The Broken Places (35 page)

Quinn sat on his desk and ate until the door opened and in walked Johnny Stagg. Stagg had his hair swept back like an old-time preacher, hands in the pockets of a blue Windbreaker with the official seal of Tibbehah County. “My heart is aching, Sheriff.”

Quinn put down the cold plate.

“I heard about Kenny’s momma,” he said. “Lord. How is the family doing? Ken Senior and all.”

“Kenny is back on patrol.”

Stagg shook his head in wonderment. “That boy has some sand.”

“What is it, Johnny?”

Johnny smiled, bemused as hell, taking his hands from the Windbreaker pockets and showing Quinn his palms. “I heard you and Leonard really got into it over them helicopters landing.”

“That’s not true.”

“Leonard said you threatened to whip his ass,” Johnny said, nodding.

“Nope.”

“Whether you like it or not, Quinn, in situations like this, we have to delegate some authority,” Stagg said. “And in the city limits, Leonard is the police chief. We can’t be having our county sheriff charging in like a bull and threatening to take a man’s head off.”

“You need to check out the law,” Quinn said. “In times of natural disasters, I’m in charge. And what Leonard told you was a lie. Whether I would have whipped his ass or not is beside the point. I told him he didn’t know shit about setting up an LZ. He had spotlights aiming to blind the pilot and railroad flares that could have been sucked into the wash and caused a real mess. He also had too many cars and trucks crowding the zone and shit that was going to make it tough on the pilot.”

“Let’s just let Leonard run things in Jericho,” Stagg said, smiling. “OK?”

“Nope.”

“Nope?”

Quinn took the paper plate back and began to scrape up the peas and eat a bit of cornbread. You ate when you found yourself with a second of downtime. You slept if possible. You kept yourself running right, so you could hit it hard when the time called.

“Listen,” Stagg said, hands back in his pockets, one coming back out with a breath mint. “We got more problems than just the storm. We still got ourselves a crazy-ass murdering convict running wild.”

“Maybe he’s dead or left the county.”

Stagg shook his head, smile dropping, crunching on the mint. In the shadowed light from the lantern, Stagg’s satyr features became more pronounced. The long pointed nose and chin, rounded goat eyes. Quinn half expected to see the tips of horns pointing from his slick, rockabilly hair.

“He ain’t gone,” Stagg said. “He busted into my office, forced an employee of mine to remove some glass from his eye. He dropped blood all over my desk and carpet, drank down some fine whiskey, and even used my commode.”

Now Quinn smiled. “And why would he return to the Rebel, Johnny?”

“Looking for money,” Stagg said. “Who the hell knows? But I just want you to know something. You have my full support in these turbulent times to use your own judgment if you run across this fella. If it come down to it and you need to make that call, you have my backing.”

Quinn finished with the plate of peas and dropped it into the trash. He reached for his gun and set it back on his hip. He sat down on the edge of his desk, a couple feet from Stagg, crossing his arms and nodding. “Shoot to kill?”

“If it come to that.”

“Appreciate that, Johnny,” Quinn said. “Still can’t figure out why he came to you.”

“The Rebel ain’t exactly a secret location,” Stagg said. “He probably wanted to hijack some trucker and get gone.”

“Maybe he did.”

“No,” Stagg said. “I think he’s still around.”

“And you want me to shoot him down.”

“Man killed two U.S. Marshals,” Stagg said. “Who’s gonna be singing ‘I’ll Fly Away’ for that son of a bitch?”

“And Leonard?”

Stagg sucked on his tooth, smelling of enough cheap cologne and breath mints to cover up something truly rotten inside. “Use your judgment,” Stagg said. “Sometimes Leonard ain’t what I call a thinker.”

Quinn nodded and walked by Johnny to the door, standing in there, trying to facilitate Stagg moving on. Plenty of folks coming in and out the front door to the SO, the road outside filled with fire trucks, electric company bucket trucks, and big trucks filled with men and women with axes and crowbars, trailers loaded down with bulldozers and backhoes. The parking lot and on down the road lit up with red and blue flashing lights.

“Can we do anything for Kenny?” Stagg said, letting himself out and into all the chaos. “I’d be glad to round up a collection.”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

“He really go back on patrol?”

“It was his idea,” Quinn said. “How he operates.”

“Boy’s got sand.”

Stagg popped in another peppermint and walked out in the SO to shake hands and show his deep and sincere appreciation.

•   •   •

An old couple from Alabama
who brought over a donation of fifty gallons of water, twenty cases of Coca-Cola, and two rounds of hoop cheese had given Jason a dollar bill. He’d been proud of it, carrying it soggy and crumpled for the last hour, until he thought on it for a while and said, “I don’t need nothing, Momma.”

“No, we don’t,” Caddy had said back. “You want to add it to the collection?”

Jamey took the dollar from Jason and kissed him on the top of his head before adding it to the coins and cash in a five-gallon Home Depot bucket. He’d been sitting with a black family of four who’d lost everything in the tornado. As Jason walked away, Jamey held hands with them and prayed.

“Where are we gonna live, Momma?”

“I’m not sure,” Caddy said, getting down on one knee and hugging him. “Where would you like to live?”

“Disney World.”

“Besides Disney World.”

“With Uncle Quinn and Hondo.”

“Besides there.”

“Always with you,” Jason said, proud of himself for giving away the dollar. “I just want to be with you, Momma.”

She hugged him tighter and picked him up, carrying him outside the barn and down a short, worn path to a ragged trailer Jamey had rented along with the property. The trailer was white and blue, rusted at the edges, the official place where he was supposed to live had he not shacked up with Caddy. They had power in the old trailer, most of Tibbehah County not being able to see or flush the toilet, but somehow they’d gotten power in that tin box.

She and Jamey had set up a small office in the kitchen of the trailer and cleared off a bed and changed the sheets for Jason. He had not once asked about his Matchbox cars or stuffed animals or the train set he had collected, piece by piece, for good behavior reports each week at preschool. The boy was tired, yawning and following Caddy as if in a daze but unable to sleep. She put him down on the bed and told him she’d be right back. But he reached up and grabbed her by the neck, holding on even tighter, not wanting to be apart for a second. So she carried him with her, Jason hanging around her neck, and took a seat at the kitchen table, where Jamey had set up a laptop, trying to get Wi-Fi through his cell phone, share the day’s stories with his outreach, without luck.

Caddy absently hit the refresh button on the computer, wondering how she would ever get Jason to sleep seeing what he had seen, without her crawling in bed with him. And Jamey needed help. She needed to be with him, working with the church, sorting clothes, stacking food and water, keeping up with the donations, praying with the survivors.

The quiet in the trailer was strange, her ears still filled with the tornado and with big trucks and bulldozers scraping away half the town. It had seemed like a hallucination, standing there at the edge of Jericho Square and finding everything she’d known and expected to just be gone. She held on to Jason very tight and kissed his cheek. “Hold on a minute, baby.”

“Why?”

“I got to tend to business.”

The laptop refreshed to the homepage for The River, and with Jason on her lap, she got into the church’s e-mail account, noting pages and pages of e-mail notifications that donations had been put into the church account via a PayPal button that they never thought anyone would use when they set up the site. Jason squirmed in her lap, wanting to go back to the barn to play tag with all those homeless kids, Caddy telling him to hold still for a moment as he rested his head on her shoulder.

Caddy logged in to the church’s bank account where the donations had been made. She stared at the screen and then hit refresh as if thinking she was having eye trouble.

“Jamey?” she said, calling out through the open door. “Jamey?”

She helped Jason off her knees and pushed him along. “Go get Jamey and tell him to come quick. Oh, Lord. Tell him to come quick.”

“What’s wrong, Momma?”

“No, sir,” Caddy said. “Nothing’s wrong at all. It’s just as Mr. Jamey told us it would be.”

Caddy sat back down slowly in the aluminum dinette chair, hand over her mouth, seeing all those zeros and shaking her head in wonderment.

Quinn broke free at 0300, riding north with Ophelia up toward Providence and the old farm that had been in his mother’s family for generations. Ophelia leaned against the big truck door, a light coat spread over her thin body, staring out into the darkness, most of the action around Jericho and off to the east, nothing out in the country and along the National Forest but darkness.  They didn’t talk much, Quinn knowing he may not find much, didn’t expect to find much, but hoped at least he could come back to the office with Hondo. He loved that old house, but he loved the dog more.

“They think they can get the power back on at the Rebel Truck Stop and a couple of the gas stations.”

“What about school?”

“It’s going to be a while,” Quinn said. “A lot of damage, walls of the cafeteria about caved in. Thank God they didn’t. There were two hundred people inside.”

“We didn’t get anything,” Ophelia said. “Not even at my mother’s house. Not a tree, not a loose shingle.”

“Count your blessings.”

“What’s your momma gonna do?”

“Some workers put a tarp over her kitchen,” Quinn said. “But she insists on staying. She’s got nothing out there but a little Honda generator and has to flush the toilet using a bucket of water. I tried to get her to come with me. But she’s got neighbors and friends, and she’s looking out for Lillie’s daughter while Lillie works.”

“Your mom is a good woman.”

“Most positive woman I’ve known, and I can’t figure out why.”

“How old when your dad left?”

“Ten.”

“You seen him since?”

“Once,” Quinn said, concentrating on the yellow centerline. “I was sixteen and drove to Memphis where he was signing autographs at a Hollywood memorabilia show. It was at some Holiday Inn by Graceland, and he’d been advertised as ‘The Man Who Made Burt Look Good.’”

“What did he say to you?”

“Nothing,” Quinn said. “He signed his name on a picture of him and Burt Reynolds with that director, Hal Needham. Didn’t even look up as I was standing there.”

“And Caddy?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I think he and Caddy corresponded for some time. I think he has a new family now. Tries to keep his past life separate. It broke Caddy’s heart. She idolized him.”

“Your father sounds like a real asshole.”

“You said it.”

They passed Varner’s Quick Mart, oddly still and dark without the soft glow of night lights on by the coolers, and up past Hill Country Radiator Shop and Blake’s Used Tires and a little old house where a family sometimes opened up a karaoke and steak restaurant. No lights in the trailers or the houses on into the curving of Highway 9 and past signs for Fate and Providence, the founders of the county obviously having some fun with the loggers and moonshiners who’d settled up into the hills. Most of the early folks had lived in tight families, little clans, and not much had changed, most folks not asking where you lived but who your people were.

Quinn turned onto his road, County Road 233, twisting along the scraggly pines planted to harvest and a big, wide-open piece of land that Johnny Stagg had recently clear-cut as a settlement on a debt with Quinn’s Uncle Hamp. The empty, eroded hills looked like a moonscape.

“You miss the Army?”

“Sometimes.”

“You ever wish you’d stayed?”

“I don’t think I had much choice.”

“Because of Johnny Stagg?”

“Nope,” Quinn said. “Lots of things.”

“Your family,” Ophelia said. “You came back to look out after them?”

“Ten years is a long time,” Quinn said. “The last six I never got home.”

“What exactly did you do in the Army all that time?”

“Jumped out of planes and killed people.”

Ophelia turned from the window and laughed. Quinn glanced at her, expressionless.

“Seriously?” she asked. “How’d that feel?”

Quinn had started to slow and turned over the small wooden bridge that crossed Sarter Creek, switching on his high beams and KC lights and shining up toward his home. A huge oak that had been planted as a shade tree maybe a hundred years ago lay sideways in front of the house. Quinn got out of the car, leaving on the lights, and walked up the stone path, finding everything intact. He turned the corner, Ophelia walking with him now, fitting herself into a short jacket, hands in her jeans.