All the Beautiful Sinners Read online

  “Tom?” he said into the mike, holding his hand out for Terra not to say anything, and four miles away Gentry looked back to his car, into the camera mounted on the dash, then hitched his pants up on the left side, kept walking.

  The longhair’s car was a blue sedan, a 1985 Impala.

  Gentry hadn’t needed the cherries, either, the lights—the car had already been slowing, guilty—but had turned them on just for Mary Watkins and her sister Janna, crossing the church parking lot early for choir, like they’d done every Wednesday for twenty-two years. They’d waved to Gentry then tied their scarves down tighter over their heads, leaned inside. Gentry had smiled, raised a finger over the wheel to them, and hit the siren too, just to see the Watkins girls jump, just to hear them later on the horn, complaining about the screamers. It was their word. Gentry liked it.

  Behind him, on the dash, he’d drawn a black cross on the notepad suction-cupped to his windshield. It meant he’d stopped at the church again. He liked to take them as far as the litter barrel, to empty his ashtray, but this Indian had too much candy in his pockets to even make it that far. Gentry smiled, leaning down the slightest bit to be sure the chicken feather was still there, on the rearview, impairing vision, endangering the lives of every other motorist for miles around. It was.

  The Indian stood from the Impala when Gentry was still even with the bumper.

  “—no, no, son,” Gentry said, his elbow already cocked out, the butt of his service revolver set in his palm.

  The Indian was a longhair in faded jeans, a blue sleeveless flannel shirt open at the chest, a concert T-shirt underneath. Def Leppard. It figured.

  “You want to be careful now,” Gentry said. “This isn’t Nebraska, now.”

  The Indian just stood there.

  Gentry smiled.

  Maybe he was one of those mutes. Kawliga.

  “You know you can’t do that,” Gentry said, hooking his chin in at the rearview.

  The Indian just stood there.

  “Got some identification, then?” Gentry said.

  The Indian raised his head as if just hearing, just tuning in, then shrugged, leaned down into the car, across to the passenger side. Gentry stepped forward, shaking his head no, saying it—“Son, no, you can’t”—his elbow cocked again, but then the Indian stood, holding something out to him. It was white like registration and insurance should be, but it was wrong, too: a snub-nose revolver wrapped in masking tape or some shit.

  He was pointing it at Gentry.

  Gentry took a step back, lowering his hip to get his revolver out faster, but it wasn’t enough: the Indian stepped forward, pulling the trigger.

  Gentry shuddered, felt the grill of his car digging into his back, heard his gun clatter to the ground, wondered what the Watkins sisters were singing just now—for him—and said his wife’s name: Agnes. And that he was sorry.

  Then he raised his hands, just to see what his insides looked like after all these years.

  His hands were clean.

  He looked at his shirt.

  It was clean too. Dry.

  The driver’s snub-nose had misfired. They were both looking at it now. Tape on the hammer, something like that.

  Gentry’s hat touched the hood once when it blew off his head, the storm pushing in, and then it was gone.

  He grubbed around in the gravel for his gun, came up with it, walked behind it to the driver, the longhair, and calmly took the snub-nose, set it on the peeling vinyl roof of the Impala. And then he went to work. With his hands, and his knees, and finally the sharp brass bead on the topside of his pistol, and the blunt, checkered plate of the handle, and the heavy door of the Impala.

  The longhair was on his knees, then on his stomach, then pulled to his knees again, then slammed into the side of the car, his hands cuffed behind him. He sagged to the ground, some of his hair catching around the post of the antenna, holding his head up at a wrong angle, the rest still hiding his face.

  Gentry leaned into the Impala for more guns, then, evidence, a reason, and when he ripped the feather from the rearview, the mirror came with it. He stood from the car with the keys in his hand, walked close enough to the longhair to knee him in the chest, and popped the trunk.

  It took his eyes—his mind—a few breaths to make sense, and then he backed up, dry-heaving.

  It was two children. They were dead, decayed, and had been for some time. For years.

  Gentry steadied himself on the hood of his car, the large, early drops of rain leaving wet spots on the dusty rear window of the Impala.

  He followed his hands along his hood to the dummy light of his cruiser, to call this in—the Army, the Navy, the National Guard—but stopped at his door, the skin on the back of his neck tightening with knowledge, awareness of the Indian balled up sideways on the ground, edging the chain of his handcuffs down the back of his legs, across the soles of his feet, then rising beside the Impala, the snub-nose in both hands.

  “Don’t—” Gentry said, and that was all he got out.

  The snub-nose didn’t misfire this time.

  Down the road, Mary and Janna Watkins raised their voices above the sound and Gentry heard it as the first slug slung him around, then the second. A pirouette, his arms flung out for balance, coming together over the holes in his body, leaving him half on the car, half not.

  And then the rain came.

  TWO27 March 1999, Liberal, Kansas

  The Indian. He’d got the Impala the old way—just led it away from its dirt lot in Kearney, Nebraska. It was where the mechanic put vehicles that still had outstanding bills. Nobody would miss it from there for weeks, and when they did, the mechanic would say the owner had an extra key, drove it away one night, stole it, and the owner would say that the mechanic chopped it after hours, sold it onto Rosebud or Pine Ridge. Nobody would look for the actual car, though, except the insurance company that finally got stuck with it, and that would be after all the claims got filed, the police reports filled out, and still, it would just be a thing of principle. Because nobody really wanted it. Except him.

  He took it because it was Chevrolet, and he knew GM ignition systems. He led the Impala out to an oily streetlight. It took him eight minutes to get it started. That was too long, he knew—unacceptable—but he kept blacking out, and his hands were shaking, or his eyes, or the world itself.

  He sat in the driver’s seat and idled down a half block, lights off, the sole of his sneaker skimming the surface of the road. His other car was there. It was a Thunderbird, from when they’d been long and heavy. It hadn’t been his first choice. But the trunk. He could have kept eight children in there, then curled up beside them, pulled the lid down.

  He backed the Impala up to the Thunderbird—already facing the other way—and once he’d worked both trunk lids open, they were a roof for him. He held the two bodies close when he moved them, and for too long, touching their dry cheeks with the inner skin of his lips, whispering where they could hear.

  The Thunderbird he left idling, to make sure somebody would take it, even if just for a little while.

  At the first gas station, the first strong lights, he checked under the Impala’s hood. The mechanic had put a new fan clutch on it. He should have put a water pump too, while he’d been in there. But it was free. He cleaned the windows, wiped down the handle of the squeegee, then turned the speakers on the back dash upside down, to fill the trunk with music. For the children.

  The car was blue, the vinyl top in ribbons.

  He loved it.

  He thumbed the tape in from the bag he had. They were all the same album, all taken from the same rack set near the front door of one of the drugstores he’d hit. They’d had the rollgate down over the pharmacy window, though, meaning no phenobarb, no Dilantin, so he’d had to make do with over-the-counter sleep aids. They were almost enough to keep the seizures down, inside him, so that he was only convulsing under the skin.

  He drove, and tried not to think.

  Nebrask
a at night was too black, though. Twice he slept; once he skated the chrome bumper of the Impala along a concrete holding wall. He didn’t hear it until miles later, when Lincoln was finally spitting him out into a tangle of single-lane construction. It became 77 after a while. And a state police was behind him now, just pacing. Like the trooper knew, was calling the Impala in right now, rousing he mechanic from bed.

  Around Beatrice, he slipped into residential and back out again in a part of town he’d never seen. Like he’d stepped through into a story. A story with no troopers. It was the best kind. He lifted a set of Nebraska plates from the bathroom wall of a breakfast place, where they were decoration, then watched the blue lid of his trunk as he screwed the two bolts into the rear bumper. There were flies at the keyhole. He drove slow through the rest of town, letting them keep up, the flies, but then they pushed him where he didn’t want to go, where he was always going: the firehouse.

  He shook his head no, no, wanted to swallow his tongue on purpose, to hold the lighter to his chest, to do anything but be here. It was like a church he had to go to though, park at, stare into. The firehouse.

  He held the wheel with both hands and stared hard at the windshield, just the windshield, and then there was a hand on his shoulder. It was later already. There was saliva dry on his chin now, the kind that had been foamy, spit up from deep inside. Medicinal. His first thought was of the flies, then the children. Then the hand.

  It was a fireman.

  They were all out washing their big red truck.

  “You okay, buddy?” he asked.

  Buddy.

  He stared.

  “I’m not Buddy,” he said.

  The fireman stared back at him. He was wearing rubber pants with the reflective stripe down the side, the big boots, the helmet, against the distant fire of the sun. Just a white T-shirt, though, the kind you buy folded in a plastic bag. And not any gloves.

  It was the no-gloves that did it. The hands, the hand, held out to him.

  He worked his fingers into his pocket for whatever bottle was there, swallowed a handful of pills dry. His throat bled from it, and he swallowed that too.

  “I’m okay,” he told the fireman, making his fingers into a careful okay, then pulled away, the fireman standing there behind him, watching him.

  At Silver Lake, just outside Topeka—how had he got so off course?—there was another cop, a city one. He flashed his lights once in the Impala’s rearview then turned around. Like it was a game. Like they were all playing with him. He could feel the miles accumulating inside him, a hard black knot.

  He took to the small roads to hide it, to keep it down, skirted Topeka and headed back southwest on 335 until it became just normal 35, and then he closed his eyes and stayed exactly on 35 until Texas. The Impala heaved from ditch to ditch, drunk with sleep. He turned the stereo up.

  At the big truck stop in Weatherford, he ran pink soap between his fingers, massaged it in. He was humming the song from the tape, content just to wash his cuticles, the hollow space on the backside of his wrist. But then a truck driver approached him in the mirror, his boots heavy like a fireman’s, and time dilated around them, the instant blooming open, and he ran out past all the slowed-down people, down the snack aisle, shielding himself from the candy, then past the register girl with the sharp teeth, and finally to the car, but just the passenger side. Because the glove box was open now. Had opened itself. Maybe that’s where the flies had all gone, or been hiding.

  He walked past the car like it wasn’t his, like he could trick it, then crept up again, on the driver’s side. The same. He settled into the seat. In the cardboard back of the glove compartment were two things: a black comb, with the teeth getting thinner and thinner towards the end, like piano keys sound, and a set of keys tagged WHITE. They fit the door and the ignition and the trunk. He wired the ignition back in for them—because it looked good to have keys, especially with out-of-state plates—and screwed the backrest of the backseat in all the way too, because he could just use the key on the trunk lid now, not have to go in the back way anymore.

  It took forty-two minutes to get it all done, and then the on-ramp for 20 was right in front of him. He took it, flew across the flat land, to 87 heading north.

  South of Plainview, though, he saw the sign—Nazareth—and then the fireman rising up from the yellow stripes in his rearview. He was chasing him, his footfalls heavy enough to send great clumps of asphalt up into the night, where they became birds.

  “I’m White,” he said into the mirror. “You don’t know me.”

  Maybe it would work.

  He had found him before, though.

  But Castro County. It was historical, where it had all started.

  He walked through its stores, looking for something. He wasn’t sure what. Just looking. It was almost familiar. He smiled at the girl with the normal teeth as he lifted the chocolate bar. Not that he would eat it, of course. Do that to his teeth, his gums. He just wanted her to see him take it, was all. Because then she wouldn’t see the bottle of Nyquil tucked into his rear pocket, upside down.

  She smiled back.

  “You kin to that deputy?” she asked.

  He narrowed his eyes at her, started to tell her she didn’t know him, that he was White, but then walked out the front door instead. The children were waiting for him in the car. Just staring.

  “Soon,” he told them, and closed it again, and then on the way out of town he passed a border patrol going the other way, and watched in his rearview for the sick-green car to turn around, follow him. Call the helicopters in and describe him on their radio. He slowed down for it to catch him. Out at the church, one of them finally did. It was a sheriff car. He smiled. This had been coming for four states now—all the cops gathering in his rearview, finally balling themselves up into one fat one, with heavy hands.

  On his shirt, the brass plaque on his shirt pocket: Gentry.

  “Got some ID?” he said, because he somehow couldn’t hear the children through the metal, chanting A-mos, A-mos, A-mos.

  It was his first time to kill in two years.

  He pulled the trigger again after the cop was dead, just to dance him around, and the shadow he threw dying like that had coattails, a helmet, and this was so right.

  Pulling away, he leaned down to his side mirror, to see his teeth.

  They were all there. He was Amos again, Amos Pease.

  He smiled, turned the radio up with both hands, the right dragging the left across the dials, the handcuff chain glinting between. By Oklahoma his front passenger side tire was throwing sparks. He could see it reflected in the shiny sides of cars he passed at night. He liked it.

  THREE25 March 1999, Dimmit, Texas

  Gentry’s funeral glittered with badges. Jim Doe hid behind his sunglasses for most of it, like everybody else, and tried not to look in the part of the cemetery that held his sister’s headstone.

  It should have been him here, instead of her.

  And now it should be him instead of Gentry.

  And everybody knew it.

  Maybe it could have all played out different, even, with another Indian on the stop. Maybe it wouldn’t have exploded into Gentry being dead.

  Agnes, Gentry’s widow, sat in the front row, her hands in her lap. Her two daughters were to either side of her. The sky above them was empty. If he tried—and it was the only good place to go, really—Jim Doe could remember driving back from the station house finally, after twenty-eight hours, how in each driveway along Bedford there had been a person standing, watching the clouds surge, the leading edge wisping up the grey face, to where it was darker still. They didn’t know about Gentry yet, then. Jim Doe had waved, his hand slight against the chrome of his mirror.

  And the blue Impala. Its junk plate had turned up in a trashcan in Dumas. Dumas was in a straight line north from Nazareth into the panhandle of Oklahoma, all thirty-seven miles of it. Then the road opened up onto the flat grasslands of Kansas, the corn and the whe
at and the sorghum swaying like a single, beaten sheet of gold.

  The highway patrol had ferried two grim-faced Texas Rangers—Bill McKirkle and Walter Maines—up to the Texhoma, where 54 crossed, and Jim Doe could almost see them standing there on either side of the blacktop, the butts of their rifles angled into their thighs, their helicopter pilot sitting his bird down in the pasture behind them, waiting for the show, his toothpick rolling from one corner of his mouth to the other. It never came, though, the show. The longhair slipped them, had maybe sidestepped off the Llano Estacado into Oklahoma proper, where his skin and hair wouldn’t give him away.

  After the funeral, Jim Doe stood, first on one leg, then the other, rolling the brim of his hat and letting it out again. Agnes was still there, the girls gone back to the house. Through the chain link of the cemetery, framed by the white brick of the school, third-graders were sliding on their slides and rushing through the air on their swings. Jim Doe didn’t remember ever looking over here when he had been in elementary.

  “I’m sorry, Agnes,” he said.

  She was standing at the edge of the grave.

  When she didn’t turn her head up to him, he finally just left, hating that his truck was so loud, that he couldn’t at least give her some peace out there. She still wasn’t crying, was the thing. It scared him.

  Five hours later he was on the other side of the school, dribbling a basketball into the slick concrete, shooting free throws. They made sense. But then Gentry’s oldest daughter Sarah was there.

  “If you make ten in a row this time, will none of it have happened?” she asked. It wasn’t really a question, more just her showing him that his skull was made of glass, that she could look right in. She’d learned it from her mother.