by Ace Atkins
“Appreciate the history lesson.”
Quinn started to get up. Stagg reached out and clutched Quinn’s wrist. “Sit down.”
“Take your hand off me, Johnny.”
“Those people who done this were animals,” Stagg said. “You look down on me, always have. But I swam through a swamp of shit to get where I’m at. Before me, there were the Vardamans and the Stevens and they didn’t know how to tend to their own business. Before you were born there was a crew down here who ran things—hookers and dope—and no one had the balls to tell them to leave. You can call me a liar, but I paid your uncle twice a month for him to patrol the Rebel. These people paid him to leave them the hell alone.”
Quinn rubbed his eyes. Above Stagg was another picture he hadn’t noticed before. Barbara Mandrell and her sisters, with the biggest goddamn hair he’d ever seen in his life. Johnny Stagg pumps our gas! written across it.
“Who were they?”
“Miscreants, freaks, didn’t have no jobs or no beliefs,” Stagg said. “Didn’t believe in Jesus. Didn’t believe in America. All they believed in was an upside-down, double-fucked world. All for free. Motorcycle gang called themselves the Born Losers. That’s about all you need to know.”
“I’ve heard about them,” Quinn said. “Everyone in Jericho knows those stories, but they’re long gone.”
“Is that a fact?” Stagg said. The plate of lemon pie arrived and slid across to Stagg, the meringue nearly four inches thick. He reached for a fork. “Glad to hear it, Sheriff. Because those sons of a bitches just rode through here yesterday, wearing their leather and flying their colors and saying they were back to stay.”
“Why?”
“On account of one man,” Stagg said. “Chains LeDoux is about to go free. Stick around and I’ll tell you about the most evil bastard ever come to Tibbehah County.”
• • •
They’d called Brushy Mountain the end of the line, but it hadn’t worked out that way for Chains LeDoux. They closed down Brushy Mountain three years ago and sent him on to a new prison, Morgan County Correctional, which didn’t have the same heroics as Brushy Mountain. You felt like you were a part of history at the old place, fashioned from stone hand-cut by the prisoners a hundred years back, the entrance looking like a castle and the whole prison built in the shape of the cross. Something about bringing hope and promise and that every man could be redeemed. Chains started to feel a part of the place, although redemption was never on his mind, only an escape that would never come. For a few years, he’d taken it on himself to guard James Earl Ray, walking the grounds with the coot, listening to his wild ideas for breaking out, even though the old man had already failed a half-dozen times. One time Ray got as close as the next town and was found by the local police hiding in the bushes, pissing himself.
No, sir. A man didn’t escape Brushy Mountain. And now in Morgan City, it wasn’t nothing but a waiting game. Two weeks. Twenty years. And then it comes down to two weeks. What a gift.
Was he rehabilitated? Was he a changed man? Had he found Jesus?
Hell no. What Chains liked about the time in that old prison was that try as they might, they couldn’t bend him or break him or make him conform to the rules. You didn’t get your back broke or whipped or nothing, but they tried to break you with the fucking time. You got one hour in the yard—one fucking hour a day—to look at the layers of rock that had been blasted off the side of the mountain, counting the sediment layers, the amount of time it took, during the dinosaurs and cavemen and shit, when Tennessee was covered by an ocean with fish as big as tractor trailers roaming the waters. Sometimes when he wasn’t even drunk on toilet hooch, he’d see the mist rising off the walls of the mountain, covering the rock and the prison, and he felt like maybe he’d walked back in time. Twenty years. A hundred fifty years. Confederates, dinosaurs, and moonshiners running together.
Two fucking weeks. He’d already started growing his hair and beard out, just as it had been. The guards didn’t give a shit. He wasn’t their problem anymore. He’d gone in a hard ass at forty-five and would stroll out a hard ass at sixty-five, give the finger to the last guard he’d see and jump on his scooter—the boys keeping it clean, oiled, and running all these years. He knew there were Born Losers who were in diapers while he was running meth, ’ludes, and grass up from the Coast. And now they were joining in the brotherhood, wild and free, and taking aim right at the son of a bitch who’d cornholed his ass high and hard.
Johnny Stagg.
There was a mirror made of polished metal over his stainless steel sink. His face had a lot more lines, there was precious little black in the beard and the hair. But the body was strong, a lot stronger than when he came in all fucked-up on pills and booze. He wanted to be like that old Brushy Mountain rock, sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups, etching his body with road maps of America, places he’d been and places he wanted to see. He’d had a big rebel flag tattooed across his back that said Southern Bad Ass and a Harley symbol etched on his flat, hard belly. He couldn’t wait to get on that bike, the club meeting him outside the gates of this joke of a prison. To call this place a prison was an insult to old Brushy Mountain. You walked out of that place and you felt like you’d been a part of history.
Here, you did your time. You waited. You made yourself harder and stronger and something more than you were before. He was a rock. He was mist. He was time.
Two goddamn weeks.
It was the morning of the Fourth of July and J.T. had bought some barbecue from a carnival vendor and served it up inside scooped-out watermelon halves. The watermelon made the pork sweet-tasting and nice with a breakfast beer. J.T. had the doors to his garage wide open, and even though it wasn’t much past ten, the day was growing hot. He had Jason’s stunt Harley on his workstation, welding the frame, his assistant Gangrene gone AWOL. The engine, tank, wheels, and the lot sat on a far table, waiting to be reassembled. Jason had left his trailer at the shop, too. Not much room at his daddy’s house. Jason knew as soon as the bike was done, he needed to head back west. All of it, the club, Jean Beckett, the whole damn town, pulling on him. Not knowing what else to do, he just sat cross-legged on that grease-stained floor of the garage, drank another cold one, and ate the sweet barbecue.
“It’s a brotherhood,” Hank Stillwell said, rubbing his thin red beard. “We do for each other. You know? I mean, like if you’re short of cash, we pass the hat. Someone has it out for you? They got it out for all of us.”
“All for one?”
“Yeah, man,” Stillwell said, blowing some joint smoke through his nose. “All that shit. This is our county, we run it. We make our own laws. Our own world. We are the true American badasses who answer to nobody.”
“Did you get some barbecue?” J.T. asked, turning off the welding torch, goggles now on top of his sweating head. “That’s some good shit. Folks brought that truck all the way down from Memphis.”
“You can’t turn down a patch, man,” Stillwell said. “You’d be the first I ever heard.”
Jason looked up from the floor. His chunky brother, Van, was over helping J.T. take the frame off a vise and set it on the ground. Van just shook his head, his gut about to bust his dirty T-shirt. Van being a helluva one to offer personal advice, as he was still living at home after turning twenty, supposedly running things for his dad, but really just not wanting to go out and get a job. He spent most of his day watching game shows and getting high. He wanted to go out west with Jason. But Van Colson in California would be a mistake.
“I would only turn down the offer because I’m leaving,” Jason said. “How can I be a part of something, part of y’all, if I’m not here?”
“Chains and Big Doug know that,” Stillwell said. “They understand that you’re in and out. But he dug the way you acted in Olive Branch. He liked that you’re a man with no fear. You get patched and you’re patched for life.”
Jason nodded. He ate some more barbecue and drank some more Coors. He crushed the can in his hand and tossed it toward the trash. “We must’ve drank five hundred cases of this when we were making Smokey. The whole movie is pretty much a commercial for Coors. Y’all seen it yet?”
J.T., Van, and Hank Stillwell shook their heads.
“It’s a good picture,” Jason said. “Can’t believe the way it turned out. They didn’t even have a script. Hal would just let everyone just let loose with their characters and say whatever came to mind. That Jackie Gleason was incredible. He just showed up, got in uniform, and became that SOB. They call him Buford T. Justice. Just the funniest things came out of him. He tells his son, who’s his deputy, that when they get back home from chasing the Bandit all over creation that he was gonna punch his momma right in the mouth. We all were on the set and just broke up on that. That’s Gleason. The man’s a genius.”
“Is making movies like a brotherhood?”
“Jesus H. Christ,” Van said, walking to a galvanized bucket full of beer and getting a new one. “Y’all give it a rest.”
“Shut up,” Hank Stillwell said. “You ain’t a part of this.”
“He’s my brother, Red.”
“Nobody calls me Red no more,” Stillwell said, glaring at Van. “Call me Hank or Pig Pen.”
“You’re still Red to me,” Van said, belching. Stillwell’s dirty looks didn’t mean shit to him. “And y’all need to get it in y’all’s head that Jason is gone. He’s leaving. When? Next week?”
Jason shrugged. “Depends on J.T.”
J.T. lit up a joint with the end of his welding torch and then turned it off. He sucked in some smoke and nodded and nodded. “Yeah, man. A week. Two weeks. Got to get some paint. You got a nice job on them Stars and Bars.”
“The redneck Evel Knievel,” Van said. “That’s you, Jason.”
“So if you’re leaving, really leaving,” Stillwell said. “What about you and Jean Beckett? Y’all hadn’t been apart. What? She going with you to Hollywood?”
Jason got up off the garage floor, not wearing shoes. His boots sat on the leather seat of his other bike outside. He had on a black T-shirt and faded Levi’s, the beard and hair growing truly wild and black. He tossed the shell of the watermelon and came back to where the boys sat around J.T. as he worked, a regular Michelangelo of scooters.
“Shit,” Jason said. “She said she’ll go if we get married. I said, ‘Cool, let’s get married.’ But she said we got to get married here with her momma and her crazy-ass family. She wants a church and all that and, man, oh man, I’m more scared of that than having a full-time old lady.”
J.T. laughed the hardest. Stillwell snorted and Van just shook his head.
“You need to do for yourself,” Van said, putting a hand to his mouth as he burped. “You don’t need to do for Jean or me and Daddy and, least of all, this here motorcycle crew. What’s all that shit mean?”
Stillwell, as narrow and skinny as a board, walked up to Jason’s short little brother and poked him in the chest. “You don’t get it. You won’t get it for a million years. Some men are born different.”
“And who’s Chains LeDoux?” Van said. “Jesus Christ?”
“You better shut your fucking mouth,” Stillwell said, a little loose on his feet. He’d come into the garage twenty minutes earlier with nearly fifty dollars’ worth of fireworks that they were going to blow at the clubhouse tonight. He was acting more like a little kid than a man nearly thirty-five years old.
His attitude changed when a young girl walked into the wide-open bay door of the garage. She was real young, probably in her early teens but trying to dress older. She had on an orange-fringed top cut into ribbons, with beads hanging down over her skinny belly, wide-legged blue jeans and tall clogs, her hair pulled back under a kerchief. Stillwell wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and tried to stand tall and sober.
He just nodded at her.
“Can I borrow some money, Daddy?” the young girl asked. Her cheeks were brushed with pink rouge and her mouth was the color of bubble gum.
“If you take that shit off your face.”
The girl’s face colored beneath the makeup. She looked down to the stained asphalt as Stillwell walked to her, wobbly on those motorcycle boots, and clutched her chin. He turned her face this way and that and reached for an oil-stained rag hanging over J.T.’s Harley.
In front of the three other men, he wiped the makeup off her face with the filthy rag, staining her cheeks and mouth with oil. “Go home and dress proper,” he said. “You look like a goddamn streetwalker.”
The girl left, crying.
Stillwell walked over to the tub for another beer. None of the men spoke for a long time, Van catching his brother’s eye as he left J.T.’s garage, an unspoken warning to back the hell off from all this. Somewhere out on the town square some kids were blowing up a strand of firecrackers.
The temperature was dropping fast, and Quinn and Lillie caught Hank Stillwell outside his trailer, chopping wood. He had a neat trailer, a lime green Plymouth and a motorcycle parked nearby under a metal carport, as he collected wood in orderly piles, split and stacked for a billowing furnace attached to the single-wide.
“Mr. Stillwell?” Quinn said. He’d met Lillie up in Yellow Leaf and they both drove their own vehicles to Stillwell’s place.
He split the final piece of wood on a big round log with a thwack and looked up to them. He was out of breath, his worn-out jacket hanging loose and open with only an undershirt beneath. He nodded and set another piece of wood on the block but laid down the ax.
“Could use a little of your time, sir,” Quinn said.
“Suppose to ice hard tonight,” Stillwell said. “Don’t like to rely on electric. Co-op takes two days before they get the power back on.”
“What’re you running?” Quinn asked.
“Y’all want to see it?” Stillwell said, wiping his nose, nodding toward around back. “Paid for itself the first year.”
They followed him around the trailer, set high on blocks on a cleared hill. The hill had a nice view of the Yellow Leaf Baptist Cemetery, if you might call a cemetery view a nice thing. The grass was brown and dead across the eroded hills of headstones. The old church, a wooden building, sat next to the new church, a big, wide metal prefab place where they advertised fellowship on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. The sign outside was a holdover from the Christmas season. Santa Claus Never Died for Anyone.
Stillwell saw Quinn staring. He shook his head. “Baptists don’t have much of a sense of humor.” He took them in back of the big white trailer and pointed out a decent-sized welded black box with squared pipe running into his home. A wheelbarrow filled with small pieces of split wood stood ready.
“Nice setup,” Quinn said. “I have a woodstove furnace. I keep it burning ’most winter long.”
“My neighbor up the hill got some of them solar panels,” Stillwell said. “His electric bills ain’t hardly nothing.”
Lillie warmed her hands over the black box as Stillwell opened up its door and stuffed in more pieces of wood. The fire inside glowed a high orange and red with bluish flames. Lillie looked to Quinn, growing bored with the talk of heating and cooling.
“I figure you know we reopened your daughter’s case,” Quinn said.
“Yes, sir.”
“We’ve gone through the interviews you did with my uncle,” Quinn said. “And we’ve sent out to Jackson for some evidence we hope is still out there. But anything you could tell us would be a big help.”
Stillwell nodded, blowing into his chapped hands. “Y’all come on inside,” he said. “It’s getting colder out here than a Minnesota well-digger’s ass.”
They followed him around the trailer and up some creaking steps. The trailer was dim, with few pieces of furniture inside and a very small TV on a corner table
. He had a few deer heads on the dark-paneled wall and a few big bass. Quinn and Lillie took a seat on a big overstuffed couch covered with a camouflage throw. Stillwell sat down in a big green La-Z-Boy, kicking his feet up, rubbing his reddish beard, the heat blowing hard and hot through the vents cut into the stove’s metal walls.
On the kitchen counter, at the back of a tiny kitchen, was a half-eaten grilled cheese sandwich and an open bottle of Mountain Dew. A grouping of pictures of Lori Stillwell faced out from a nearby table. They were school photos, the girl caught in time in fading colors.
Stillwell reached over to the side table and pulled a photo of Lori. He leaned forward in the recliner and handed the gilded frame to Quinn. Her young skin had an oily sheen to it, with a couple blemishes on her cheeks, braces on her teeth, and feathered hair. She wore a long-collared polka-dot top, a chain and cross hung around her neck. She looked eager and happy and very young.
“Y’all been talking to Diane?”
“Yes, sir,” Lillie said.
“She can tell you the worst of it,” Stillwell said, watching as Quinn passed the frame to Lillie. Lillie studied the photo for a moment, smiled to Stillwell, and then handed the frame back. The home was pleasant and warm. From the spot on the couch, you could see out the window to an open row of pine trees, not the eroded lot of the cemetery. There were hunting magazines on the table and a few more about motorcycles. One called Easy Riders with a girl in a green bikini on the back of a black Harley.
“You still ride?” Quinn said.
“Not as much as I’d like,” Stillwell said. “Got J.T. working on some repairs right now. I got real stupid a couple years back and got a scooter with a twin-cam engine. Hell, everyone knows them things got problems. It’s got messed-up cam chains and shoes. J.T. told me to go ahead and replace that gear system before it throws the whole goddamn engine. It ain’t cheap, but better than replacing everything. The Harley people never tell you this shit could cut off the oil to the engine and blow it all. Y’all ride at all?”
