Dry County

by Jake Hinkson

  “And I get you a discount on groceries at Pickett’s.”

  I stand up.

  He stands up, too. “Long as I’m paying the rent around here,” he says, “I’ll say whatever the fuck I want to say.”

  He just stands there like he’s making some big point.

  I tell him, “Long as you’re standing up, why don’t you go put on some clothes.”

  He smiles and looks at Momma’s back. She’s stacking the French toast on a plate. He turns back to me and pulls down the front of his boxers and shows me his hairy junk.

  “Gross!” I yell. “Momma . . . !”

  Tommy sits down. Momma pours herself a cup of coffee. She turns her head just enough to say over her shoulder, “Sarabeth, you ain’t getting any less late to work.”

  I pull into the employee parking next to the dumpsters behind Pickett’s. I take a deep breath before I get out of the car. It’s five after nine, so I’m over an hour late.

  As I walk past the dumpsters, the smell of rotting produce hits me like a hammer. My head’s still throbbing, and my eyes still hurt. Now my heart starts thumping. I open the back door and go inside. Why am I scared? The stock room is empty, and the lights are off in the manager’s office. I clock in and walk up to the salesfloor.

  I groan a little when I see we have no customers. At least if we had some shoppers, I could avoid that bitch. But she’s the only one in the whole store. She’s up front on the register.

  When she hears me walk in, she turns around and crosses her arms and stares at me. She’s tall, with two chins and a hairdo that she sprayed into place back in 1994. I walk up and stand on the opposite side of the register.

  I just stare back at her for a while until it gets uncomfortable. Then I look away and glance around the store. It’s bright and clean. All the lights are on. Everything is in its place. Just another quiet Saturday morning. One person can run the store until damn near noon. Most people in town just drive over to Walmart, anyway. This bitch knows it, and so do I.

  “Do you have anything to say?” she finally asks.

  I turn back to her. “I had car trouble.”

  “That’s it? You come in an hour and a half late, and that’s all you have to say?”

  “I’m an hour late.”

  “You’re supposed to be here half an hour before we open; you know that.”

  I sigh. “I’m sorry I had car trouble.”

  “What kind of car trouble did you have?”

  My face gets hot. What am I, a fucking mechanic? And why the interrogation?

  “I don’t know. It wouldn’t start.”

  “How’d you get here?”

  “It finally started.”

  She stares at me. Sure, I’m lying, but what’s it to her? She hasn’t done anything for the last hour. Stood here. Posted boring shit on Facebook. Maybe sold a newspaper or a gallon of milk. If I’d been here, I just would have been standing around while she sat in the back telling Facebook about her breakfast.

  “I need you here to watch the front,” she says. “I have work to do in the back.”

  Yeah, the world’s dullest Facebook account ain’t going to update itself.

  “Okay.”

  She logs herself off the register. I log myself on.

  “We’re not done talking about this,” she says.

  I nod, and she walks to the back, shaking her head.

  I stand behind the register and dig my cell phone out of my pocket. I go to Facebook and go to her profile.

  Five.

  Four.

  Three.

  Two.

  One.

  She updates her status:

  A word of Advice to the Youth of America. Be at the place where your supposed to be when your supposed to be there!!! Okay??? It will help you keep your job!!!

  Just to be a bitch, I hit Like on her status and put my phone back in my pocket.

  An old man walks by the front of the store and waves. I wave back. He keeps walking. I notice he’s carrying a Walmart bag.

  A little before lunch, Gary texts me, You at work?

  Yeah, I write back.

  Im going to come see you.

  Better not, I tell him.

  ??

  That bitch, I text back. I was late and shes acting like a real whore about it

  A minute or two goes by, and then he texts, I talked to Holy Shit.

  I almost yelp. When?

  This morning

  Where?

  At the pit

  Did he g

  “Are you texting?”

  I jump and look up, and that bitch is basically right beside me.

  “You startled me,” I tell her.

  She just stares at me with her stupid face.

  She’s about to say something when Jason comes in. He’s already got on his vest. “Morning,” he says.

  “Jason,” she tells him, “after you get clocked in, come right on up here.”

  He says okay and goes to the back.

  “When he gets up here,” she says, “you come see me.”

  She passes Jason on his way back to the registers, and I hear her tell him, “Go ahead and log in on register one.”

  When he walks up, he asks me, “How’s it going?”

  “I was a little late this morning,” I tell him, “and now she’s acting like I’ve been out campaigning for Hillary.”

  Jason smiles and shakes his head.

  I log out. He logs in. I head to the back.

  She’s sitting at her desk pretending to be looking at some forms.

  I stick my head in the doorway. “Hey.”

  She turns in her chair. “You might want to sit down.”

  I cross over and sit down. “Okay.”

  “We’re going to have to let you go.”

  “’Cause I’m late.”

  “I mean, you really want me to go into all the ways you’ve earned getting fired? You were late. Again. Not the first time. Not the fifth time. Now you’re up there texting.”

  “There’s no one in the store.”

  She nods. “Yeah. I knew you were going to say that.”

  “Because it’s true.”

  She smiles. She’s got the answer ready, and she’s in such a rush to get it out, her voice cracks. “Pickett’s doesn’t pay you to text.”

  “Does it pay you to post shit on Facebook?”

  Now she gets an ugly look on her face. “Sarabeth, I don’t need to hear any more of that kind of language. You can just go ahead and punch out and go on home.”

  “Maybe we should talk to Mr. Pickett.”

  She spreads her palms. “I already talked to Mr. Pickett, dear, but you are more than welcome to call him.” She pushes her phone across the desk. “Here. I’ll even dial his number for you.”

  She ain’t bluffing, either. It ain’t like Pickett knows me or gives a shit about me. He’d chew me out and tell me I had it coming while she sat there and watched.

  I just stand up and walk out. Behind me, I hear her get up and follow me down the hall to the clock.

  I turn around. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m escorting you out. That’s the way it’s done.”

  “You think I’m going to steal something?”

  “C’mon, Sarabeth, let’s just get you out of here.”

  She watches as I punch out, and then she follows me to the back door.

  I swing the door hard, trying to slam it shut, but it has one of those little bike-pump-looking things at the top that cushions the door and makes it impossible to slam. I hear it click shut behind me.

  I stomp over to my car and fire it up. I tear out of the parking lot.

  It don’t take long, though, before I realize I don’t know where I’m going.

  I just drive around town. My mind is weirdly clear now, like I just came out of my hangover. Heading away from downtown and the square, I get on the highway and pass by the gas stations and the McDonald’s and the Dollar General and the Subway. They
all seem small and plastic to me right now. Why is that? Through the windows, I see the people standing in line, or walking out to their cars, and none of them seem any more real to me than the plastic signs. I drive past the big Cowboy Supply and Feed store—two shitkickers in Stetsons are leaning against their trucks talking—and then I’m crossing over the Little Red River Bridge. It’s high over the water. When I first got my driver’s license, I used to have dreams that I would drive across this bridge and the end would disappear and I’d zoom right off like a ramp. Far down the river, I can barely make out the tiny figure of a man in a boat fishing in the shade.

  The highway curves, and on the left, down a little slope, is Stock First Baptist Church.

  I dig out my cell, scroll to Gary’s name, and press Call.

  “Hey,” he says.

  “I got fired.”

  “What? When?”

  “Now. Just now. That fucking cunt drug me into her office and fired me.”

  I can hear him breathing as he thinks about that. I pass the KFC, the horse vet, the library. “Well,” he says, “fuck her. And that place. Because the good news is you don’t need that job anymore.”

  My heart almost explodes. “You got the money?”

  “Not yet. But he said he’ll get it.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah. First thing this morning I called him and woke him up. Got his ass out of bed to come meet me.”

  “He tell you why he didn’t show up at Petit Jean?”

  “With his kids, he said. Couldn’t get away.”

  “What about the money?”

  “Said he’d get it.”

  “But you told him he has to give you the money, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the only way this will work—if you tell him he doesn’t have a choice.”

  “I know. I told him I’d tell his wife.”

  “Hell yeah. And everybody else in town.”

  “Sure, but she’s the one he’s afraid of. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”

  “Is that from the Bible?”

  “William Congreve. From a play I read in college.”

  “You’re so fucking smart, Gary.”

  “A play I read in college before I flunked out . . .”

  I laugh.

  I get to the stoplight up by the post office, take a right, and pull into the Walmart parking lot. There are a bunch of cars, but they’re all clustered near the front. I park at the very end of the lot and just sit there.

  “So, what do you think he’ll do?” I ask.

  “He’ll find a way to get the money.”

  “And you’re sure of that?”

  “Yes. You should have seen him when I said I was going to go to his wife. I thought he was going to shit himself.”

  “Because hell has no fury like a pissed-off preacher’s wife.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But what if . . . Just for the sake of argument, say she doesn’t care. Then what?”

  “Amos Pettibone.”

  “What?”

  “I go to Amos Pettibone.”

  “Who the fuck is Amos Pettibone?”

  “The chairman of the deacons.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Well, if the preacher is the CEO of the church, then the deacons are like the board of directors. They’re the ones who could actually fire him. And Richard and Amos hate each other the way only two Christians can. They shake hands and smile and say, ‘Brother, the Lord gave me a message to give to you,’ and then they very sweetly tell the other guy to go fuck himself. When Richard and I first started messing around, he used to make me swear to never tell anyone. He was always super paranoid about it. All that ‘This is our little secret’ shit, you know? It was Brother Amos. Brother Amos is the one he’s scared of. The wife and the deacon. It’s a one-two punch.”

  “Good,” I say. I let out a sigh. “That sounds good. I’m just so damn ready to get out of here. I can’t keep living with Momma and Tommy or I’m gonna slit my wrist.”

  “Well, don’t buy a razor just yet,” Gary says. “Richard’s got to pay us. What else can he do?”

  FOUR RICHARD WEATHERFORD

  By the time I make it home, the children are awake. The older kids are all doing their own thing. Mary is helping her mother prepare breakfast while Matthew reads the newspaper at the kitchen table. Mark is in the bathroom upstairs. Because of his challenges, it takes him a little longer than the others to do things. As he’s getting ready, I hear his slurred voice warbling along atonally to an Elvis gospel song.

  In the living room, the two little ones are arguing about something. I’ve barely closed the front door before Johnny and Ruth rush up and demand that I arbitrate their petty dispute.

  “I don’t . . . Not now, kids.”

  Johnny says, “But, Dad—”

  I grab his small chin and bend down to lock eyes with him. All my children know what this means. “Not now, Jonathan.”

  “Yes, sir,” he quivers. As I start toward the kitchen, I can hear his little sister, suddenly overcome with either guilt or compassion, tell him that they can both share whatever silly object they were fighting over. Without trying—in fact, by actively avoiding the argument altogether—I’ve resolved their quarrel.

  Penny turns to me from the kitchen sink. The sleeves of her charcoal jumper are pushed up to her elbows, and she’s washing orange rinds and eggshells down the garbage disposal. She asks, “Well, how’d it go?”

  “What?”

  Matthew puts down the paper. “How was Terry Baltimore? I wish you would have gotten me up. I would have liked to have gone with you.” Of my children, Matthew is the only one I’ve ever taken with me on visitations.

  “Visiting with Terry would be a trial by fire,” Mary tells him. She’s pretty, my Mary, with strawberry-blonde hair like her mother. She’s cut it quite short, though, and I don’t much care for it. I thought I might say something about it, but Penny cautioned me against it. She already knows you don’t like it, she said. How? I asked. Because you’ve mentioned it twice already since she’s been home, she said. But I didn’t say anything bad about it. I merely noted how short it was. Penny said, You noting it twice is like anyone else saying something bad about it. I don’t always defer to Penny’s wisdom about our children—mothers are somewhat overpraised for their intuition, I think—but I trust she knows more about Mary’s hair than I do.

  “So,” Penny says, “how did it go?”

  I raise my hands in a mock gesture of futility. For a brief and terrible moment, I realize that everyone is awaiting my reply, preemptive smiles queued on their lips because they know I’ll say something funny about Terry Baltimore. The terrible part of it is how counterfeit I feel at the sudden realization that I am about to tell all of these people I love a lie.

  I sigh. “He’s Terry Baltimore.”

  They all chuckle, a little let down, perhaps, because I didn’t say something about how Terry Baltimore is a trial put here by the Lord or how I’m still praying for a miracle. They all go back to what they were doing.

  Penny watches me as I begin to move toward the door. She asks, “Are you going to call your father? We’re nearly ready to eat.”

  I almost groan. I forgot about the phone call to my father. It’s an important tradition between us. My mother was always the interpersonal conduit of our family, so all information and affection between my father and myself passed through her. When she died, the year I turned thirty, my father and I lost our emotional translator. As a result, we have each retreated into our own lives. I have my family and my church. My father has his neighbors and a couple of old buddies from the Corps. The only exceptions to this shared silence are Easter and Christmas, when one of us calls the other and we go through the motions of catching up. Like bad Christians, we only show up on holidays, these phone calls our only rituals.

  “I’m going to go to my office to do the prayer list. I’ll call him later.�
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  I walk down the hall to my office and find Johnny sitting on the floor, his arms wrapped around his legs, brooding.

  “Johnny, I need the office.”

  He doesn’t respond, which is a pet peeve of mine.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He climbs to his feet and makes quite a show of slinking dejectedly out of the room. Clearly, the boy wants my attention, perhaps wanting to relitigate the earlier dispute with Ruth.

  I don’t have the time for such nonsense, though. I close the door behind him. I don’t have a lock on the door, nor do I need one. Everyone in the family knows not to come in when the door is closed. They know to knock only in case something requires my urgent attention. When the door is closed, it’s understood that I’m in consultation with the Lord.

  I descend to my knees and clasp my hands.

  Please, God . . .

  I’ve prayed for thousands of people in my life, maybe tens of thousands. People in need. People in pain. The sick. The dying. The saved and the unsaved. But now I try to pray for myself, and it’s as if I’ve never prayed before. I don’t know how to speak to God. Not about this. Of course, he already knows. He’s seen everything I’ve done. Which is exactly why I can’t talk to him about it, why I can ask for neither forgiveness nor help.

  I broke this, and now I have to fix this.

  If I don’t give this boy money, he’ll ruin me. That is the crisis I’m in.

  Would Penny forgive me? What if I told her before Gary could?

  My answer is a wave of nausea.

  I think of a night with Penny more than a year ago, months before I began to see Gary. Our physical coldness—my physical coldness—led to a fight late one night, to tears and hard words whispered so the children wouldn’t hear. Do we really have to talk about this? I asked. You haven’t touched me since I had Ruth, she said. Do you know how that makes me feel? Look, I said, men just get older. I’ve already given you five children. Penny shook her head. I’m not talking about making children, Richard. I need to know that I’m still attractive. I’m not some old woman. Am I supposed to go another forty years without sex? Am I supposed to go another forty years without feeling like someone wants me?

  I don’t know why I couldn’t simply give her the reassurances she wanted that night. I think I was afraid that she’d want me to prove my attraction to her. Instead, I became indignant, accusing her of thinking about sex in a worldly way. The next day, she apologized to me. She swallowed her own humiliation because she felt she’d hurt me, insulted my masculine pride. We haven’t returned to the subject—or touched each other—since.