All the Beautiful Sinners

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Out by the used tire rack, he fed the rest of the sandwich to a dog, her teats calloused and dragging.

  She growled as she chewed, stared at him the whole time.

  He gave her a bag of chips, told her not to drink any antifreeze, and reached down to scratch her head.

  She snapped at him, was ready to crawl up his arm if he reached down again

  “Kansas,” he said down to her, hands in full view and moving slow. “How about I just call you Kansas, yeah?”

  Behind him, somebody chuckled.

  Jim Doe turned slow.

  It was coming from a pile of rags that shook itself into shape. Into an old man.

  The same one from the convenience store in . . . in Gove, yeah. Right before the basketball game. Before Garden City. A lifetime ago.

  Kansas ran over to him and he rubbed behind her ears, her pale eyes watching Jim Doe the whole time, teeth bared.

  “Ever find her?” the old man said, a grin in his eyes.

  “It was a him,” Jim Doe said.

  “Sure?”

  “Where is everybody tonight?” Jim Doe asked.

  The old man didn’t say anything at first.

  Together they watched one raggedy RV pull another, newer RV past. Heading south.

  There were tribal designs painted all around the skirt of the second RV. Blue outlines of bears, and tracks, like the bear had walked through paint then leaned on the side of the RV a few times, maybe trying to push it over, open it like a cooler.

  The old man said, “Where you think they’re going?”

  Jim Doe came back to the old man.

  “Only one place to be tonight if you’re Indian,” the old man said, shrugging one shoulder as if this were just a fact.

  They left the dog standing in the shade of the garage.

  Behind them, the clouds were swelling, filling the sky.

  TWENTY-SIXApril 19 1999, Claymore, Oklahoma

  Amos parked in the ditch when everything in his head was telling him to drive, rubbed the paint into his face, smoothed his hair back with bear fat he’d fingered from a pork’n beans can, and let himself drift into the near trees, move from shadow to shadow to the outer ring of campfires.

  It was so dark that the fires could have been from a hundred years ago. Amos tracked from them up into the sky, its velvet softness soaking up the stars to the north, the darkness seeping across.

  The first heavy drop of rain splatted against a faded beer can two feet in front of him, made a hollow sound.

  He wasn’t sure if he should have the children with him yet or not.

  Russell would be all right, would act tough around all these other Indians, but Gina, she was falling apart. Amos would have to keep her to the shadows, because nobody would understand.

  So he walked through the carnival alone, and the black paint smeared across his eyes two fingers wide, it was no different than all the fancydancers’. Like them, too, he’d changed back into street clothes, didn’t want to forget, sit back on a four-hundred dollar porcupine bustle.

  Of course Father had taught him that all these people were sheep as well. That Amos was the only real wolf. And a part of them deep inside could sense this, would always let him pass unmolested.

  He was right.

  Amos moved from booth to booth, saw fat men balancing complete racks of french fries on their paper plates, saw women with clear-beaded headdresses trailing from their keychains, stared down children whose chins were stained red with icee slush.

  He’d forgot to ask Gina and Russell what their parents sold from their the side of their RV, though.

  Amos clutched the wad of bills in his pocket, stood in line after line, went to window after window, never taking a bite of any of it, just dropping it in the trash on the way to the next RV, the next plywood store on wheels.

  Back past where he could see, people were singing, and Amos stopped, listened.

  There was frybread in his hand, in a paper boat, and, without thinking, he lowered his mouth to it.

  One story Father had told him about pow-wows was how some criminal from the rez had come back from town once not with a trunkload of beer or a white woman to show off, but with a panda bear on a chain.

  Amos had almost wet himself, listening.

  The Indian had pulled the bear into a booth selling shirts—his cousin’s booth—and charged two dollars to touch it, even though its white parts were all brown and dusty by then, and, later that night, when everybody was throwing bottles up into the sky, and there were fireworks, he’d pulled the bear into the ring where the dancing had happened, and let it fight the reservation dogs, and then had tied it to the trunk of his mother’s car, driven away into the mountains, to find the right place to bury the panda.

  As far as Father had known, he was still up there, trying to find the panda burial grounds.

  Amos had smiled, listening, and, right when it was over, asked for it again, and again.

  Now, in Claremore, leaning against a blue port-a-john, frybread clutched tight in his right hand, he wanted to hear it again.

  The door of the john flapped open, swung shut, and a tall thick Lakota came around the corner, right into Amos.

  “See anything you like?” he said, tilting his head to the ventilation slats Amos had had his head leaned against.

  Amos let his frybread fall, stepped up to the big man, his face to the guy’s chest, about.

  “See anything you like?” he said.

  The Lakota—Amos could tell from the braids—pushed Amos back, hard, sending Amos into the dirt between all the booths. The dirt stuck to his face paint.

  Amos stayed there a moment, on fingertips and toes, then rose like a weasel, humped across the distance between him and the Lakota and climbed straight up him, started tearing at his face.

  By the time people pulled him off, he’d stuffed one of the Lakota’s braids most of the way down his throat. Somebody pulled it out for the Lakota and he threw up behind it, couldn’t seem to stop.

  Amos twisted against the hands holding him, slipped between two of the booths, under a guidewire, grabbed a football jersey off the rack and disappeared, woke up sitting in the wooden stands of the main dancing place.

  He was shaking, crying. There was flesh from somebody’s face under his fingernails. He put his fingers to his mouth, tasted it.

  You’re Indian, Father had told him once, for six years. You’re Indian.

  The football jersey he’d pulled on for disguise was for the Dolphins, and would have been big enough for shoulder pads if Amos had had any.

  Amos drew it around him, shivered.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about the panda bear, dirty, thousands of miles from home, the rez dogs snapping at it, everybody standing around, their beer cans glinting in the moonlight.

  Amos shook his head no, and that he was sorry, and the next time he looked up, the deputy from the newspaper was standing in the middle of all the stands, looking around.

  Jim Doe.

  The name was a screech in Amos’s head.

  Amos opened his mouth to say something, or just to let the sound in his head have a vent, but fell over instead, hugging his own shoulders, a dolphin out here on the plains, no longer able to find even a single breath of air to breathe.

  Jim Doe heard the guy’s head hit the wooden seat, pulled his lips away from his teeth because it had to have hurt.

  “Hey,” he called, “you all right, man?”

  No answer.

  Probably drunk. Just needed to sleep it off.

  But still.

  There had been no Brougham in the field everybody was parking in. Maybe this wasn’t the right pow-wow.

  All the same, it was like he’d been here before, too, in another lifetime. Especially the field of cars, all just parked wherever.

  It was back when he had still been Indian, when he had still been Blackfeet, just in Texas. Maybe six years old, him and Sarina weaving through the cars to get to the exhibit building, Sarina
touching each S in the license plates, him touching all the Js. Amarillo, it had been Amarillo. The stands had been wooden there too, and loud, and he’d held his dad’s hand once they were inside, because this was another world.

  Then, after his dad started saying that the storm had come for Sarina because she was Indian, that the check the insurance man gave for her was the same as the settlement checks he got from the tribe, like the past could be bought, after that, him and his dad had stopped being Indian. As easy as that.

  But now here Jim Doe was again, at a pow-wow, in the Indian Territories.

  The old man who’d directed him here had peeled off again, sat down at some campfire or another, lifting his arm in farewell as he scooted off, and the way it felt for Jim Doe was that he’d finally let go of his dad’s hand. Was going to have to walk the lanes and aisles of this new world alone.

  He did, trying not to let his legs go robot, trying not to look at any one person too long. Trying to fit in.

  It wasn’t as hard as he thought. Here, he was Indian, not Mexican.

  He walked along the booths and the tables, trailed his hand over the table tops, touching the grey fur of animals he’d never seen, couldn’t imagine. At one point a girl—five, maybe—latched onto his finger, led him to a set of earrings she’d found, then looked up at him, saw he wasn’t who he was supposed to be. The vendor looked at Jim Doe as if he were still supposed to buy the earrings. Jim Doe stepped away, breathed in, breathed out.

  Every once and again there would be a fat raindrop, splatting into his shoulder or the top of his hand, but everybody seemed to be wanting to stay just one minute longer.

  Jim Doe could maybe understand.

  For a moment he stood, trying to listen to the storm, to gauge the wind up there. As long as it was blowing, they were okay. It was when it stopped that you had to run, hide deep.

  After walking everywhere twice, he’d started looking into the spaces he hadn’t checked. Between the booths, behind the close-parked cars, through doors people hadn’t closed, or that hadn’t stayed closed.

  One of them opened up not into a supply closet, but the main arena. The dancing place.

  Jim Doe walked out into the center of it, looked straight up, heard the Indian tump over on the wooden stands.

  “Want me to get somebody?” he called again.

  Nothing.

  He looked up at the storm again. The wind was whipping hard past the metal overhang now, the big circle of sky it left, cut by guide wires.

  Good. It was when it went still that you had to worry.

  Jim Doe looked around at the rest of the circle of stands, trash blowing through them—the storm was almost here—one blanket left, and then up to the glass booth where the announcers would be if this were a rodeo.

  Past the entry, he could hear plywood window flaps slamming shut, could feel the lanes getting rolled up, could guess that children were being collected, ushered up into campers, into the backs of cars.

  There was maybe three minutes before the sky was going to open up, if that. The field was going to be a slurry, a mudpit, and slick, but he was pretty sure the Rangers’ Ford would be heavy enough to bite through, chug him out, even if the gate got clogged and he had to snip a fence.

  Right now, he was more worried about this one Indian, passed out in the stands. Like that could have been himself, if he’d made one different decision. Like, if Sarina hadn’t been taken, he might have grown his hair out into braids too, started hanging around the Oklahoma reservations, because there were no Indians in Texas.

  Instead, without her, he’d put a badge on, let Gentry call him chief.

  More raindrops were hitting now.

  Jim Doe stepped through them to the shelter of the underhang, sat a few lengths from the sleeping-it-off Indian.

  Jim Doe shook his head, looked back to the arena floor.

  Somebody moving around down there? Why?

  “Hey,” he said to the sleeping Indian, “somebody’s looking for you, man”—it had been the running joke in high school, especially at farm auctions, to get your buddy to accidentally bid—but the Indian sat up in his oversized jersey, looked groggily to the center of the arena, and every raindrop in the arena stopped mid-air.

  It was the longhair. From Gentry’s videotape.

  And in bad shape, his eyes painted like a domino mask, his hand fluttering with bandages, surely infected, lips cracked and bleeding.

  But none of that mattered.

  He was just watching whoever was moving below. Trying to get his eyes to focus, it looked like.

  “She said your name,” Jim Doe added, running with the high-school joke, suddenly aware he’d left the .44 tucked under the seatpost of the truck.

  But not his cuffs.

  He reached back like tucking his shirt in, eased them out, the upper jaw cocked back, just a silver rib running along the underside of his index finger.

  “It’s her?” the longhair said, still dazed with sleep and infection and whatever other damage he had. He looked over to Jim Doe.

  Jim Doe shook his head yes, it was definitely her, and neatly cuffed the longhair’s wrist.

  The longhair studied his wrist, this new thing happening, then got bored with it, looked back to the arena floor.

  Jim Doe followed the longhair’s eyes, still holding the other end of the cuffs.

  There was somebody down there. A woman. Like he’d talked her into being real, brought her into the world with his words. Like magic.

  He squinted to make her out through the rain. Just to be sure he wasn’t imagining this.

  A woman.

  She was dancing whatever dance they called it that’s like a skip, that the women in the loud dresses do. Jingle dance. Just moving slow, head down.

  But there was something about her.

  Jim Doe stood.

  Her hair was across her face, and that hair was long, and black.

  Like Sarina’s had been. Like Sarina’s still would be, if she’d had the chance to grow up.

  Jim Doe took an involuntary step forward.

  No. This was impossible.

  She was dead. She’d been dead for seventeen years.

  But had he only been telling himself that because the other way was worse? For her to be alive, locked in some basement, never being saved?

  Jim Doe took another step forward, his knee jamming against the step because he wasn’t looking down for it.

  Amos stumbled behind, still cuffed.

  Without turning from the arena, Jim Doe bit the other of the cuffs around a scarred metal pole holding the overhang up.

  And he walked on, down to the packed dirt.

  “Sarina?” he said, his voice cracking.

  He swallowed. The rain, it was like there were people on the overhang with bucket after bucket. With a hose.

  But the woman, this girl—his sister? She was still dancing, her face down.

  Jim Doe took another step towards her, about to cross the middle part, the island in the center of the track, but then a voice crackled down, from all around: “The right way.”

  Jim Doe stopped, swung his head up to the voice.

  The speakers.

  There was somebody in the booth.

  Jim Doe tried to see through the glass, couldn’t, so took another step, and just as his foot came down, a string of lights came one. Christmas lights, like he’d been seeing tacked around the frame of all the booths, all the windows.

  They were all around, the overhang filthy with them, but there was one deviant strand.

  It was noosed around Sarina’s neck, had been tossed over one of the guide wires connecting the overhang to itself.

  So long as she only walked in the dance’s prescribed circle, and not more than once or twice, she had enough rope. But that rope, that string of lights, its other end was lost, was maybe hanging off the backside of the overhang. Still plugged in somewhere, but then, to show what it could do, that there was something heavy on the other end, it
slipped a bit, the two bulbs closest to the guide wire exploding against the guide wire, the rope tightening so that Sarina had to stand on her toes.

  “No!” the longhair screamed, and Jim Doe turned to him, saw him reaching as far as the cuff would allow.

  For Sarina?

  The longhair’s wrist was completely opened against the steel, the chain dripping blood.

  He couldn’t reach far enough to even get properly wet, though.

  Jim Doe nodded that he understood the warning, and stepped back, into the dance path.

  Sarina’s rope stayed in place, and she began dancing again, as close to the island as she could, for all the slack she could get, the longhair screaming and clawing to get to her.

  Jim Doe followed her, going the right way around the packed dirt, but then the rope tightened again, another bulb sparking down.

  “Like her,” the voice said, like this was all amusing, and at first Jim Doe didn’t get it, but then the voice added, “Like an Indian, yeah?”

  So Jim Doe lowered his face slowly, checked the booth again—still too dark to see—then lowered his face again, began skip-dancing like Sarina was.

  The silence from above was approval.

  And her rope, those broken bulbs, the water was in there now, was sparking. It was only a matter of time, of luck, before she got lit up.

  Jim Doe danced faster, his back to the booth, and was almost to her when her rope tightened again, pulling her around, forcing her to go to the center, off the dirt path.

  She turned—no, twirled around, her toes just dragging the ground, and Jim Doe dove for her, pulled her to him to carry her weight, to hold her down—no, no, to hold her up—and, then, at the very last moment, she said it, her voice so perfect: Sorry.

  Jim Doe looked up to her face, saw how beautiful she was, and then she put her hand over his mouth, only her hand was a cloth, was wet with something already evaporating.

  The bottle in her other hand was brown, like hydrogen peroxide, but Jim Doe wasn’t hurt, didn’t need, and this, this wasn’t, it wasn’t—it was like running through fiberglass insulation, the kind in attics, where it’s rising glittering into the air before you, and you know at any moment you’re going to step through, into open space, and just keep falling.