The Lost Ones Read online

  “I knew a boy one time who put his pecker in a peanut sack,” Donnie said. “Waited till his little lady got hungry.”

  “You got the money?”

  “Hell yes, Johnny,” Donnie said. “Jesus Christ. You mind if I stay and watch the third quarter?”

  “Water Valley has a colored quarterback who ain’t afraid to run, take some hits,” Stagg said. “He’s one to watch. Heard he already committed to Arkansas. I don’t know why we can’t keep the good blacks in this state.”

  Donnie dropped a heavy backpack between him and Stagg. He reached into the sack for a few more peanuts, waiting for the band to clear the field, all of the music an off-tune medley of new country by Keith Urban, Lady Antebellum, Miranda Lambert, and all that assorted bullshit. One of the flag girls wasn’t too bad, her cheeks painted up all rosy, and a tight little ass set off in gold sequins.

  “This is the first time I’ve ever known Tibbehah to be undefeated,” Donnie said.

  “Won state in ’63,” Stagg said. “Had two players go to Ole Miss. Another fella went to Auburn. We got a senior playing defensive tackle who’s a top prospect. I got his momma a job washing dishes at the truck stop.”

  “You goin’ to the game in Oxford?” Donnie asked, not ’cause he gave a shit, but because it was a way of passing the time with Stagg before they talked business. “I know you love the Rebels.”

  “I own season tickets,” Stagg said. “We got a hell of a tent in the Grove.”

  “Think you might invite me sometime?” Donnie said, cracking a whole peanut shell in his back teeth and spitting out the shells. “Or would I embarrass your high-dollar friends in Oxford?”

  “You’re welcome anytime, Donnie,” Stagg said. “Bring your daddy out, too.”

  “You know Luther, he don’t take off Saturdays,” Donnie said. “Besides, lots going on right here. You hear about that dead Mex at the Traveler’s Rest?”

  Stagg said nothing. The players took the field, stretching out before the kickoff.

  “He was of those carnival folks,” Donnie said. “They got some kind of fighting go on with each other. Doesn’t concern us. They got it straight now. I don’t want this spooking you.”

  The crowd yelled and clapped as the ball sailed into the air, the players for both teams crashing together, knocking the hell out of each other. A little black kid for the Wildcats ran the ball about two yards before being swarmed by the Water Valley Blue Devils. The folks who’d driven over from Yalobusha County all yelled and screamed from the pissant stands across the way, ringing cowbells and sounding air horns.

  “I heard a man on television say there was nothing like football in the South,” Stagg said. “He said it was because Southerners were defeated people and appreciated the idea of going to war every week.”

  “Football ain’t war.”

  “It’s like war,” Stagg said. “You don’t think those folks from Yalobusha wouldn’t love to come down here to give us a good ass-whipping? This is their clan they sent to show us up. Look at them girls across the way with war paint on their faces.”

  “Ain’t the same, Mr. Stagg,” Donnie said.

  Stagg chewed on some peanuts, and they watched the game for a while. Donnie thought the Wildcats looked like they had lead in their ass tonight, loafing from play to play. If he’d walked across the field like that, his coach would have chewed him out good.

  “We can’t be seen together no more,” Stagg said. “You hear me? Don’t come ’round the truck stop.”

  “Leonard told me,” Donnie said. “That’s why I wanted to give this to you personal.”

  The Water Valley quarterback tossed the ball to a halfback who put on the afterburner and rammed it down the throats of Tibbehah, getting a first down and then some. Donnie clapped as the back bounced up and started talking some shit to a couple Tibbehah players. The sidelines bulging, both teams ready to bolt onto the field and break out some whoop-ass.

  “Feds have been giving Mr. Campo hell these last few weeks,” Stagg said. “A couple ’em come by the Rebel yesterday, asking me about business I have up in Memphis. I don’t think it’s anything for us to worry about. But you can’t be too careful, son.”

  “I got an order for one more load,” Donnie said. “Same as before.”

  Stagg laughed. He cracked some peanuts and watched the game. Water Valley drove it down the field in three plays, scoring on a twenty-yard pass to the end zone. Those Yalobusha bastards really raising hell now with their cowbells and horns. They finally got quiet after the extra point was kicked, and Stagg leaned over to Donnie’s ear and said, “You got to be shitting me.”

  “Promised twenty grand on top of what was paid this time.”

  Stagg sucked a tooth, clearing out a lodged peanut.

  “Twenty grand?” Stagg asked.

  Donnie nodded.

  “No.” Stagg shook his head. “Can’t do it.”

  “OK.”

  “What about the dead Mex?” Stagg asked.

  “He ain’t my problem.”

  “Anything bother you about this here deal?” Stagg said. “You gonna do business, you need to know who you’re dealing with. What the hell do you know about these damn Mexicans? They’re shooting up their own people. You don’t think they’d shoot us up when they got what they needed? I read on the computer that these people hang their rivals off highway overpasses, messages spray-painted across their dead bodies. I don’t want any more of this.”

  “What about Mr. Campo?” Donnie asked. “You speak for him, too?”

  “He’s out, too,” Stagg said. “You can ask him if you like.”

  “I just might do that,” Donnie said. “Ain’t but ninety miles to Memphis.”

  Donnie stood up to leave.

  “Appreciate the business,” Stagg said, watching the game but offering his hand. “Come see me when the shitstorm passes.”

  Donnie shook it just as Leonard’s fat ass lumbered on up the stairs, sitting on the opposite side of Stagg. He’d brought a couple hot dogs and Cokes.

  The Wildcats had the ball now. Donnie had lost track of the game but turned back now as the quarterback scrambled with those Blue Devils over him like flies. He threw a damn turkey up high into the lights, ball dropping right into the hands of a Water Valley defensive back. God damn if he didn’t have some running room, sprinting by everyone and scoring a touchdown.

  Donnie shook his head. “Guess this ain’t Tibbehah’s year.”

  LUZ CAME TO SEE HIM a little past midnight, letting herself into Donnie’s Airstream and finding him half asleep, half drunk on the bed, watching a show about rednecks who hunted alligators. He passed her the bottle of Jack, but she put it down on the coffee table, crawling onto the bed and straddling him, kissing him full on the mouth in a real familiar way. Donnie looked up at her from flat on his back and said, “Well, hello there.”

  Luz hadn’t said a word since she’d walked inside, a cold wind shifting the old Airstream a bit. The only light in the place came from a strand of chili pepper lights he’d strung above the bed. Luz smiled down at him and pulled off her jeans jacket and kissed him again, this time longer and slower. She lay down next to him, pulling herself in close, where Donnie could hear her breathing.

  “I tried to call you,” Donnie said. “You ditch that phone? I thought y’all had left.”

  “Everything is a mess.”

  “You gonna tell me more about why y’all are shootin’ each other?” Donnie said. “Ain’t nobody gonna do business with folks who kill each other. What the hell?”

  “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  “Son of a bitch didn’t kill himself,” Donnie said. “What was his name?”

  “Vincente.”

  “Vincente trip and shoot himself in the head?”

  “He was a good man.”

  “Apparently not for y’all.”

  “Alejandro believed that he was stealing from us, taking guns and money to use against us,” she said. “I don’t
know what happened. But Alejandro killed him. He’s a violent man. A sicario who’s worked for the narcos since he was a boy. He enjoys the killing and thinks nothing of it.”

  “Well, then. I sure am glad you brought him my way.” Donnie shook his head. “So, was he?”

  “What?” Luz asked, rolling over on her side, propping up her head with an elbow.

  “Did Vincente try and double-cross y’all?”

  Luz shook her head. She lay back down, pillow under her head, hand on Donnie’s chest. “They are impatient. These people want the guns and money we have. They want us to return now. But we’re not ready. Not yet.”

  Donnie nodded. “So that’s why you’re here,” he said. “You want to know how we’re doing with those guns?”

  “It’s not the reason,” she said. “I wanted to see you. You know that.”

  Donnie rolled off his back, snatched the bottle back, and planted his feet on the floor. He took another hit of the Jack and turned off the show about the rednecks hunting gators. He hadn’t had dinner and thought about heading back into town for a Sonic burger or maybe seeing if the Fillin’ Station was still open. You could get bacon and eggs damn near anytime.

  “How can I call you?” Donnie said. “Your number ain’t good no more.”

  “I have another.”

  She leaned in and wrapped her arms around Donnie. She snuggled in close, making it seem as if she really felt something, and nuzzled her nose against his ear. She smelled sweet and good.

  “Ain’t necessary,” Donnie said. “I’ll get your guns just the same. Don’t sugarcoat it.”

  She pulled away and sat down next to him. Her eyes looked very sad and dead as she watched his face. She just shook her head as if she’d grown disappointed in him. Donnie knew that look. A lot of people had tried it out on him his whole damn life.

  “You, too?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You need to tell Alejandro he needs to take some anger management or some shit, because if he keeps killing folks here in Tibbehah, he’s gone get arrested,” Donnie said. “Our gun supplier don’t want to work with me no more ’cause of all this shit. I don’t know how you do it in Mexico, but you can’t just start killing folks you don’t like in the USA. Our police will investigate. Did you know you got federal agents looking for you all? Federales? You know?”

  “You can’t get the guns?”

  “What it all boils down to,” Donnie said. “Don’t it, sister?”

  She reached out and grabbed his hand and looked long and hard at his face. Her eyes were so damn big and brown, and Donnie wanted to believe her if she said the world was flat and gumdrops fell from the sky. He looked away and drank some more. He got up and hunted up a T-shirt to cover his scars.

  “Is that what you think?” she asked. “That I am with you only for the guns? You were paid. I am not part of that.”

  “All right. All right. You want some more whiskey?”

  She tilted her head, making some kind of decision. She stood and touched his face and ran her hand long against his naked back, feeling for the contours of the scars. She held his hand and ran it up under her shirt and across her rib cage, where she had her own thick scars. She moved his fingers back and forth across them.

  “How’d you get that?” he asked.

  “I lied to someone once.”

  “Your boyfriend cut you?”

  She let Donnie’s hand drop and held it in hers, snatching his other with her opposite. The cold wind buffeted around the trailer, Donnie having had enough Jack Daniel’s to remember being on the flip side of this earth and having to clean out the sand from his boots and ears every time the wind blew. Sand getting goddamn everywhere again as soon as you finished.

  “You want to stay the night or something?” he asked.

  Luz nodded. Damn, Donnie had never realized how lonely this trailer could be. She pulled his hand and made him find the flat of her back. Donnie wanted to pull her so damn close but stopped himself and asked the question that had made him drink half that bottle in half an hour: “What are y’all doing with those kids?”

  Luz’s face turned sad. She shook her head as if she didn’t know.

  “That fat woman, the American? What in the hell is she doing with y’all?”

  “I saw her and I saw the children,” Luz said. “The man, her husband, has friends in Mexico. He is trying to leave the country.”

  “And y’all going to give him a ride?”

  “I don’t know,” Luz said. “Who is she?”

  “She killed a child. She’s beaten and tortured the others,” Donnie said. “Y’all need to let those kids go.”

  Luz shook her head. “I’m sorry. This is why you’re angry?”

  “I don’t know what y’all do, and I really don’t give a shit. But when you start hurting kids, that makes my stomach turn.”

  “I can find out,” Luz said. “There is so much you don’t know.”

  “I know enough.”

  “Vincente was my friend.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She pulled the Jack Daniel’s from his hand and drank down a generous portion. She sat at the edge of the pullout bed and held her head in her hands, black hair spilled over her face.

  She began to cry a bit.

  “Just what the hell is going on?” Donnie asked. “I feel like I walked into this picture show kind of late.”

  31

  QUINN HAD FALLEN ASLEEP AT THE FIRE, BUT THE HARD KICK OF A BOOT knocked him awake and down on his side. He turned and looked up into the double barrel of Warden Porter’s shotgun, the flat of his boot across Quinn’s chest. The man was red-eyed and unshaven and breathing hard. “Get up,” Porter said.

  He stepped off Quinn’s chest and let the boy get to his elbows and then knees.

  Porter knocked him across the mouth with the butt of the shotgun, sending him sprawling down by the edge of the pond. Quinn’s mouth began to bleed.

  Caddy screamed and ran to him, trying to block the way between the old man and her brother. Quinn regained his vision and wiped the blood from his lip, feeling like his jaw might be broken. He pulled Caddy back as Porter approached, the old warden wearing a dark rain slicker and slouch hat.

  “You kids give me trouble and I’ll sink y’all both in that there pond,” Porter said. “Don’t matter to me.”

  “My uncle said you were a cocksucker,” Quinn said.

  Porter moved on him, Caddy trying to push him away and getting the back hand from the older man, sending her onto her butt in the mud. Quinn rushed the man, a flurry of little fists and elbows, not really knowing how to fight yet, and the man gripped his small fist and pulled it hard behind his back, hard enough that Quinn heard the pop in his shoulder. Porter held him facedown in the mud before he jerked him up and bound his wrists with thin rope, telling his sister to quit her bawling.

  “We got a good eight miles to go through this forest,” Porter said, picking up his hat from the ground. “I’ll pull the boy, but don’t make me rope you, too. You hear me?”

  Caddy didn’t say anything.

  Porter screamed it again, veins bursting in his neck.

  Quinn spit blood at the man.

  “You ’bout broke my neck when you set that trap for me over that ravine, you little shit,” Porter said. “Don’t try and be a man.”

  Quinn spit out some more blood and watched as Porter kicked dirt over the fire, sending smoldering smoke up into the gray sky. He pulled some Red Man from a pouch in his coat and set a fat chaw in his cheek. He looked to Quinn and his crying sister and shook his head with disgust. Porter yanked at the rope tying his hands.

  “Don’t worry, Caddy,” Quinn said. “Don’t you worry about nothing.”

  Porter lumbered over at the lean-to and kicked over the carefully placed pine and oak limbs. He studied the way Caddy had arranged all the food she’d taken from the house on a rock shelf and laughed as if it were the funniest thing he’d ever seen. He marched
back to the smoking fire ring and reached down for the .22 Browning that had once belonged to Quinn’s grandfather. He roughly pulled out the loading pin and shook loose the long bullets inside. He threw the gun over his shoulder, spitting in the dirt fire, and grinned at Quinn. The man had dared him to say a word.

  He’d left about four feet of rope hanging from Quinn’s wrists and used the loose end to yank him to his feet. Porter kicked him hard in the backside, setting him forward and stumbling and right to his knees. Quinn called him a fat old bastard. The old man kicked him again.

  “You can be as tough as you want, boy,” Porter said. “But the next kick is for your sister. You want that?”

  Quinn shook his head, and the man marched them forward up the fire trail and over the first great hill and the next, taking them out the opposite way from the way they’d entered the woods, the long way.

  “Why are you headed west?” Quinn asked. “It’s shorter back toward Tibbehah County.”

  “Sometimes I figure out things on a walk,” Porter said, taking a moment to study the darkening sky. “Hadn’t figured out what to do with you all yet.”

  Caddy’s face was a mess, but she had quit crying. She walked alongside Quinn, step for step, until Porter reached for her shirt and yanked her back with him. When Quinn turned back and stopped walking, Porter slapped him against the back of the head.

  “You lay a hand on her, you bastard, and I’ll kill you.”

  “Sure like to see you pull that off, kid.”

  It started to rain a few miles in, the trail wandering and wild, overgrown with thorny brush and blocked with fallen, rotting trees. But Porter knew the way, as Quinn did, and they pushed ahead. The rain coming down hard in Quinn’s eyes as he felt his jaw swell to the size of a baseball. Caddy was quiet, and every so often, Quinn would look over his shoulder to make sure she was OK. She walked right in front of Porter, and Porter lowered his eyes on the wetness of her shirt and small figure, spitting now and then into the brush.

  He called her “girlie” and tried to make small talk. He said he was sorry for the rain. He said he was sorry her no-account brother caused all this trouble. Caddy didn’t answer him. The trail spread out into four or five fingers, dipping up and down the rolling hills of north Mississippi, until they connected with a well-traveled path through a patch of new-growth trees that thinned down and long into an open clearing of cotton land. An old rusted barn stood alone in the new growth of the forest, the farmland being reclaimed by nature.