The Broken Places (32 page)

“It just might be,” Stagg said. “So, you mind getting your ass out of my vehicle? I have official duties to perform and such.”

“Start the car, old man, and drive,” Esau said. “This don’t mean nothin’ to our business.”

Stagg just sat there until Esau placed the gun behind his right ear. Stagg turned halfway, staring out at the truck stop parking lot and a mess of ambulances and police cars and fire trucks. A bunch of folks scattering off every few minutes. All of north Mississippi coming on up to Tibbehah County.

“My county doesn’t have no water, no power,” Stagg said, driving away from the Rebel Truck Stop. “Most of our county seat been wiped out. I got constituents with immediate needs.”

“Same as me.”

“Ain’t same as you,” Stagg said, turning onto the highway toward town. “All that business can wait, son. This is bigger.”

“Says who?” Esau said. “You say that to the man who’s running for his life with the hellhounds sniffing for his asshole? ‘Hold on just a minute, partner. I’ll get right back to you.’
Bullshit
, Mr. Stagg. My needs must be met. I ain’t got nowhere to sleep, no money, and I need some medical attention and clothes. My eye swolled up like that fella Quasimodo.”

“Take a number,” Stagg said. “Do you know how many people died in this shitstorm?”

“No, sir,” Esau said. “And don’t much care, neither.”

“Just what the hell do you want of me?”

“To let you know nothing has changed.”

“You’re soiling my car,” Stagg said. “You smell like you been rolling in a cow field.”

“Been living like an animal since your lawmen chased me into the woods this morning like I was a ten-point buck,” Esau said. “Caught my best friend. So excuse me if I might have shit my britches.”

“This Cadillac is brand-new.”

“Get an air freshener,” Esau said. “And turn down that side road.”

“You gonna kill me?” Stagg said, peering up every few seconds into the rearview. “That it? You think I called the law on you? I told you we have a deal and we got a deal. I can’t help that the hand of God reached down and tried to shake this county off the map.”

“Pull over there.”

“You kill me and you don’t get nothin’,” Stagg said. “Jamey Dixon is a liar. A false prophet who ran over his old girlfriend and then sat by the roadside to watch her body be pulverized into nothing. You throwin’ in with a man like that?”

Stagg stopped the car on the highway. A fire truck raced by. A hundred yards down the highway, it stopped dead cold. A tall old pine fallen over the road. Some firefighters hopped out of the truck and took to the pine with a chain saw, the tree splitting in half, four men grabbing one end of the tree and pulling it out of the road. They drove off, and an ambulance followed with lights and sirens. More police cars. A couple state troopers.

“When?” Esau said.

“When for what?”

“When can you get me a lift out of here?”

“I’m reaching into my glove box, son, but there’s a weapon there,” Stagg said. “Going for it nice and easy, don’t get jumpy. I just need to get some breath mints. The smell of everything is giving me a migraine.”

“What kind of man needs a breath mint after his hometown is blown apart?”

“A man who needs a minute,” Stagg said. He reached for a couple peppermints and offered one to Esau. Esau took it. Stagg crunched on his, eyes darting up to the rearview.

“I got five hundred dollars in my wallet,” Stagg said. “I got a private shower in my office. It runs off a generator. You don’t make a mess and I’ll come back after I assess the situation in Jericho.”

“This situation is that your little town is fucked to hell,” Esau said. “The trumpet has been sounded. I seen it. Looks like what happens after a dog gets after your trash. You better be thinking on the future, old man.”

Stagg finished the breath mint, swallowed, and half turned back to Esau.

“You mind if I start up my vehicle and turn back to the truck stop?” Stagg said. “You can clean yourself and help yourself to my refrigerator. I got ice cream and whiskey. I’ll find out about Dixon. And then you can finish it.”

“Be easy for a man to get lost right about now.”

“Yes, sir,” Stagg said. “It would.”

“You threatenin’ me?” Esau said. “You want to do that, and I’ll blow your goddamn head all over your dashboard and these nice, clean leather seats. Ain’t no air freshener for that.”

“Sit back, Mr. Davis,” Stagg said, turning off the shoulder and heading away from the stopped fire truck and the downed tree. “Let me take the wheel for a bit and find out exactly what we got left.”

Quinn could see where the tornado had crossed the Jericho Square, up from the southwest and slamming into the town diagonally. It ripped a good section of the storefronts, a copy shop, a Laundromat, the
Tibbehah Monitor
’s office clean off their foundations. Cars and trucks had been turned on their backs, brick walls had been busted through. The force of it had come on across Cotton Road, the county highway running over to 45, taking out the Hollywood Video, the Dollar General, and the roof of the Piggly Wiggly. To the east there was a broken and busted world; turn to the west and everything looked the same, the old movie theater, the Fillin’ Station diner, and the Jericho General Store. Even the Veterans’ monument stood straight and proud in the dead center of the Square. Junk and trash and busted pieces of Sheetrock littered the lawn, now surrounded with emergency vehicles. But some of the town had been spared, and there was a small miracle in that.

He and Lillie searched for survivors in a neighborhood right off the Square where Caddy’s house had been, sending survivors back to the sheriff’s office, where Quinn had helped set up a command center. Not an hour since the storm and the Salvation Army was already there, feeding and clothing people. They put out tables and chairs in front of their trailer, hot meals and coffee. All seven of his deputies were working traffic, while Quinn and Lillie worked with volunteers, searching for people who may have been trapped or for the dead. Memphis was sending down rescue dogs to sniff for cadavers.

The entire neighborhood was just gone. The little saltboxes had been built for GIs after the war, turning into slums during the seventies but recently becoming rediscovered by young families. Caddy had spent most of last year fixing and painting the house, planting flowers and a small garden. Quinn had helped screen in her back porch, where they’d spent hours talking things out. Caddy finding a lot of strength and pride in that old home.

“Piggly Wiggly is giving out water and food,” Lillie said, wiping dirt and sweat from her face. She wore a gray T-shirt with her uniform pants and combat boots, gun on her hip. “People rushing over there like it’s Christmas Day. Free T-bone steaks and Coca-Cola.”

The streets were not streets but heaps of Sheetrock, busted boards, and bricks. The old oaks that kept upright looked naked and obscene, as if they’d been whipped bare. Quinn had on his old Merrell boots and carried a flat-blade ax. There was quiet and stillness, dogs barking, sirens far off. Families gathering. They tried not to talk, but to listen for cries of pain or help. Quinn had worked three hours straight, his shirt soaked with sweat, bloody calluses on his hand from the ax handle. A gas crew had set up on Main Street, shutting off the entire system.

“I wouldn’t light up a cigar just yet,” Lillie said.

Quinn nodded, standing on top of what used to be a house, the rusted blue water tower still looming over town, reading
JERICHO
in faded, worn letters. Lillie took a call from Mary Alice.

“Found another one,” Lillie said. “Old woman laid out in a field by the high school stadium. Mary Alice says she’d been impaled by a four-by-four.”

“Anyone we know?”

“Don’t think it’s easy to tell,” Lillie said. “They’re going to need you back at the SO. Nobody could have survived in here. Better just wait for the dogs.”

“I’d like to ride up to Carthage.”

“Lee County and Lafayette County are going door-to-door,” Lillie said. “Someone is going to have to talk to the press. Mary Alice says TV crews want permission to enter the Square. I think the town would rather see you on TV than Johnny Stagg’s grinning pumpkin head.”

“I’d rather search.”

“We got six counties who’ve come to help,” she said. “You can’t direct it all from radio. And those boys from emergency management need a little input on the local terrain.”

“What about you?”

“I want to check on Rose and your momma,” Lillie said. “See how they’re doing together.”

“Caddy took Jason to the church with her,” Quinn said. “I appreciate you giving Jean something to do and a place to stay. She needed that.”

“You say it ripped off her kitchen?”

Quinn nodded. “But you know Jean,” he said. “She said she’d always hated that kitchen and wanted to remodel anyway.”

He and Lillie walked down the trash-strewn street and destroyed neighborhood. Quinn held the ax loose in his bloodied hands. Volunteers from the local churches continued to dig into the piles, spraying all-clear symbols on vacant houses. So far, the county had accounted for six dead. A quarter of the downtown was just gone, the business district wiped clean.

On the hill off Main Street, Quinn searched for the Stevens home, seeing the old Victorian still standing but the right side splitting away from the center. A hundred-year-old shade oak had sliced away a solid portion. Quinn motioned for Lillie to walk on as he took a call from Mary Alice, directing Kenny and Art Watts over to the Piggly Wiggly for crowd control and to direct traffic.

Anna Lee stood on the hill, holding her child, speaking to a photographer who stepped back and framed her against what had been a town showpiece. Anna Lee wore jeans and boots, a cowboy shirt loose and flowing over a tank top. She looked proud and strong, resolved on the big hill, with the baby on her hip. Quinn wanted to run to her but slowed his pace to a jog.

The photographer, a big guy with gray hair and glasses from Oxford, left a card and moved on. Quinn stepped up to Anna Lee. He wanted to put his arms around her and hold her close and kiss her neck and cheek and take her with him. Wind pulled the hair into her face, and she pushed back a few strands, just staring at Quinn.

Quinn nodded. Never in his life had the town seemed so silent.

At the foot of the hill, a crew of local volunteers gathered around Lillie. Lillie sent them in the direction of the tornado, away from the old saltboxes and onto a grouping of larger, older houses that had been built not long after Reconstruction.

“Caddy said she saw you,” Quinn said.

Anna Lee nodded.

“Can I help?”

Looking sad, she shook her head.

“Can I put my arm around you?”

She shook her head.

“This is hard.”

Anna Lee nodded as if she might cry and turned back to the house. From over her shoulder, her daughter stared back at Quinn. In the west, the sun was starting to set. Just the thinnest edge of clouds, blood-red and black, streaked the horizon, shadowing the violence and wreckage.

As he got close to the Town Square, Quinn watched a young boy and his father raise an American flag off a toppled pole and lean it against a gazebo, where it caught the wind. Rescue workers and volunteers crowded the sheriff’s office parking lot. Television news trucks and wreckers and power company workers sat waiting with engines and lights idling. The night was coming on quick, the sky purple-red behind the old Jericho water tower, flash bars strobing atop police cars and sheriff’s department vehicles from as far away as Laurel.

Lillie saw Quinn and nodded. She held the door as he walked on into the SO, crowded as it had ever been. “Sheriff,” she said. Maps covered the conference room table. Mary Alice and two other dispatchers fielded the radio and calls. Someone had started to brew coffee. A crew was on top of the building, hammering up new tin.

•   •   •

“God is good,”
Jamey Dixon said.

“How can you say that?” Caddy said. “At this moment? With what we’ve just seen?”

They stood next to the old barn, unwrapping hamburger buns and mixing sweet tea in five-gallon buckets. Jamey smiled and said, “Pretty easy.”

A few hundred people had just shown up at The River, unprepared and unaware but knowing something had to be done. Uncle Van, looking like a rat shaken loose from his tree, and some other men had started to pull out the picnic tables from the barn. Generators started whirring, long strands of the Christmas lights lit the mouth of the church and glowed out from the barn onto tall wooden poles where grills were lit, tablecloths were laid, and pitchers of water and tea were placed. After the storm, Jamey set out a feast, a celebration for everyone who came onto the old farm still hanging on to the earth.

They cooked out hot dogs and hamburgers and served sweet tea and Kool-Aid. Boxes and boxes of used clothes Jamey had gathered for a thrift store in town were thrown open and sorted at the church altar. Buckets were left by the front door for donations.

“God is at work in all our individual lives,” Jamey said. “You see it here.”

Caddy had moved into the barn and to a big table by the altar, folding and spreading out blue jeans and shirts and underwear and socks. Inside, you could take a hot shower and change and get a cot to sleep. She shook her head, overwhelmed with the sadness for her town and everything taken away. Caddy felt like she had a rock in her throat.