The Forsaken (5 page)

“And what’s that?” the Trooper said, grinning. Ringold shuffled a bit
on the far wall, those spooky blue eyes blank and almost sleepy, but he heard every goddamn word. His jacket bulging with a Smith & Wesson automatic.

Stagg looked at him, the pulsing dance music in the bar shaking the thick concrete walls. “You’re sitting right in it,” Stagg said. “Chains LeDoux says he’s coming to take over what’s rightfully his.”

Q
uinn took the highway north headed toward Fate, the fastest way from town up into the hills and his farm, his family, and his cattle dog, Hondo. The setting sun gave all the busted-up trees on the way that in-between red-and-black glow, almost making the destruction pretty. Ophelia and Caddy were still outside, talking on top of a big wooden picnic table, while Jason ran around the bare apple trees with Hondo. Caddy smoked a cigarette but quickly extinguished it as Quinn got out of his truck.

The old farmhouse was a two-story white box with a tin roof and wide porch facing the curve of a gravel drive. The big colored Christmas lights still up from the holidays shined bright and welcoming as Jason and Hondo raced toward him. He picked up Jason, which got harder to do every day as the boy grew, and walked up to where the women sat. Hondo’s tongue lolled from the side of his mouth as Quinn patted his head.

“Trouble,” Quinn said. “Real trouble, with y’all discussing matters.”

“Why’s it men always think women are talking about them?” Caddy said. “You know, there are a lot more interesting subjects.”

“Like what?” Quinn said.

“Embalming,” Ophelia said. “Miranda Lambert’s new album, and maybe taking a trip Saturday to Tupelo. Jason wanted to go see his Great-uncle Van.”

“Embalming?” Quinn said.

“Been a busy week,” Ophelia said. “Should I expect more business tomorrow?”

“Nope,” Quinn said, smiling. “Slow day in the county. Although I saw Darnel Bryant at the gas station and he was looking pretty rough. Not long now.”

Ophelia had brown eyes and brown hair parted down the middle, cut in kind of a stylish shaggy way when not worn up in a bun. When she worked, she didn’t wear makeup, jewelry, or let her hair down. Working with the dead meant hospital scrubs and rubber gloves and masks, and Quinn was always glad to see her out of uniform in blue jeans and lace-up boots, an emerald green V-neck sweater scooped enough to show the gold cross around her neck. She wore her heavy blue coat unbuttoned.

She smiled back at Quinn. Very white straight teeth, nice red lips, and an impressive body under all those winter clothes.

“Grandma’s fixing meat loaf,” Jason said. “You like meat loaf, Uncle Quinn?”

Quinn looked to his sister, and she nodded, shooting him a look. Quinn nodded, too, and told Jason he liked it just fine.

“Momma says it tastes like shit,” Jason said.

Caddy swatted his little leg, lightly but firm. “Where on earth did you learn to talk like that?”

Jason shrugged, unfazed. Quinn kept quiet, knowing exactly where he heard it.

The back field had been turned over, waiting for the spring, lying dormant until after Good Friday and planting time. Jean and Caddy both had a pretty ambitious list for the farm this year. Lots of corn, tomatoes,
peppers, and peas. They already had cattle, but his mother wondered if they might get a milk cow, too. Quinn wanted to know who was going to milk it every morning when his mother moved back to town once her house repairs were done.

“Who was at the Star?” Ophelia asked.

Quinn shook his head. “Boom,” he said. “Ran into Diane Tull.”

Caddy looked up, Jason crawling up into her lap, watching Hondo chase after a brave squirrel who’d come down from a pecan tree. “When can I shoot?” Jason said. “I could shoot that squirrel.
Pow.
I could knock him outta that tree.”

“You ever heard Diane sing?” Ophelia said, wrapping her arms around her body. It was a warm night for January, but it was still January. Quinn sat down next to her and put an arm around her. “She’s got a gift.”

The trees were leafless and skeletal, skies turning a reddish copper with long wisps of clouds. “Yep,” Quinn said. “There’s something about her that reminds me a bit of June Carter Cash.”

“Most people say Jessi Colter,” Caddy said, piping up, pulling a cigarette out of the pack and giving Quinn a
Don’t you dare lecture me, you cigar-smoking bastard
stare.

“Just because you smoke Cubans doesn’t make ’em any less dangerous.”

“Dominicans,” Quinn said. “Cubans are illegal.”

Jason waved away the smoke with his little hand and jumped off the picnic bench, pointing up into the tree. “There’s two of ’em. Look, Uncle Quinn.
Pow. Pow. Pow.
I can get both.”

“And Boom?” Ophelia asked. “He’s doing OK?”

“Hadn’t drank in a long while,” Quinn said. “Says he’s fine with that.”

“I couldn’t get by without him at The River,” Caddy said. “He comes by every day after work. Helps out on Saturday and after church, too.”

“You do the true Lord’s work.” Ophelia plucked the cigarette from Caddy’s hand and took a puff. “Y’all feed the poor and the sick and give
people a place to stay when they have nowhere to go. You don’t need to be a man or go to Bible school for that.”

She handed Caddy back her cigarette.

Little Jason now talked about hunting deer and wild turkey and maybe he could buy that bowie knife at the Farm & Ranch. “Like the one in the book you read,” Jason said. “About the king and that knife in the rock?”

Jean stepped out onto the porch and called them to supper. Quinn caught just a glimpse of his mother in the fading light, blue jeans and an old gray sweatshirt. Dressing up was a rare thing for her, only church, weddings, and funerals. His father had been gone nearly twenty years, and despite some men coming and leaving, she preferred to keep to herself. She was a tallish redhead, a little heavier, a few more wrinkles in her face over the years, but men still turned and looked at Jean Colson. She yelled again and stepped back inside.

Jason didn’t seem excited about supper but walked on ahead with Caddy, Hondo trying to scoot into the kitchen door but someone pushing him back. Hondo, a coat of gray and black patches, ran up to Quinn and nuzzled his leg, flashing the saddest eyes he’d ever seen.

“Hondo’s been banished from supper,” Quinn said. “Jason was feeding him under the table.”

“You always let him clean your plates.”

“Yeah, but Jason was giving him too much,” Quinn said. “That dog is getting fat.”

Ophelia rubbed Hondo’s ears and told Quinn not to talk that way. Quinn didn’t say anything, just leaned in and kissed her hard on that tight red mouth. Glad to be alone with her again.

“How’d the meeting with Mr. Stevens go?” she asked.

“He said me and Lillie got nothing to worry about.”

“You believe that?”

“Hell no,” Quinn said, standing. “But, c’mon, let’s eat. I hear the meat loaf tastes like shit.”

•   •   •

When Diane
Tull
got home at midnight, his bright green Plymouth Road Runner was parked out front, him waiting on her and wanting to talk again. She’d told him to please call first, that he couldn’t just come on over when he was lonely or bored and wanted to break out the Jim Beam and cigarettes and discuss his troubles. She told him last time she wasn’t goddamn Oprah Winfrey or Dr. Phil, she was just a working woman trying to have a little fun in the middle years and that bringing up the past wasn’t part of the grand plan. But there he was again, slumped behind the wheel, probably drunk but trying to hide it with the breath mints and chewing gum, trying to walk straight, be focused, and have them talk about Lori. Again.

“I’m sorry,” he said, starting off the conversation like that. Who does that
? I’m sorry.
Really?

“I’m not in the mood, Hank,” she said. “Can we let it alone for the night?”

“I started on it again,” he said. “My daughter came to me in a dream.”

“She did to me, too,” Diane said. “For a long time. But I finally got brave enough to ask her to leave. And you know what? She did. Lori hasn’t come back since.”

“May I come in?”

“It’s late,” she said. “I got work in the morning.”

“You sure are all dolled up.”

“I sang tonight,” she said. “At the Southern Star. I told you about it last week. You said you might come and listen. I was looking for you. Might’ve been able to talk there.”

“I’m real sorry,” he said. “I’ve been a mess. I bet you sure were some
thing. I saw you and that preacher sing last year, that one who had that church in a barn and got himself shot?”

“Jamey Dixon.”

“Yeah, Dixon,” Stillwell said. “Y’all sounded pitch-perfect on those old hymns.”

Diane leaned into the doorway of her 1920s bungalow, complete with rose trellis and porch swing, and just looked at him. He had a haphazard way of dressing, new blue jeans, an old Marshall Tucker Band tee, and a mackinaw coat that stunk of cigarettes. He had longish red hair and a red beard, both showing some gray. “Come on in,” she said. “Jesus Christ.”

“I just wanted to see how things went,” he said. “With the sheriff. Did he know about what happened? He had to have known about it. Had to bother him, thinking this was all left unsettled in the county.”

“It happened three years before he was even born, Mr. Stillwell,” she said. “Sit down in the kitchen and I’ll get you something to drink. You hungry?”

“Water is fine.”

“Sit down,” she said. “I’ll get you a Coors.”

“OK.” Stillwell licked his lips. “Appreciate it.”

He took a seat at the small kitchen table, slumped at the shoulders, hands laced before him. A hanging silver lamp in the center of the room shining over him. She opened up the refrigerator and grabbed a couple bottles, popped the tops, and placed one in front of him.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” he said, seeming embarrassed to take a drink. “You can ask me whatever you want. Me and you, we’re almost family.”

“We’re not family,” she said. “We just have a pretty ugly connection. That’s worse than being kin.”

“That we do.”

“Why do you keep coming to me?” she said. “Why bring all this up
inside me? You do realize I left this shithole town for twenty years because I was tired of heading to the store for bread and milk and getting eyes of fucking pity. You know how many times people started laying hands on me in the damn cereal aisle, wanting to pray, when all I wanted was a goddamn box of Frosted Flakes?”

Stillwell licked his lips more and then drank a few swallows of the Coors. “I don’t rightly know,” he said. “I think it had something to do with the storm.”

“The storm?” she said. “How’s that?”

He coughed and gave a loose, weak smile. She drank some beer while she waited for him to think on things, mull over what he wanted to say. A beer always helped her come down from the high of singing, this group of them getting it right, finding a nice feel for some Haggard, that old bottle letting everyone down, feeling no pain at closing time. And finishing things off, closing out the last set with a bluegrass version of “Mama Tried.” She and J.T. harmonizing on the chorus, J.T. setting down his bass for a mandolin, making each note sound like the turning of pins in a kid’s music box.

“I lost everything in that storm,” he said. “I knew then there might be no more time to make sense of it. I got to make sense of it before I’m gone. You remember how we used to always light candles for Lori every year on the Fourth. And then people just stopped showing up.”

He looked down at the table, took a breath, and he started to cry. After a while, he wiped his eyes and his face and drank some more beer.

“Hell,” he said. “You don’t have to do nothin’, Diane. I guess I just feel it’s time to shine a light on this.”

“Why me?”

“’Cause you were the one who was there,” he said. “But I ain’t telling you to do nothing. Maybe I just wanted some company. Or maybe I just wanted folks to remember her.”

Diane reached up to the edge of her hair, feeling for that long streak of
gray in all that black. She played with the end and glanced down at the gray, thinking maybe this would be the week to finally start dyeing it, making it all even. She tipped the Coors bottle at Stillwell and said, “I’ve never forgotten.”

“I think about the last time I seen her,” he said. “She came to me to borrow ten dollars at the body shop and I wouldn’t give it to her. I’d got all over her about the way she’d been dressing. Embarrassed her. You believe that? She’d gotten all made-up for the carnival with a lot of lipstick and stuff on her eyes and such. You know what I did? I told her to go wash that shit off her face, said that she looked like a streetwalker. How you think that sounds from her daddy? No wonder she didn’t call me when y’all needed a ride. When I had to go see her body with Sheriff Beckett, it was raining and all that goddamn paint was washing off her, making her look something foolish. Why did I talk like that? Like I was some kind of goddamn preacher. What kind of right did I have to be such a goddamn asshole? I deserve every bit of what’s come to me.”

Diane had heard this story perhaps a thousand times, the father playing it over and over again in his mind, trying to figure a way he might have found a new outcome. Sometime later, he became such a crazy-ass drunk that he’d been kicked out of the Born Losers Motorcycle Club as a liability. That fact would become Hank Stillwell’s epitaph,
Too Fucked-up to Ride
with a bunch of hellraisers. The man still sporting the skull-and-crossbones tattoos on his nothing biceps and sagging skin.
Pig Pen
written in jagged ink.