All the Beautiful Sinners

by Stephen Graham Jones

  GARDEN CITY SHERIFF.

  Amos made another chirping sound, had to clap his hand over his mouth.

  Because it was too late to turn around, he crept by, idled through what of Vermillion there still was since the storm, then parked down the road, had to do this, had to figure out how.

  Right?

  But no no no.

  Stealing ice from the cooler of the grocery store, then, a bagboy watching him but pretending not to, Amos saw the flyer. It was faded orange. Not one of the ones of him, but one that was like a message for him:

  CLAREMORE POW-WOW

  CLAREMORE, OKLAHOMA

  APRIL 20TH, 1999

  He raced back to the car, shuffled through the Shoots Twice’s mail, and yes yes yes, there it was: a letter from Claremore.

  Amos ripped it open with his teeth.

  It was a confirmation for a booth, and an application for a vendor’s license.

  Yes.

  The long square of yellow grass was where the frybread RV had been parked. But now it wasn’t.

  It was in Oklahoma.

  “I know where they are,” Amos said to Gina and Russell.

  Indian Territory.

  They went the speed limit all the way out of town.

  It was another thing Father had taught him.

  It worked.

  TWENTY-TWO2 September 1977, Pueblo, Colorado

  Jessie Wiggs was Burt Reynolds dressed up like Rod Stewart, ducking out incognito for a little rest and relaxation. It was long overdue: he’d been an absolute choirboy now for three and a half years. He wore the Jackie O shades all the way out of Oklahoma, keeping the speedometer nice and legal. The car was candy apple red—a bad idea, he knew, but it was the only one in the yard with t-tops. They made the girls who walked over from the sidewalks feel less threatened. Like he didn’t have anything to hide. Like they could get out whenever they wanted.

  School had started last week.

  Jessie knew because he’d found himself taking the long way back to his mother’s place, found himself brushing his hair for the drive, sitting far down in the seat, one arm stabbed up at the windshield, slung casual over the wheel. There were newspaper clippings of him on the telephone poles, though. His face, the three kids he’d fathered so far, only one of the mothers legal, now. The other two would be in a year, though. Soon he’d have his own James Gang. He laughed, dialed it back to a smile, then just pursed his lips, kept his right hand on the floor shifter, his left on the wheel. Fuck Enid, then. It brought the smile back, thinking of Enid as female, a woman. Oklahoma slipped away faster and faster.

  In the tachometer housing was the snapshot. His ticket; the carrot.

  It had turned up in his mother’s mailbox two days ago, taped between two of the same postcard. Of Pueblo, Colorado. They’d been glued back to front, so they looked like just one. It was too thick, though, uneasy to bend. Jessie opened it standing at the mailbox, and the nostalgia washing up from the snapshot had been so thick he’d had to grab onto the shaft of the red flag to stay standing: it was Candace, or Christine, maybe. From Colorado, anyway. Her skin was grey in the picture, but she’d coughed herself awake at the end, he remembered. Candace, yes. With the healthy set of lungs. Twined in there with her was John13, or Hari Kari, or Bodhisattva, Whoudini, or whatever the kid had been trying to get everyone to call him after that. Deflowered would have been Jessie’s suggestion.

  Initiated.

  Broken in.

  But fuck him too. He was dead now anyway. Jessie’s mother had showed him the article before work one day: the kid swallowing pounds of birdshot then walking out into the reservoir, his hair a spoked disc on the surface of the water for a few steps, then not anymore. Four people had watched him do it, raised their beers to him. They only told the cops about it because they’d built their fire too big that night again. They traded the kid’s suicide for a warning citation. Jessie had nodded to his mother, touched the paper with his middle finger, told her See? You can work with the law.

  The note on the back of the second postcard said simply HAVING FUN IN PUEBLO. WORKING AT SCHLESINGER’S NOW.

  Candace. It had definitely been Candace.

  Jessie pulled into and out of the diner parking lot all afternoon, suddenly frantic about the snapshot: was it an angry boyfriend? big brother? father? husband? But how would they have gotten it? That was the thing. Candace shouldn’t even have had it—nobody should have. They were gone, used up. Except for the one the kid took. Jessie clearly remembered looking for that one, in every crevice of the car, for weeks. It was from when they’d swung through Enid, just before Tinkerbell Base. Angel. He’d wanted to show her that one. Wait for her to get older then show her, see if she remembered.

  The only answer was that, now that the kid was dead, he had become Jessie’s helper. Was doing things for him from the other side. Helping him out. Reminding him of the good old days.

  It felt good, but he didn’t want to see him, either, his stomach distended with lead, his skin flaying away from his face.

  Before he went into the diner where she worked now, Candace, he made up a system of hand signs he could talk to the ghost kid with. Most of them just meant thanks, and yes, and I remember. He could do them all under the table without anybody seeing.

  Inside, he recognized her immediately. Smiled. Had to adjust.

  “Smoking?” she said, just that. Her voice flat.

  “Sure,” he said. “Yeah, smoking.”

  It was like it was all meant to be.

  “You know you’re parked in handicapped,” she said, taking his order, and Jesse James shrugged, was back. At least for today.

  “Well, I’m an outlaw, see,” he told her, trying to remind her. It was the same line he’d used last time, when the car had been pulled up against a red curb.

  She stared at him over her pad, like it was almost clicking.

  He sat there the rest of the afternoon, eating, walking the line of booths to the bathroom, to throw up in the urinal. He’d never taken a grown woman like this. Even if it was Candace. Should he say some line? Maybe if she could just see him in his car.

  It took him two more hours to decide, and then he said it: “Boone, right? Out past the chemical depot?”

  She nodded, poured.

  “You?” she said back.

  “Once upon a time,” he said. “I think we used to play you in football or something.”

  It was like he was invisible to her—like in her head she’d cut a Jessie Wiggs-shaped stencil out of corrugated cardboard, sewed a couple of elastic straps to the back for her forearm, then used it as a shield, so that anybody who looked like him now just wouldn’t exist. Or maybe it was just that he looked like Rod Stewart these days.

  “Christine,” he said to her, guessing.

  She smiled.

  “Candace,” she said.

  “Candy,” he said.

  He asked her if she’d ever ridden in a silver Trans-Am. She looked out at the parking lot, back to him, and that was all it took: she was the same junior high girl who’d crossed the sidewalk to him thirteen years ago, because his hands were too big to get the pocket comb he’d dropped between the seats.

  Candace.

  Her shift was over at six, and he walked her out of it, to his car, to the hotel, and when it happened—when she saw him in the cheap mirror, recognized him—it was all okay, because she just went limp, pliant. Like she remembered. Had been conditioned.

  Jesse James smiled, laid her back on the bed.

  She was too old, but he made do. He could close his eyes, and, if he pushed hard enough, reach the girl still inside her.

  Candace Crocker.

  She was number one.

  He left her in the room, her clothes opened around her like when you butterfly a shrimp, and at the last moment he looked back, took a picture of her in his mind for later, then just walked away like you had to, sat in the car. There was another snapshot under the wipers, on his side.

  Two
days later, he was in Utah, reading about Candace.

  She was dead.

  He made a hand sign under the table—please—then chatted up MJ Harrison. Her earrings had gotten her kicked off the junior high cheerleading squad. Jesse James had liked them, though. Wanted to see them up close. But that was 1966. She was married now. With children. And he had to tell her over and over that he wasn’t who he was, and still, she wouldn’t serve him, so he had to wait for her in the parking lot. It was the same, though; in the motel room her body remembered what her head didn’t want to.

  Jessie tried looking back at her like he had Candace, but MJ was balled up, sobbing.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it.

  She didn’t look up.

  After that, he decided to make it better, nicer for them, so he scored some Tuinol, tapped it into their drinks. Jesse James rides again.

  MJ turned up dead too, though.

  Jessie drove faster. Quit bathing.

  The next snapshot that shouldn’t have still existed was Jennifer Korell. He shook his head no, no no no, then holed up in a truck stop diner for two days, until he started seeing himself out at the pumps, his long blond hair lifting in the wind, his hands in his pockets. He was waiting out there. For himself to come out. He made a hand sign under the table. When he got to the car, there was a belt-CB waiting for him.

  It was the kid, talking to him from the afterlife.

  “Her name was Jennifer Korell,” the kid said.

  “I don’t want to,” Jessie said.

  “Her shift starts at eight.”

  “But you died.”

  “I can’t die, Jessie. Don’t you know that?”

  After that, they were in contact always. Jessie never even talked into the radio anymore. He just wanted to be back in his mother’s garage, or in the shop, scraping gaskets, or anyfuckingwhere, please.

  Jennifer Korell.

  He held her down by the wrists and cried as he did it to her, then stood, saw himself crossing the parking lot to this room, the blade flashing by his leg.

  “You can’t do this!” Jessie yelled.

  The kid just kept on coming.

  “I’ll tell,” Jessie said.

  “Your mother?” the kid said back, from Jessie’s belt.

  Jennifer Korell was already dying. Slow.

  Jessie Wiggs shook his head no.

  That night he wrote all the letters all at once, addressed them to the newspapers of the different cities he’d been in already—you zombie, be born again my friend, won’t you sign in stranger—and all the cities he thought he was going to. The next day he bought a fabulous red top hat, sat in a booth to have his picture taken, and, when the hat blew across the parking lot, slipped the letters into a drop box. He’d written like the kid would have, if he were still alive. He was telling. All the hand signs he made were to himself, now.

  The next girl was Wanda Richardson.

  Jessie got a mannequin from his trunk, dressed it up like her, left it in a motel room.

  It didn’t work, though. Nothing did.

  He drove, and drove, then read one of the letters he’d written on the front page of a paper, circled it in red, left it in Wanda’s diner, P L E A S E spelled out beside it.

  Nobody was listening.

  The next picture was Angeline Dougherty. Back in Colorado.

  Jesse James stood at an island of pumps at some sprawling truck stop, filling the car up, the weight of his thirty-four years heavy on him now, like car batteries tied to his neck, but then a twelve-year-old girl stepped out of her father’s sedan one island over and Jessie watched her cross the slick concrete for the restaurant, stretching her legs as she walked, and he smiled, relaxed his hand on the pump, so he wouldn’t finish before she was gone, so she could stay like that forever, for him.

  Two weeks later he was dead, cornered in a motel room with a dead girl, the big shoot-out with the police that made all the papers, all the textbooks.

  On the motel telephone he’d cried and begged them to believe he hadn’t killed those girls, to tell his mom that he hadn’t, that there was this ghost kid out there setting him up, this kid who could hear the weather, that they could talk to him on the CB if they wanted.

  It was a classic case.

  TWENTY-THREE19 April 1999, Vermillion, Kansas

  Ninety-eight gallons.

  That was how much diesel Maines and McKirkle had in the number one auxiliary tank in the bed of their truck. In-line pump, readout on the dash, six foot hose and everything—courtesy of the Texas Rangers. And there was another tank built in under the toolbox. Counting what was left in the twin tanks the truck had stock, Jim Doe figured he had at least two-hundred gallons of diesel to burn.

  Even if he was just getting fifteen miles to the gallon—even with ten-ply highway tires, the truck was still a dually—that was three thousand miles, give or take.

  Which was good, and necessary.

  When he’d stopped by the caved-in LeMans in Pawnee City, the envelope of cash from Agnes had been gone. Kids, maybe, or adults, or, with the windows shattered, it could have been birds, or rats. He’d had it tucked under the passenger seat cover where it was torn, anyway, and now the foam there was all gutted out.

  They hadn’t got the .44 from under the front seat, though.

  Jim Doe slid it barrel-first under the front seat of the Ford, then thought again, handcuffed the trigger guard to the seatpost down there, using the same handcuffs that had saved him in Verdon, the chrome chain hooked around the gooseneck ball.

  His wrists were bleeding now, the thumbs already turning purple, the nails beaten black, but it was better than getting sucked up into the sky, and the key to the cuffs had been on the ring in the ignition, and the truck was definitely a trade up from a car there were already bulletins circulating for. And he was counting the truck as recompense anyway, for Maines and McKirkle blindsiding him, leaving him out there like a sacrifice to the storm.

  No, it was recompense for 1982, for keeping the Tin Man secret all this time. And it wasn’t nearly enough.

  Jim Doe opened the Powerstroke up, got the hell out of Nebraska, was thirty minutes into Kansas before a lightbar flashed behind him.

  For a moment his boot hesitated over the accelerator, but there was no outrunning the radio.

  He coasted over, the twin tires in back slinging gravel up into the fiberglass fenders. Hopefully cracking them.

  He put his hands in view and waited.

  The last Kansas law he’d encountered had been Lobicek, in Lydia. No, Debs, through the bars of a jail cell.

  Neither tokened well.

  Three minutes later, though, he was waiting for the glowplugs to warm, then moving on down the road.

  Exempt Texas plates plus a Texas badge, and on a holy mission to find his sheriff’s killer? He was bulletproof. For the moment, anyway. And Maines and McKirkle must have been too proud to call the truck in, too, the same way they’d been too proud to tell the feds that that kidnapper had slipped them in Nazareth seventeen years ago. That he’d gotten away with the girl.

  But they’d get him next time. Or the time after.

  Jim Doe hit the heel of his hand into the dash.

  None of this had had to happen.

  Sarina—it still hurt to say her name—she could have helped him with his algebra all through school, had her heart broken that she wasn’t on the homecoming court, gone to two years of school at South Plains. Right now she could be deciding whether to cut her hair off or not. Trolling yard sales for a high chair. Stealing cable.

  Except for the Rangers. Except for the Tin Man.

  Now she was in their stupid story. Was Dorothy forever.

  Jim Doe drove and tried to dial in some news about the tornado then switched to the police radio, for any developments with the longhair. With any Indian out there, leaving a trail of bodies behind, because that would be the longhair, would be something he could fix. The only thing he cold fix.

  But the
n, a few miles into listening, he coasted to the side of the road again.

  Even with three thousand miles in the tank, still, just driving around random was no plan.

  How had the Rangers been showing up everywhere, though?

  Granted, they could hear about the bodies before they made the news, but still—Verdon, Nebraska? That wasn’t coincidence. It was too far out in the middle of nowhere.

  They knew something.

  Jim Doe cracked into the glove compartment, the console, dug behind the visors and through the map pockets on the door.

  Nothing.

  Then the backseat, the duffel bags, the spotting scope, the ammo box, the empty rifle case and the 7mm Weatherby Mark IV in its plastic shell, probably sighted in at five hundred yards.

  No accordion file, though, no three-ring binder, no seventeen years of paperwork and leads and maybes.

  Shit. Shit shit shit.

  Jim Doe was tempted to take the Weatherby out, scratch the ivory and rosewood tip, pack the chamber with mud, something.

  Instead, he lobbed the duffel bags out onto the yellow stripes.

  Childish, but screw it.

  Next was the leather rifle case, but then he jogged out for it. Truckers would run over a bag just to feel it explode under them, but they’d stop for a rifle case. Anybody would.

  So he threw it out by the fence, for the rats to make a winter home in.

  He couldn’t bring himself to disrespect the spotting scope, though. Scopes like that were beautiful. And the Weatherby, it was still a Weatherby, it didn’t matter who had the papers on it, and if he dumped the ammo box and a grassfire came through next year . . .

  He jogged out into the road, collected the clothes, stuffed them back into the exploded duffels bags and stuffed the bags into the toolbox.

  This was it, then.

  He had a truck with unlimited gas, he had a free pass from the state police, and there was nowhere to go. Or, there was everywhere to go, but that was the same thing.

  He dialed in the news, waved a farmer on who was slowing to see what was wrong.

  Everything, sir. Police business. Personal matter. Thank you.

  And the news was all about Verdon, of course. The town that blew up, the town the wind had taken away a second time, the town God hated.