The Broken Places (31 page)

The thing was passing over them. Caddy held Jason. She prayed.

That thunder mixed in with what sounded like a giant jet engine being fed with sticks and wood and eating up everything that passed through its sharp blades. The low rumbling shook the entire shelter, and cinder blocks fell off the wall. One of them fell and broke on the old man’s shoulder, but he didn’t pay it any mind, holding his wife tight. Caddy had seen them before, knew them when she was a kid, and they weren’t so old. Wade Mize didn’t say shit, just stared at Caddy and smiled, Caddy not giving one single shit for a look that said to her, “We’re fucked to hell.” She’d take her chances on Jesus, not the Chamber. She rocked Jason back and forth, ground shaking, the jet engine from hell eating the town, thunder shaking the entire earth like the eight-headed beasts and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the final judgment on this world.

Dear Jesus. Dear Jesus. Protect us. Keep us safe. Protect this child. Our Lord, please have mercy and grace upon this child. You may suck me into the next world, but keep this boy safe.
Door rattling and shaking. All the adults looked to one another, because this wasn’t a human hand trying to get them, this was the beast seeking and ripping and tearing and destroying everything it touched.
Dear Jesus. Wise Jesus. Good Jesus. Jesus, please save our asses.

“Momma?”

She had her eyes shut tight.

“Momma,” Jason said. “What happened?”

Her ears wouldn’t pop. She was breathing hard and sweating, with a heart jackhammering in her chest. “Where are we?”

“Miss Mize’s playhouse,” Caddy said. “Isn’t it fun and neat?”

Wade looked down at his hands. He was thinking of his mother.

“It’s gone,” Wade said, Caddy just realizing all the noise and shaking had left them alone. The silence was so absolute it was electric.

“Where did it go?” Jason asked.

“It’s gone, sweetheart,” Caddy said, hugging Jason close and kissing his face. But her thoughts turning dark and worried, wondering about Jean, Quinn, and Jamey, and the whole damned town.

Wade took a breath, wiped his sweating face with a rag. Caddy only just noticing he wore a pair of blue jeans and no shirt or shoes. She’d never seen him in town without a coat and tie while he ran his downtown bank or the Chamber meetings. He patted Jason’s head and gave a sad smile as he turned the lock and the door opened with a pop.

A strange, hot white light filled the room. “God help us,” Wade said, and began to help them from the shelter.

•   •   •

“You all right?”
Quinn said to Luther Varner, who’d been thrown into the back of the cab.

“The dirt people can’t claim my ass yet.”

“Can you help me out?” Quinn said. “Seat won’t give.”

Luther leaned through the seats of the sideways truck, finding purchase on the driver’s-side window, blown out and ragged with glass. He reached into the upper frame and started kicking at the passenger seat until it broke free and Quinn could crawl out. Varner got his wiry old frame out first and then stood atop his truck and reached a hand down for Quinn. A fallen tree lay prone across where there used to be a windshield. “My Lord,” Varner said. “You ever seen such a clusterfuck?”

Quinn jumped down off the truck and onto the torn-up asphalt, taking in Jericho in all directions. Trees lay uprooted, skinned like animals of their bark. Paper and tin and pieces of wood had been scattered all across the road, and littered a field that was once a pine forest but now had been wiped down to mud. Quinn tried his phone. All circuits were jammed or the towers were down. Either way, it was useless. He went back to the truck and crawled inside, searching for his radio. He called for dispatch. Nothing.

“We got to hump a mile to town,” Varner said. “I’m sure your people and my people found some shelter. You remember the last one?”

“No, sir,” Quinn said. “I was only one.”

“Your daddy was there,” Luther said. “Saved a bunch of folks.”

Quinn shook his head.

“Better believe it; Jason Colson was a man.”

They followed the trash-strewn road, the tornado siren still going from near the water tower. People emerged from some houses; other houses lay in heaps; some had just been cleaned from their concrete foundations. Quinn would be back and help them all, but he needed to find his family and Anna Lee. He needed to find Lillie and his deputies. Quinn moved as fast as he could, Varner not slacking one bit at his side, bringing back memories of the last fight he’d been in with the old man. The ex-Marine going back to his training on Parris Island, coming back to an operational mind-set like a rubber band. Nothing familiar. Nothing stood. Everything was a mess, a pile of debris.

“You got to think of them being OK,” Varner said. “You check on your people.”

“What about you?”

“Well,” the old man said. “My son is rightly in prison, and my wife is dead. Smartest thing little Darl did was move to Nashville.”

They stopped only twice before reaching the Town Square. A woman and her two children had been trapped inside a toppled minivan. They had all been scared to death but were fine; Varner used his combat knife to cut them from their seat belts. Another time, they stopped to find a young girl, maybe six or seven, a little older than Jason, asking for her momma.

The house behind him didn’t even make sense, a trash pile caught in the path of that thing; nothing familiar stretched out to Quinn for miles. Varner grabbed the little girl and hoisted her onto his shoulders, keeping her there as they walked on to the sheriff’s office, finding a section of the roof gone but most of it and the walls standing. Lillie Virgil stood outside with a group of people, some covered in blankets, all bruised and bloody, seeking some type of direction. Their eyes were wandering and glassy, the look of refugees he’d seen in the Afghan mountains, everything they’d known taken away in an instant. The mind not quite catching up with the eye.

Varner helped the little girl off his shoulders. She ran to a woman standing by Lillie and wrapped her small arms around her neck.

Quinn looked over the growing crowd to Lillie. Lillie just shook her head.

Quinn started running for home.

•   •   •

After the silence was the crying
and the screaming and the folks walking out into what used to be a street and asking, “You seen my daddy?” or kids asking, “You seen my dog?” People were confused and turned-around as they stood, frozen, trying to make some kind of sense of what just happened and where to go next. No homes, no cars. No roads. People who had survived hugged a lot. Caddy saw many people dropping to their knees and praying to the clearing skies, the first time Caddy had seen the sun in a week. She walked with Jason in her arms back through the backyard, Wade going to find his mother at the newspaper and check on the bank. The old people just remained in that shelter, trying to get enough courage to see what the hell was left. Caddy wanted to see it, had to see it. She felt full of courage and wonder. If a tornado couldn’t take out her and Jason, then there was more purpose to her life, more meaning, and God was indeed good. She kept on patting Jason’s little legs and squeezing his feet as they passed over the creek and saw what had been a neighborhood since after the Second World War nothing but a landfill. Their little home was just gone, her white Honda had been flipped upside down, and water shot up in the air from what had been their bathroom. Caddy thanked God once again for her not being so almighty stupid as to try to ride this son of a bitch out in a bathtub. She kissed Jason’s cheek. God was good. They had been spared.

She had come back to Jericho with nothing. She’d come back from this.

Everything else around her didn’t make sense. The hundred-year-old oaks that had lined the quiet street and cooled during the summer were gone. You could smell the oak and the pine in the air. People screaming and shouting, some in pain and some in joy.

Down the street, or what had been a street but was now a river of clothes, busted wood, and garbage, she saw a man in a long white robe. There was a moment of foolishness, but her eyes cleared and she smiled, holding Jason up so he could see Jamey Dixon hobbling down the road in a hospital gown, scruffy and worn, silly in a pair of cowboy boots. His grin and open arms were everything.

She rushed to him, Jason clinging to her neck.

“You know I never much did like that damn kitchen table, anyway,” Jean Colson said, hands shaking while she lit a menthol with a match. “I hated those old knotty pine cabinets, too.”

Most of the Colson house remained. The open back porch, the kitchen, and a stretch of magnolias and pines did not. Quinn had his arm around his mother as they walked up the hill where he and Caddy played as kids. The old tree house still sat perched oddly alone in four pine trees that were skinned up pretty good but still there. Jean saw Quinn staring. “Maybe I could live in that tree house?”

“Sure.”

“I ran down the hall to get in the linen closet, come to find the closet wasn’t even there.”

“Where’d you go?”

“Nowhere,” she said. “Duck and cover in the hallway. Like an atom bomb had landed.”

“You see it?”

His mother shook her head, blew a stream of smoke upwind. Folks walked up and down Ithaca Road, most of it a mess but a lot of houses still standing. A ton of trees were down, most coming down right in the middle of people’s houses. Quinn had been in touch with Lillie by radio, learning the supervisors had sent a team of bulldozers into downtown Jericho to clear the roads so emergency vehicles could get through. The deputies were going door-to-door looking for survivors, Quinn saying he’d join them as soon as he checked on his mother.

Quinn had come up on the house at the same time as Caddy and Jason. Jamey Dixon, looking like a true convict, limped up behind them, his long hair and beard wild and his ass exposed in the hospital gown he wore with cowboy boots.

Jason ran for Quinn, leaping three feet up and into his arms. He squeezed his neck tight, and Quinn told him that he loved him. Caddy walked up and hugged her brother. She cried for a moment but cleared her face as Jamey walked up and offered his hand to Quinn.

“You know, I got some pants inside, Dixon. How about you put them on?”

Dixon nodded and walked up past Quinn and over the lawn and into the house, Quinn not moving an inch. Jason was smiling with all the excitement, telling Uncle Quinn all about the ’nado that about knocked the whole earth on its ass.

“Where’d that kid learn to talk like that?” Quinn said.

Caddy shrugged. They walked up to the steps to the house
and sat.

“The Stevens house is half gone,” she said. “Thank God they got a basement.”

Quinn’s blood quickened. “You see her? You sure they’re all right?”

“Had to walk right by their house to get here,” Caddy said, nodding. “It’s a mess, Quinn. Lots of people got to be dead.”

Quinn radioed in to Lillie again. They had two dead in a house right off from the old rail depot. She wasn’t sure but thought it had been the Sayleses, man and woman in their seventies. When Quinn asked about an ID, Lillie said that would take some doing. The tornado had blown into Tibbehah right over Choctaw Lake and then cut up over the city and on up toward Carthage and the hills and out into Lee County, where things sounded just as bad.

“You gonna put Jamey back under arrest?” Caddy said.

Quinn shook his head.

“We need the help,” Caddy said.

“I just asked emergency management if we could get a gimpy leg preacher,” Quinn said. “Must be my day.”

“He wants to go back to The River,” she said. “If it’s still there, it can be a place for folks to get washed and fed. We need that right now.”

Quinn nodded.

“Those men forced him with a gun,” Caddy said. “He can help.”

Quinn nodded again, Jean walking around the corner of her house, crying a bit, arms around Miss Davis, whose house next door had been split in two like a birthday cake. Caddy let Jason to the ground, the boy running for his grandmother with excitement, pointing to all the carnage and destruction. Caddy stayed seated on the stoop, not taking her eyes off Quinn. “We nearly died.”

Quinn nodded.

“That means something.”

“Sure.”

Caddy ran her hand over her face and massaged her neck. “Just give him a chance,” she said. “This town doesn’t have much, but we need him today. Our ministry. His ministry. This is what we do.”

“Hell, I gave him my pants, didn’t I?”

Caddy looked at Quinn, shook her head, and then smiled. Just slightly. Quinn smiled back and ran, double-timing it all the way back to the sheriff’s office, where they were already bringing in the dead.

•   •   •

“Afternoon, Mr. Stagg,”
Esau said, as soon as Johnny Stagg climbed into the driver’s seat of his Cadillac and stuck the key into the ignition. Esau came up from the backseat and told Stagg to just be cool and just drive. “Don’t study on things too much.”

“In case you hadn’t fucking heard, son, we got ourselves an emergency situation.”

“I saw the whole thing from the hills,” Esau said. “That twister must’ve been a half mile across. Sky turned black as midnight. Saw sparks of the power lines, whole cars being picked up and tossed like they was toys. When it come up on Jericho, I was sure the whole town would be gone.”