The Fallen

by Ace Atkins

  “Appreciate your buddy putting me up,” Mingo said, reaching for a dish towel to help dry as Caddy dipped another plate in the sudsy water.

  “I felt it was safer,” she said. “He can watch out for you. And nobody knows where Boom lives.”

  “You expect some trouble?”

  “Some men in the same white truck followed me today,” Caddy said. “Nothing happened. And they took off after a while. But it was them. They wanted me to know they were there and make sure and scare me good.”

  “I don’t think you scare easy, Miss Caddy.”

  “Just ‘Caddy,’” she said. “And bet your ass I do. I’m scared right now. I’d actually feel better if you’d talk to my brother again, go ahead and maybe stay at the jail until he gets this all worked out with his friend in Memphis. Would you do that for me?”

  Mingo reached for another washed dish and dried it, setting it in the rack. He shook his head, long black hair scattering across his face. “I don’t trust those people.”

  “But you’re going to have to talk to them,” Caddy said. “Quinn has someone special coming down tomorrow to meet you. Without you, we won’t ever find Ana Maria or Tamika.”

  Mingo swallowed and put a hand to Caddy’s forearm. He smiled at her. “What if there was another way?” he said. “If the law comes down on this, the girls are as good as dead. You know that.”

  Caddy nodded, pulling the plug in the sink and hearing the gurgling sound of all that dirty water starting to drain. The hard rain tapping the roof above them.

  “What if I could guarantee a way to get both of them back to Jericho without getting into all this mess?” he asked.

  Caddy looked at him, hands on hips, waiting for the kid to tell her just what the hell he had in mind.

  “And how would that work?”

  “You just need to trust me,” Mingo said. “I want to make everything right.”

  32

  Quinn had stayed a while at the Fillin’ Station that morning, allowing himself a fourth cup of coffee with the locals, a longer talk with a group of old farmers. Luther Varner had stopped by, asking a lot of questions about how Lillie had made that shot on Rick Wilcox. Varner, an ex–Marine sniper, had taken a lot of pride in Lillie, always proud of her in a way he’d never been with his own children. Luther shook Quinn’s hand and went for the door, the rain coming down hard now, and he tugged down his SEMPER FI ball cap and headed out to his truck. Within a couple of seconds, the bell jingled above the door and Skinner walked into the nearly empty diner. Quinn was sitting at one of the tables in the middle, all the booths and tables in back cleared of breakfast.

  Skinner nodded to Miss Mary and walked toward Quinn’s table. Quinn nodded at the man but didn’t stand. Standing would have implied respect.

  “You mind if I take a seat?” Skinner said.

  “Thought we had a meeting at one.”

  “Good a time as any,” Skinner said. “Work crews starting early. Didn’t have time to eat.”

  Quinn pushed away his empty plate and wrapped his hand around his coffee mug. He motioned to an empty chair across from him. Miss Mary took his order and headed off to the kitchen, afterward opening the front door, leaning against the jamb while she smoked a cigarette.

  “OK,” Quinn said. “I’m ready. Let’s use whatever laws we got to shut down Hathcock.”

  Skinner’s clear blue eyes and drooping face looked uneasy. He set his wet Stetson crown-side down on the seat next to him and brushed his fingers over his bare scalp in thought.

  “Isn’t that what you want?” Quinn said. “If we don’t do it, the Feds will come down here and embarrass us all. How will that look to your big-shot investors?”

  Skinner cocked his head. “The way I understand it is that Miss Hathcock is now following the county ordinance,” he said. “Far as I know, the girls are wearing proper attire and not touching patrons. As long as they comply.”

  “Fannie’s running girls out of there,” Quinn said, quicker than he meant to. “They’ve got hookers going all night at the Golden Cherry.”

  “Whew,” Skinner said, shaking his head. “That’s a hell of an accusation. That’s the first I’m hearing of any of it.”

  “Folks have been running whores out of the Golden Cherry since long before I was born,” Quinn said. “It’s been as regular as folks pumping gas at the Rebel.”

  Skinner looked hard at Quinn, breaking into a smile as Miss Mary delivered his sausage biscuit and set down a complimentary glass of prune juice. Skinner toasted Quinn with the prune juice and finished it in a couple of quick swallows.

  “Well,” Skinner said, “how about you address the board next session? You can lay out all your concerns. But you can’t go all willy-nilly with this stuff. You’re going to have to show us some proof.”

  Quinn shook his head and laughed. “Or how about you and me drive out to the Golden Cherry right now?” he said. “Knock on a few doors and see how many county workers come crawling out of their holes?”

  “Some might call that slander, Sheriff Colson.”

  “Some might.”

  Skinner worked on his biscuit, his jaw muscles like big balls flexing as he ate. He wiped his greasy mouth and set down the rest of the biscuit. “Board appreciates you making Hathcock follow the law,” he said. “But after that Wild West show out there, we’d like things to cool down a bit. We get in the news any more and it might scare some folks off. We had to really reassure some important men after what happened out there.”

  “Sorry to inconvenience y’all with a hostage situation,” Quinn said. “And four dead bikers.”

  “The others pulled through?”

  “Afraid so,” Quinn said.

  “Well,” Skinner said, “y’all did an outstanding job. I know Sam Bishop is working up some kind of citation for y’all. You think you can get Miss Virgil down here to accept it?”

  “She said she’d rather bathe in a river of shit than see the board again.”

  Skinner nodded, eyes flicking up to Quinn as he chewed, mouth slightly open and greasy. “Well,” he said. “I’ll take that as a no.”

  “I really thought you wanted Fannie Hathcock gone before y’all cut the ribbon on the Tibbehah Miracle.”

  “No, sir,” Skinner said. “We just want to enforce what’s on the books. Rome wasn’t built in a day. And it may take me a bit longer to get Tibbehah looking like it did when I was a boy.”

  “You sure miss those times.”

  Skinner leaned back in his seat, reached for his Stetson, and nodded. “I sure do,” he said. “Folks out there are fed up.”

  “Vardaman’s kind of folks?” Quinn said. “The real working man. The rednecks for change.”

  “If you want to put it so crudely.”

  Quinn shook his head. Skinner stood, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a few loose dollars and lay them on the table. “Look forward to seeing you next week,” he said. “I think that citation is going look real nice hanging in your office.”

  • • •

  Caddy drove out to Sugar Ditch in the rain, the wind blowing so hard it buffeted and rocked her truck, rain leaking through the busted passenger window and spilling onto the floorboard. The worn-out windshield wipers didn’t do much good and the glass had fogged up, Caddy having to reach up and clear her view until she found the dirt road and the turnoff into the endless acres of farmland. During the harvest, Boom liked that he lived in the middle of a snowy field, cotton for as far as you could see.

  She drove another mile past nothing but open, muddy fields, hitting potholes, jarring the truck and splashing up brown water as she drove through little ravines the rain had made. When she finally got to Boom’s, she saw that the front porch light was on, his house a small shotgun shack that had been in his family for almost a hundred years. It barely looked big enough for Boom, but he alwa
ys said it had once been good enough for his great-grandfather and eight kids. He could make do.

  She parked her truck up next to his and raced through the rain up onto his porch. He had a string of colored Christmas lights dipping from the tin roof, two rusted green chairs on the uneven porch slats. But the door was open, floors swept clean, the interior smelling like bacon and kerosene.

  Boom came to the screen door, filling it up with his huge frame, lifting the hook lock, and walking on out. He had on a pair of blue jeans, a white undershirt, and no shoes. He’d yet to put on his prosthetic hand, as he often didn’t at home, and the nub of his arm was puckered and pink, hanging down by his big chest.

  “How’s the road?” Boom said.

  “Looks like shit,” Caddy said.

  “Supervisors said they’re gonna pave it next year.”

  “You believe ’em?”

  “They just cut me down to three days a week,” Boom said. “I’m not in a position to argue.”

  Caddy took a seat, watching the rain hitting all the dead cotton stems and currents of water flowing off the higher land down into the ditch lining the gravel road. Boom sat down next to her, rubbing his face with his good hand, looking like he’d just woke up. She wasn’t sure if he’d been drinking, but his eyes were bloodshot and he had a haze about him.

  “Have you heard from Mingo?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “You?”

  “I tried to stop him, Caddy,” Boom said. “I really did. But he’s a quick little bastard. He had his own vehicle down here. I could’ve shot at him but didn’t think you’d like that.”

  “Good call.”

  “What the hell was he thinking?”

  “Mingo told me he had a way of getting the girls back,” she said. “He said he didn’t trust the police or the Feds. Fannie had polluted his mind that they were all corrupt and dirty and he would only get the girls killed.”

  Boom nodded. He watched the endless land his people had been working for generations, looking more tired than she’d seen in a long time. “We both got to face it.”

  Caddy turned to him.

  “Those girls are dead,” he said. “They were probably dead before me and you ever talked to Cho Cho Porter.”

  Caddy started to cry. She hadn’t felt it welling up inside her, but slow, gentle tears just spilled out. She felt her eyes fill up and wiped them with the back of her hands. “What a damn waste.”

  “They didn’t mean nothing to nobody.”

  “Except us.”

  Boom nodded.

  “I just wish like hell that Mingo trusted me,” Caddy said. “I tried to talk him out of whatever he was planning and he promised me he’d sit tight. He was supposed to talk to that federal agent up in Oxford about what he saw, with all those immigrant girls being moved through Fannie’s place.”

  “He could have shut down that show.”

  “And shut down Fannie for good.”

  Boom stood, walking to the edge of the porch and leaning into a post. He looked at Caddy with sad eyes, not saying he was sorry but expressing as much.

  “I heard that woman raised him from a kid,” Boom said.

  “He’s still a kid.”

  “He won’t leave her,” Boom said. “That’s where he went. He couldn’t turn on that evil woman any more than he could his own momma.”

  Boom and Caddy sat there for a long time until, without a word, Caddy got up and hugged the big man, then got into her truck to head back to The River. There were more people to clothe, mouths to feed, and ministry to do.

  • • •

  The next morning, leaving Vienna’s at four a.m., Fannie drove Mingo down toward Picayune, Mississippi, for a reunion with those two girls he’d been wanting to find. Ana Maria and Tamika had been nothing but a pain in Fannie’s ass since they arrived at her club, but Mingo was determined to see this through and get straight with Fannie and she’d promised to help.

  “Who are these men?” Mingo said, the only light coming from the glow of her Mercedes dashboard as she hit eighty on the interstate.

  “I didn’t ask,” she said. “But I agreed to pay the freight. So here we go.”

  “Are you mad?”

  “Kid,” Fannie said, “I could never be mad at you.”

  “I’ve seen a lot of things,” he said. “But I couldn’t live with this anymore. These girls were about the same age as my little sister. I figured something bad might have happened to them.”

  “Mingo, your heart is too big to be in this racket,” Fannie said, punching the lighter in her dash and cracking her window. “I’ve always been worried about that.”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, looking meek and humbled as he sat in the passenger seat, a faint blue light coming from the east. “I understand women do what they want to do. I know the girls that work for you have families, kids, and need to make some money fast. But these two girls. Well, you know. They’re just kids. Both of them just turned fifteen. When I drove Ana Maria, she used to bring a damn stuffed dog around with her like a little girl.”

  “You do understand that some folks are born into things,” she said. “No matter what Blue Daniels did or I did, these little girls would’ve been whores. If anything, I did them a favor getting them out of Tibbehah County. If you’re going to be a whore, it’s not good to do it in your hometown. Give these girls a chance to make some money, pay off their debt, and maybe they’d come back as women.”

  “You get started early?”

  Fannie drove the Mercedes, loving the way it handled with just a slight touch of the fingers, the way the dash lit up like the inside of a spaceship, the rich smell of the black leather. She nodded, knowing she’d worked for everything she got. Every quiver, every grunt, every drop of sweat. Fannie had risen from the damn stinking cypress swamp to run the show. “Yeah,” she said. “I got started early.”

  “How early?”

  Fannie turned her head slightly as she sped south on the highway, the radio station they’d been following out of Jackson now replaced by some screaming preacher talking about the devil walking among us, looking for the many ways to provide us with a shot of evil in our lives. She reached down and turned that bullshit off. A new day dawned in south Mississippi, the grayish blue light spreading across the wide pastures and beaten red barns, the small brick houses and double-wide trailers.

  “You really want to know?” Fannie said.

  Mingo had on a navy blue T-shirt with cut-off sleeves and slim Wrangler jeans, his black hair tied back in a ponytail, looking more and more like he should be riding a fucking painted pony and carrying a spear. He nodded.

  “My daddy took to me when I was in the first grade,” she said. “He didn’t back off until I was in junior high and I stabbed him in the ribs with a pair of sewing scissors. Didn’t stop him, but it sure slowed him down.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I told you, don’t be sorry, kid,” Fannie said, turning off the interstate, following the directions she’d been given. “My daddy wasn’t the worst of it. It was being passed around to his buddies, having him wait in the car when he drove me out to shithole motels in Biloxi or towns in Louisiana with a bunch of oil riggers. Guys with skinned knuckles and greasy hands no matter how many times they washed them.”

  Mingo didn’t speak for another ten miles until dawn was full on them. Fannie turned down a dirt road through some property that had probably been a farm at one time. Now it was only cleared land and an abandoned trailer up on blocks. She kept on driving through a thicket of young pine trees and came up to a levee and small pond. Two trucks were parked by the berm, a red Dodge and a white Chevy. Fannie knew she had the place and shut off her engine.

  “Where are they?” Mingo said.

  “With those fellas,” Fannie said, reaching into the backseat for a canvas gym bag, stuffed fat and full. �
��Give ’em this. And they’ll give you the girls.”

  Mingo looked at Fannie, squinting his eyes, not so sure about what was happening but trusting her all the same, as he always had. As he reached for the door handle, Fannie reached across the console to give him a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek. “You’re a good kid,” she said. “You’ve done good.”

  Mingo looked up at the levee, at the four men standing up by the water looking down at him and Fannie. In the faint morning light, Fannie couldn’t make out their faces or who’d come down from Jackson. She’d rather not know.

  She sat back in her car and watched Mingo walk toward them. He turned back only once, now knowing just exactly what his errand was but moving ahead just the same, following a little footpath up to the men. He was an inky figure in the purplish blue light, looking like an old-time silhouette drawing, holding out the bag. Two of the shadow puppet men grabbed him from behind and fitted a pillowcase over his head. Another reached around with some type of wire, pulling so tight it knocked the kid’s legs out from under him.

  Fannie started the Mercedes. She was crying now, crying hard, watching the man twist the wire until the kid collapsed. Another man walked up on him and aimed a gun at the back of Mingo’s head. She heard two quick shots and it was over.

  Fannie turned her car around, sobbing now, barely able to see, surprised she still had this kind of emotion in her, not knowing it would affect her like this. She wiped her eyes, a clutching hand on her heart, until she got back on the interstate and then pulled off a mile down the road.

  She walked from her Mercedes, hazard lights flashing, bent at the waist, and threw up over and over. Her perfectly styled hair fell loose, some of it catching the bile and spit and scattering in her eyes as the sun rose.

  33

  “I brought back the records you loaned me,” Maggie said. “The George Jones and Tammy Wynette and the Jeannie C. Riley. I really dug her voice, but the album was kind of different versions of ‘Harper Valley PTA,’ which is cool because I love it. But a little repetitive. I really liked the Porter Wagoner version, such a happy way of singing about some really dark shit.”