All the Beautiful Sinners by Stephen Graham Jones

Author:Stephen Graham Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Dzanc Books

EIGHTEEN16 April 1999, Verdon, Nebraska

The fireman. He was moving along the edge of town in the boots, his heart slapping the inside of his chest, his facemask down. Blood seeping from his left ear, under his collar. It had started when he first heard the tornado—throaty, pure—then, on the news station over the counter of the diner he was camped in, waiting, there was the first hesitant funnel dipping down from the clouds like he knew was going to happen, with a system like this. He’d left a twenty on the counter, walked calmly across the parking lot, and opened his trunk.

The coat and helmet and boots and axe were there, like always, but more important right then had been the phonebooks.

Verdon’s was a wisp of a directory, was for the whole county and still barely went twenty pages, with ads, but it still took him a couple of minutes to tease the Indian names from the non-Indian.

It wasn’t always easy, or obvious.

If you had the rollsheets for all the local tribes, though, and an eye for French, well.

The family’s name this time was Malory, with one L—the Indian agent’s fault, not the family’s. They were Winnebago. The people of the stagnant water.

The tribe listed two children and their mother, displaced from their home reservation. By violence, scholarship, marriage?

It didn’t matter.

He memorized their address, locked the slight map of the town into his head, and closed the trunk. Six miles closer to Verdon, the barometer dropped hard enough that he had to pull the side of his head down to his shoulder. It was leaving blood already.

It meant the storm was touching down. Was connecting itself to the town, to the people, to the land.

As it should be.

He pulled into the outskirts just as it was dissipating. Still trash in the air, a distinct spent feeling to the sky, the light wavery, weak. Like it understood what had just happened, and respected that.

It had been six years since he’d promised himself all this was over. Six years since he’d elected just to pack his ear with cotton in the spring and watch the doppler over the weatherman’s shoulder. Pass his various duties down to the next generation, who was ready.

Or, who he’d thought was ready.

But his time was coming. There were only so many places left for him to go.

The fireman pulled over onto the shoulder, stood in the lee of his trunk and shrugged into the heavy jacket, ducked into the helmet, stepped into the boots.

You never forget.

The head of the axe was freshly painted, so he rubbed mud onto it, walked into town proper, following the map in his head, detouring through Cherry Street for old times’ sake but you don’t linger in the past. The official truck from Texas was meant to tell him that. So he walked deeper and deeper into the broken concrete and shattered glass, until another fireman waved him over, to help pry a garage door up.

He walked over, using his thumbnail to chip the already-dried mud off his axe, because now it didn’t even look like an axe anymore.

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