The Shameless

by Ace Atkins

  Boom kept quiet, knowing damn well Caddy Colson knew what she was talking about. Caddy stared straight ahead, seeing Boom’s little shack, set back from the road and lit up with a string of Christmas lights.

  “It’ll be better when I’m back on the road,” Boom said. “I feel like a million bucks behind the wheel, shiftin’ them gears. Nothing but the long white line, leaving all this bullshit behind. Ain’t that something? Ain’t that purpose?”

  * * *

  * * *

  “The woman and the deputy are locked up,” Toby said. “And I smashed the ever-living fuck out of the consoles in the dispatch room. There’s no video feed. I yanked out the whole damn hard drive and set it by the back door.”

  “You opened up the gate?”

  “Of course I opened up the damn gate,” Toby said. “First thing. I did like you told me.”

  “Wait in the car.”

  “I don’t want to wait,” Toby said. “I want to watch you kill this man.”

  Sam Frye and Toby stood in front of a small holding cell by the processing desk. The man they came to kill, Wes Taggart, sat in his bunk staring dead-eyed at the two men. He hadn’t tried to stand or argue, just sat on the bunk, elbows on knees, waiting for them to get the whole thing done.

  “Go,” Sam Frye said. “Now.”

  He had added some real force to the words. The kid looked at him and turned toward the door back to the sally port. Sam Frye lifted his .357 off his belt and nodded to the man on the bunk.

  “Don’t move.”

  Sam Frye turned the key in the lock and opened the door. Taggart, a skinny, hard-looking white man, swallowed and kind of pursed his lips. “How’s it hanging, Tonto?”

  “On your knees.”

  “Why don’t you just shoot me right here?”

  “On your knees,” Sam Frye said, slow and even.

  Taggart stood up and walked a few feet. Sam could tell he was trying to judge the distance between him and the gun, thinking maybe, just maybe, he could wrestle it from Frye’s hands and reverse his sorry situation.

  “Who sent you?” Taggart said, getting to his knees. “Buster White? Or Ray? Or was it that redheaded cunt herself?”

  Sam Frye didn’t know any of those names or care to know any more than he’d been told. He heard the wind and the rain against the windows and the stolen patrol car turn over and then idle in the sally port. Sam Frye lifted the gun, wanting to make it a good, clean single shot. They would ditch the patrol car way down by the county line and pick up their car where they’d hidden it off a back road. The darkness, the rain, and the confusion would offer them the damn perfect cover.

  “I used to like Indians,” Taggart said. “Noble savages and all that kind of bullshit. But now? I think y’all deserved to get cornholed on this fucked-up land.”

  Sam lifted the gun toward Taggart’s forehead and pulled the trigger. The lightning cracked and the lights sputtered inside the cells as he turned and made his way to the back door out of the jail.

  Tashi Coleman

  Thin Air podcast

  Episode 4: THE TEACHER

  HUBIE PHILLIPS: It was the worst-kept secret in Jericho. Everyone in town knew I was gay but didn’t seem to give a damn as long as I didn’t make much of it. Folks joked with me, wanting to know when I was going to settle down with a nice lady or wanting me to help them pick out curtains or furniture because I had great style. Some even referred to me as the town queer behind my back. But let me tell you something. If they thought I was the only queer man in town, they were sadly mistaken. Maybe the only one who hadn’t tried to hide it by getting married, having children, sneaking around on the side. Funny how people see only what they want. As long as I was funny, eccentric, and nonthreatening, everyone left me alone. I was an important part of the Tibbehah High faculty, a member of the chamber of commerce, and the president of our local film festival. The year Brandon died, I’d just put in to have Claude Jarman Jr. come to town. We were going to show The Yearling and Intruder in the Dust. Nobody seemed to give me much trouble until Brandon disappeared. That’s when rumors started and I found out how many friends I actually had. Not just the ones who wanted to gay up their Christmas parties.

  TASHI: What did they say about you?

  HUBIE: Oh, you know. “Don’t you think it’s strange a grown man would spend that much time with a teenage boy? Why would a young boy want to go over to that man’s house and say he was watching movies?” Let me tell you something, Brandon Taylor was one of the brightest young minds I’d ever met. His interest in film, books, and art could never even be fathomed by a man like Tim Taylor. Tim Taylor was the kind of man you’d see in an old Republic Western. The first cowboy to yell, “String ’em up.”

  TASHI: But that didn’t come until he found the money?

  HUBIE: Yes. But he’d found the money some months before. He was incensed by it. He called me up and called me all sorts of names. He blamed me for paying his son to perform unnatural acts. And I had to be smart with him, saying what he was insinuating wasn’t unnatural if you knew the right way to do it. He threatened to beat me up. But of course he didn’t. They dropped the money issue for then. But, of course, it came back up.

  [A BELL RINGS. A MUFFLED BIT OF GREETINGS AND TALK, BRIGHT LAUGHTER FROM FAR OFF.]

  TASHI: How much money did he find?

  HUBIE: I can’t say for sure. I never could get a straight answer from Brandon. But I had a feeling it was in the thousands, hundred-dollar bills rolled and wrapped with rubber bands, crammed in a shoe box and hidden in the top of his closet. I don’t know how he got that kind of money.

  NARRATOR: The money. No one in Brandon’s family mentioned this to us, but Hubie Phillips said the money Tim Taylor found in his son’s closet was a major point of contention in the Taylor family just before Brandon died. How could a teenage boy from a modest family have thousands of dollars—in cash—hidden in his room?

  HUBIE: When I asked him, he said he’d been saving for a while. I figured he was lying. But I didn’t push him. That was our relationship. We were friends. I wasn’t a parental or authority figure.

  TASHI: What were you, then?

  HUBIE [SIGHING]: I think my home and my classroom was a haven. Brandon need a break from his parents and their pedestrian, straight-ahead life. He was a wonderful young photographer and I introduced him to all kinds of movies. I remember watching The 400 Blows with him. You know the Truffaut film?

  TASHI: Of course.

  HUBIE: Well, it was all new to Brandon. Truffaut. France. New Wave cinema. A revelation there was a world outside Tibbehah County, Mississippi. And he never had to be like his father. He never had to admit to himself that one day his youthful shell would crack away and he’d turn into a fat, bitter old fool like Tim Taylor. I wanted him gone. I had just started helping him research schools out of state. Good schools.

  TASHI: You miss teaching?

  HUBIE [LONG PAUSE]: Some. But I miss being someone. I’d spent a long time developing a reputation. After Brandon died, everything was destroyed.

  NARRATOR: Hubie Phillips told us about the humiliation of being picked up at the high school and driven in a patrol car back to the sheriff’s office. He spent two days in the jail without ever being charged. He told us of the humiliation of being asked personal questions by Sheriff Beckett about his love life and relationship with Brandon. On the third day, Phillips finally secured a lawyer in town and he was released.

  HUBIE: I thought I could resume my life at the high school. We all desperately wanted to find Brandon. I helped some with the search parties, brought food to the volunteers, and distributed fliers in three other counties.

  NARRATOR: But two days before Brandon Taylor’s body was found, Tim Taylor walked into Tibbehah High School, bypassed the main office, and marched right toward the yearbook lab.

  HUBIE: I
t was after lunch and we were all hanging out, looking at photos from earlier in the year. Many of them taken by Brandon. It was sort of a somber mood, but also hopeful, everyone so religious. Everyone had prayed as hard as they could that he’d be safe. And in rushed Tim Taylor in front of all my kids. He knocked a sixteen-year-old girl out of the way to get to me. He grabbed me by my shirt, ripping away my buttons, and dragged me down the hallway to the bathroom. Then he stuck a big black gun in my mouth. He demanded to know what I’d done with his son.

  TASHI: What did you say?

  HUBIE: Well, I couldn’t talk. And once I could, he didn’t want to listen to me. Coach Bud Mills pulled him off me. That seemed to mean something to Tim Taylor, as everyone in town worshipped the evil son of a bitch.

  NARRATOR: As an aside, Tibbehah High School football coach Bud Mills actually did sexually abuse young boys, according to the acting sheriff, Lillie Virgil, who arrested him a couple of years ago for that and other crimes. Virgil, the first female sheriff in the state of Mississippi, was running for election at the time and her arrest of the beloved coach killed her chances. She withdrew, and the current sheriff, Quinn Colson, entered the race. Many in the community didn’t believe what she alleged about Mills could be true. He didn’t fit the stereotype. But let’s get back to Hubie Phillips, who did.

  At first, the threats against Hubie were small and impersonal. Heavy breathing on a late-night phone call, someone dumping FOR SALE signs in his yard. Other times, they were wild and up close. Twice someone shot into his living room. He was asked to give up his status as yearbook adviser. Members of the chamber of commerce thought it best for him to resign until things settled. And even his church shunned him. He sang in the choir and often practices and performances were scheduled without him being notified.

  HUBIE: It takes a lot of people to let a man know he doesn’t really exist. Even after Sheriff Beckett ruled Brandon’s death a suicide, folks blamed me. Even if he’d taken his own life, I was the one responsible. After all, who else could’ve exposed him to such regret and humiliation?

  ELEVEN

  Ten days after Wes Taggart had been shot dead in the Tibbehah County Jail, Lillie Virgil stood in the open door to his cell and looked down at the stained floor. “Damn shame.”

  “It was a real mess, Lil,” Quinn said. “I don’t find much comfort in a man being shot while under my watch.”

  “Technically, he was under my watch,” Lillie said. She glanced around the cell. The bloody sheets taken from the bed, a bare pillow and mattress left on the lower bunk. Quinn was told the state people were done taking pictures and he could use it again. Not many takers with the inmates he had now. Even after a lot of scrubbing, the concrete floors still held the stain.

  “How long did the Marshals put you on leave?”

  “Two weeks,” Lillie said. “Paid. But still.”

  “I shouldn’t have asked you to bring him here,” Quinn said.

  “You didn’t ask a damn thing,” Lillie said. “I brought him here because this was where the first charges were filed. It was up to you where they shipped his sorry ass next. I’m curious as hell about how and why this shitshow went down, but let’s not pretend like either one of us is sad this turd’s gotten taken off the board. You and I didn’t cause this. Wes Taggart started the whole thing by throwing in with J. B. Hood and going after Boom.”

  Quinn nodded, wanting to tell her about Reggie and how he blamed himself. He’d come in to apologize to Quinn damn-near every day about screwing up, letting those two men inside the jail without getting confirmation. Quinn had told him that he would’ve done the same, no one expecting a couple of killers to roll up in a patrol car stolen from Lafayette County. They looked and acted the part. Everyone knows they got hit by some pros. Quinn had told him so.

  “You think someone here snitched on him?”

  “About what he said about Vardaman?” Quinn asked.

  Lillie nodded.

  “Nope,” Quinn said. “I think they had this planned out the minute you snatched him up in Biloxi. He didn’t start talking until his lawyer ditched him. Wes believed the Syndicate boys had already left him behind.”

  “Did he give you anything?” Lillie asked.

  “Not really,” Quinn said. “He only confirmed what we already know. I’d arranged for a meet between him and the Feds in Memphis. Jon Holliday had set it all up and Taggart had agreed to make some kind of bargain against jail time.”

  “But nothing you could work with until he got an official offer?”

  Quinn nodded. “The boy may have been stupid, but he wasn’t dumb. He wanted to see what kind of deal he could work with the Feds and I can’t say I really blame him.” Quinn lifted his chin toward Lillie. “Any chance you might stick around for a few days?”

  “I shouldn’t even be down here,” she said. “But we can’t have a prisoner killed under my watch. Or your watch. That’s just plain disrespectful. What’d Boom say when he heard about Wes Taggart?”

  Quinn shook his head. “I think it rattled him a bit,” he said. “Boom was counting on evening things up with ole Wes somewhere down the road. When I told him, he wouldn’t look me in the eye, just wandered off to the edge of the field and stared out at the cotton. Something’s about to break in Boom. And this shooting didn’t help a bit.”

  “Any idea about the shooter?” Lillie asked, both of them moving away from the cell and getting buzzed back through the gates to the sheriff’s office. Walking and talking with Lillie in the hollowness of the concrete jail felt like old times. It was good to have her back, even it if was just now and again.

  “Those boys beat the hell out of our camera system,” Quinn said. “We didn’t get much besides Reggie’s description.”

  “A big Indian,” Lillie said.

  “And a rough-looking kid,” Quinn said. “The one who was supposed to be a prisoner. Reggie didn’t get much of a look at him. The kid had half his head covered in a hoodie and forced Reggie and Cleotha into a cell with a gun. Told them not to turn around or he’d shoot ’em in the back.”

  “When you sent me the sketch,” Lillie said, smiling, walking back into the hall toward the offices, “I thought it was Jay Silverheels.”

  “Holliday’s pretty sure they were sent up from the Rez.”

  “No shit,” Lillie said. “You need a federal agent to draw you a map down to the casinos? Those folks joined up with our boys in Biloxi a long time ago. Ole Wes didn’t stand a goddamn chance. He must’ve had some real nasty shit on those people and Vardaman.”

  “We’ll never know.”

  “I wonder how many pole dancers will show up at the service?” Lillie said. “Maybe they’ll wear black G-strings while they mourn. Boy, that’d be a hell of a tribute. A little AC/DC and Aerosmith.”

  Quinn nodded, walking into his office, turning on the lights and slipping his .45 back onto his belt. He handed Lillie her Sig Sauer. “We both know the one person who could answer that question.”

  “Fannie Hathcock?” Lillie said. “Shit. That woman thinks you’re cute. But these are her damn people. She may be the worst of ’em. She’s not gonna ID these boys.”

  “Might as well try.”

  “How long has that woman been trying to get her claws into your Levi’s?”

  “Come on, Lillie.”

  “You know it’s true.” Lillie started to laugh. “Tell me I’m lying.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Skinner felt extremely blessed. As he drove the back roads of Tibbehah County, two fingers on the wheel of his red Dodge Ram 2500 that smelled of fresh leather right off the dealer’s lot, he marveled at the beauty of his home in north Mississippi. A light fog lifted off of the pasturelands and rolling hills, looking almost like smoke drifting into the tall stretch of pines. Old barns sat crooked on land he’d known since he was a boy. Twisted creeks brought back ha
ppy memories of swimming holes and cane poles, drinking Coca-Cola from little green bottles and smoking rabbit tobacco. This was a land of values, faith, and history. He had his radio turned to a family station out of Tupelo, a morning show discussing how Chicago had become a lawless hell and how an Army chaplain was being court-martialed for speaking out against gays. Skinner shook his head as he drove, mad enough to spit, wondering how the America he’d known as a boy had all come to this. He’d no more set foot in Chicago than take a rocket to the moon. Those people were living like gosh-darn savages.

  Tibbehah County was his home and he’d be damned if anyone would try and invade it.

  Skinner’s people had settled this land in the 1850s, driving out the red man, taking a few arrows for the effort, and had stood tall during the Civil War. Skinner was a proud member of the Sons of the Confederacy, having ancestors on both sides of his family who’d fought with honor. If some no-’count so-and-so wanted to come to Tibbehah County and remove the old boy in the kepi cap from the Jericho Square, he’d chain his old bones to the statue.

  As he turned off onto County Road 433, rolling toward Vardaman’s lodge, he had no doubt white Christians were under attack. That’s how the whole idea for the Tibbehah Cross came about. The cross would become a beacon for every man, woman, and child moving through his little ole country county. They’d see the bigness, the majesty of Christ’s power, light shining up into the heavens. And in the process, it would dim the glow on that den of iniquity outside the Rebel Truck Stop.

  The radio show went to a commercial break, a man talking straight to other men about problems he had with low testosterone, finding vitality from a breakthrough pill boosting energy and stamina. Skinner rolled down the busted road filled with potholes, narrow, with no shoulders and a steep drop on either side, on up toward the Vardaman lodge. He had plenty to discuss with the senator about helping him get rid of the last vestiges of that old rascal Johnny T. Stagg. This was a long time coming, and the state legislator—soon to be governor—sure had to understand that. When Stagg had been running the show, taking over from Skinner when he’d suffered his first heart attack, there’d been compromises made. Stagg was a businessman who catered to truckers’ needs, with an old-fashioned inkling those needs included not only a decent chicken-fried steak and a full tank of diesel but a primal release for some godless men.