The Forsaken (22 page)

I
t was the morning of the Fourth of July and J.T. had bought some barbecue from a carnival vendor and served it up inside scooped-out watermelon halves. The watermelon made the pork sweet-tasting and nice with a breakfast beer. J.T. had the doors to his garage wide open, and even though it wasn’t much past ten, the day was growing hot. He had Jason’s stunt Harley on his workstation, welding the frame, his assistant Gangrene gone AWOL. The engine, tank, wheels, and the lot sat on a far table, waiting to be reassembled. Jason had left his trailer at the shop, too. Not much room at his daddy’s house. Jason knew as soon as the bike was done, he needed to head back west. All of it, the club, Jean Beckett, the whole damn town, pulling on him. Not knowing what else to do, he just sat cross-legged on that grease-stained floor of the garage, drank another cold one, and ate the sweet barbecue.

“It’s a brotherhood,” Hank Stillwell said, rubbing his thin red beard. “We do for each other. You know? I mean, like if you’re short of cash, we pass the hat. Someone has it out for you? They got it out for all of us.”

“All for one?”

“Yeah, man,” Stillwell said, blowing some joint smoke through his nose. “All that shit. This is our county, we run it. We make our own laws. Our own world. We are the true American badasses who answer to nobody.”

“Did you get some barbecue?” J.T. asked, turning off the welding torch, goggles now on top of his sweating head. “That’s some good shit. Folks brought that truck all the way down from Memphis.”

“You can’t turn down a patch, man,” Stillwell said. “You’d be the first I ever heard.”

Jason looked up from the floor. His chunky brother, Van, was over helping J.T. take the frame off a vise and set it on the ground. Van just shook his head, his gut about to bust his dirty T-shirt. Van being a helluva one to offer personal advice, as he was still living at home after turning twenty, supposedly running things for his dad, but really just not wanting to go out and get a job. He spent most of his day watching game shows and getting high. He wanted to go out west with Jason. But Van Colson in California would be a mistake.

“I would only turn down the offer because I’m leaving,” Jason said. “How can I be a part of something, part of y’all, if I’m not here?”

“Chains and Big Doug know that,” Stillwell said. “They understand that you’re in and out. But he dug the way you acted in Olive Branch. He liked that you’re a man with no fear. You get patched and you’re patched for life.”

Jason nodded. He ate some more barbecue and drank some more Coors. He crushed the can in his hand and tossed it toward the trash. “We must’ve drank five hundred cases of this when we were making
Smokey
. The whole movie is pretty much a commercial for Coors. Y’all seen it yet?”

J.T., Van, and Hank Stillwell shook their heads.

“It’s a good picture,” Jason said. “Can’t believe the way it turned out. They didn’t even have a script. Hal would just let everyone just let loose with their characters and say whatever came to mind. That Jackie Gleason was incredible. He just showed up, got in uniform, and became that SOB. They call him Buford T. Justice. Just the funniest things came out of him. He tells his son, who’s his deputy, that when they get back home from chasing the Bandit all over creation that he was gonna punch his momma right in the mouth. We all were on the set and just broke up on that. That’s Gleason. The man’s a genius.”

“Is making movies like a brotherhood?”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Van said, walking to a galvanized bucket full of beer and getting a new one. “Y’all give it a rest.”

“Shut up,” Hank Stillwell said. “You ain’t a part of this.”

“He’s my brother, Red.”

“Nobody calls me Red no more,” Stillwell said, glaring at Van. “Call me Hank or Pig Pen.”

“You’re still Red to me,” Van said, belching. Stillwell’s dirty looks didn’t mean shit to him. “And y’all need to get it in y’all’s head that Jason is gone. He’s leaving. When? Next week?”

Jason shrugged. “Depends on J.T.”

J.T. lit up a joint with the end of his welding torch and then turned it off. He sucked in some smoke and nodded and nodded. “Yeah, man. A week. Two weeks. Got to get some paint. You got a nice job on them Stars and Bars.”

“The redneck Evel Knievel,” Van said. “That’s you, Jason.”

“So if you’re leaving, really leaving,” Stillwell said. “What about you and Jean Beckett? Y’all hadn’t been apart. What? She going with you to Hollywood?”

Jason got up off the garage floor, not wearing shoes. His boots sat on the leather seat of his other bike outside. He had on a black T-shirt and faded Levi’s, the beard and hair growing truly wild and black. He tossed the shell of the watermelon and came back to where the boys sat around J.T. as he worked, a regular Michelangelo of scooters.

“Shit,” Jason said. “She said she’ll go if we get married. I said, ‘Cool, let’s get married.’ But she said we got to get married here with her momma and her crazy-ass family. She wants a church and all that and, man, oh man, I’m more scared of that than having a full-time old lady.”

J.T. laughed the hardest. Stillwell snorted and Van just shook his head.

“You need to do for yourself,” Van said, putting a hand to his mouth as he burped. “You don’t need to do for Jean or me and Daddy and, least of all, this here motorcycle crew. What’s all that shit mean?”

Stillwell, as narrow and skinny as a board, walked up to Jason’s short little
brother and poked him in the chest. “You don’t get it. You won’t get it for a million years. Some men are born different.”

“And who’s Chains LeDoux?” Van said. “Jesus Christ?”

“You better shut your fucking mouth,” Stillwell said, a little loose on his feet. He’d come into the garage twenty minutes earlier with nearly fifty dollars’ worth of fireworks that they were going to blow at the clubhouse tonight. He was acting more like a little kid than a man nearly thirty-five years old.

His attitude changed when a young girl walked into the wide-open bay door of the garage. She was real young, probably in her early teens but trying to dress older. She had on an orange-fringed top cut into ribbons, with beads hanging down over her skinny belly, wide-legged blue jeans and tall clogs, her hair pulled back under a kerchief. Stillwell wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and tried to stand tall and sober.

He just nodded at her.

“Can I borrow some money, Daddy?” the young girl asked. Her cheeks were brushed with pink rouge and her mouth was the color of bubble gum.

“If you take that shit off your face.”

The girl’s face colored beneath the makeup. She looked down to the stained asphalt as Stillwell walked to her, wobbly on those motorcycle boots, and clutched her chin. He turned her face this way and that and reached for an oil-stained rag hanging over J.T.’s Harley.

In front of the three other men, he wiped the makeup off her face with the filthy rag, staining her cheeks and mouth with oil. “Go home and dress proper,” he said. “You look like a goddamn streetwalker.”

The girl left, crying.

Stillwell walked over to the tub for another beer. None of the men spoke for a long time, Van catching his brother’s eye as he left J.T.’s garage, an unspoken warning to back the hell off from all this. Somewhere out on the town square some kids were blowing up a strand of firecrackers.

T
he temperature was dropping fast, and Quinn and Lillie caught Hank Stillwell outside his trailer, chopping wood. He had a neat trailer, a lime green Plymouth and a motorcycle parked nearby under a metal carport, as he collected wood in orderly piles, split and stacked for a billowing furnace attached to the single-wide.

“Mr. Stillwell?” Quinn said. He’d met Lillie up in Yellow Leaf and they both drove their own vehicles to Stillwell’s place.

He split the final piece of wood on a big round log with a thwack and looked up to them. He was out of breath, his worn-out jacket hanging loose and open with only an undershirt beneath. He nodded and set another piece of wood on the block but laid down the ax.

“Could use a little of your time, sir,” Quinn said.

“Suppose to ice hard tonight,” Stillwell said. “Don’t like to rely on electric. Co-op takes two days before they get the power back on.”

“What’re you running?” Quinn asked.

“Y’all want to see it?” Stillwell said, wiping his nose, nodding toward around back. “Paid for itself the first year.”

They followed him around the trailer, set high on blocks on a cleared hill. The hill had a nice view of the Yellow Leaf Baptist Cemetery, if you
might call a cemetery view a nice thing. The grass was brown and dead across the eroded hills of headstones. The old church, a wooden building, sat next to the new church, a big, wide metal prefab place where they advertised fellowship on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. The sign outside was a holdover from the Christmas season.
Santa Claus Never Died for Anyone
.

Stillwell saw Quinn staring. He shook his head. “Baptists don’t have much of a sense of humor.” He took them in back of the big white trailer and pointed out a decent-sized welded black box with squared pipe running into his home. A wheelbarrow filled with small pieces of split wood stood ready.

“Nice setup,” Quinn said. “I have a woodstove furnace. I keep it burning ’most winter long.”

“My neighbor up the hill got some of them solar panels,” Stillwell said. “His electric bills ain’t hardly nothing.”

Lillie warmed her hands over the black box as Stillwell opened up its door and stuffed in more pieces of wood. The fire inside glowed a high orange and red with bluish flames. Lillie looked to Quinn, growing bored with the talk of heating and cooling.

“I figure you know we reopened your daughter’s case,” Quinn said.

“Yes, sir.”

“We’ve gone through the interviews you did with my uncle,” Quinn said. “And we’ve sent out to Jackson for some evidence we hope is still out there. But anything you could tell us would be a big help.”

Stillwell nodded, blowing into his chapped hands. “Y’all come on inside,” he said. “It’s getting colder out here than a Minnesota well-digger’s ass.”

They followed him around the trailer and up some creaking steps. The trailer was dim, with few pieces of furniture inside and a very small TV on a corner table. He had a few deer heads on the dark-paneled wall and a few big bass. Quinn and Lillie took a seat on a big overstuffed couch
covered with a camouflage throw. Stillwell sat down in a big green La-Z-Boy, kicking his feet up, rubbing his reddish beard, the heat blowing hard and hot through the vents cut into the stove’s metal walls.

On the kitchen counter, at the back of a tiny kitchen, was a half-eaten grilled cheese sandwich and an open bottle of Mountain Dew. A grouping of pictures of Lori Stillwell faced out from a nearby table. They were school photos, the girl caught in time in fading colors.

Stillwell reached over to the side table and pulled a photo of Lori. He leaned forward in the recliner and handed the gilded frame to Quinn. Her young skin had an oily sheen to it, with a couple blemishes on her cheeks, braces on her teeth, and feathered hair. She wore a long-collared polka-dot top, a chain and cross hung around her neck. She looked eager and happy and very young.

“Y’all been talking to Diane?”

“Yes, sir,” Lillie said.

“She can tell you the worst of it,” Stillwell said, watching as Quinn passed the frame to Lillie. Lillie studied the photo for a moment, smiled to Stillwell, and then handed the frame back. The home was pleasant and warm. From the spot on the couch, you could see out the window to an open row of pine trees, not the eroded lot of the cemetery. There were hunting magazines on the table and a few more about motorcycles. One called
Easy Riders
with a girl in a green bikini on the back of a black Harley.

“You still ride?” Quinn said.

“Not as much as I’d like,” Stillwell said. “Got J.T. working on some repairs right now. I got real stupid a couple years back and got a scooter with a twin-cam engine. Hell, everyone knows them things got problems. It’s got messed-up cam chains and shoes. J.T. told me to go ahead and replace that gear system before it throws the whole goddamn engine. It ain’t cheap, but better than replacing everything. The Harley people never tell
you this shit could cut off the oil to the engine and blow it all. Y’all ride at all?”

“Dirt bikes,” Quinn said. “I used to always have Hondas out at my uncle’s place. We built a little dirt track just for jumping and messing around. It’s been a while.”

“Highway riding is something special,” Stillwell said. “When I had the money and a good bike, I could clean my head out. If I hadn’t had a bike when Lori was killed, I think they’d better gone ahead and took me to Whitfield and tied on the straitjacket. I just rode and rode. Seems like all I did for nearly ten years is stay on that bike.”

“And you rode a lot when Lori was alive?” Lillie asked.

Stillwell fingered at his nose, straightened himself against the back of the recliner. He looked to Quinn and Lillie and said, “Don’t think it’s a secret who I rode with back then.”

“Born Losers,” Quinn said.

“Among others,” Stillwell said. “Joined up with them when I got back from ’Nam.”

“Army?”

“101st Airborne, 506th Regiment.”

“When?”

“In the shit of it,” Stillwell said. “’Sixty-nine through ’73. Hamburger Hill. Yes, sir. I was there.”

Quinn had a cousin who had died in the same battle back in ’69, serving in the 101st but with another regiment. He recalled his great-uncle and great-aunt, sad old farmers who lived not two miles from his farm who had always seemed to be in perpetual mourning until they died fifteen years ago, two months apart.

“You think we’ll ever know?” Stillwell said. “Your uncle said I needed to make peace that some things just don’t have answers.”

“Diane Tull says a lynch mob killed the wrong man,” Lillie said.

“Yeah,” Stillwell said, hands a bit shaky on the arms of the recliner. “I know about all that.”

“You agree?” Lillie asked.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Because of Diane?” Quinn said. “Because of her seeing the man who did this a few weeks later?”

“No, sir,” Stillwell said, licking his lips and rubbing his face, eyes void and hovering on a spot between where Quinn and Lillie sat. He was still holding the old gold picture frame tight. “No. I know they had the wrong man from when they set out that night from the clubhouse. They were going to get someone no matter what. I tried to stop it. But it wasn’t going to happen. I can make sense of soldiers holding a hill, but this was just blood for blood.”

There were a few more pictures on the wall and an old black-and-white of a young man with a crew cut on a motorcycle. A young woman sat behind him, arms wrapped around his waist. The boy, Hank Stillwell, wore aviators and had a cigarette plucked in his mouth.

“What about the man who attacked your daughter?” Lillie said. “After all these years, has anyone told you anything?”

“No, ma’am,” he said. “My firm belief is that the boy wasn’t from here. He was a hunter, a goddamn animal, coming through looking for young girls. He did what he aimed to do and took off down the road. I believe I have asked every man, woman, and child alive at that time if they ever saw a twisted son of a bitch who had a face like that. I still ask.”

Lillie nodded.

“So who was the man who was lynched?” Quinn said.

“Never knew his name,” Stillwell said. “Nobody did. He was sick in the head, lived up in the hills. Some said he was a vet, like me. Don’t know. Nobody talked much about it later. It was your uncle who set us straight after all this. He knew what we did and told us never to speak about it ever again. He said we’d have to make right with God what we
done. He said no court of law could make sense of the savagery. He said that, ‘savagery.’ Your uncle was a hard man. He didn’t want no part of this posse.”

“How was it done?”

“I rode off when they caught him,” Stillwell said. “I guess that makes me a coward. I said my piece, but no one was listening. It was Chains LeDoux told me to ride off if I didn’t have the nuts for it. You know who he was?”

Quinn nodded. “I heard some.”

Lillie stood up and looked into the back of the property, to the woods and rows and rows of young pine trees. Quinn turned to see where she was staring and saw two figures walking at the edge of the woods, a glint of light off some field glasses, and then they disappeared.

“You have a lot of hunters around here?” Quinn asked, still watching the woods.

“Some,” Stillwell said. “Why?”

“That your property behind you?”

“I got fifteen acres of them pines.”

“You may have some poachers,” Lillie said. “We’ll check it out but you may want to call Wildlife and Game.”

Quinn was still seated and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “So you didn’t see it?”

“I saw them catch the man, take him away.”

“Are any of the old riders still around?”

Hank Stillwell bowed his head and closed his eyes, nodding over and over to himself. “You are aware that Chains LeDoux goes free from federal charges in a few weeks?”

“Yes, sir,” Quinn said. “I just heard the news from Johnny Stagg.”

“I ain’t forgot,” Stillwell said. “I got a lot of guilt and shit. Someone like Chains doesn’t have the right to be out and among living, breathing humans. If he comes back to Jericho . . .”

“Bad news?” Lillie said.

“Real bad,” Stillwell said.

Quinn stood. The old man remained in the recliner, where he probably spent most of his days and nights. Quinn scanned the woods again but didn’t see anyone roaming the edges. Lillie had already walked to the door, fingering at her handheld radio, calling for Kenny to sweep the roads around the Yellow Leaf church for some poachers out and about.

“‘Poachers’?” Stillwell said.

“Who else?” Quinn said.

“It’s Chains’s people,” the old man said, unchanged and not moving from the chair. A quiet heat poured into the room, smelling of sweet red oak. “Y’all realize they’re back?”

Quinn nodded, Lillie walking toward the thin metal door and out into the cold. He stood there and looked down at Stillwell, gaunt and graying, shoulder-length hair and beard with still some red in it. He could see the man riding with bikers back in the day.

“When’s the last time y’all went out and patrolled around Choctaw?”

•   •   •

Diane Tull
performed happy hour at the Southern Star twice a week and an acoustic set at The River at the Sunday service. She liked the performances at the Star a bit better, as she could include her whole band and drink Jack Daniel’s on the rocks while she sang. She pulled out a torn piece of notebook paper from her Levi’s jacket and read the set list. A little changeup from last time.

1. “Kiss an Angel Good Morning”
   
2. “I’m the Only Hell My Mama Raised”
   
3. “Come Early Morning”
   
4. “She Called Me Baby” (Reworking a bit with “He Called Me Baby”)
   
5. “Trailer for Rent”
   

The last song of the first set was the newest. Diane didn’t care much, if anything, for what was coming out of Nashville these days, but she was really digging what the Pistol Annies were recording. She did like a singer from Alabama named Jamey Johnson. And, of course, good old Alan Jackson. But those guys were hardheaded and not part of that Hollywood sound, where producers never heard of pedal steel, Porter Wagoner, or that a good night of heartbreak and drinking was good for the soul. If she had to hear another song about how much a man loved sitting his porch and sipping sweet tea, she swore to Jesus she was going to blast her radio with her 12-gauge. Country music was about a man and a woman, drinking hard, and getting through life. She was sick to death of folks trying to put a glitter ball over Hank’s grave.

“You want another?” the bartender Chip asked.

“I’m good.”

“You look like you’ve had a hell of a day.”

“Lots on my mind,” Diane said. “Say, go ahead and pop the top on a Coors. I’ll bring it up with me.”

She took the beer and reached down for the handle on her guitar case and walked up to the narrow little stage, where J.T. had leaned an upright bass, not sure why he changed up from the electric. A mandolin lay at his feet to play for certain songs.

Diane pulled the microphone close to the raised stool and positioned a second mic alongside her Martin guitar. Their drummer was a guy from Holly Springs named Wallace who’d played for a lot of big bands in Memphis and New Orleans. He knew all the songs by heart. They’d only gone through the list a few times, with him nailing every bit.