The Shameless

by Ace Atkins

Bentley said he didn’t mind. In fact, he’d love to hear all about it. He said he had Elvis on SiriusXM Radio and loved listening to The George Klein Show, George always having great stories about his time with the Memphis Mafia. It had started to mist a little, the raindrops little specks in the hot white stadium lights.

  “Shh,” Caddy said, holding up her hand, watching the quarterback pitch Jason the ball. Jason got around the end fast but got hit two yards off the line, spinning off a tackler and trying to find some daylight before three Winona boys brought him down.

  Caddy saw Boom on the sidelines, walking without a cane or any assistance, shaking his head and yelling at the referees. She wasn’t sure what he was mad about, but Boom was mighty pissed off. He said something to the head coach and then yelled at the referee out on the field. One of the other assistants walked over and placed a hand on Boom’s good arm, telling him to calm down a bit, walk back to the bench. Boom shook him off, stumbling a little on his way over to the bench and kicking at a water bottle.

  “Everything OK down there?” Bentley asked.

  “Don’t know,” Caddy said, standing up to watch Boom, her hand over her mouth. Something was definitely off-center, not only with Boom’s walk but his focus. Boom wasn’t the kind of man to take Little League sports so seriously, always kidding around, providing positive encouragement for the kids. He limped on back to the sidelines, yelling something at the ref, who seemed to pay him no mind.

  Caddy looked across Bentley at her mother. Jean caught her eye and nodded. Yep. Boom was drunk.

  “Should I do something?” she asked her mother.

  Jean shook her head. “I wouldn’t go down on that field right now for nothing in this world.”

  Boom stayed put for a moment, but then, unable to take it anymore, walked back to the sideline, stepped onto the field, and yelled back at the referee as Tibbehah was about to punt. The referee answered and pointed to the head coach, the coach turning to Boom. Three assistants now reaching for Boom’s massive body, wrapping him around the waist, holding his good arm, trying to coax him back off the field to the sidelines.

  “What’s he so mad about?” Jean asked.

  “Jason should’ve had first down,” Bentley said. “Can’t say I blame Boom. That referee spotted the ball two yards back.”

  “I’ll get Boom,” Caddy said. “It’s just a game.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Jean said.

  Caddy headed down the bleacher steps and to the exit onto the field. Four coaches and Kenny from the sheriff’s office had already started to walk Boom toward the field gate. Caddy met them at the exit. “Let me give you a ride home.”

  “Nah,” Boom said. “I’m good.”

  Caddy nodded to Kenny and Kenny backed off, Boom heading out the gate ahead of her toward his truck. “Come on,” she said. “This game is done anyway. Give me your keys. I’ll get you home.”

  “Winona must be paying that ref,” Boom said. “Did you see that shit?”

  “Let me have your keys.”

  “I said I’m good.”

  “Boom,” Caddy said. “Don’t do this. You and I both know it’s a hell of a trip back.”

  Caddy reached out her hand, but Boom turned away from her and jumped into his beat-up old truck. He cranked the engine and sped out, the pipes growling, with only one working headlight. As she watched him go, a trailer chain dragged behind his tailgate, throwing sparks up into the darkness.

  * * *

  * * *

  Quinn and Lillie found Curtis Creekmore hunched over a workbench, cigarette bobbing out of the corner of his mouth, as he worked on the engine of a Stihl chain saw. A small radio sat beside him playing David Allan Coe singing how Mona Lisa lost her smile. The dingy little shop cluttered with used pressure washers, weed whackers, and dozens of old, dirty chain saws hanging from the ceiling, tagged like meat in a butcher shop. He looked up and grinned with crooked yellow teeth and said, “Well, goddamn, if it ain’t Johnny and Jane Law.”

  “Curtis,” Quinn said. “You’re a long way from Jericho.”

  “Guess not far enough, Sheriff,” Curtis said. “What can I do you for? Deputy Virgil? My, my, my. Ain’t never seen you in no street clothes before. You don’t look half bad when you’re cleaned up. Almost look like a woman.”

  “And you look about the same, Curtis,” Lillie said. “Like you just stepped out of one of those Lord of the Rings movies. One of those fellas with pointy ears, yellow eyes, and fucked-up teeth. Is that a new tattoo?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Curtis said, pushing away from his workbench and examining his skinny bicep. “Ain’t it pretty? That’s my ole cat Mr. Whiskers. God rest his soul.”

  “Is he wearing a cowboy hat?” Lillie asked.

  “Sure is,” Curtis said. “And smoking a corncob pipe. Just the way I always saw him in my mind’s eye. He was a damn good little pussy. Got this one down in Jericho before y’all kicked my ass over to Parchman this last time. Rerun is a true artiste. Man can ink up anything you bring him. I was all tore up when Mr. Whiskers got kilt. Got run over by the damn UPS truck. Damn near killed the motherfucker driving. I can still see him standing there, in those little brown shorts, telling me I’m the one responsible for not keeping my animals put up. You know better than anyone, Deputy Virgil, how a pussy sure do love to roam.”

  “I’m a U.S. Marshal now, dickhead,” Lillie said. “And you got two outstanding warrants out on your sorry ass. You haven’t shown up for your last three court appearances.”

  “I haven’t?” Curtis said, cigarette still screwed into the corner of his mouth, eyes squinty from the smoke. “Don’t know nothing about that.”

  “Fella that owns this shop knows you’re a felon?” Quinn said.

  “He damn well better,” Curtis said. “Used to be my dang brother-in-law.”

  “You hadn’t been out of jail two weeks when you got busted stealing a trailer full of work tools.”

  “That was a misunderstanding.”

  “Maybe you should’ve shown up in court, then,” Quinn said. “Told your side of the story.”

  “That fella said I could borrow them anytime I liked,” Curtis said. “Me and him drinking buddies at the Southern Star. Must’ve had Jäger on the brain the night he offered ’em because now he’s acting like me and him never even met.”

  The Essential David Allan Coe kept on playing. “Need a Little Time Off for Bad Behavior.” Looks like I’ve been too good for too long . . . The air hazy under the fluorescent lights, the windows dark and covered with thick metal bars. Curtis had on an Under Armour hoodie and paint-splattered jeans tucked into his mud boots. His sallow face and thin graying beard shadowed under a ball cap, sunglasses resting on the bill.

  “I know folks sure do miss you in Tibbehah,” Lillie said. “Maybe you can get that girlfriend of yours to bring you more Popeyes fried chicken.”

  “I ain’t seeing her no more,” Curtis said. “Said I wasn’t willing to spiritually grow with her, whatever the fuck that means. Some real Oprah shit going on. I guess that’s what you get when you date a black woman. Did y’all really drive all this way to come and give ole Curtis a hard time? If I knew this was the way my night was gonna turn out, I would’ve packed my toothbrush and a few pairs of underwear.”

  Quinn looked to Lillie and Lillie nodded back. Curtis’s hair grew long and stringy down the back of his skinny neck in an epic mullet. His hands down at his sides as he stayed on his metal stool. Quinn couldn’t see a gun anywhere, although Curtis was the type to pick up a chain saw, let her rip, and clear a path for the nearest door.

  “The last time we busted your ass, you had a thick roll of hundred-dollar bills in your pocket,” Lillie said. “You’d just gotten back from a long weekend down on the Coast. Said you’d hit the big time playing blackjack.”

  “That’s right.”

  “You were big
-time,” Quinn said. “That work shed of yours looked like the inside of King Tut’s tomb. Fifteen pickup trucks, a tractor trailer. Rolexes, gold chains, diamond rings. Forty guns. You’ve really taken a step down.”

  “You got a hell of a memory, Sheriff,” Curtis said, grinning. “I might’ve dabbled from time to time helping folks sell a few things. I didn’t know being a goddamn businessman was a fucking crime until y’all busted in my shop like Navy SEALs on Bin Laden’s ass, making me damn near shit my drawers.”

  “Being a fence isn’t a vocation,” Lillie said. “It’s more of an affliction.”

  “Yeah?” Curtis said. “Well, I don’t do that no more. Go on ahead and look around. Not many high-dollar items here. I’m just a simple man, doing a simple job.”

  “Just the way God and Mr. Whiskers intended.”

  Curtis dropped the smile and stood up, not impressive at maybe five-six, one-twenty, with a sunken chest and hard round belly. “I’d appreciate you not joking about something so personal. You’re just being flat-out mean, Miss Virgil.”

  “You still keep in touch with Buster White and his people?” Quinn asked.

  “Y’all were always trying to tie me into some big criminal conspiracy,” Curtis said, ashing his cigarette. “How many times I got to tell you? I don’t know no one named Buster White and there ain’t no such thing as the fucking Syndicate or Dixie Mafia or whatever the fuck y’all want to call it this week. I may have bent the law a time or two, but I did my goddamn time. And you coming over to me won’t be nothing more than a fucking field day when I talk to my people at Morgan and Morgan.”

  “What a shame,” Lillie said. “If you did know something, I might forget I ran into you down here in Coffeeville. Let nature take its course in y’all’s confederacy of thieves.”

  Curtis swallowed and tilted his chin up to Lillie. “Goddamn, I can’t talk about that shit. I’d just as soon not end up dead like that motherfucker Wes Taggart.”

  “So you do know these people?” Quinn asked.

  “I got a TV,” he said. “I seen the news outta Memphis and Tupelo. Everybody knows some bad folks busted in your jail and took ole Wes’s ass out.”

  Lillie nodded. She walked through the smoke up close to Curtis, tapping his sternum with her finger, making him take two steps back, his butt knocking into a metal shelf loaded with machine parts. “I figured you might be smarter than that,” Lillie said. “Maybe interested in some kind of trade?”

  “Just what are you talking about?” Curtis said.

  Lillie turned her head to Quinn. Quinn stood close by, hands on his hips, nodding back at Lillie.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Lillie said. “How does a head start sound to you?”

  * * *

  * * *

  Caddy headed back from the parking lot, through the admission gate and straight to the bathrooms behind the bleachers. She needed to clear her head before going back to her momma and Bentley, composing herself before she went back to the stands, with all those nosy goddamn folks sitting around them. She walked up to one of the sinks set against the concrete wall and turned on the faucet, staring at herself in the mirror, the PA system outside playing the Migos for their hype music. Walk it, like I talk it . . . Caddy knowing damn well what it was like to be Boom, sliding off the rails and rolling into that fuzzy fucking abyss, trying to find the walls as the earth kept on tilting on you.

  She reached down and splashed some water on her face. Glad to see a different face there without all the blonde hair and makeup from years before. Just a plain, thin face and straight, freckled nose, elfin ears, and a few more lines under her eyes. She still had the nasty scar on her temple, a thin white line running into her sun-bleached hair where a man at a club had had too damn much to drink and knocked her off the stage with a bottle of Bud Light. She touched the scar with her fingers, still feeling the blow twelve years later.

  “Hello?” a woman asked.

  Caddy turned off the faucet, looked in the mirror again, and saw Tashi Coleman coming in from outside. She wasn’t carrying the microphone this time, just a purse thrown over her shoulder, some kind of T-shirt with a flowered Mexican skull—Day of the Dead. Her long black hair worn loose and stringy down her back.

  “Not right now, Tashi,” Caddy said. “OK?”

  “I just need you for a moment.”

  “That’s always what you say. Just a moment. But you always want much more, don’t you? You want me to break down and tell you my brother was a teenage sociopath and my uncle was just another corrupt redneck sheriff. I know we have to amuse the shit out of you down here, Tashi Coleman. But today, I don’t have time to entertain.”

  “I saw what happened out there,” Tashi said. “I’m sorry.”

  “So what?” Caddy said. “Boom got drunk. Nobody cried. Nobody got hurt. Not even the makings of a country song. Just another night in Tibbehah County. How about we don’t make such a damn big deal of it? It’s nobody’s business but his own.”

  “I don’t care about that,” Tashi said. “I just had two very important questions about the time Brandon Taylor died. If you could just answer those, I swear to God I will leave you alone for good. We think we might know whose body they found last month out at the Penningtons’ place.”

  “Oh yeah?” Caddy said. “Did Quinn shoot her, too?”

  “We never said Quinn shot Brandon,” Tashi said. “It was just an anomaly, a question. We know for a fact Sheriff Beckett continued to dismiss charges against your brother. Jessica and I found dozens of arrests for Quinn when he was in high school. A few of them with Boom Kimbrough. Most of them were pretty minor. But a couple were pretty serious. Your brother was arrested for assault and then the charge just went away.”

  “Sure,” Caddy said. “But if you took the time to find out how it went down, you’ll understand that preacher had it coming.”

  “He assaulted a minister?”

  “You had to be there,” Caddy said. “It was just a youth pastor with a smart mouth. Are we done here? I don’t have anything to add. And I don’t give a damn to be on your little hipster radio show. But I do want you to leave my brother the fuck alone. He’s done nothing but try his best to clean up this messed-up county. Did you know he walked away from the U.S. Army to make a difference in his own backyard? He figured Tibbehah wasn’t a hell of a lot different from the shit he was seeing over in Afghanistan. Corrupt chieftains, drug dealers, crimes against children and women. Who really gives a shit if he used to raise hell as a kid? Let’s move on to the next episode.”

  “Did you know Quinn got charged with poaching on the Hawkins land in ’97?”

  “So what?” Caddy said.

  “It’s a pretty big deal,” Tashi said. “Your brother has denied it, but we’ve found the reports. He’s lying to us.”

  “Or maybe he just forgot,” Caddy said. “I’m sure you know Quinn hunted a lot of land without permission. Is that why you came to see me? You wanted to tell me about some bullshit that happened twenty years ago?”

  “There’s more.”

  “Of course there is.” Caddy dried her hands on some paper towels and was about to push past Tashi to the door when Tashi asked her about Ansley Cuthbert. The name came out of nowhere and stopped her cold.

  “What about her?” Caddy asked.

  “She was a friend of Brandon Taylor,” Tashi said. “Right? Maybe his best friend. She disappeared a few months after Brandon.”

  Caddy closed her eyes and shook her head, not knowing if she was about to scream or start laughing. “You think Ansley Cuthbert is dead?”

  “We can’t find any family,” Tashi said. “We’ve tried our best to track them down. We think maybe they moved to Houston a few years ago? She had a stepmother who’s still alive but no one at her last known address. It doesn’t look like anyone has seen Ansley since high school. We found a missing persons report.
And we know she dropped out before graduation—’’

  Caddy held up the flat of her hand. “You want to talk to Ansley Cuthbert?”

  Tashi nodded. “Very much so.”

  “Would that make you leave Quinn the hell alone?”

  “She disappeared right after Brandon and now a young woman’s body has been found. You don’t think that has to mean something?”

  “I know Ansley Cuthbert,” Caddy said, folding her arms over her chest. “We were in the same class and got to be pretty damn good friends up in Memphis. That girl was wild as hell. I can promise you one thing. She sure as shit didn’t die back in ’97 if she was up in Memphis partying with me fifteen years ago. We worked at the same clubs, dated some of the same men, were pretty much inseparable until I decided to get my ass clean.”

  Tashi looked disappointed her theory was being shot to shit but interested at the same time. Her chin tilted upward, the fluorescent lights overhead reflected off her chunky glasses, old-school sneakers on her feet. “Can you help us find her?”

  “I haven’t seen Ansley Cuthbert for almost ten years.”

  “That’s a lot more recently than most,” Tashi said. “If you could maybe tell us where to look or anyone who might have kept in touch.”

  “Did you try the Memphis phone book?” Caddy said. “Y’all are some damn reporters.”

  “We called every person we could find with that name in the South.”

  “Could still be in Memphis.”

  “Where did you two work?”

  “Oh,” Caddy said. “A real fine place right near the airport. Ever heard of a gentleman’s club called Dixie Belles? She used to put on a hell of a show to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Black Dog.’ Knee-high fur boots, black leather bikini, and a damn bullwhip. I don’t know where Ansley’s gone, but ten to one she’s still in the life.”

  “Will you help us?”

  “Like I said,” Caddy said. “Will you leave Quinn alone?”

  “All depends,” Tashi said, shuffling her black Chuck Taylor sneakers, trying to look tough. “On what she has to say.”