The Ranger (24 page)

“Is that it?” his mother asked.

He nodded.

Quinn’s cell phone continued to buzz in his coat pocket. He reached to switch it back off but saw it was Lillie. He answered it as his mother went to scoop up Jason, both of them still at the grave site.

“Where are you?” Lillie asked.

“A little family time.”

“Can you get over to your uncle’s place?”

“Sure. Can it wait?”

“There’s been some trouble. You need to get out here right now.”

25

Quinn drove over the Sarter Creek bridge and
stopped his truck with a skid on the gravel drive, running for the burning barn caught up in flames and smoke. A big shed had gone up, too, but the fire had already ripped through it, and all that was left was a heap of crackling and snapping wood. Lillie met him on the hill and said she’d called the fire department, volunteers arriving in spurts, spilling from pickup trucks and old cars. The red engine was the last vehicle to arrive, and got stuck twice in the mud before getting close enough to get a decent shot at the barn that now was pretty much ruined and leaning because of the destroyed beams.

He called for Hondo but couldn’t find the dog.

A young boy, maybe twelve, ran up to Quinn. He was barefoot, even in the cold, and as soon as he began to speak it was easy to tell he was somewhat mentally deficient. He asked Quinn about all those dead cows.

“There weren’t any animals in that barn,” Quinn said. The heat was tremendous across his face, and ash blew over them in a steady wave of wind.

The boy shook his head and pointed to the muddy pasture, where a half-dozen cows lay on their sides, the blood clearly visible across their flanks.

Quinn walked toward the animals, the barn behind him, the cars and trucks and commotion, men smoking cigarettes and calling home on cell phones. A hell of a banner day for Tibbehah Station No. 8. One of the firemen joked to another: “Anyone want to grill up some T-bones?”

The cattle had been raked with automatic weapons, looked to him like small caliber, probably .223 assault rifles. There were more dead animals down in the creek, two calves dead in shallow water running with blood, and a momma cow that lay on her back in a sandy creek bed, probably toppling over while trying to get away, mouthing for air like a beached fish. He heard more cries from cattle along the edge of the creek.

Quinn walked back toward the house through the heavy black smoke in the air, wondering why they’d spared the house, but then he spotted the long black charred marks across the east side. A fire had been started but didn’t take. They’d only been able to bust out a couple windows.

He found the Browning .308 in the back of his truck and loaded it with bullets, followed the broken path and skittered down the muddy bank to the dying cow. He took a breath, and the rifle recoiled in his hands.

He walked to another, reloading, and did the same.

A third, and then there was an electric silence in his ears.

Again he yelled and whistled for Hondo.

As he crossed the road and entered the drive, a blue sedan pulled up behind Quinn’s truck and killed its engine. County fire marshal Chuck Tuttle stood up out of the car, a leather jacket over his shirt and tie, a toothpick hanging out of his mouth, picking the last bits of a leisurely meal before getting down to work.

He shook his head sadly when he saw Quinn and offered his hand.

Quinn just stared at him, his right hand hanging at his side.

“Everybody all right?” Tuttle said, again shaking a hangdog head.

“I must’ve left the skillet on too long,” Quinn said.

“Come back?” Tuttle said, a confused smile on his lips.

“Looks like a grease fire to me.”

“You trying to burn down them old barns?”

Quinn didn’t say anything.

“All right,” Tuttle said. “Let me take a look. Some teenagers probably thought this place was abandoned.”

“How much?” Quinn asked. Tuttle turned to walk down to the barn.

Chuck Tuttle pulled the toothpick from his mouth and spat.

“I sure as shit hope Johnny Stagg made it worth your while,” Quinn said. “I wonder how those kids felt as they were being burned alive.”

Quinn felt a gentle hand on his shoulder and found Wesley looking down and smiling at him.

Tuttle kept walking down the hill. Wesley blew out a long breath and took in the whole scene, slipping off his baseball cap in some kind of reverence. “Holy shit.”

“Tuttle said it was some kids.”

“I saw the cows. This wasn’t no kids.”

“You believe Shackelford now?”

“I never argued there weren’t some evil people living among us,” Wesley said, placing his cap back on his head, hands on his hips. “I just didn’t see any conspiracy in what happened. Look at Gowrie, look at what he did here. You see that shit from a mile away.”

“You see Hondo?”

“Shit.”

“He’s not down with the cattle.”

“I’ll drive up the road into the hills,” Wesley said, nodding. “You want to ride with me?”

“Nope.”

“Quinn, I know what’s on your mind.”

“I’ll wait.”

“Come on with me. Let’s go find that dog. You can’t do nothin’ here.”

“I want to stay.”

Wesley nodded and patted his arm again, crawling into the sheriff’s truck and driving slow up the gravel road into the hills, looking for that lost dog.

Quinn walked back to his truck, slammed the door, and accelerated in a slew of gravel and dirt in the opposite direction toward the main road back to town. The smell of charred wood and smoke bringing back thoughts of a firefight on top of a snowcapped mountain a few years back. A seventeen-hour gun battle over rocks and in caves, five soldiers dead.

The Army lost track of enemy dead after three hundred.

Charley insisted on it.
Absolutely insisted on it.

The baby, still with no name, had to come, too, he said. He wouldn’t have a child that wasn’t raised in a proper church. And Lena made the point that any church that made its home in an old movie theater wasn’t a real church at all. Charley got all solemn about it, thinking—as if the dummy could think—and told her that churches were built with lives and souls. How in the hell can you argue with a load of crap like that? The marquee was still advertising BIG MOMMA’S HOUSE 2.

Of course Lena had been raised in the church, knew the liars and the creeps, the fools who fell out on Sunday, rolling in the aisles, while the big-toothed preacher passed around the collection plate. She knew the old men who carried weathered Bibles and hugged you a little too close when you turned thirteen and wore a little bra. But Charley had said something about them all getting fed, and since they’d left the hospital that morning, having to sneak out a back door on account of Charley saying he couldn’t deal with the government, she hadn’t had much besides a hamburger and a cold Coke from the Shell station.

She’d slept thirty minutes in the back of a broke-down van.

For the last hour she hadn’t been paying much attention to the sermon, maybe on account of the preacher being Brother Davis and her having used profanity with him and all earlier, but then he started repeating and repeating that he was a worthless soul and a nobody and a fool, and that got her attention—Lena thinking he’d learned something—until she realized he was speaking as Moses.

Brother Davis wore a suit that looked as if it had come off a corpse—the kind you see your grandpa renting before they plant him. It was dark brown, and he’d matched it with a stiff brown tie with a deer head painted on it.

“Moses said to God, ‘Do you know my name? I ain’t nobody,’ ” Brother Davis said, seeming upset by it, shaking his head, making you know that he often felt like nobody, too. Everyone did. “You see, dear friends, Moses didn’t think he was special. He wasn’t no household name among the Israelites. He was even a wanted man in the pharaoh’s country.”

Lena turned to study Charley’s profile, the dummy nodding with great understanding as the preacher continued. “He had wanted posters throughout Egypt. ‘Wanted Dead or Alive!’ And Moses said to God again: ‘I know you ain’t talkin’ about me.’ And then God says to Moses . . . Say it with me, folks: ‘I am that I am!’ ”

The forty or so creatures in the movie theater repeated it back, their words echoing off the walls and down the long sloping floor, where you could still see the candy and bubble-gum stains. Lena rocked her baby, watching its pale blue eyes wander blindly across her face. Lena thought maybe she could pray for some kind of miracle to get out of this world and back home. She said a little prayer.

“God said, ‘I send you,’ ” Brother Davis said. “You thought when you faced that ole Pharaoh and them Israelites that you are alone. But I’m asking you to use the name that is above all things. Y’all know what I mean.”

Brother Davis prowled back and forth from his Hollywood pulpit.

“How do I face financial struggle, the physical struggle, the demons in my body? You are strong in His name. In His name. Because everything is His name. His name is above cancer. Above struggle. Poverty. Affliction. His name is above everything. His name! PRAISE HIM!”

Two rows back a man started to scream:
“Shana-meana. Honi-aname. Shana-meana Homa-aname.”

“Jesus Christ,” Lena leaned over to Charley and whispered. “They gonna start that business? We won’t be out of here till midnight.”

“Shush. Hadn’t you ever heard an unbridled soul speak?”

Lena whispered again to Charley, this time saying she had to pee pee, and he looked real aggravated as he stood to let her and the baby out, not even offering to help her a little bit, everyone too concentrated on Brother Davis, lost and wandering, picking manna from the air, proud as hell of that cordless microphone, where he could leap off the stage and touch folks’ hands like he was a damn Kenny Chesney. Gowrie and his daddy sat in the last row, not even bothering to dress for the night service. Gowrie had on an old Army coat, the hair on his face about the same stubbled length as that on his head. His daddy wore a ragged T-shirt that read HAULIN’ ASS, with a girl wearing a thong riding a motorcycle.

Gowrie winked at her and reached out to touch the baby—some kind of gesture of forgiveness—as she turned and gave him her backside, shouldering the door and heading into the lobby.

A card table had been set up with free Bibles with plastic covers and tons of pamphlets on the End Times, and those comic books you see in gas-station bathrooms about men humping each other or drinking bottles marked with XXX, as if liquor came like that anymore.

She sat in a hard plastic seat and leafed through them as she pulled up her sweater and set the baby to her breast, the baby finding her nipple as easy as you please. Lena saw one comic where Jesus appeared at a bar and the man was too drunk to even realize there was a man with long hair and a beard—wearing a robe and sandals, no less—trying to chat him up.

“How old is she?” asked the woman behind the card table, knowing the baby was a girl on account of the pink blanket.

“One day.”

“She sure is hungry.”

Lena rocked her in that hard school seat.

“Y’all should be alone,” the woman said.

Lena heard someone strumming an electric guitar, and the drum machine kicked in, an off-key voice singing some Christian rock.

“I would like that.”

She led Lena down a long hallway and back behind what would’ve been the screen of the old theater. The noise was muffled by a big concrete wall, and she could sit there without men coming in and craning their heads to look at her young titties. She closed her eyes, falling asleep for a long while, not dreaming but dead asleep, then breaking awake and back, feeling the baby suckle on her, her body feeling hollow and bled out and spent. Hands shaky and hungry, wishing that son of a bitch onstage would get done with what he had to say so they could get to that food she’d been promised. Brother Davis’s words sounded as if they were coming from the bottom of the sea or an old worn-out videotape:

“They will see the bloodstained path that was in my death in my resurrection.

“When you say you can’t or shouldn’t, know that I have gone before you. I have prepared the way. And know I am working through you. Hallelujah!”

“Hallelujah,” Lena said, very small, snuggling her baby. “Get done, you asshole preacher.”

She rocked the child among the stage props that had been made by children, castles and dragons and sheep and robes. She fell asleep again to the pounding of words and a wave of nonsensical stuttering going over the people like water. She stood and walked in the dim light, running her hands over the piles of plastic swords and fake trees, looking for a way out.

Against the back wall was another card table, two of them pushed together, lined with piles of guns and fat bundles of cash.

Holy shit. Cash.

For a moment Lena felt like a spell had come over her, and she stepped toward the table, reaching for the pile of money, smiling, feeling like it might actually be a real thing—a holy prayer answered!—when the door slammed open and two of Gowrie’s boys rolled through it, full of piss and beer, pushing at her and asking her what in God’s name did she think she was doing by breaking in back here?