Dry County

by Jake Hinkson

  DRY COUNTY

  JAKE HINKSON

  PEGASUS CRIME

  NEW YORK LONDON

  For my friend

  Oliver Gallmeister

  God owns heaven

  but He craves the earth

  —Anne Sexton

  PART ONE SATURDAY MORNING

  ONE RICHARD WEATHERFORD

  The cell phone on my nightstand tremors just before daybreak. At first, I fear that something has happened to a member of my congregation. More than once, I’ve been awakened by the news of a car crash out on the highway, or a family left homeless by a house fire, or someone shaken by the prognosis of cancer. Taking only a moment to rub sleep from my eyes, I steel myself for any of these crises, but when I lift the glowing blue screen to my face and see Gary’s number, I almost curse. Slipping out of the sheets, with the phone spasming in my hand, I manage to cross the bedroom without waking my wife.

  “Can you talk?” he asks.

  My bare feet plod against the cool floors as I rush down the hallway, past the rooms where my children lay sleeping. I take the stairs two at a time. Once I’m safely to the bottom, I turn into the kitchen and whisper, “It’s four in the morning.”

  “It’s five,” he says. “More like five.”

  I glance at the digital readout on the microwave. 4:56.

  I want to yell at him, but I can’t, so my voice comes out in a choked and angry rasp. “I’m in bed with my wife.”

  “You’re talking to me from your bed?”

  “No. I got out of bed and came downstairs when my phone vibrated.”

  Although I’m trying to speak softly, my voice echoes in the large, unoccupied spaces of my home. I have always loved how our enormous kitchen feeds into the dining room, which in turn opens into the living room that runs along the front of the house. Now, however, all this space seems to amplify my whispers into announcements at a ballpark.

  I hurry down the hallway to the basement door.

  He says, “You were supposed to meet me yesterday.”

  I ease the door shut behind me. “And you think calling me at home first thing in the morning is the smart thing to do?”

  “Did Penny hear the phone go off?”

  “Don’t say her name.”

  I clomp down the wooden basement steps and pace the concrete floor between the boys’ weight bench and dusty boxes of old knickknacks stacked against the wall.

  “Do you hear me?” I say. “Don’t say her name.”

  “Sensitive,” he says. “What if I just hang up the phone? Then what happens?”

  Steadying myself against a box labeled Christmas Ornaments in Penny’s immaculate handwriting, I say, “No. Please, don’t.”

  “We need to talk,” he says. “Today.”

  Taking a deep breath, I think, This is what I get. This is what a fool gets.

  “It would be difficult for me to get away today. It’s the busiest time of the year for me. There are things I have to tend to. A lot of things. I can’t just leave town.”

  “Then let’s meet in town.”

  “Gary, no.”

  “We’re just going to talk. And it doesn’t have to be a long conversation, either. But it has to happen today. I mean it. I’m not giving you a choice about this.”

  I find another breath. “Where do you want to meet?”

  “Your office.”

  “I’m not meeting you at the church. Don’t be stupid.”

  “Watch your fucking mouth, Richard.”

  “I’m not . . . Look, I’m sorry. I’m just saying, think about it. It’s the worst place to meet. People will be going in and out of there all day today.”

  “On a Saturday?”

  “Tomorrow’s Easter. We have the final preparations for the Passion Play. Musicians, actors, sound and lighting people. The Ladies’ Auxiliary will be running in and out of there helping set things up.”

  “Okay then. Down behind the school.”

  “You mean that pit back there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But if someone sees us it will only draw attention to us. You know what I mean?”

  “Hey, it’s up to you. We can meet in public and try to blend in, or we can meet in secret and try not to get caught. You decide.”

  I rub my face. “Behind the school, then.”

  “When can you come?”

  “The sooner the better. How about an hour? Can you be there in an hour?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.”

  “Richard?”

  “What?”

  “If you don’t show up today, we’re going to move into the consequences phase of things.”

  I’m standing in my pajama bottoms, in an old T-shirt, with the basement’s concrete floor cold against my feet, and I’m frightened beyond measure at the danger posed to me by this boy, but, even so, my voice sounds indignant when I tell him, “I’ll be there.”

  I climb the wooden steps, my feet numb and dirty. I go upstairs and try to slip as quietly as I can back into our bedroom.

  In my absence, the first faint overtures of the coming sun have lightened the sky outside our windows to a bright, misty gray. Penny turns over to look at me.

  “What is it?” she asks.

  Reentering the warmth of our bed, I tell her, “Terry Baltimore.”

  I am amazed how easily this lie comes, not just in its speed but in its perfection. Terry Baltimore is a shattered remnant of a man, all that remains of a life squandered in drunken oblivion. He is one of those men who sporadically appears at any church. He has learned the words to say—he tells me he has given his ruined life to Christ and wants to walk the straight and narrow from here on out—but he still has the stink about him. Not just the stink of booze, but the stink of defeat. I believe that Christ can redeem anyone, but I learned long ago that he will not redeem everyone. For the Terry Baltimores of the world, Christ is just another hustle. I know this, and I endure it because it’s my job. My job is not to save Terry Baltimore; my job is to talk the talk of redemption until Terry Baltimore finally decides to move on. They always do. Once they’ve exhausted the goodwill and disposable charity of some of our older or more gullible church members, the Terry Baltimores always leave without a word, without a trace, never to be heard from again.

  “It’s five o’clock in the morning,” Penny tells me.

  “I know. I gather Terry had a long night.”

  “Ugh.”

  Again, I’m struck by the perfection of my lie. Penny has a good heart, and her faith is real, but her sense of Christian obligation never strays far from her own comfort. She likes teaching third-grade Sunday school and having luncheons with the ladies because she gets to lead the prayers. She is not one to linger in the grimy, broken world of the Terry Baltimores, faith or no faith. Of all our congregants, Terry is the one she is most likely to believe the worst of and the one she is least likely to speak to about it. He is the perfect excuse.

  “Well,” she says, “what did he want?”

  “He wants to see me, wants to pray with me. I take it he’s having a crisis of faith.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “Now? It’s—”

  “I know what time it is, dear.”

  “On the Saturday before Easter, of all days.”

  “I pointed that out to him.”

  “I bet you didn’t. What does he want to pray about?”

  I shrug.

  She asks, “And you’re going to go?”

  I turn to her. It’s funny, but I’m actually disappointed in her lack of charity. “Don’t you think I should? In your heart of hearts, do you think the Lord wants me to lie here in bed while a man who has called me for help languishes on the other side of town?”

  She h
ugs her body pillow and closes her eyes.

  I tell her, “I’ll run over there and . . . do whatever. Then I’ll be back. An hour, tops.”

  “Okay,” she says. “Just try not to wake up your children, please. The little ones are going to come jumping on me the second their eyes open.”

  I kiss her forehead and walk to the bathroom. I would like to throw on some clothes and go now, but I should do this as normally as possible. I should get ready and conduct myself as if nothing’s out of the ordinary, and that means adhering to my usual morning regimen.

  Running the shower until it’s hot, I undress and get in. The scalding water lashes my skin, shocking any remaining sluggishness out of me. I lather up. I clean my body, but when I shut off the water and step from the shower, my steaming skin still dripping, a groan escapes my throat, involuntarily.

  God, I am so sorry.

  Please help me.

  Please make him leave.

  I wrap a towel around my waist and shave my face over the sink. My hair is plastered to my scalp, accentuating my large features. I’m handsome, in a makeshift kind of way. Photographed at a good angle—as I was for the staff picture on our church website—I am a good-looking man. Caught at the wrong angle, however, my attractiveness looks as if it were assembled from spare parts. My ears stick out a bit, my nose is disproportionate to my cheeks, and my lips slightly overwhelm my jaw.

  That’s the way it looks to me this morning, less like a face that God made and more like some kind of genetic accident.

  I shake my head. The mirror is the quickest route away from God.

  By the time I leave to go meet Gary, sunlight is creeping through the trees at the edge of my yard and the neighborhood is yawning and stretching itself awake. I back the Odyssey out of the driveway and wave at Mr. Newman, who is retrieving his paper from the lawn next door.

  He waves at me, then points to the sign in his yard that reads: KEEP VAN BUREN COUNTY DRY.

  I have the same sign, of course. We give each other a thumbs-up.

  Down the street, Carrie Close is loading her children into her hatchback. Her boy Allen has his swimming lessons down in Little Rock on Saturdays, and she has to leave early to get there on time. Carrie seems to be speaking harshly to Allen and his younger sisters as she shuts the rear door, but when she sees me, she smiles and waves.

  At the end of the road, I turn onto School Hill Road. Climbing the hill, I pass a large red truck blasting music. The music is country, I suppose, though twenty-five years ago, when I was in high school, it would have been considered rock. Either way, it’s turned up too loud for an early Saturday morning.

  School Hill Road swings past the high school. Down the hill, past the middle and elementary school buildings, the blacktop disintegrates into a gravel road that runs by the rodeo arena—a large dirt pen flanked by unpainted bleachers, with an announcer’s box in the middle. Past that, before the road reaches the baseball field, I turn right across an empty green field toward the trees.

  I didn’t grow up in Stock, so I didn’t learn the town’s nooks and crannies as a child. Since I was called to pastor this church ten years ago, however, Penny and I have raised our children here. Although the older ones, all college age, were born when we lived in North Carolina, they came of age in Arkansas. The little ones were born here and have never known anything else. As a result, my children are natives of this place, while, in some ways, I think I’ll always feel like an immigrant freshly arrived on its strange shores. The kids have taught me its language, showed me its customs. They’ve also taught me certain things through the gossip they’ve brought home. And one thing I know about is the hidden pit near the trees between the rodeo ring and the baseball diamond.

  The field looks normal from the gravel road, just a grassy slope gently rising toward the tree line. If you turn off the road and drive toward the trees, however, you discover that after rising for a bit the ground suddenly plunges into a large pit that’s invisible to the road. This, I am told, is where the bad kids go to drink.

  I pull up to the edge of the worn earthen crater. At its charred center, a bonfire’s remains look like the impact site of a bomb. I get out of the mini-van and tromp down the loose dirt to this scarred, blackened soil. Old beer cans. A broken bottle. Cigarette butts.

  “Good morning, Brother Weatherford,” Gary says, walking out of the trees, his hands in the pockets of his dark jeans.

  I scan the top of the pit.

  “There’s no one around,” he says. He slides down the crumbling crater wall and stops on the other side of the ashes. “Kids don’t come out here this early, so neither do the cops.”

  His narrow face is pale, and he’s wearing a dark windbreaker over a black T-shirt with some secular band on it. He’s a college dropout, but in the diffuse morning light, he almost looks too young to have been to university. The sight of him slightly nauseates me.

  “You know you can’t call me,” I tell him. “What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking about how I drove all the way to Petit Jean and sat there for an hour waiting for you.”

  “I told you I was busy. My kids are all in town for Easter.”

  “Don’t hide behind your children,” he says. “It’s so gross.”

  My face flushes. “I’m here now.”

  “Then let’s get to it. Where’s my money?”

  “Your money? You mean my money.”

  “Which you said you would give to me.”

  “I said I’d think about it.”

  “Why are you doing this to me, Richard?”

  “What am I doing to you?”

  “You’re forcing me to hurt you. I don’t want to do that. That’s not who I am.”

  “Really? You’re not blackmailing me?”

  He stares at me with the kind of disappointment that I sometimes use against my children. No one else in my life, not even Penny, ever regards me with such open condescension. I hate myself for giving him that kind of power.

  He says, “We agreed together that the best thing for me was to move on, to get out of this shithole and start over somewhere else. Hell, it was your idea.”

  “All I said was—”

  He dismisses my defense with a wave of his hand. “I only want what you promised me. If you want to stand here and debate, we can do that, but every second we do we run the risk of someone seeing us together.”

  I look up at the top of the pit, bare dirt against a limestone blue sky.

  Gary says, “See? That’s what this is all about. You don’t want to be seen with me. Ever. You don’t want people to know about us. Ever. You got what you wanted from me, and now you want me to just disappear. But that can’t happen until you give me thirty thousand dollars. You understand that? I’m not blackmailing you. You’re paying me to move away and act like I don’t know you. It’s about what you want me to do. I’m just not going to do it for free.”

  I rub my eyes. “Where am I supposed to get thirty thousand dollars?”

  “You’re the one always telling me how successful you are. You can get that much.”

  “Not like that, not with no one knowing. I don’t just have thirty grand stuck in a drawer somewhere.”

  “Well, you need to find it somewhere,” he says calmly, like he’s telling a child to clean their room. “I’m done waiting.” He turns his attention back to the mound of cold ashes and charred beer cans. “If you don’t help me out, then I guess I’ll just stay in town and tell the truth.”

  “You really want to be the local scandal?”

  With a smile, he shakes his head and kicks some dirt into the ashes. “These rednecks have been calling me a faggot since the fifth grade, Richard. They’ll just say, ‘We knew it.’ You’re the one with the good reputation hanging around his neck like a noose.”

  Trying to sound confident, I try the only thing I have left. I tell him, “It would be my word against yours. People would believe me.”

  “Some would, sure. But honestly, h
ow many people would have to believe me before it ruined your reputation with everyone? Ten? Five? One?” Gary nudges a broken bottle with the toe of his boot. “Really, all it would take is Penny.”

  I want to step through the ashes and grab him, ball up his shirt in my fist, and hit him as hard as I can. But I can’t move.

  “What did you say to me?” is all I can get out.

  He turns his face to me now, his expression almost pitying. As if he’s being the most reasonable man in the world, he says, “It’s all up to you, Richard. If you give me the money to leave, I’ll leave. I’ll just go away. And then your life can be normal again. Isn’t that what you want?”

  My head swims, and I have to close my eyes to keep from losing my balance. “I’ll kill you if you go near my family . . . ,” I say.

  The threat doesn’t faze him at all. He just says, “It would be a lot easier to help me leave town.”

  When I open my eyes, they’re wet. My mouth is dry. There’s a ringing in my ears. It’s as if he has slapped me.

  Blood-pink splotches mottle his pale face, and his slender chest rises against his shirt, but his eyes are as empty as a school shooter’s.

  He’s not just a boy. He can really do this. He knows what to say, and he knows who to say it to.

  “All right, goddamn you,” I say, taking the Lord’s name in vain for the first time in years. “I’ll get you your money.”

  TWO BRIAN HARTEN

  The motherfucking car alarm wakes me up. I’ve always hated that thing. Roxie had it put in as a birthday present one year. “Who’s gonna steal my car in Stock?” I asked her. She said I was an ungrateful asshole.

  Fair enough. Now she’s gone, but I’ve still got the alarm.

  Good thing this morning, I guess. The alarm is blaring away while I haul my ass out of bed—in nothing but boxers—and pull up the blinds.

  Two guys in the parking lot of the apartment complex are loading my car onto a big white tow truck. One of them turns off my car alarm somehow. I’m not sure how he does that, but it just stops.