The Lost Ones Read online

  The church was built out of pine and cypress right before the turn of the century—the last one—looking a bit like a one-room schoolhouse where they’d fitted in twenty pews, ten to each side, instead of little desks. Once inside, there was some handshaking and waves, hellos from distant cousins and friends. A smile from the friendly preacher, Reverend Rebecca White, who once told an ornery elder that sometimes you couldn’t set a man’s mind right with a brand-new gun.

  Donnie and Luther sat side by side, Donnie’s morning sweats coming on along with a strong hatred for tequila and most things Mexican as Reverend White led them through “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” and “Blessed Assurance” and then right into the Call to Worship and the Lord’s Prayer. The service was straightforward and old-fashioned, with hymns from the 1800s and a sermon that landed right on time and didn’t require shouting to drive its points home. His grandfather and his great-grandfather had both been members here. His mother’s folks, too.

  Up front, Donnie took notice of Quinn Colson, and Quinn had his arm around that half-black kid of Caddy’s. The sister and his crazy mother sitting right by Quinn in the pew. A few times, Quinn would turn that high-and-tight buzzed head around and study the church, eyes wandering over Donnie. Donnie thought for a minute that old Quinn may have conspired with Reverend White for her sermon about “Being Your Brother’s Keeper” and how Cain didn’t think his actions were anyone’s business till God scattered his ass to the wind.

  “Everything you do affects another human being,” Reverend White said. “Let me say it again. Everything you do affects another person. Your actions can’t be hidden from God. He knows your every thought. Good and bad. Cain said he wasn’t his brother’s keeper. But the Lord saw the blood spill from the soil.”

  Quinn Colson cocked his head and scratched his ear. Son of a bitch.

  “Are you your brother’s keeper?” Reverend White asked. “How do your life and your actions serve Christ? Every one of your actions sends a ripple through hundreds or maybe thousands of people. Do you present yourself with honesty and integrity, thinking of others? Or do you walk a selfish road, looking out for your own business, locked up tight in your own thoughts and deeds?”

  Donnie studied the church bulletin, learning from the prayer concerns who was sick, down on their luck, or dead. He looked up again and found Quinn was back watching the preacher and taking care of his own business instead of messing with Donnie. The little boy had fallen asleep over Quinn’s shoulder, his momma, Caddy, leaning back and watching her brother holding the child with a soft smile on her face. Donnie felt embarrassed every time he saw her, searching for words to say, because when you’d been with a woman, it was damn hard to smile and shake hands. Hell, she probably didn’t even remember it, after five years.

  Donnie’d been home before he left for Iraq, and Caddy was home for the holidays, and they’d met up at that shit beer joint off 45, near Stagg’s place. She’d been with a pretty rough fella, a roofer from Calhoun County, and there had been a drunken exchange over a dart game. The roofer left her. Caddy had been on pills and drunk, and things kind of picked up momentum quick. Donnie had stayed, and they’d talked. First time they’d talked since school. And it didn’t take long till they got sloppy over cold Coors and started kissing at the bar and then ended up at the trailer, where she sure as hell made him hurt. Donnie had been with a lot of women, but no one with that kind of rage in them. She bit and clawed and screamed till she passed out.

  He seemed to recall she had a small tattoo on her right shoulder of a sunflower.

  “Do you offer the Lord your bounty or the scraps of what you have left?” Reverend White asked.

  Donnie had found Caddy sitting on the hood of his truck the next morning, smoking a cigarette and watching the sun rise. As he walked up to the truck, she didn’t even hear him, too intent on crying and praying. He wasn’t dumb enough to think it was on account of him; there was only so much self-hatred a Varner man could inflict. Her knees were cradled to her chest, cigarette loose in a hand from crossed arms. She turned to him and wiped her face. “What?” she said.

  Donnie shook his head.

  “Want to talk about it?” he asked.

  Caddy tossed the cigarette and slid from the truck. She shook her head and met him toe-to-toe. “You got somewhere to be?” she asked. She stayed two days before she slipped out, and he hadn’t seen her since.

  Why did Donnie always end up with the head cases and women with problems? Surely there was just one girl he could meet who could cook him supper and knock boots with him and not make him crazy or get him killed.

  Reverend White told everyone to please stand for the final hymn, and Donnie found the page for “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” He didn’t give a damn where the carnival had set down today, knowing he’d find Luz, not wanting to wait till they exchanged the guns for cash. He was tired of sitting on them, waiting for a phone call, while he kept that tractor trailer at Stagg’s.

  Quinn Colson turned back and eyed Donnie. He gave a nod, the kid asleep on his shoulder.

  Donnie pretended like he hadn’t seen him and kept on singing.

  DONNIE FOUND her that afternoon in Tupelo, running the Ferris wheel and drinking a Mountain Dew. She was none too glad to see him and stood with her hand on her left hip and eyes lowered.

  “We shouldn’t be seen together,” Luz said.

  “But we look real good.”

  Her shirt was snap-button gingham and she wore tight dark jeans with a pair of cockroach-killer boots. The hard angle of her naked hip was visible when the wind kicked up the hem of the shirt.

  “Can’t hurt nothing,” Donnie said. “Can you take a break?”

  She shook her head. The teenage kid he’d seen unload the magazine on the M4 was loading folks from the wheel while Luz took the tickets. Sign said it took a whole five dollars just to ride. He handed her a ten, but she wouldn’t take it. The little Mex kid smiled to himself, his teeth so white they looked bleached against his dark skin.

  “How about me and you just take a couple spins around?” Donnie said. “When it sets back down, I’ll head back to Jericho.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “I just got back from church, doll,” he said. “I don’t drink on Sunday. I’m too damn hungover.”

  She agreed, because she knew he wouldn’t leave, and soon they were up and away, with a good view of the fair, this one being about five times as big as the one over in Byhalia, looking across downtown Tupelo and over at Highway 45. There was a little corral down next to the Scrambler, where they set monkeys on the backs of dogs and let them race. The sign read banana derby.

  “Elvis grew up over on the east side of town,” Donnie said. “You want, I’ll take you over to where he was born.”

  “We shut down tonight,” she said. “We work all night and leave in the morning.”

  “Where?”

  “Bruce.”

  “God help y’all.”

  The Ferris wheel stopped, and they hung there at the high point, rocking in that passenger car for a moment. Donnie leaned in and placed his arm around her, studying her mouth and dark hair. Luz put a hand to his chest. He could tell she wanted to speak but didn’t know what to say. She just studied the horizon and little buildings, the car finally steadied.

  “You tell Alejandro we need to deal soon or else the price goes up.”

  “Are the guns safe?”

  “Sure,” Donnie said. “But I don’t know for how long. Sheriff’s been asking about you. He says y’all connected to this fella Torres and his fat wife. They were selling kids on the Internet or some crazy shit. You know something about that?”

  Luz shook her head.

  “As soon as we’re settled at the next town,” Luz said, “we’ll come for the guns.”

  “I want to see you.”

  “I’m here.”

  “Away from this shit.”

  “Why?”

  “You kind of left me in a precarious st
ate, darlin’.”

  The Ferris wheel kicked back on and rolled back down to the ground, passing that crazy-ass teenage shooter who was at the controls now. He looked like he should be packing groceries at the Piggly Wiggly or pumping gas. He barely had a bit of fuzz over his lip.

  “I’ll cook you dinner,” he said. “I’ll grill T-bones. We’ll drink some beer. Listen to some music and build a fire.”

  Luz didn’t say anything, watching the brick downtown and a gathering of campers and trailers of all the carnival folks in a distant lot. The neon light clicked off and on, the sounds of the midway loud as hell even up in the air. The bells and whistles and crazy barkers screaming at the folks that filled the fairground. Everything smelled like burnt popcorn and cigarettes. Families with five dollars to their name and not a damn job on the horizon dished out two hundred bucks for screaming kids to win a fucking stuffed SpongeBob Square-Pants.

  “You got a trailer?” he asked. Donnie rested his hand on her knee.

  She removed it.

  “God damn.”

  “You shouldn’t have come here,” she said.

  “Alejandro needs to mind his fucking business.”

  “This is so much more than you think,” Luz said. She tucked her hair behind her ear, the blackness of it shining like a crow’s wing.

  “I don’t care what y’all are doing with them guns,” Donnie said. “But we can’t do it in Tibbehah no more. You understand?”

  They went up and over one more time, the car slowing to a stop on the platform. The boy still stood at the controls, but this time it was Alejandro’s bad self who unlocked the little gate. He didn’t say anything to Donnie, most of the weird horns and scrawls and numbers on his face saying it for him. Donnie just winked at him as he passed, waiting on the steps for Luz to join him.

  “If you leave now,” she said, “I will call. We can talk.”

  “About the guns?” Donnie asked and frowned.

  “Whatever you wish,” she said.

  “What about Alejandro?”

  “This is none of his business.”

  19

  QUINN AND JASON WENT FISHING AFTER CHURCH. CADDY CAME OUT TO pick him up a little while later, Jason passed out on the couch, tired from the sermon and lunch and catching bluegill and running wild at his uncle’s farm. Caddy still wore her Sunday dress, but Quinn was back into his jeans and khaki sheriff’s shirt. He’d been ready for her and had already fitted the gun on his belt as she drove up and met him on the path. The gravel road was rutted and muddy with the rains.

  “Sacked out.”

  “You carry him?” she asked.

  Quinn nodded and went back into the house, returning with Jason over his shoulder. He helped Caddy fit him into the safety seat, and she closed the door, smiling at Quinn and squinting to watch him. He nodded back to her.

  “We’re gonna have to talk sooner or later.”

  Quinn nodded.

  “My therapist wants you to join us,” she said. “She says that was a lot on a little boy.”

  “I got to go to work, Caddy.”

  “You want to pretend it never happened?”

  “Nope,” Quinn said. “I want us to remember it happened when we were kids and it’s over.”

  “Not over for me.”

  Quinn leaned against her car, a beaten-up blue Honda that had taken her back to Jericho. He studied the two big pecans in his back acreage, a tire swing knotted over a big fat branch. Hondo was in the far field on his back, taking a nap, yellow grasses bending around him.

  “Listen,” he said. “I’ll do whatever you want me to. If you want me to talk to your doctor and all, that’s fine. But there’s some places I don’t care to go back to. You need to respect that. Why don’t we make sure you’re churning this shit up for a reason and not just to make me uncomfortable?”

  “I love you for what you did, Quinn,” she said. “You got to understand that. I want you to know it.”

  “I didn’t do anything.”

  “You did everything.”

  Caddy reached over and took his hand. She smiled at him. “Can we quit fighting?” she asked. “I’m not like you. I wish there wasn’t evil in this world. You’ve made friends with the idea. You think there’s something you can actually do about it.”

  “Nope,” he said.

  “You do,” Caddy said. “I just wish I hadn’t been eight years old when I learned that lesson.”

  “I didn’t do nothing.”

  “You saved me.”

  Quinn turned his head. He spit on the ground. His cell phone went off in his pocket, and he was glad for the call, Lillie telling him some crazy-ass hermit on County Road 32 was telling his neighbors he was an instrument of God.

  “Hold on,” Quinn told Lillie. “Is he armed?”

  “Wouldn’t be interesting if he wasn’t,” Lillie said.

  Caddy kissed his cheek before getting behind the wheel and driving off.

  THE MAN WITH THE GUN was a Vietnam vet named Nehemiah Davis, a white male, aged sixty. According to Lillie, he was new to the county, moved to Tibbehah about ten years ago and had parked his trailer on some logged-out land right off the road. Earlier in the day, he’d taken some shots at a woman who lived down the road. He said he’d been charged with protecting the land by God Almighty Himself.

  “Who are we to interfere?” Quinn asked.

  “He’s toting a .45 pistol.”

  “God give him that?”

  “I think the fella must be Catholic,” Lillie said. “Keeps on talking about the Holy Mother.”

  “Thanks for calling.”

  “Figured you’d need to be in on this one,” Lillie said. “Kenny thought we should just shoot him.”

  “Who are his people?”

  “I think he used to go with the Jessup woman, before she died. Like I said, I don’t think he’s from around here.”

  Quinn placed his hands on the hood of Lillie’s Jeep and stared down the short dirt road to the trailer on blocks. A dog trotted out from below, and a white curtain moved in the far left window. “The reason I appreciated you calling is that Caddy wants me to meet with her therapist. She wants us to talk about when we were kids.”

  “Couldn’t have been easy growing up Quinn Colson’s sister.”

  Quinn shrugged as Lillie reached into the back of her Jeep for a shotgun. She thumbed in four shells as Quinn said, “What’s wrong with that?”

  They walked side by side down the path. The windows to the trailer were closed. The dog ran up to greet them, a dirty red hound missing an ear and eaten up with fleas. A couple junk trucks, weight-lifting equipment, and various tools turned to shit littered the front path.

  “Maybe Caddy’s trying to help you,” Lillie said.

  “Come again?”

  “I know, I know. She’s a real pain in the ass. But she’s your sister.”

  “Caddy does for Caddy.”

  The curtain in the window moved again. The brief lighting of a wild-eyed face and then nothing. Lillie saw him, too, and lifted the shotgun in both hands. The front door was closed, with a screen door in front of it.

  “How was church?”

  “Good sermon,” Quinn said. “Cain and Abel.”

  “Never could figure out why Cain killed his brother.”

  “Jealousy.”

  “Over what?” Lillie asked.

  “God didn’t appreciate Cain giving Him the dregs of his grain. Abel was a shepherd and sacrificed the best of his flock.”

  “Pissed off his brother.”

  “Yep.”

  The dog circled away and trotted to the back of the property. A door or window creaked, and there was a thump. Quinn removed the 9mm on his hip and waited for Nehemiah Davis to round the corner and come tell them all about it.

  “Also never did figure out how Cain met a wife,” Lillie said. “If he and Abel were born to the first man and woman, where’d they meet women?”

  “Must’ve been a bar,” Quinn said. “Maybe o
ver in Canaan.”

  “See him?”

  “Yep,” Quinn said.

  Nehemiah Davis was little and skinny and wearing nothing but a pair of white undershorts. He hadn’t shaved in a while, and the top of his head was balding and sunburned. He waved a .45 pistol up in the air and told them to disperse from this Holy Place.

  “What’s so holy about it, Mr. Davis?” Lillie asked.

  “I’m the Angel Gabriel,” Mr. Davis said. “I am charged to protect this land.”

  “You would’ve thought Holy Land would’ve called for a double-wide,” Lillie said under her breath. “Mr. Gabriel, would you mind putting down the weapon, seeing as how you’re an angel and all?”

  “The Holy Mother is here.”

  “In your trailer?” Quinn asked.

  Davis nodded, frail and bony, with a chest and shoulders covered in fine white hair.

  “Y’all got cable?” Lillie asked.

  “Don’t push him,” Quinn said.

  Behind the half-naked man sat an Oldsmobile Toronado. Maybe a ’69, silver with whitewalls, the top ragged and covered with a blue tarp. The back tires were flat, but the paint looked good.

  “You get that car when you left the service?” Quinn asked.

  Davis turned back, the memory of such a sweet vehicle a little too much for an archangel. Mr. Davis’s eyes grew smaller, and he nodded a bit, the .45 lowered in his hand. He used his free hand to scratch his butt. The dog came up and sat down on his haunches, yawning.

  “You got a 425 under there?” Quinn asked.

  Nehemiah scratched his butt some more. He turned back to the car. And then back to Quinn, and then looked down at the dog. He mumbled something.

  “What’s that, sir?” Lillie asked.

  “455,” he said.