Read Online All the Beautiful Sinners by Stephen Graham Jones - Free Book Online Page B

worth it, though. There were the coffins. Amos nodded, retreated to the LeMans, cracked the trunk open. The children were still there, staring up at him. One of them—the girl, always the girl—raised her arms for his neck, and he bent down, pressed his face into her shoulder as he lifted her from the ground, cradled her small form to the new grave. Because her family was gone. But this would do, this was close enough.
    His hair had grave dirt in it by the time he got the boy into his coffin. He laid tobacco ties on each of the children’s chests, at the point where the turkey foot carved into their torsos branched out into toes. Like the turkey had been what pressed them down into the ground. They put their hands over the tobacco in thanks. Because it was right, proper. And things had to be proper.
    Amos closed the trunk, looked back east, and turned the great car around, for Kansas, doubling back on the same blacktop, which he’d promised himself not to do. He was fixing the world, body by body. It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood.

ELEVEN 2 April 1999, Deerfield, Kansas
    From a payphone at the turn up to Lydia, Jim Doe called Castro County. Not Monica at Dispatch, to check in, but Agnes. It was pushing dawn.
    “Where are you?” she asked.
    Jim Doe looked around, shivered. “Kansas,” he said.
    “You should come home.”
    “I’m going to pay you back.”
    “I don’t care about the money.”
    “I’m going to pay you back for Tom, Agnes.”
    “Joe.”
    “Jim,” Jim Doe smiled.
    It was good to hear her voice.
    “You’re not calling just to tell me that,” she told him.
    Jim Doe switched ears, watched a car flash past, its driver lit up by his own dome light at the last moment.
    “The fireman,” he said, cupping his hand around the phone to say it. “He was real, Agnes. Did Tom know?”
    The way she hesitated was all the answer he needed.
    “It’s something with the—with all the towns that got hit by a tornado, I think.”
    “Joe, no.”
    “I can find her,” he said then, quieter, with his eyes closed.
    “Come home,” Agnes said again, the defeat there in her voice, and Jim Doe made it easy for her, just hung up.
    To the south there was an outflow boundary, a shelf cloud moving low across the land. In the parking lot he was in, three of the six cars had feathers dangling from their mirrors. The thread wrapped around one of their spines was a military pattern, for Vietnam. Green and white and red. Jim Doe knew the colors from his father.
    He got in the truck, lowered his face into his sunglasses, and closed his eyes for what he told himself was just going to be two seconds, woke to a man knocking on the window. He was Indian, tall.
    Jim Doe cracked the window.
    “Smells hot,” the man said, touching the hood to show what he meant.
    Jim Doe blinked, managed to focus in on his gauge. Two-twenty. He’d fallen asleep with the engine idling, the doors unlocked. His hand not on his gun. Nothing hanging from his rearview.
    “Shit,” Jim Doe said. “Thanks.”
    “You okay?” the man asked. “Not shot or anything?”
    Jim Doe looked at his stomach, his chest.
    In his side mirror, the man’s tall kid was placing his hand in the handprint on the back fender of the truck. The print was more brown now than red. Like a scab. The kid’s hand seemed to fit. Jim Doe watched him do this and watched him do this and then reached beside his seat for the nightstick he still carried, wedged it against the accelerator to cool the engine down. He stepped out into the midday glare. The man towered over him. The kid too. Basketball. He had probably played in the game two nights ago, even.
    “Who won?” Jim Doe asked.
    The man hooked one side of his face into a smile, said, “Who do you think?”
    The tall kid’s hand did fit. He backed off with Jim Doe’s approach. Jim Doe told him it was all right. He placed his own hand there. It fit too. The kid smiled. Jim Doe bent down to the print, took his