The Broken Places (25 page)

“How about we save his life first,” he said. “I’ll get him checked in under an assumed name.”

“You can do that?”

“Caddy.”

“OK,” she said. “OK.”

Caddy got in the car and pulled out, Luke running up the hill to his house for pants or car keys and probably to tell Anna Lee just what kind of shit Caddy Colson had gotten herself into now. “We’re gonna be OK,” she said in a soft voice. “Jamey? You’re gonna be just fine.”

She circled the Square, the wind blowing so hard the streetlamps rocked back and forth. The old lamps scattered light across Jamey’s white face. She held his hand and prayed quiet all the way.

•   •   •

“Baby,” Esau said.

The bedroom was dark besides a small lamp on the bedside table. Becky was under the covers, head turned to the outside window, snuffling and crying a bit.

“I know you didn’t fuck Mr. Stagg,” Esau said. “I am sorry I implied that you did. His pecker probably don’t even work.”

“You didn’t imply, Esau,” Becky said. “You come right out and said I’d gotten nekkid and saddled up to his old ass.”

“My mistake.”

“Goddamn right.”

“What I need to know is why you didn’t tell me about working with Dixon?” Esau said. He reached for a pack of cigarettes under the bedside lamp and lit up a smoke. Wind howling like a son of a bitch outside.

“You knew I was meeting with Jamey,” she said. “You told me to.”

“OK,” he said. “But what did Dixon tell you to tell Stagg?”

“We could talk at the church at Parchman,” she said. “Wadn’t nobody listening in. He had written out a letter to Stagg. I wasn’t supposed to look at it, but he should have figured I would. It offered Stagg a lot of money if he could get Jamey a pardon.”

“Did it tell Stagg where to find that armored car?”

“In the letter?” Becky asked, now turning and facing him.

“Yep.”

“He didn’t mention it.”

“Did you tell Stagg where to find the car?”

“No,” Becky said. “Shit. How fucking stupid do you think I am?”

Esau blew out a long stream of smoke, took in a long breath. “All Dixon wanted you to do is go back and forth between him and Stagg to work out a deal?”

“I had to go six, seven times before they came to an agreement.”

“You know how much?”

“I don’t know final offer,” she said. “Stagg came to Parchman, I think for them to settle.”

“Maybe he told him then?” Esau said. “Where to find my fucking pond?”

Becky shook her head. “I don’t know, Esau. What are you thinking?”

“Stagg says Dixon got that money after he got out,” Esau said. “Not before, like he told us. He says he kept some of that money back.”

“That rotten motherfucker.”

Esau nodded, letting more smoke stream out from his lips. The blinds were closed in the room, and everything felt real closed in. He nodded to himself in thought.

“We ain’t getting out of here,” she said. “Are we?”

“You can go,” he said. “Go on if you want.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

“I said you’d fucked that old coot.”

“’Cause you love me.”

“Guess I do.”

“What are you going to do?” Becky said, half raising from the bed, wrapping her arm around Esau’s hairy neck. Esau burned down the cigarette and mashed it into a coffee cup beside the bed.

“Plans have changed,” Esau said. “But we’ll get out by morning. Pack your shit tonight. That old coot is making a lot of sense right about now.”

•   •   •

Caddy now had
to put her full faith in Luke Stevens and Jesus Christ while she kept praying and walking in a sad little waiting room filled with
People
and
Us Weekly
from three years ago. A fuzzy television sat in the corner of the room, playing some silly sitcom with a lot of canned laughter and people falling down, as all Caddy could do now was think about what life would be like if Jamey Dixon died.

She’d come to God before she’d met him, but there was so much strength in that man. She hadn’t cared if she had ever met another, every man she’d ever been with treating her like trash, calling her trash, taking from her and wanting more because she believed she wasn’t good enough. Jamey made her feel the way God made her feel.
Loved, valued, and purposed.
She had told him everything about the stupid boys in high school and their big trucks with big cabs and later sneaking off to Memphis and that boyfriend, whose name she would never repeat for all her days, who helped her run up thirty thousand dollars on credit cards. And how all of her Memphis friends told her how sexy and gorgeous she was and how much money she could make just in a couple months putting on big heels and taking off her clothes. Caddy had told Jamey she didn’t expect to do it but a couple months. It turned into more than a year.

She told him all about the needy men she knew—Jamey making light of it and calling it her own style of ministry—who came to her with problems about their wives and their girlfriends. Most of them just wanted someone to talk to, even if that meant talking with her naked in their lap. Jamey had asked why she did it. And she told him about what had happened to her when she was eight, something that only Quinn knew about, since her brother and Uncle Hamp had been the ones who took care of the situation. She told him about another boy who forced himself on her at a swimming pool bathroom and that time when she was thirteen and those two boys cornered her that summer. She started to believe these things happened to her because she was worthless and unimportant and trash, and that the only thing God had given her—not really thinking of it as God-given at the time—was sex. And she might as well start using it to her advantage.

The apartment in Memphis became her prison. Three girls and one stupid boy. The boy at one time being a boyfriend to them all, Caddy bringing home her cash every night and him taking it, still getting more credit cards in her name, sending her out to the couch to sleep and watch television while he had sex with another girl. She was worthless. And unimportant. She believed she was fucking trash. The drugs just numbed her, made her a spectator to life.

Jamey Dixon loved her as-is. That’s how he put it. “As-is.”

And she loved him the same. She started to cry.

He would not die. He’d get on through.

She found an old Gideon’s Bible in the waiting room and thumbed to her favorite passage. John 15:5.
I am the vine, you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing.

Nothing.

Caddy could not be nothing again. The room was windowless and airless. A black woman, about her age, walked in with an infant and a five-year-old boy. The woman looked very tired. The kids sleepy. She smiled at Caddy as she hugged her kids close. Caddy wiped her face and closed the Bible, resting it soundly in her lap.

Loved, valued, and purposed.

•   •   •

“Good thing I seen you
when I did, Mr. Stagg,” said the trucker. “I said to myself, That fella looks just like ole Johnny Stagg, and then I thought, That can’t be Mr. Stagg. Mr. Stagg wouldn’t be walking by the side of Highway 45. But as I got close and seen your face, damn if it weren’t you, Mr. Stagg. Sure am glad I stopped. Real windy out there.”

Stagg nodded. The truck kept on rolling north toward the Rebel.

“I can’t believe it stopped raining,” the trucker said. “Been raining on me since I left OK City. I ran into a hailstorm out there that knocked dents in the pavement. Hail as big as softballs. I had my rig in the shop. If I hadn’t, I’d be out of luck without no load. Got to be keeping it moving. Supposed to be down in Meridian in a couple hours. I get a little rest, turn her back around, and get on back up to Kansas City. I got a bunch of TVs and electronics and such for Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City. They got stores all around Mississippi. You know them?”

Stagg nodded.

“You OK, Mr. Stagg?” the trucker said. “You weren’t in no wreck or nothing. Figured your car just broke down.”

Stagg nodded again.

Stagg could see the exit sign coming up for the Rebel Truck Stop, a big billboard for the Booby Trap a half mile from the exit reading
SLIPPERY WHEN WET
. The sign had been Johnny’s idea, knowing that truckers always took heed of road warnings and pictures of a woman’s gigantic ta-tas.

“I think y’all have the finest chicken-fried steak in north Mississippi,” the trucker said. “I know my stops, and I always stop at the Rebel. I just wish I didn’t have such a quick turnaround or I might take a little detour at the Booby Trap. Last time I was there met a fine little ole gal named Brittany. You think them girls use their real names? Something about her didn’t seem like a Brittany at all. She was a black girl, and black girls ain’t usually a Brittany. I think more about some white girl being named that.”

The trucker turned off Highway 45 and crossed the overpass on into Johnny’s big, sprawling complex lit up with tall parking lamps and headlights and taillights of dozens of trucks and miles of neon from the Rebel and the Booby Trap. The sign on the Trap talking about Miss Double D Texas, who had been recently voted Dallas’s Nude Woman of the Year. Where the hell do they make this shit up?

“I tell you, Mr. Stagg,” the trucker said as his brakes hissed on the wet asphalt. “Sure has been an honor having you in my cab. You ever need anything, you let me know. This place sure has meant a lot to me for a long time. That chicken-fried steak is just a-calling.”

Johnny thanked the man, jumped out of the cab, and slammed the door, trying to steady his breath as he walked back to the Rebel. He went right through the front doors, past the cash registers, and into the Western-wear shop to the side entrance to the diner and the door to the back offices. A few people waved; others said hello. A big fat Choctaw dishwasher they called Double Down opened the door for him, and he went down the long linoleum hall, fluorescent light scattering on and off, to the back office, where he unlocked the door and turned on the desk light.

The phone numbers were written on the back side of a desk drawer, and he had to yank it on out and dump out all the crap inside. The phone rang and rang, maybe twelve, thirteen times, before the man picked up. Johnny Stagg identified himself as the man from Jericho. The line went silent. The line started to ring again and again. Not as long this time, until a familiar voice answered.

“It’s me,” Stagg said. “I got two shitbirds on my ass. A couple convicts busted out of Parchman. Some redheaded freak named Esau Davis and his nigger partner, Bones. I got them headed to my property before sundown. I’d like y’all to blast their shit to Kingdom come just as fast as possible.
Mmmhmm.
I sure would appreciate it.”

Quinn drove back to the farm at 0200 to check on things and leave some chow out for Hondo. He turned on the house lights and set a pot of coffee on his old gas stove to boil. He’d driven nearly every inch of Tibbehah County, looking for Caddy and Jamey Dixon, and was thinking at this point they may have shagged ass until things quieted down. Or at least he hoped they’d made that decision. The highway patrol, the Marshal service, and all his deputies—everyone out and on patrol—couldn’t find Esau Davis or Bones Magee, either. Everyone out there, finding some way to make contact in another town and another county, was not the best of scenarios. Until he found Caddy, he’d just keep going, keep on driving, until he made contact and could lock her up in the county jail until this thing shook out.

Hondo had run in from the back field, where he often slept on hay bales at night or inside one of the old barns. He came in through the dog door to the kitchen and found his chow, wagging his tail and crunching up a mouthful. Quinn was pouring coffee when he heard a car outside, and he wandered out to the porch, lit up from lights he hadn’t taken down after Christmas because he liked the way they looked. He watched Anna Lee walk up the front path to meet him on the steps.

“Caddy is safe,” she said. “She’s at the hospital with Luke.”

Quinn nodded her over to the front porch swing, where she took a seat. She was dressed in a navy Ole Miss sweatshirt, khaki shorts, and canvas gym shoes.

“What happened?”

“She’s fine,” Anna Lee said, pulling her long tan legs up under her. “She came to our house a few hours ago with Jamey Dixon. He’d been shot up and was bleeding. She tried to get Luke to help without having to take Dixon to the hospital.”

Quinn shook his head. He leaned against the porch rail and took out a cigar, burning the end with a butane lighter. The coffee mug steamed next to him.

“Luke doesn’t know I’m telling you this,” Anna Lee said. “He checked in Dixon under a fake name. Caddy said those two convicts were trying to kill him.”

Quinn nodded. “That’s true,” he said. “But Caddy shouldn’t run out like that. She left Jason with Lillie, and that put Lillie’s ass in a sling. I don’t know why Caddy thinks that everyone in town owes her a favor. And I don’t know why she keeps on trying to keep away from me. It’s not like I don’t have some type of professional interest in her matters.”