Read Online All the Beautiful Sinners by Stephen Graham Jones - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Stephen Graham Jones
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anybody, kept it between the two of them, and that was the last tornado Nazareth had seen for nearly twenty years.
TEN 1 April 1999, Kansas
Amos got a new car in Holcomb, from another garage. Honest Injun’s. In the daytime, Mr. Honest Injun in his Honest Injun coveralls bleeding out slow behind the Honest Injun tire-balancing rig, an Honest Injun fan belt wound tight around his throat to keep him from calling anybody over, his cut-out tongue in his hand in case he wanted to throw it at anybody, or to a dog, do one nice thing. The belt left little grooves for the mouth blood to run around his neck in. In trade, Amos left the Impala he’d driven out of Garden City. The new car was a 1981 LeMans.
At the first halfway truck stop, nervous without any music, the road too full of sound, he found a plastic-wrapped Royal Scam , thumbed it in, turned it up. Drove. The miles melted away behind him. He was fixing the world. Making up for everything. All it had taken was one ambulance left parked on the street like a gift for him, two bottles of Dilantin in the cage. He mixed it with some Percocet and Xanax and baby formula.
Once it hit his system right, he tied his hair high up on his head and became a woman he’d seen in Garden City. He could feel the truckers looking at him from their high seats. He waved his fingertips at them.
In Kendall, his hair under a cap now, a clerk asked what his name was. He recited from the newspaper he’d seen in the ambulance: Jim. Jim Doe. The one that got away. He stood around then, letting the camera get him from all angles but making it look accidental too.
No cops pulled him over. Because they’d heard about Texas. And there were no fireman anymore, not since the Dilantin. Or maybe it was the baby formula.
The back of the LeMans was squatted down on the springs, so sitting behind the wheel was like sitting in the water, on a boat.
From a payphone he found himself at in Coolidge, almost to Colorado—the road had been so smooth he’d overshot his turn north—he placed a call. His fingers knew the number without him, had been dialing on the dashboard for miles already. It was just a matter of time before they found a dialpad.
The phone on the other end rang the usual fourteen times before somebody lifted it. Amos could almost hear the cardigan, sweeping across the room.
“Mr. Rogers’s house,” the man on the other end said, the voice cheerful, false.
“Um, yeah,” Amos heard himself saying.
“Oh, it’s you,” the chipper man said. “Yes?”
On the screen in his mind, Mr. Rogers walked to the closet, hung his cardigan up in it then turned around just fast enough for Amos to make out the look in his eye.
Amos made his hand hang the phone up, went back to wipe it down, then crossed the state line.
In Hartman, Colorado—it was on his list anyway, was just out of order now—he sat in the LeMans cleaning his teeth until dark, then rolled the headlights on, eased through the outskirts of town, to the cemetery. They were all the same: unguarded. Like the dead didn’t matter. But they did.
He didn’t have to look at a list for the two names. He’d known them, could still see their faces in the darkness of the basement, even, when he didn’t want to.
The ground was soft, and the names of the children carved into the headstones matched the parents buried to either side, all dead the same day, the same storm, except the mom was named Jane, and Jane was supposed to be married to Tarzan, and Tarzan was a town in Texas, near Nazareth, where Jesus wasn’t born.
It didn’t matter.
The ground was soft, and fertile. Not the hardscrabble Amos knew from Nebraska.
But he couldn’t think about Nebraska yet.
He grubbed for the Dilantin, crushed the tablets on a headstone, inhaled them from the crook of his thumb.
It made him dig faster into the two smaller graves, not thinking about it, not letting himself think about it, his radiator-burned palm bloody with blisters. It was
TEN 1 April 1999, Kansas
Amos got a new car in Holcomb, from another garage. Honest Injun’s. In the daytime, Mr. Honest Injun in his Honest Injun coveralls bleeding out slow behind the Honest Injun tire-balancing rig, an Honest Injun fan belt wound tight around his throat to keep him from calling anybody over, his cut-out tongue in his hand in case he wanted to throw it at anybody, or to a dog, do one nice thing. The belt left little grooves for the mouth blood to run around his neck in. In trade, Amos left the Impala he’d driven out of Garden City. The new car was a 1981 LeMans.
At the first halfway truck stop, nervous without any music, the road too full of sound, he found a plastic-wrapped Royal Scam , thumbed it in, turned it up. Drove. The miles melted away behind him. He was fixing the world. Making up for everything. All it had taken was one ambulance left parked on the street like a gift for him, two bottles of Dilantin in the cage. He mixed it with some Percocet and Xanax and baby formula.
Once it hit his system right, he tied his hair high up on his head and became a woman he’d seen in Garden City. He could feel the truckers looking at him from their high seats. He waved his fingertips at them.
In Kendall, his hair under a cap now, a clerk asked what his name was. He recited from the newspaper he’d seen in the ambulance: Jim. Jim Doe. The one that got away. He stood around then, letting the camera get him from all angles but making it look accidental too.
No cops pulled him over. Because they’d heard about Texas. And there were no fireman anymore, not since the Dilantin. Or maybe it was the baby formula.
The back of the LeMans was squatted down on the springs, so sitting behind the wheel was like sitting in the water, on a boat.
From a payphone he found himself at in Coolidge, almost to Colorado—the road had been so smooth he’d overshot his turn north—he placed a call. His fingers knew the number without him, had been dialing on the dashboard for miles already. It was just a matter of time before they found a dialpad.
The phone on the other end rang the usual fourteen times before somebody lifted it. Amos could almost hear the cardigan, sweeping across the room.
“Mr. Rogers’s house,” the man on the other end said, the voice cheerful, false.
“Um, yeah,” Amos heard himself saying.
“Oh, it’s you,” the chipper man said. “Yes?”
On the screen in his mind, Mr. Rogers walked to the closet, hung his cardigan up in it then turned around just fast enough for Amos to make out the look in his eye.
Amos made his hand hang the phone up, went back to wipe it down, then crossed the state line.
In Hartman, Colorado—it was on his list anyway, was just out of order now—he sat in the LeMans cleaning his teeth until dark, then rolled the headlights on, eased through the outskirts of town, to the cemetery. They were all the same: unguarded. Like the dead didn’t matter. But they did.
He didn’t have to look at a list for the two names. He’d known them, could still see their faces in the darkness of the basement, even, when he didn’t want to.
The ground was soft, and the names of the children carved into the headstones matched the parents buried to either side, all dead the same day, the same storm, except the mom was named Jane, and Jane was supposed to be married to Tarzan, and Tarzan was a town in Texas, near Nazareth, where Jesus wasn’t born.
It didn’t matter.
The ground was soft, and fertile. Not the hardscrabble Amos knew from Nebraska.
But he couldn’t think about Nebraska yet.
He grubbed for the Dilantin, crushed the tablets on a headstone, inhaled them from the crook of his thumb.
It made him dig faster into the two smaller graves, not thinking about it, not letting himself think about it, his radiator-burned palm bloody with blisters. It was
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