Alabama Pink
There were trucks parked out front of the Ryan house; old pickups with big tires, mud sprayed up the doors and rifles on the seats.
Raine heard voices in the kitchen. She looked in and saw men standing over the table and maps spread all over. Her momma was on the telephone and she was talking and her eyes were sunk and swollen.
She saw her uncle Tommy take a beer from the refrigerator. He wore his hair long and had the kinda smile that kept the ladies lining up. He’d sweeten his drawl, then drop them quick after. Said he only had eyes for his nieces. That was true for a long time while their daddy was away. She and Summer would go on begging each weekend to stay in his cabin. He’d teach them to lay snares, to track and shoot.
Raine turned and stepped out onto the porch. She sat on the top step, by the spot where she’d carved their names with a hunting knife when they were seven and got in major shit for it. She traced her finger over the curves.
Rusty had stopped by their place at noon, reckoned Summer was safe ’cause she’d packed a bag first. Not like the missing girls from Briar County. They got snatched up, plucked from their lives so sudden and random the cops didn’t piece it together till number three.
She heard the engine before she saw the truck. It barrelled round the corner and stopped right in front of her. Four guys got out, Tommy’s friends, their doors slamming together.
One was young; she tried a smile as they walked into the house but he wouldn’t meet her eye.
Raine walked over to the truck, reached in through the window, and took a half-empty pack of Marlboros from the seat. She stuffed it in her pocket quick as she heard her daddy call.
“Can I come out with y’all? I want to help search,” Raine said straight off when she reached the door.
Joe shook his head. “Head out on your bicycle, maybe get up with the neighbors. Don’t go near Hell’s Gate.”
Raine nodded, knew they reckoned she was holding out ’cause that’s why he was sending her out alone.
“I don’t know where she is, swear I don’t.” She felt his eyes on her ’cause he knew her tells.
“You cut your knee,” he said, looking at her leg.
“Ain’t nothin’.”
She got in scraps and scrapes since she was small but she didn’t cry so they never knew if she was hurt bad or not.
He opened his arms, she stepped into them and he kissed her head and held her awhile. He was tall and strong and she loved him more than she did her momma, which she didn’t find a hard truth to swallow. Daddy’s girl, that’s what folk said, so when they couldn’t keep her straight no more they talked about apples and trees and smiled, for a while.
“Bring her back, Raine.”
She picked up her yellow bicycle from where it lay in the yard. She pedaled to the end of her street, dumped it in the tall grass, then doubled back for her momma’s truck. The keys were in the visor but she let it roll the slope before she fired it. A cross hung from the rearview mirror, swinging back and forth as she bumped along the road.
*
The engine quit as Raine was gunning it down one of the long tracks by the Kinley farm. Steam ran from the hood and fogged the windshield. She climbed out and walked round to the tailgate, cussin’ when she saw the empty water bottles in the bed. She stared around. The corn stood tall and green on both sides, clustered so tight she couldn’t make out much beyond the high sun. She knew there was a breeze ’cause the crops moved but it weren’t strong enough to trouble the heat.
She paced the track awhile, kicked out and watched dust spread as she reached a hand up and dragged it through her hair. Her daddy would be pissed. She weren’t supposed to take the pickup, not just ’cause the engine was fucked but ’cause she was a year shy of getting her license and Black’s patience had worn long back.
She wondered what time Summer would break, no way she’d stay out all night. She was soft like that, had been since they were small and the Spanish moss painted shadow faces on her bedroom wall. She wouldn’t catch shit for it neither. Their momma would be full of worry ’cause it was Summer this time. She might even sleep beside her, like she used to when they were young and got sick, stroking their hair with cigarette fingers and telling them stories about their grandparents, and cotton and soybeans, and the boll weevils that choked their land and their lives.
She leaned back, the metal hot on her thighs. She brought her knee up, ran her finger over the scab and licked salty sweat from her lips.
*
Noah drove slow down his street then turned onto Hickory Glen, following it till he passed by the square and the town began to thin in his rear-view. He rolled the window, glanced up, and saw a thundercloud over the canopy of Hell’s Gate. His grandmother had been waiting on a storm. She spent her days on the front porch, rocking and switching her gaze between their yard and the sky, her mouth turned down like the weight of what had come and gone dragged on it. She spoke of death with an evenness that came from outliving her only daughter. Some days she rode him about his grades, and others she stared straight through him. Social Services had paid a visit four months back when she fell and bruised her hip so bad it turned black.
She went to bed early each night, closed the drapes long before the sun dropped. He’d wait an hour, then take the key from the brass hook, start the Buick, and sit patient while it shuddered and smoked. The Buick was black and rusted and long as a boat. It had the wire wheels that Purv reckoned girls would like, but then Purv reckoned lots of shit Noah had a hard time buying.
It’d been his grandfather’s car. She wouldn’t sell it, said she could still smell the old man in it. Noah took it out most nights, had done so for six months now, the thrill an even match for the fear of getting caught.
He kept the speed down as he drove along Elba, passing the barren fields. A scarecrow stood, head bowed and dropping a shadow of crucifixion.
He turned off, passed the Kinley place, and ducked low in case Rita was looking out, then drove the track for half a mile before he saw a pickup in the distance, parked lazy in the red dirt.
He caught sight of Raine; recognized the light hair and the long legs. For a moment he sat still, searching for courage, then he eased the gas pedal down and trundled toward her. He drew up short, killed the engine, and got out.
She had her eyes closed, her head tilted up as the sky turned iron above. She wore shorts cut high on her thigh, the last smoke from a cigarette rose from the dirt by her foot.
“Raine.”
Her eyes snapped open and she turned to look at him.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said.
“You didn’t. I ain’t the type that scares easy.” She had a rough edge to her voice, maybe ’cause she smoked and drank.
“Do you need help?”
She met his eye, cocked her head, and stared so long he wanted to say something else, anything else.
“Storm . . . she’s a comin’.” Anything but that.
She smoothed her vest down, pulling it tight over her chest.
He swallowed dry.
“I need water,” she said. “For the truck.”
“I could fill you up –”
“I doubt that.”
His eyes widened. “Shit, that came out . . . I could get you some water.”
She wore a half smile that rolled his stomach. She tucked her hair behind her ear then spit her gum in the dirt.
“You know who my sister is?”
He nodded.
“You seen her about?”
He shook his head.
“I gotta find her. I was headed for the houses on Chapel Lake Drive. I figured she might’ve headed that way . . . everyone reckons she followed the Red.”
“I could drive you there? Right now, wherever you need to go.” He tried to keep the eager from his voice.
She looked around like she was weighing options, then walked at him.
He stepped to the side and she got in the Buick and he followed.
“Smells like old man in this car,” she said.
“That’ll be my dead grandfather.”
“He ain’t in the trunk is he?”
She reached for the radio and found something loud and angry. She kicked off her sandals and put her bare feet on the dash, then pulled a bottle of Barton from her bag and drank. Vodka and smoke and cheap perfume, Noah’s head was light.
*
They drove down roads with arched trees that cut the sky to nothing but a dying strip. They passed a couple double-wides and they saw the blue green of television light blinking in the box windows. He made a right onto Chapel Lake Drive, took it wide, and ran the grass but she didn’t say nothing and he was glad.
“I can’t see a lake,” he said.
“Ain’t no chapel neither.”
Chapel Lake Drive was once grand, maybe fifty years back when the land was rich with cotton and Grace was something more than run out.
He pulled up. The gate was wrought iron, hanging loose at the top hinge. There was a long driveway that wound its way up to a big house. The fascia was carved and might’ve been beautiful but for the dark mold crawling from the soffits. The roof was half covered in tarp and steel scaffolding rose to it. A sign hung, the lettering fancy but faded. BOWDOIN CONSTRUCTION.
Both knew it was the Lumen house.
They left the Buick by the gate and followed the gravel, thinned and torn with broadleaf weed.
“It’s gettin’ dark,” Noah said, looking up. “And Pastor Lumen scares the shit outta me.”
“Maybe you’ll get lucky and the Angel will come to the door,” she said.
The Angel. Everybody knew him ’cause he had fluffy white hair and snow-white skin and eyes ringed with the lightest pink. Most knew he was albino, ’cept for Samson’s momma and the pastor, who were quick to declare him an angel when he was born. Raine’s momma said they didn’t ever take him to the doctor.
She banged the door with a closed fist, shaking the timber frame and loosening citrine paint.
She pressed her head against the window beside. There were paintings on the wall, winged women with their tits showing and horses with ringlets of white hair. She saw a bowed shelf and a photo frame with a pressed pink flower behind the glass. Raine reckoned it looked like an Alabama Pink even though you weren’t supposed to pick them. The flowers were so rare no one knew where to find them. Rumor was, if you held them to the light they’d cast a colored glow.
She stood there a long time, then felt dark crawl the roofline and snatch daylight away. She turned and saw Noah standing in the grass watching her and he jerked his head away quick like he’d been checking out her ass or something.
They moved on to Merle’s place next door. The farmhouse roof bowed so bad that Merle slept in the barn behind. Nobody answered at either when Raine banged the doors. Merle ran the auto shop on Sayer Street, and he ran poker games and sold jars of moonshine.
Merle’s ’shine was known far ’cause it was so charged that lighting a smoke within fifty yards of it would likely start a fire. It happened once before. Wilbur Orr and his part-timers put it out before it reached the barrels, otherwise half the town would’ve been buttered on the fumes.
They tried another couple houses but didn’t get nothing.
*
Samson Lumen dressed the same no matter the season; pale skin covered, hat pulled low and dark shelled glasses that shielded his eyes from a sun too ruthless. His momma once said he was an angel and angels flew at night, like that explained away the questions he asked.
He worked at the school and the church and at both he did those background jobs most reckoned beneath them. Sometimes the kids pissed on the floor then hollered for him and laughed.
With his daddy, the pastor, in the hospital he lay with fearful eyes each night, thinking every noise was the noise he’d been waiting on. He locked the doors and windows but the roof of the old house was open to the night and to dark creatures like Ray Bowdoin.
Ray looked at him like he was soft and strange and ripe for picking. At first it was money, the money Ray said the pastor owed for the work he was doing, but now it was more.
Ray had a gun in his truck and a switchblade in his pocket and the kinda eyes that told Samson he was close with both. Samson was afraid of death and of Ray Bowdoin, but most of all Samson was afraid of his daddy, of the damnation the pastor said would visit them if Samson didn’t prove himself worthy and right of the Lumen name. Though his daddy was sick with an ailment that drooped his eye and his arm like they were being tugged from beneath, the hatred still burned. The pastor didn’t care for his only son, not since he was born and not since he’d found the pornographic magazines Samson bought from Lucky Delfray when he was fifteen. He remembered that day clear; the heat of his daddy’s hand and the cold ache of the Red River, and his momma’s panic as she ran for the house and the telephone.
There were worse things than sins of the flesh his momma had said, but she didn’t get it, not none of it ’cause his daddy saw to that. Sweep it away and bury it deep.
Samson had his head pressed to the window when the girl knocked at the door, the pretty ghost girl that stole all his breath. He wanted to answer, to call her in and maybe talk to her and the boy, the boy with the cop badge. Samson didn’t have no friends. But then he’d seen what they brought, the heavy dark cloud that ate the Alabama sky like summer weren’t ever coming back. So he dropped to his bed and he curled fetal, his head beneath the pillow ’cause that’s how cowards hid.
*
Raine rolled down the window, hung her arm out, and opened her hand to the breeze. “You ever pretend your hand is a bird?” she said.
Noah shook his head.
“When I’m in my daddy’s truck I put my hand out the window and pretend it’s a bird. I sweep it up and down in the wind. You try it.”
“I ain’t sure I should take my hand off the wheel.”
“You always such a pussy?”
He rolled his window and stuck his arm out, and he swept his hand up and down and cupped slate air between his fingers.
The Buick veered across the double lines and knocked down a mailbox.
“Shit,” he said, jerking the wheel.
She laughed, so he smiled like his heart weren’t pounding out.
He pulled into the gas station on Highway 125 and filled a container with water, then drove back toward the Kinleys’ fields.
“I don’t see you at school no more,” he said.
“You go to my school?”
He took the hit well.
She rubbed her eyes ’cause she’d got in late the night before. She’d seen the note straight off, then climbed the stairs and changed her clothes, woke her parents and watched their world dim.
“She’ll be okay,” he said.
“I ain’t worried.”
She threw the empty vodka bottle out the window and heard it smash. She liked the sound, so high and jarring.
The Buick bumped along the track and she frowned like Noah should’ve known how to ride the ditches better.
He popped the hood of her truck and filled the empty coolant tank.
She stood by the tall crops and thought about her sister, and though she didn’t believe as Summer did, she said a quick and quiet prayer that when she got home things would be right, ’cause she couldn’t handle her momma getting on her over nothing else.
“I could drive you again,” he said, head under the hood. “If you need help, come find me at the station.”
“So you’re a cop?” she said, glancing at the badge, an eyebrow raised.
“Yeah,” he said, straight. Then added, “kinda.”
She laughed and he blushed, then she climbed into the truck and pulled away.
She saw him in the mirror standing still and watching her go till dust ghosted his face. She kept the window down. Her hand was a bird and she made it fly as the crickets sang their night songs.
*
The sweats came and went but sleep did not. Chief Black sat in a high-backed chair in the center of the living room and stared at a large map of Briar County and at the faces of the stolen girls. The Briar girls.
Home was a small clapboard close to one of the many backwaters that fed the Red River. The walls were papered with all they had on the Bird. The link was there, the churches of Briar County, but of them there were many and second-guessing weren’t even close to possible.
He’d worked murders in his years as a trooper, domestics and rapes and men that touched kids. They left prints on him so deep he knew he weren’t cut out for the job. Mitch Wild used to tell him a good cop was a cop with heart, but then Mitch could say that ’cause purpose fit him like a second skin, a skin he’d slip from as he headed home each night. Noah looked so much like Mitch it carried Black back every time he saw the kid.
The Briar girls case was unmatched in scale, from Briar County Sheriff Ernie Redell to the state cops, and they’d turned up nothing.
“The Bird.” He said it loud with a slight slur.
The press cooked that one up. The only sighting with girl number four, Coralee Simmons. Twenty minutes after she got taken, by a track she used as a shortcut to the Green Acres Baptist Church, a couple kids playing soldier had seen someone walking through Hell’s Gate. He was big they said, big like a monster and feathered like a bird. He had a girl on his shoulder, hanging limp like she was sleeping. And the bird smiled at them, then brought a finger to his lips.
It was well outta Grace but Black was nearest, got there and headed in lone. He backed Ernie and Ernie backed him, there was a lot of land in Briar and not nearly enough cops. He’d been walking maybe a mile when he glimpsed something. He’d drawn, called, and followed. The shape, that’s all it was, was big and moved quick. The ground was leaves and mud, the trees tight and close. Black was sloppy, drunk, but he’d gained a little before he fell hard. The shape turned and Black had raised his gun ’cause the shot was clear no matter what he’d told Ernie and the state cops. He’d missed by a head. That miss . . . sleep didn’t come, the blood on his hands wouldn’t ever dry.
He poured a measure of Evan Williams. He had pills—Phrenilin and Nembutal and Halcion. When he mixed them with booze they guided him to lucid dreams where he aimed a little left and took the shadow off its feet. And where he made the call to Jasper Stimson, and Mitch Wild didn’t walk that dark trail alone and take that bullet to the chest and leave a widow and a child to claw at Black’s soul.
He weren’t old but felt tired, weren’t fat but weight dragged on him. Sometimes he was amazed what the human body could endure. He surfed close to the divide, never more so than when girl five got taken.
He wouldn’t chase that Baphomet shadow again, not a chance. No, he wouldn’t chalk up another loss. She’d show up soon. Summer Ryan would be all right.