Free All the Beautiful Sinners by Stephen Graham Jones Page A

then it came to him all at once, so hard that he almost stumbled—what had been getting louder and louder since Debs and Garden City, since Deerfield: the insurance man.
    The one who had come to pay for Jim Doe’s sister.
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    By that time, just a week out from the storm, Jim Doe had already been calling her Dorothy in his head, because the wind had taken her, and because she was going to come back again. It was his secret deal.
    And then the insurance man came to pay for her.
    Jim Doe never even saw him. He had still been hiding behind the one standing wall of his bedroom, then. Pretending. But then the car pulled up, its dust plume settling over the remains of Horace Doe’s house, coating everything with a fine layer of caliche. Another fine layer of caliche. Jim Doe made himself smaller behind the partial wall, closed his eyes, and listened. It was the insurance man’s voice he would remember. How he’d talked to his father, calling him Mr . Doe at first, then moving on to Horace , until that became something different too: Horse .
    They were sitting on the couch his father had dug out. Or, his father was. Maybe the insurance man was standing, walking, pacing like a teacher. Looking out the windows as he spoke. The whole house was a window.
    The insurance man was saying how he was here as an extension of the company. To show how much they cared in this, Horse’s time of loss, of grief, and grieving. That he knew Horse wasn’t thinking about money yet, of course, but it was his job to. His duty in times like this.
    “Just tell me what I owe,” Horace Doe said, his voice flat.
    His wallet had blown away along with his daughter.
    The insurance man didn’t say anything for a long while. It was just his feet on the broken glass of the floor. Then he said it: “Nothing, Mr. Doe. Horse. We owe you .”
    Jim Doe could hear his mother in the other room, sweeping. The walls around her were two feet tall, maybe. The broom was makeshift, rags and a stick; her real broom was stuck in a locustwood fencepost three acres away, like it had been shot there by a giant, inconceivable bow. Birds were already sitting on it, bobbing up and down, waiting for the straw to cack in half so they could weave nests out if it.
    The insurance man said it again: Nothing .
    And then he extended the check to Horace Doe. Twenty-two hundred dollars.
    Jim Doe could hear his father looking up, could hear the insurance man smiling, the check fluttering. The burial insurance that wasn’t included in Horace’s premiums was paid out on the check, listed on the stub. The amount was real. Horace looked from it to the insurance man. The insurance man said it must have been an oversight at the main office. That it happened all the time. That he understood what it was like to lose someone. To just cash it.
    After that, silence. So long that Jim Doe put his hands over his ears, started humming to himself. It was the same quiet now as it had been right before the circle vent sucked out of the wall. A roaring silence. His hands at eight weren’t thick enough, though. He could still hear the insurance man talking in low tones—private tones, like this wasn’t for everybody. It was a joke. An Indian joke, one Jim Doe would never be able to remember, just that it made his father laugh, sitting there on the couch. Made him laugh for the first time in days. The sound of his laughter spilled through the house and out into the grass, and for a moment his wife stopped sweeping, and his son stood up, and the three of them looked at each other, and started getting better. Started becoming three instead of four. The insurance man was already a car pulling away, back into Nazareth. Jim Doe waved, wanted more, please, more—make us laugh—but that was all.
    Dorothy , he’d called out after him in gratitude, breaking his secret deal, her name was Dorothy , and then his father had him around the middle and was lifting him into the air and his mother still wasn’t