you just want the sink here. He’s taller than you, so isn’t afraid. He should never have kept his arms crossed, though. It’ll take too long to untangle them.

  “She’s a whore,” you tell him—the girl—and just as he smiles, not really disagreeing, you do it: whip around behind him, wrapping his arms up, his hair in there too, so he can’t come back with his head.

  You drag him into the handicapped stall, kick the door out hard, so that when it swings back, it’ll wedge itself into the frame. Because you don’t have time or hands to mess with the lock.

  Four feet away, at the row of urinals, someone starts peeing, a steady, confident stream.

  Father.

  He doesn’t flush, doesn’t leave, just listens. Is probably even the one who told the guy where you were.

  The guy in your arms kicks the toilet paper dispenser, the metal wall, the toilet itself. Pushes you back into the wall over and over, until you both fall into the sludge.

  The bar of soap is cold in your pocket.

  How to get it, though?

  And maybe you’re crying, here, about to panic. But then a wide brown loafer comes down on the other side of the stall, standing on the guy’s hair. Yes. Thank you, thank you thank you thank you. You let the guy go, let him try to stand, and then come back down with the Ivory.

  The only place to put it is his mouth, his throat, then hold it there until he stops kicking. It has to get wet with his saliva first, though, so it can slip in, wholly block the airway. And then he’s dead. Simple as that. No problem at all. Sheep.

  Father steps off his hair, appears in the door of the stall. Outside, Def Leppard is filling the world with sound. Pyromania. Burn this place to the ground. He reseats the plug in his sensitive ear, looks from the guy up to you, sitting on the toilet, breathing hard.

  “Ninety seconds,” he says, impressed, and you nod, remove the soap, pocket it again because it’s soft, made for prints. But it has to look like an accident. That’s the most important part. You stand, looking around—slam his head into the toilet bowl rim, faking a fall?—but then your sludge-wet hair touches your face, sticks to your cheek, and you know, and it’s perfect.

  You bring your wet hair around to your face, making yourself look at the grainy matter there, then place it in your mouth.

  There’s no sound anymore, just the taste. The idea.

  You lower yourself to the dead guy as your gorge rises, and, right before you spill it into his mouth, faking the rock star death—which fits, that’s what makes it so perfect, so ingenuitive—you see his teeth, artificially white from the soap, and long after you’ve walked away, the new Def Leppard shirt slung over your shoulder like a trophy, the girl’s breasts pale above the crowd once and forever, the bathroom wiped down, those white teeth remain, how perfect they were in death. How you wanted to lick them.

  “Like this,” Amos told the boy, and reached down, his tongue to the boy’s mouth but it had been sewn together at some point, and he was pushing him away anyway, wasn’t like his sister at all.

  Amos eased back over the fence, patted the dog’s head with the boy’s hand, the dog still flapping its tail, and then he hoisted him up into the treehouse, nailed one of his hands to the top of the halfwall and set his other over his sister’s left hand, drove a nail down there, so they wouldn’t be scared.

  Perfect.

  And then, just because the world knew what Amos was doing here, the sky finally opened up like it had meaning to all afternoon, its long black rope twisting down to the water tower, sucking it up in pieces.

  All the leaves on the floor of the treehouse lifted, because they wanted to go too, and Amos smiled, heard a truck stop in the street in front of the house.

  He skittered along an important branch of the tree, made the roof, crawled up to the peak on fingers and toes.

  A four-door truck, with four tires in back, in a line. For pulling trailers.

  In back, in the bed, tied up by the feet and hands, was the deputy from the newspaper. Jim Doe. His name made Amos think of what some Indians had called horses, when they first saw them: holy elk. Except it didn’t make any sense to go from deer to horses to elk.

  Amos squinted, a screeching starting behind his eyes.

  He tamped it down, held it there, watched the d
oors of the truck open at once, together, like a plan.

  Two giant cowboys stepped down.

  Amos lowered himself even lower behind the peak, until he was just eyes.

  The cowboys were holding their hats tight to their heads, one of them watching the tornado tearing through town. It was making the mudflaps on their truck pop.

  Amos rolled onto his back, dug out the last of the Dilantin, inhaled it before it could blow away.

  The cowboy with the mustache was knocking on the Chamberlain’s door now, hard, the other standing by the driveway, watching all the trash and broken things float through the air, like he was reading something from their pattern.

  And he was.

  “Hey!” he called through the wind, to the other cowboy.

  The tornado had seen them, wanted them, was turning this direction.

  Amos felt himself float off the roof, had to hold onto a steampipe, his hair all around him, his shirt tails higher than he was.

  He smiled, was afraid he was going to start laughing, give himself away. He wanted to tell the boy in the treehouse that now he was the girl at the concert, up above the crowd, shirt off, that this is how things always worked, in circles, always coming back around, but then the house across the street exploded into a thousand pieces of shingle and brick and glass, started grinding through the air, undoing itself.

  The giant cowboys—they were after Amos, he knew, were the only kind who could ever catch a real true Indian—they were anywhere.

  Amos screamed into the storm’s wide throat and the storm screamed back even louder, and for a long time then he forgot if he was awake or asleep. Just that he was holding on.

  Minutes later, his face and sides nicked and scratched, scoured raw, his hands still vice-gripped onto the vent pipe, he spit out a piece of dry dog food he didn’t remember having put there. It rolled down the roof of the house, into the rain gutter, for some squirrel to find later. Or bird. Because they’re delicate, need everything they can find.

  And then Amos looked past the roof he was on.

  This was the last house standing on this street. The last house in the world. Or the first.

  Amos breathed in the clean air, coughed it back out. His hair was knotted and wild and full of trash, the sky thick with paper and ash and dirt, and Amos knew that when the Chamberlains came back, when they crawled up from the cellar or wherever they were hiding, that it would be like the storm had delivered their children back to them, after taking them away so many years ago.

  They would stand on the back porch and hold hands and point up into the tree and cry and say thank you thank you.

  This was the best one so far.

  Amos stood up, held his arms out just be part of all this, and that’s when he heard him coming.

  Father.

  He was moving up Cherry Street, his boots crunching through the rubble, the plastic visor of his helmet down, his yellow coat long like death, his axe perfectly balanced at, at, what did he call it? Port arms, yes. Port arms. To keep it ready. To not let it not get tangled or caught up in anything. To let the world see it, know what it meant.

  Amos stopped breathing.

  Father had to stop at the giant cowboys’ giant truck, feel his way around. It was in the way because it had spun a perfect circle, was in a yard now, half covered with parts of exploded houses. Father studied the exempt Texas plates, evaluated the neighborhood again, closer this time, surveying it in a grid like he’d taught Amos. Not rushing, just cataloging.

  It made it so that him and Amos were the only two alive people left in the world anymore.

  And, because he’d been there before, he was especially studying the Chamberlain house. Like he could hear the kids in back, waiting on the treehouse. Like his first visit had made the house impervious to the storm now.

  Things move in circles, Amos knew.

  What that meant was that it was starting again, now, trying to. It was all wanting to happen like it had the first time—the fireman, reaching down for him, leading him to another life, one bound by basement walls and instructional films and motivational lectures, hands-on learning, until he was born again at a concert, took on his real name then kept it even after he betrayed the man who had given him everything, after he crossed his old man, don’t take me alive.

  Father lifted his red axe like sighting along its spine, like he’d seen Amos peeking over the roof—seen something—and Amos fell backwards from it, rolled off the roof, scrambled over the fence and dove in front of the sudden train the loudest one in the world ever and he ran and ran and ran, trying to take the dog with him at first to save it but, by the time he got to the Monte Carlo, all he had was the lower jaw.

  He bit down on it to make it his own and, while the emergency vehicles crept past, held it there for disguise, the blood slipping down his chin, down his throat, onto his right nipple. Then, working the wheel slow and careful, Amos Pease turned the maroon Monte Carlo back the way he’d come.

  West, and then south.

  The world wasn’t going to save itself.

  EIGHTEEN16 April 1999, Verdon, Nebraska

  The fireman. He was moving along the edge of town in the boots, his heart slapping the inside of his chest, his facemask down. Blood seeping from his left ear, under his collar. It had started when he first heard the tornado—throaty, pure—then, on the news station over the counter of the diner he was camped in, waiting, there was the first hesitant funnel dipping down from the clouds like he knew was going to happen, with a system like this. He’d left a twenty on the counter, walked calmly across the parking lot, and opened his trunk.

  The coat and helmet and boots and axe were there, like always, but more important right then had been the phonebooks.

  Verdon’s was a wisp of a directory, was for the whole county and still barely went twenty pages, with ads, but it still took him a couple of minutes to tease the Indian names from the non-Indian.

  It wasn’t always easy, or obvious.

  If you had the rollsheets for all the local tribes, though, and an eye for French, well.

  The family’s name this time was Malory, with one L—the Indian agent’s fault, not the family’s. They were Winnebago. The people of the stagnant water.

  The tribe listed two children and their mother, displaced from their home reservation. By violence, scholarship, marriage?

  It didn’t matter.

  He memorized their address, locked the slight map of the town into his head, and closed the trunk. Six miles closer to Verdon, the barometer dropped hard enough that he had to pull the side of his head down to his shoulder. It was leaving blood already.

  It meant the storm was touching down. Was connecting itself to the town, to the people, to the land.

  As it should be.

  He pulled into the outskirts just as it was dissipating. Still trash in the air, a distinct spent feeling to the sky, the light wavery, weak. Like it understood what had just happened, and respected that.

  It had been six years since he’d promised himself all this was over. Six years since he’d elected just to pack his ear with cotton in the spring and watch the doppler over the weatherman’s shoulder. Pass his various duties down to the next generation, who was ready.

  Or, who he’d thought was ready.

  But his time was coming. There were only so many places left for him to go.

  The fireman pulled over onto the shoulder, stood in the lee of his trunk and shrugged into the heavy jacket, ducked into the helmet, stepped into the boots.

  You never forget.

  The head of the axe was freshly painted, so he rubbed mud onto it, walked into town proper, following the map in his head, detouring through Cherry Street for old times’ sake but you don’t linger in the past. The official truck from Texas was meant to tell him that. So he walked deeper and deeper into the broken concrete and shattered glass, until another fireman waved him over, to help pry a garage door up.

  He walked over, using his thumbnail to chip the
already-dried mud off his axe, because now it didn’t even look like an axe anymore.

  The other fireman registered the non-regulation bit, maybe even the tribal feather etched onto each side, for power, and tracked up from it, to see if the face behind the shield was Indian as well.

  He should have just kept his attention on the task at hand.

  The fireman left him under the garage door, his head only connected by the trachea now, so if he needed to say anything to anybody, he could, and then the fireman—his axe now primed—moved on in the jacket he’d claimed, the numbers on it matching all the other firemen’s numbers now. The fingers of the dead man’s gloves were thick and warm. He flexed them, making them his own. A cat darted in front of him, stretched out and long, barely touching the ground, still distrustful of the sky.

  Nothing had changed.

  He smiled, saw his smile on the backside of the heat-resistant plastiglass: sharp, hungry.

  He watched the cat run.

  The residential area crumbled all around him hadn’t been planned, so the houses weren’t square with each other.

  They deserved the storm. Should have known it was coming.

  The fireman stopped at the entry sidewalk of the Malorys’ half-collapsed, pre-built house. The red flag on the mailbox was still up. He lowered it, approached the house, opened the door, ducked in. It was quiet, wet. His thick fingers located the phone cord, followed it into the kitchen. It ended at the wall, the jack. So he followed it the other way, across what had been the hall. It went under the closet door. He tapped on the knob with the sharp end of the axe. Nothing. He opened it.

  It was a father and a son, the father white, the son darker, meaning it had been marriage that took the Malorys from their home reservation, but—the white father had the name that was on the tribal roll? Or, more likely, he was the member, but just barely made the blood quantum cut-off. Unlike his wife, this son, who had the real blood.