All the Beautiful Sinners. Stephen Graham Jones

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 wheat 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.

      Jim Doe looked over at her. She was four years older than him, had been in the homecoming court when he was still waiting to get his learner’s permit.

      “Hey,” he said.

      She nodded, took the bounce pass.

      “They say he’s gone,” she said—the longhair. “Just . . . poof.”

      Jim Doe chased her rebound down, held the ball between his hands.

      “What about the video?” she asked.

      “You can’t see anything.”

      “Not now,” she said. “No. Not like it is.”

      He shot. “You’ve been seeing too many movies, Sare.”

      “They have to be based on something.”

      “This is Castro County.”

      “Jim.”

      He looked to her. She had the ball now.

      “It won’t bring him back either, you know,” he said, trying to use her line against her.

      “It’s not him I’m worried about,” she said back, chest-passing the ball at him, hard, her thumbnails clicking together on the follow-through, her eyes fixed on him already.

      He said it again after she was gone—it won’t bring him back—but this time it was for himself, so he could hear what he’d sounded like to her, what he hadn’t.

      #

      He was there before classes started the next morning. Seven-thirty, the audio-visual room. The heaviest, thickest door in the high school.

      “You want what?” Weiner said, his chair skittering across the room on its plastic wheels.

      Weiner ran the projectors, the cameras, all of it. He was a sophomore. There early, even.

      Jim Doe looked back at the door, then handed Gentry’s tape across. He was supposed to have it hand-delivered to Shirl at the post office by three, addressed to Lubbock, who, if they didn’t have the right equipment, would probably send it down to Austin, who’d get back some time next year.

      “Just enhanced,” he said. “You can do that, right?”

      It was hard to say Weiner’s name right, so he was trying to just not say it at all. At any moment Terra could appear in the doorway, too. He hadn’t seen her since she’d sat in Interrogation Room B the afternoon of the twenty-first, waiting for her father to pick her up, the hall through the one-way glass full of law—Gentry’s friends and family from three or four counties in either direction, Midland to Amarillo, DPS to SID, eighteen to seventy-five. When Jim Doe had walked through, his shirtfront congealed to a dark black, they had quieted, just let him pass. For the moment. He could feel it, though, that they’d already listened to Monica’s audio of it. That they knew he hadn’t been there. And that Terra had been with him.

      And then her father had walked in.

      Jim Doe closed his eyes to make himself concentrate on Weiner, on now.

      “I’ll be late for class,” Weiner was saying, taking the tape.

      “It’s police business,” Jim Doe said back. “I’ll write you a note.”

      Weiner turned the tape over, never looked up when he spoke. “This is the original,” he said, impressed. Then he looked up. “Thought you were mailing this one off?”

      “You hear this on the radio, or what?” Jim Doe said, then remembered who he was talking to.

      “Why not just wait, then?” Weiner said. “Lubbock has better equipment, you know.”

      “Because I wanted you,” Jim Doe said, still watching the door.

      And because they might not think to show it to me when it comes back, he didn’t say. If he even still had a badge, then.

      “He’s СКАЧАТЬ