by Ace Atkins
“Did you want something or did you just stop by to talk?”
“I could use a new union suit.”
“Inside,” Diane said. “Go down the third aisle, with the work pants. They’re down there.”
“You got honey?”
“From Tibbehah bees.”
“I’ll get that, too,” he said. “Y’all got a bit of everything here, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I appreciate what you did,” Stillwell said. “I know it was painful. Reaching back into those memories, that time. But I feel we owe it to Lori. Don’t you? Her having no end to her story. No sense of knowing. Don’t you want to know? I can’t die and leave this earth without knowing why and who. I feel like my insides are done eaten away.”
“Go on in and see if we got that union suit,” Diane said. “I’ll meet you inside. I got to finish stacking all this shit.”
“You’re a tough woman, Diane Tull.”
“I’ll meet you inside, Hank.”
The store was nearly out of Diamond dog food, the premium, not the stuff for the pups or the old dogs. They were overstocked with topsoil and nearly out of manure, although most people around here scoured the cow fields for their own manure. Not buying your manure being kind of a point of pride for most folks who worked their own land.
Diane finished stacking the sacks on wooden pallets and checking the inventory. She needed some more wheat-straw bales and could do with some more sacks of corn for deer, people loving to get those animals close and captive, square and dead in their sights. Diane wore an old Sherpa coat with Marlboro Lights in one pocket and all her keys in the other. All the keys she owned: to her home, to her farm, the Farm & Ranch, to the cattle and chicken houses, feeling like it weighed a ton.
Stillwell lay down a small bottle of honey and an XL union suit, bright red with buttons down the front and an opener for the backside. Diane added the purchases to the register. “You mix this stuff in your coffee and tea and you won’t get allergies come spring,” she said.
“What do you think he’ll do?” he asked. “Sheriff Colson?”
“He said he’d look into things.”
“That don’t mean shit,” he said. “How long people been saying that? God damn.”
“Maybe,” Diane said. “But it’s more than we had. You said you’d talked to Sheriff Beckett five years ago and he told you the whole thing was done and gone. Quinn Colson is an altogether different man.”
Stillwell’s face looked drawn, maybe more drawn than when he was drunk and hollow and passed out on her porch swing or slumped down in the seat of his old car. She finished ringing him up, and after he handed back the change, she put his stuff in a sack and walked out with him to the loading dock. It was bright and cold. She could see her breath, and the cold air felt good on her face and down into her lungs. Everything kind of clean and new that morning.
“It ain’t right,” he said. “It ain’t fucking right. We got to make sense of things. Me and you.”
“You’re talking thirty-seven years ago.”
“You’re telling me that someone don’t know?” he said. “Someone saw something. Someone knows something. This county ain’t that big. Cowards keep shit to themselves.”
Diane put her hands in her coat pockets, feeling the keys deep on the right side. She gripped the heft of them and nodded to Stillwell, wanting the old man to just go the hell away. She’d done what she’d promised. What else did he want of her? She wished he’d just leave her the hell alone and let them both go back to living their own lives, down their own paths. She never invited him.
“Do you want to talk to Sheriff Colson?” Diane asked. “Maybe that would help you and him.”
“No, ma’am.”
“But what you told me,” she said. “Those are things he should know.”
“If there comes a time when that’s important,” he said, “I’ll do what’s needed.”
Diane lit up a cigarette and blew smoke into the crisp wind. “Can I ask you something?”
The old man spit and turned to her, waiting on the loading dock. A pickup truck turned in from the gates and drove up toward the Co-op. She wondered if Hank Stillwell had a job, had a woman, had anything in his wretched old life other than thinking about what happened to his daughter. It had seemed to become his main occupation, beyond any kind of obsession a normal person might have.
“What do you want to know?”
“Is it the truth you’re hoping to find?” Diane asked.
“Goddamn right.”
“Or is it what came later that bothers you?” Diane asked.
Stillwell swallowed hard, spit again, and seemed to stand up straighter. His breath came out in clouds as his face turned a bright shade of red. “I don’t study on that time much.”
“You don’t?” Diane said. “What happened doesn’t bother you?”
“Decisions were made and things were done,” Stillwell said. “People were upset. Things just got set in motion. I couldn’t stop it. Nothing I said could stop it.”
“It wasn’t right.”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “It was one of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen. I never wanted that. Never.” Stillwell held the brown paper bag tight in his arms, hanging there on the loading dock, as a black woman crawled out of the pickup and asked if they had any collard greens. Diane smiled and yelled back for her to come on in, before turning back and whispering to Hank.
“You know it will come out,” she said. “You can’t bring up one without the other.”
“If it helps learn who did this to you and Lori?” the old man said. “Fine by me.”
He hobbled down the loading dock step and walked over to an aging Harley. He threw a leg over the seat, kick-started the engine, and roared out of the gravel lot. Diane squashed her cigarette and went inside the loading dock to help the woman.
Before Jason had left for L.A. the first time, he’d seen this corny biker movie at the old Jericho Drive-In, promising Brutal Violence Turned On by Hot Chicks and Burning Rubber. Maybe that’s all he really needed to know about the Born Losers MC, although there’d been a lot of talk since he rode with them about brotherhood, respect, and being the kind of men who would not and could not conform to society. Chains LeDoux had gotten pretty ripped at Shiloh the night before, standing on the silent battleground and telling them all they were the sons of Confederates, Vikings, and the goddamn Knights of the Round Table, punching clocks and paying taxes were for the weak, the emasculated, the deadbeats. He then smoked down a joint, passed it on to Big Doug, and started into a karate kata that ended with a kick to the moon and a rebel yell.
Now, they’d been riding all day, most of it through foothills of Tennessee, and then down through the streets of Memphis and finally catching up with 78, where all of them were hungover, hungry, and getting a little worn in the saddle. Chains wanted to stop off at a little barbecue joint in Olive Branch run by a fellow Marine—Chains had been in ’Nam. The ex-Marine sometimes rode with the club and always gave out big plates of ribs, beans, and coleslaw when they got to town.
Jason just wanted to get home, check in with that sweet Jean Beckett, already calling her from a pay phone in Adamsville, and spend some more time with his dad and brothers before he’d load his bikes onto his truck trailer and head west. There was a new film shooting in a few months, again with Needham and Reynolds. A picture that promised to make stuntmen the real heroes. Needham wanted to jump a rocket car over a river.
The thirteen bikers plus Jason parked out front and used the toilets, the owner coming out and hugging the boys. Big Doug introduced Jason as a bad-ass potential member, saying he’d never met a crazier son of a bitch in his life. A Born Loser, if there’d ever been one, Jason learning “Loser” really meant an outcast from society.
“Big Doug don’t say that ’bout anybody,
” the man said. “You want slaw and beans with them ribs?”
“Sure.”
“Beers in the Coca-Cola cooler in the kitchen,” he said. “Help yourself.”
“Being with the club got perks,” Big Doug said, “don’t it?”
Jason nodded and made his way to a big circular table in the center of the room, a couple waitresses in white-and-red ringer T-shirts already laying down plates and handing out cans of beer and glasses of sweet tea for the boys. One of the other riders, that fella named Hank but called Pig Pen, took a seat across from him, the other bikers becoming friendlier and more open on the ride. He had wispy long red hair and a scraggly beard. Dirt up under his fingernails.
Chains LeDoux still couldn’t even acknowledge Jason’s presence. Chains had found a tree stump to sit on in his chaps and leather vest and smoke a joint, looking out at the cars going back and forth on the highway.
“Your ass hurt as much as mine?” Jason asked.
“Probably more,” Stillwell said. “You get a chopper and the ride is smoother, just lay back, let the bike just take you where it wants to go.”
“We know each other,” Jason said. “Before the other night, when you almost stabbed me with that fork? Don’t we?”
“I think you used to date my youngest sister.”
“Don’t say . . .”
“You remember her?”
“What was her name?”
“Darlene.”
“Darlene what?”
“You dated more than one Darlene?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” Jason said, grinning, a plate of ribs sliding in front of him. A cold Coors laid down at his elbow by the pit owner. “I can think of six just in Jericho.”
“Darlene Stillwell.”
“Hell yes, I know Darlene Stillwell,” Jason said. “Sang in the choir. Twirled a baton that was on fire. Nicest girl you’ll ever meet.”
“She got married,” Stillwell said. “Got two boys. She’s a teller at the bank. They say she got management potential.”
The men ate hunched over the plates, manners tossed aside, teeth on bone, wiping sauce on their bare chests and Levi’s. Some of the boys started to throw rib bones at one another’s heads. Nobody seemed to mind until Chains walked in and swept up a waitress in his arms and squeezed her ass, asking if she wanted to go for a nice long ride. The woman slapped his face and Chains just laughed, drinking more beer, some spilling down his beard, as he strutted over to the window of the restaurant. All the laughing and the jackassing and the cussing and eating slipping off when they heard the rumble of more bikes coming from the highway, Chains stood still at the window, not grinning about the waitress anymore but watching the parking lot, pulling a .38 from the back of his leather pants, telling everyone to get off their asses. “God damn, here they come,” he said. “Ain’t that somethin’?”
“Who?” Jason said, standing up. Hank looking like he’d just swallowed a big stone. “Who’s coming?”
“Goddamn Outlaws,” Stillwell said. “They claim this part of Mississippi. They warned the owner here that if he served us again, they’d burn the place to the fucking ground.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Can you fight?” Stillwell asked.
“Yep.”
“Shoot?”
“You bet.”
“All right, then, come on,” Stillwell said, joining up with all the boys in their leather and denim and man stink and testosterone. A couple had guns tucked in the waistbands of their wide belts; no shirts over their big furry-ape chests, and long beards. Jason the only one of them without a patched jacket. Big Doug stood up front with Chains, holding a two-foot-long section of metal pipe in his right hand and palming it into his left.
There were twenty Outlaws, just as hairy and ugly and big. The only way to tell the difference was by their leather vests and the big red-eyed skull and crossbone pistons. Memphis was an Outlaws town, and the Born Losers weren’t but about fifteen miles from it.
“You jokers want to ride on into here, flying your colors, like it ain’t no thing,” said a big gray-haired bastard. “May not be nothing to you, but it’s a big goddamn thing to me.”
Chains looked to the man standing opposite to him, spit on the ground, and grabbed himself between the legs. “Suck it, motherfucker.”
“Is that it?” the man said. “That’s what you got? ’Cause I’m tired of talking shit with you, LeDoux. Let’s take it back to the goddamn cowboy days.”
Big Doug stepped up between the men and pushed the Outlaw guy square in the chest, knocking him back a few feet, and then every single goddamn Outlaw looked for a Born Loser skull to crack. There just wasn’t any time for Jason to explain he had never really formally joined a damn thing, had just decided to ride along as a gag, on a dare. But a fight is a fight, and there had always been something in Jason Colson that made him love fighting in a real and authentic way. He grabbed the first son of a bitch he saw and punched him hard in the mouth, feeling good to really connect to some teeth, none of this fake throwing shit anymore, knocking the dude on the ground and looking for more. There were grunts, blows, kicking, and yelling and swearing, and then some blood spilled on the pavement at the barbecue joint. Somewhere, a dog on a chain was going crazy, wanting to get into the mess, and the hot summer wind had changed, blowing woodsmoke down through the brawl, making eyes water and the whole wild scene seem like something out of a crazy dream. It was Brutal Violence Turned On by Hot Chicks and Burning Rubber, only there weren’t any hot chicks besides the two big-bottomed waitresses in red short shorts and tight ringer tees, screaming at them to either stop or beat some more ass.
Some Outlaw bastard had a big handful of Jason’s hair and was trying to run his ass straight into a long line of Born Losers’ bikes, but Jason rolled away from him, sweeping his legs out and then getting on top of the ugly man, punching him right in the ugly face, busting the man’s lip and nose and reaching for his long greasy hair to slam his head on the pavement.
Somebody reached for him, Jason realizing it was two more Outlaws, one of them with a long metal chain that he fitted around Jason’s neck and pulled, dragging him away from the bleeding man. Somewhere, someone fired a pistol. Someone yelled.
Jason could not breathe, thinking, God damn, this is how it all ends. You jump out of a helicopter, free-fall from a skyscraper, and plan to jump a car over a river, only to get your ass taken out by some redneck mad you ate his barbecue.
Jason was on his knees, trying for air and not succeeding a bit with the chain on his throat, when he heard a thwack and plunk and the pressure was gone, Jason rolling to his back, choking in long swallows of air. Big Doug appeared over him with the pipe, dripping with blood, and offered him a big meaty paw to get back to his feet and get on with it.
There was another shot, another cracking pistol. The women screamed, and the barbecue joint owner was in the middle of them all, blasting off his shotgun, but not a damn thing stopped until they all heard those sirens coming off Highway 78, the men backing away, the kicking and punching slowing down, until they were still, Outlaw and Born Loser alike crawling back on their choppers, giving one another the bird and tailing on out of the parking lot. Jason’s heart was jumping so bad in his chest, after not feeling that kind of worry for a good long while, that he nearly missed the fella laid out cold in the parking lot, a halo of blood spreading around the body and head.
One of the big-bottomed waitresses was screaming like hell, holding the Outlaw’s head in her lap, waiting for the law and medical help, and for the chaos to ride on down the road.
It wasn’t a mile away that the fists of the bikers raised in the sky, high off handlebars, bikes crisscrossing and bikers high-fiving, on the back highways to Jericho.
You notice anything strange about that report in your hand, Sheriff?” Lillie said.
“The paper feels strange,” Qui
nn said, looking up from the stack of files on the desk. “Onionskin. Pretty damn thin.”
“And the report itself?”
“Real thin.”
Lillie nodded. She sat down with Quinn in the SO conference room, not much to the room but a long row of file cabinets, a couple grease boards, and the coffee machine. There were old plaques on the wall for honors given to his late uncle by the state and a brand-new calendar from the Jericho National Bank. It was one of those big old-fashioned ones of bird dogs hunting through the brush, men in quilted coats raising guns to flying quail. The whole thing old-time wishful thinking, as the quail had died off decades ago, either from an influx of the coyotes or the invention of the bush hog, taking out their natural habitat.
Lillie set down a sack from the Sonic. “Saw you working when I left,” Lillie said. “I got you a cheeseburger and fries. Everything on it.”
“Reason I made you my chief deputy.”
“Not because I had the most law enforcement experience?”
“I figured we needed to boost your self-confidence,” Quinn said, reaching into the sack and getting the burger and fries, “since that’s in such short supply with you.”
Quinn already had a big cup of black coffee going on the desk. He didn’t bother keeping track of how many cups he drank in a day. If Mary Alice wouldn’t complain, he’d have a La Gloria Cubana going, too. Which he did, on occasion, when a window and fan were handy.
“After I came back from Memphis, your uncle wanted to go on and purge these files,” Lillie said. “He always said he wanted to have a bonfire party on your land and clear the decks.”
“He say why?”
“Officially?” Lillie asked. “He said the cases were closed and we needed the space.”
“Unofficially?”
“He was a servant of the people and said there were a great many things in his file cabinet that would embarrass some fine folks and good families.”
“Bless their hearts.”
“Funny how you and Sheriff Beckett were related,” Lillie said, stealing a French fry from the carton. “You could give a rat’s ass about what people think. Or fine families and such.”
