Читать книгу All the Beautiful Sinners - Stephen Graham Jones - Страница 12

The old man was standing in front of the convenience store. It was six o’clock maybe. The fluorescents under the awning made the late, light snow look whiter than it was. The tires of Jim Doe’s Bronco crunched it down. He’d been in four-wheel drive for miles, now, the gas gauge diving. He’d been so alone in his lane that he hadn’t even had to pull over to lock the hubs. He’d just done it in the road. This was Kansas.

The old man looked up out of his pea coat collar at Jim Doe. The old man was Indian. Jim Doe nodded. His deputy jacket wasn’t thick enough for the wind. Opening the glass door, he lowered his head into the old snow whipping around the corner, but his hat was still in Texas and he got a face full of hair instead. His own. The tip ends bit into his eyes. The old man was still watching him.

“What town is this?” Jim Doe called out.

The old man looked around.

“Glove,” he said. Maybe. Or dove. Like the bird. His voice was clipped, from the reservation.

“What?” Jim Doe asked.

Love?

The old man pointed at the sign above the store. Between gusts of white it read GOVE QUICKSTOP.

Jim Doe nodded at the old man again, in thanks, and stepped in. Gove. It was up towards 70, on the map. Just west of Trego Center, where nobody’d seen the longhair either. There was no trail, just miles and miles of blacktop spooling out over the prairie.

“Usually snow this late?” Jim Doe asked the girl behind the counter.

She didn’t even look up from her magazine. “Weird year,” she said. “Like last one, y’know?”

The girl popped her gum to show she was done talking.

Jim Doe looked out at the old man, still standing there. The Bronco was idling, its exhaust curling up past the tailgate, the snow falling on the hood turning into individual droplets of water. But it kept falling there anyway.

“Who’s he?” he asked the clerk.

She still wasn’t looking up. “Who?” she said.

Jim Doe stared at her.

“Coffee’s there,” she pointed. At the side of the store, just past the fountain drinks. Her nail was perfect red. Joe followed it, poured one cup, then another, pressed the lids down onto the white foam lips.

At the checkout counter he asked if they got many out-of-towners this time of year.

The girl finally looked up at him. Just her eyes.

“You,” she said.

Jim Doe took out one of the flyers he’d made, unrolled it on the counter for her.

“Him?” he asked.

The girl looked down at the grainy face: the longhair looking back, into Gentry’s dash camera.

“This a joke?” the girl said.

“It’s not me,” Jim Doe said. He’d had to say it in Montezuma and in Jetmore and in Bazine already. He knew he should have gone to Oklahoma, too. That’s where everybody else was, working with the tribal police, stopping every blue Impala with an Indian driver, and hitting the barbershops too. Because maybe he’d changed his appearance. Become Jim Doe, to hide.

The girl was smiling now. “He supposed to have come through here or something?” she asked.

“Nebraska plates,” Jim Doe said.

“You’re from Texas,” the girl said.

Jim Doe nodded.

“But you’re Indian,” she said.

“Blackfeet, yeah.”

She laughed some. “Let me see your hands,” she said.

Jim Doe did, unsure, keeping his elbows close to his ribs. She pulled his hands the rest of the way across the counter, turned one over then the other. Shrugged.

“Yeah,” she said. “One of my boyfriends was from Browning. It’s something about the fingers with you Piegan”—she rolled her eyes when she said it, like she’d been trained to say it like that, pay-gun—“how they look at certain angles.”

Jim Doe looked at them, his hands.

“What are you doing down here, though?” she asked. “Long way from Montana, cowboy. Yeah?”

Jim Doe flattened the copy of the face on the counter.

“This isn’t about Montana,” he told her. “It’s about Texas. Listen, just—have you seen him?”

She looked down. Shook her head no.

“I should have xeroxed his hands, right?” Jim Doe said, refolding the flyer.

She rang up his coffee and he held both cups close to his stomach and opened the door with his back, nodding bye to the girl at the last possible instant. He was glad to have the coffee in his hands, too. Because she would have been looking at them.

In the parking lot, the old man was standing there, switching from foot to foot.

Jim Doe tried walking to his truck. He could feel the old man watching him, measuring his steps. Finally he turned to him.

The old man was smiling.

Gove. Somebody should have warned him about this Gove.

He offered one of the cups to the old man, already shuffling across the parking lot, taking it in both hands. The steam from the coffee caressed the old man’s face. He said something in some kind of Indian to Jim Doe.

“No problem,” Jim Doe said, lifting his cup—you’re welcome.

The old man looked over at the idling Bronco.

“Where you going?” he said. In English.

Jim Doe lifted his cup to his mouth.

“You?” he asked.

One side of the old man’s mouth hooked up into a smile. “North,” he said. “Home.”

Jim Doe looked north.

“Sorry,” he said to the old man.

The old man shrugged, raised his cup in thanks for the coffee.

Alone in his truck, Jim Doe sat there taking small, hot sips.

The old man was just standing by the ice machine again. Waiting for Jim Doe to go south. The way he had to have seen the Bronco just come from.

The girl was reading her magazine.

Jim Doe backed out, slid to a slow, drifting stop, and crawled the Bronco to the front of the parking lot.

He’d already been south, was the thing.

He shook his head, said to himself what the hell, clipping the words in his head, and reached over for the passenger side door handle. The wind opened it, flung it as far as the hinge went, but the old man didn’t step in. Jim Doe looked in the rearview mirror—empty?—so he turned around, to look through the back glass. Nothing.

“Old Indian trick,” he said to himself, smiling—it was an Eastwood line, maybe—then popped first gear to close the door, and had to slam the brakes before he could even get the clutch back down.

The old man was standing right in front of him. Still holding his coffee.

The truck was dead, the headlights paler for it.

“That face you’re looking for,” the old man said from the passenger seat, two miles closer to 70. “He’s Indian, enit?”

Jim Doe nodded. “My brother,” he said, half a joke.

The old man looked hard at the shotgun locked in place between them, aimed up at the sky, then raised his cup, took a long drink.

“Only one place to be if you’re Indian tonight,” he said, and winked at Jim Doe. “Put your ear to the ground, man, you can hear it.”