The Broken Places by Ace Atkins

knew.”
    “Men from Parchman?”
    Jamey nodded.
    “What did they want?”
    “Like I said, they think I have something that belongs to them.”
    “But you don’t.”
    “I don’t, Caddy,” Jamey said. “I’m done with all that. They’re the kind of people looking for a free ride and always have excuses about what they’ve become.”
    “They looked pretty rough.”
    “Not a lot of the clean-cut types in the Farm.”
    “That one man, the black man, I didn’t care for the way he looked at me.”
    “’Cause he was black?”
    “Because there was something wrong with his brain,” she said. “He thought it was OK to look at a person like an animal. He looked like he was in ecstasy.”
    “Maybe he had to go to the bathroom.”
    “I’m not joking with you about this.”
    “One thing I know for sure,” Jamey said, smiling. “We aren’t that far different from animals. It just depends on how you decide to evolve.”
    A teenage girl on roller skates and in a pair of shorts and a tight Alan Jackson T-shirt appeared and handed them a couple Cokes and a big sack of burgers. She smiled big at Jamey, and Jamey tipped her two dollars, sending her off on skates.
    “Caddy, I appreciate all you done,” Jamey said. “The garden is going to be beautiful and help a lot of folks in need.”
    “I about made a mess of it, tromping through when those men came up.”
    “Caddy?”
    She looked at Jamey behind the wheel, wearing sunglasses, not touching the food between them. “I want you to forget about those men and what they said,” he said. “More than anything, I don’t want you to talk to Quinn about it.”
    “I don’t tell Quinn anything.”
    “Good,” he said. “It will just get messy for me. He’s looking for an excuse to get me in trouble with the parole board. He hates that we’re together.”
    “But those men,” Caddy said. “They’ll come back for you. What about then? What if they try to hurt you or the church? Or what if Jason is around?”
    Jamey reached into the sack for a cheeseburger and a couple fries. He thought as he ate, nodding to himself with what he seemed to believe was a solid answer. “When they get what’s happened through their thick heads, they’ll leave us all alone.”
    “But if they don’t,” Caddy said. “I still don’t know what happened. What the hell do they want from you? More money?”
    “I don’t want to discuss it,” Jamey said. “But I swear to you that they’ll never get close to you again.”
    Jamey set his jaw and ate in silence, studying on a part of his life he’d never share with her. It didn’t make her mad as much as it made her face flush with jealousy.

 
    “Sheriff,” Johnny Stagg said. “Good to see you. Come on in.”
    “Thanks, Johnny.”
    Stagg smiled his satyr grin, his face an elongated mask of self-confidence, and pointed to an empty wooden chair before a big old desk. Behind him there were dozens of 8×10 photographs of the famous, nearly famous, and almost famous who’d come through his truck stop over the last three decades. The only two Quinn could really place were Goober from The Andy Griffith Show and B.B. King. Several of the pictures showed Johnny with his arm around the athlete or ballplayer or state politician. Johnny seemed to collect meeting people the way some kids do bubble-gum cards.
    Quinn stood behind the chair, resting his hands on the back.
    “You come to talk about that stolen car?” Johnny said, still smiling, all bemused in Quinn’s presence.
    “Yep.”
    “I didn’t even see it,” Johnny said. “It was Leonard come in this afternoon and tole me that some truckers were complaining that it was blocking a turn.”
    “Probably where the girls can hop up in their cabs,” Quinn said.
    Johnny grinned some more, looking downright civil in a red Ole Miss sweater, a checked shirt with spread collar, and stiff khaki pants. He was in his late fifties or early sixties, with the purplish reddened skin of a hill