All the Beautiful Sinners

by Stephen Graham Jones

  Way past them, maybe three miles out in the field, was the lone black ribbon that had been the tornado.

  As Jim Doe watched, it dissipated, was spinning out, turning back to dust and ash.

  About three miles too late for Earth.

  Jim Doe had never come here much in high school, but he’d liked the bumperstickers.

  He stepped through the rubble, touching this streetsign, now on its side, that wingback chair, no longer in its house.

  It was something he’d never got to do in 1982.

  Then, he’d been trapped under the roof for hours, bundled straight into an ambulance, was the one who lived, the one the town had to protect.

  This was calmer. A different kind of silence altogether. A deeper quiet.

  The one the Tin Man operated in. Was moving through right now.

  Jim Doe reached down for his pistol but it was still handcuffed to a seatpost, so he went back to the Nebraska cruiser for its shotgun. The key was right there on the ring, the ring in the ignition in case anybody needed to move the car.

  He hated Texas, but sometimes he loved it, too.

  He worked the slide, collected the shells in his hand and loaded them again, just to be sure.

  Then he went back in, walking where the cars couldn’t go.

  The weatherman had been back on the radio for the short ride here, his voice mournful, cataloging the damage.

  He was comparing what had happened to Lubbock to Woodward, 1947. The big F5 that threw bodies miles away. Except, in Lubbock, instead of one big one, they’d had between eight and a dozen ropy sidewinders.

  The big one had been out here. Just nobody knew yet.

  And . . . were there any Indians in Earth?

  Jim Doe wasn’t sure. Mexicans, definitely, and the Tin Man had taken one Mexican, once, but that had maybe been an accident.

  He’d meant to get Sarina’s Indian little brother, Jim Doe knew.

  He closed his eyes, opened them.

  Kept the shotgun at port arms.

  The sky was full of newspaper, now, like the town had been made of it, and leaves, and plastic shopping bags, and grain, and, every once and again, a solid thunk in the ground that had to be a car wheel, a mailbox, a chimney.

  And the smell. The musty insides of trees, not open for two centuries probably, before Texas was Texas. And under that the stagnant water of iron pipes. Whatever had been fermenting at the bottom of the grain silo. Blood.

  Jim Doe stepped into what had been the main convenience store. The shelves were collapsed, the windows shattered out, the ceiling tiles on the floor.

  A sound, though.

  The kid clerk stood up into the yawning mouth of Jim Doe’s shotgun.

  Jim Doe lowered it.

  “You all right?” he said to the clerk, and the clerk nodded too fast, too nervous.

  “Anybody else?” Jim Doe asked.

  The clerk shook his head no, less sure now.

  “Phonebook?” Jim Doe asked.

  The clerk, keeping his hands in sight, produced one.

  It was too confusing, though. Name after name after name.

  “Any Indians in town?” Jim Doe finally said. “Like, with kids?”

  The clerk narrowed his eyes, didn’t understand.

  “Feathers, not dots,” Jim Doe clarified.

  “Indio or Indian?” the clerk finally asked back.

  American or Mexican Indians.

  “Like me,” Jim Doe said.

  The clerk flipped to the back of the directory, the map that meant nothing now, and touched what had been a part of town. It was just another row of streets.

  “And they’re Indian?” Jim Doe said.

  “I think so.”

  “Why?”

  “Everybody calls him Chief.”

  Jim Doe studied the store again and left, had a direction now.

  Sometimes he mostly hated Texas.

  He stepped out, heard footsteps crunching through the debris and went flush against the store, between the ice machine and the phone bolted to the wall, the shotgun threaded straight up in front of him, his finger hooked on the trigger guard.

  It was the Rangers, Maines and McKirkle.

  They were walking on either side of the street, guns out, eyes steely.

  McKirkle stopped to toe over a roadside blanket booth that had exploded. There were blankets everywhere, silver wolves and Korean flags and Elvis faces and dramatic moons and fake fur.

  Maines covered McKirkle with his lever-action until he was through with the digging.

  Nothing.

  They moved on and Jim Doe stepped out, made himself count to fifty, to be sure they were gone, and then he eased through the relatively quiet destruction of the blanket booth, walked the map he’d burned into his head, not having to follow the streets so much anymore since the houses weren’t in the way.

  Maybe fifty yards into it, a parking curb fell from the sky, stood end-up for a moment in the asphalt, then the concrete crumbled away, leaving just the rebar underneath.

  Jim Doe looked up to where it had fallen from, saw, instead of a rain of parking curbs, the way he’d heard happened with frogs and fish and salamanders, National Guard helicopters.

  They were touching down at the eastern edge of town like Valkyrie, to ferry off the dead. Like buzzards, come to scavenge. Big metal flies.

  Meaning there wouldn’t be much time, now. The Tin Man wouldn’t want to have to answer their questions, explain where the rest of his rescue unit was.

  Jim Doe paced the Rangers north, to the house that was supposed to be Indian. It was like they knew about it too, somehow, or were following the truck’s tracks, or its exhaust, still hanging oily in the air. Or maybe they were just going for worse and worse neighborhoods, until they found the Indians.

  The air was humid, thick, and the sounds there should have been were gone, until Jim Doe grubbed up to the gauze on the side of his head, pulled it off.

  The sound came—a loud emptiness—and blood seeped down his neck.

  One house he walked through still had the television on, sideways, the picture rolling, the horizontal forever shot.

  Lying alongside it, as if to see better, adjust, was a man, dead.

  Jim Doe moved on, a loud newspaper clinging to the shin of his pants leg, found the street he was pretty sure the clerk had landed his finger on, and knew the Indian house right away, the same way the Rangers had. It was the lowslung ramshackle one that had a trailer growing from it, the plywood-roofed walkway between them getting more boards each year, until it was almost a hall, something you’d need a lightbulb for. The only thing that had kept it standing was that there were so many holes and slits in the walkway that the wind had blown through, instead of against. It was the best defense, the only defense. A judo house.

  Positioned in front of it, too, crouched behind a turned-over pick-up, was Walter Maines.

  He was waiting, the butt of his lever-action against his thigh.

  Through the broken-out window for a flash, at an angle Maines didn’t have, Jim Doe saw what he was waiting for: a yellow jacket, moving past. A ghost. The boogey man from his childhood.

  It made his knees weak, his eyes hot.

  He raised the shotgun, fired into the wall six paces past the window, blasting a basketball-sized hole that opened onto nothing. Just darkness.

  Maines turned, had his carbie centered on Jim Doe at fifteen yards.

  “Son,” he said, and they heard it together, over whatever the clouds were doing now: a propane tank like from a barbecue.

  It was rolling out into the yard.

  “Shit,” Maines said, and ducked behind the car.

  Seconds later, the tank exploded, from some jury-rigged timer or a well-placed shot from the house, Jim Doe had no idea.

  And it didn’t matter.

  The tank whooshed a mushroom into the sky, all flame and anger, and then Jim Doe heard the shooting, another cannon going off.

  Through the smoke to the
left was the fireman, running hard, his arms cradling a long bundle to his chest—a child.

  The shooting was coming from McKirkle, stepping around from behind the house, unable to see what the Tin Man was carrying.

  For an instant the Tin Man was exactly between him and Jim Doe, and McKirkle could have had him, knocked him over right there, except the slug would have carried through, into Jim Doe.

  McKirkle sneered, tipped his pistol up as if in recoil, and Jim Doe fell back anyway.

  Maines was already gone, after the fireman, shooting every chance he got, kid be damned.

  And there was something else.

  Jim Doe looked up.

  It was one of the National Guard helicopters.

  It was out of control, was falling across the sky, the body of the copter spinning the opposite way from the blades. It made the blades look slower.

  Jim Doe looked to where it was going, and had to look up, and up.

  It was an F5. The single most destructive force on earth, spinning itself back together for one more go-round. A temporary black hole, scraping across the land.

  And it shouldn’t have been so calm this close to it, but Jim Doe didn’t know the rules, either, and couldn’t tell the size to know how close it really was, or wasn’t.

  The ramshackle house crumbled up into the windpipe, anyway, didn’t come back.

  Jim Doe dropped the shotgun, scrambled away trying to keep the tornado in sight, track it, then he just turned, ran so fast he was having to touch down with his fingertips every few steps.

  Ahead, there was still shooting, but the sound was small, muted, distant, hardly mattered.

  One block later—les than a second for an F5—Jim Doe came upon the scene that had been coming for years, the big standoff at the end of the chase.

  The Tin Man was trapped against the skeletal remains of a water tower. Past it the street had been churned deep, was all vertical slabs of sidewalk, crumpled cars, and mounds of asphalt. Nothing he could hope to cross without going slow. Which there was no time for anymore.

  Maines was standing not thirty feet away, looking down along the top of his lever-action.

  “Time to meet the wizard,” he said, and shot into the ground maybe an inch before the fireman boots.

  The Tin Man didn’t flinch, just stared through his face shield.

  And, because it was just Maines here, Jim Doe knew McKirkle was coming around the back way, through the galvanized struts and cross braces of the water tower.

  He looked back, checked the tornado but it was all around now, was too big to even see all at once anymore, was so big it seemed to be rotating in slow motion. A brown and white swirling wall of pain.

  Caught up in it now was what Jim Doe initially thought was the helicopter, but turned out to be an oxidized box car, tumbling through the sky. Growing larger and larger now.

  It came down for them all, slammed down between Maines and the Tin Man, knocking Maines and Jim Doe back just from the force of its landing, which buried it two feet in the ground.

  Jim Doe couldn’t tell if the Tin Man had been caught under it or not, but then the yellow jacket came streaking around the front of the box car—it had landed like it had sat in real life, its doors ripped away—and the Tin Man did the one thing Jim Doe would never have guessed, at this point in the game: threw the child into the box car then kept running, McKirkle finally cresting the mound of blacktop behind him, his pistol going off, no sound from it, just stabs of flame.

  Hi shots found the Tin Man, blew his chest out before him, and now Maines was firing too, spinning the Tin Man around by the shoulder, the Tin Man’s fire helmet slinging off so that Jim Doe could see he had that same Tin Man mask not just on, but duct-taped on to hide him forever, making the whole top of his head look tin. As he fell, and his arms opened out to the side, a roll of paper or white tape or cloth unrolled from his hand—what he’d meant to tie the kid up with, maybe—and then the F5 was there like the finger of God, pointing down, and that wall of wind was lifting him before he could hit the ground, taking him up into the sky to bury him once and for all, and the last thing Jim Doe remembered before the world died was diving for the safety of the box car, rolling into it with the bundled-up child the Tin Man had left there and coming up in the back corner of the car, making one ruby slipper wish, the most important one, and then closing his eyes to make it come true.

  20 May 1999, Nazareth, Texas

  Jim Doe was in one of the two booths of the convenience store at the edge of town, a paper boat of potato wedges before him, from under the heat lamp. But they’re not what he was studying.

  What he was studying was the folder of one of the reports that had trickled in. From Kansas.

  Agnes had just walked into the station, taken it.

  “The presumption of widows,” she’d called it, clipping her words like she probably had for whoever had asked what she was doing in the official papers.

  Jim Doe had nodded, kind of understood.

  He was still on paid leave.

  When the tornado had flipped the box car over in Earth that day, it had broken his arm in three places, and unseated his shoulder in a way they said was going to need surgery. But he hadn’t let go of the bundled kid he’d been holding. Who’d turned out not to even need holding.

  It didn’t make sense.

  McKirkle and Maines were heroes in the news for taking down the twenty-year serial killer. Their hats were crisp and new, and, as far as Jim Doe knew, the big F5 had swallowed their truck forever.

  It meant they couldn’t jam him up for stealing it, anyway.

  Sometimes it’s the small things.

  And the storm had spared Nazareth, too. That was kind of more than a small thing.

  The news would have had fun with it, just the name, all the bible jokes waiting to happen, but, with the Columbine Massacre, things were more somber on the networks this summer, so far. But at least that building in downtown Lubbock had survived again, somehow. The ‘Molly Brown of office high-rises,’ the stations were calling it.

  Whatever.

  All that mattered was that Nazareth hadn’t died. And that the Tin Man had.

  Except.

  Sarina had bobbed to the top of Lake Meredith, just up from Amarillo. Only she wasn’t Sarina, was a Winnebago woman who had been taken from Verdon, Nebraska. A mom.

  And now that they knew what lake to drag, they’d found the longhair too, in the Dolphins jersey Jim Doe had told them about.

  Unlike the mom who wasn’t Sarina, his hands hadn’t been chewed down by catfish.

  It was why Agnes had agreed to get the report.

  Jim Doe finally opened it. After driving around all afternoon with it on the seat. Cruising by all the old places. Parking by the cemetery for too long. Out where he’d been when Gentry called him, about the longhair.

  But then, “James!”

  He turned and it was Terra.

  Benjamin Donner was immediately behind her, already had his thick hand on her shoulder, guiding her back to the cooler for the blue sports drink she always had to have, that tasted like melted popsicles.

  Jim Doe lowered his face as if nodding to them, tried to read what didn’t make sense: the prints from the longhair in the lake, they didn’t match the prints he’d sent in the brown envelope to Sheriff Debs. The ones in red paint, from the side of the Bronco, that had already been washed off before he even get back to town.

  But they had to, right?

  Except, the bundle he’d cradled to him so hard in the box car, trying to save at least one kid, it hadn’t been a kid at all, had turned out to be a wall blanket taken from the exploded booth in Earth, one that had the lush black and white polyester fur of a panda, even half marbles for eyes.

  Why take that?

  Nobody else knew about the report, either, as far as Jim Doe knew. It was between him and Debs, and Debs was dead. To everybody else, it was just a mis-identification—trying to run prints you’ve only taken a picture o
f is gamey at best, and, coupled with all the weathering that had happened to them, being on the side of the truck like that . . .

  But still.

  Jim Doe looked up, caught Terra sneaking a look at him up the candy aisle.

  Behind him the cowbell above the door dinged again.

  Jim Doe didn’t look, was trying to just study the page, not have anything to do with Benjamin Donner.

  This page was the last page, where the prints from the truck had come up indeterminate. It was standard procedure, to run them against the database when they weren’t fitting.

  There had been one sixty-percent match, though.

  Gerald Cojas.

  Jim Doe had to hold onto the sides of the table.

  Gerry Box, his prints in the system because he was a lost child.

  It made Jim Doe breathe hard. Look out the window.

  The new car nosed up to the curb of the store was a fleet car, one of hundreds circling the South Plains now, bureaucrats on wheels. This guy was a licensed radio operator, though, had the big antenna on the back of his car, the plates to match, his handle there like they all did, like it meant anything to the real world: GB4HK.

  Jim Doe tried to make a word from it, a name, couldn’t get anything so just closed his eyes, saw the Tin Man at the very end, before the F5 took him. Saw him opening his hand, that roll of cloth unrolling from his hand.

  It was gauze, wasn’t it? Couldn’t it have been? Like from the Blue Kettle memorial service.

  It’s all he’d been thinking for the past week.

  That didn’t mean it was definitely Gerry, but it definitely didn’t hurt. Gerry, who didn’t die in the lake. Gerry, trying to steal away into forever with a panda blanket. Gerry, the one not-Indian the Tin Man had ever taken, raised into a killer, made to do things he never would have done otherwise.

  It was why, at the pow-wow in Oklahoma, he’d been reaching for the arena floor the same as Jim Doe.

  He had been reaching for Sarina. Trying to go back, too.

  On the radio now, a caller was calling Lubbock ‘the town God hated,’ because it had sent the storms down on it twice already, which couldn’t be any accident. Like maybe it was Sodom and Gomorrah rolled into one.