Dry County

by Jake Hinkson

  “What are you talking about? I work hard for people. I visit the sick and elderly. I help people in times of crisis. I think all those folks would be shocked to hear that I don’t believe in compassion.”

  “No, you believe in duty. You help people because you think you’re supposed to. Like a garbage collector picking up the trash. You’re a man doing a job. There’s no real compassion in you, no empathy.”

  “Wow. I sound like a really awful person, Penny. Thank you for enlightening me.”

  She breathes through her nose. She closes her eyes. She says, “You don’t care about me, Richard.”

  “And now I don’t care about you.”

  “It’s not a new thing. It’s an old thing. Like I said, we got married because we thought it made sense. We had children because we thought it made sense.”

  “So, is that what this is? You’re rethinking our marriage now?”

  She rubs her nose. “I’ve rethought our marriage so many times.” She looks up at me. Her face has returned to its natural color. Her eyes are still a little pink, but they’re not full of tears anymore. “When I was young, I tried to be the wife you wanted me to be. When that didn’t work, I tried to make you the husband I wanted you to be. That didn’t work, either. So in the end, I guess I settled for raising the children the way I thought they should be raised, in a good home, in a good church.”

  “We brought them up right.”

  “We? Yes. You’re their father, and they love you.”

  “Oh, well, thank you for granting me that, at least. I’m relieved to hear that my children love me.”

  “Sometimes, I wish they didn’t.”

  “Penny . . .”

  “You let them come to you. You let them love you. You let them compete for your attention. And it works. They all love you, and they all want you to love them, to forgive them for the many sins you see in them.”

  That stops me. “Now you’re just being ugly,” I say. “Now you’re just being cruel.”

  “I’m being honest,” she says. “It’s the same thing as being cruel sometimes.”

  The way she says it makes me sick. The grandiosity, the sense of superiority. “Thank you for your honesty,” I say. “What do you want to do, get a divorce?”

  I intend these words as a jab, but in one terrible instant I am aware that part of me hopes she’ll answer yes.

  “Of course not,” she says, and when she says it, I’m filled with an even more terrible sense of relief. “Too many people believe in us. It’s not like Sandy and Gene. No one lost their faith because the Loomises got divorced. But there are too many people who need us to keep being Brother and Sister Weatherford. We don’t just have our children to think about; we have our church, the whole town in some ways . . . That’s the truly awful part.” She stops and shakes her head. “We’re too big to fail.”

  “Then what do you want?” I ask.

  She sighs. “For you to be honest.”

  “I am honest.”

  “Are you? We’ve been together a long time, Richard. I’ve given you a houseful of children so you could feel like a man. I’ve let you make fun of me in sermons so you could look like some kind of guy’s guy. I’ve toed the party line. And I’m not going anywhere. I’ll bury you, or you’ll bury me. One way or the other. But don’t stand there and tell me you went and saw Terry Baltimore this morning.”

  I stare at her.

  Downstairs, the front door opens and the children come in, laughing and loud, Johnny already seeking us out.

  “The kids are home,” I say.

  She shakes her head. “That’s it? ‘The kids are home.’ You’re going to hide behind the children?”

  “I have to go to church. It’s almost two, you know. I have Easter practice with the choir and the actors.”

  She rubs her face with both hands, checking for tears. “Two. Right. You need to go.”

  “And you, you have things to do up at the church this afternoon, right?”

  “Yes, one of my little meetings.”

  “Penny . . . My point is, we can talk about this later.”

  She stands up and crosses the room. “Of course.”

  I almost reach out for her, but I know that’s not what she wants. Instead, I step away from the door and tell her, “I love you, Penelope.”

  Her hand on the doorknob, she closes her eyes. “Do you know you haven’t told me that in years?” she says.

  “It’s true, though. I do.”

  She looks back at me with nothing eyes, and she nods, but I’m not sure exactly what she’s nodding at.

  Then she opens the door and walks downstairs to our children.

  PART TWO SATURDAY EVENING

  ELEVEN BRIAN HARTEN

  I’m sitting in Roxie’s car just up the road when the collector passes me on his way to Tommy’s Bar. His name is Frankie James. He has a brother named Jesse. Of course he does. His parents are fucking idiots. Frankie’s not really an idiot, though. He’s a pretty sharp guy. I need to keep that in mind while I try to get away with this.

  It’s about five, so he’s probably just coming in. This is about the time I used to get to work. Tommy will line Frankie out on some stuff, and then he’ll give him his marching orders for the night. Then Tommy will go home for a while and Frankie will take off to make the daily collections. I don’t know what route he’ll take, but he’ll have to hit at least three places around town: Tommy’s Other Bar, Tommy’s Car Wash, and Tommy’s Slices. Tommy also has a piece of Arkansas Integrity Lumber, but I don’t know if Frankie will do a collection there or not. When I was doing the collecting, I only collected from the lumberyard once in a blue moon. Most of the time, Tommy works out his cut with Hank Dobson over there and Hank cuts him a check.

  Everything else, though—the two bars, the pizza place, and the car wash—all operate on a cash-only basis. Frankie will make the collections, and then he’ll bring them back here. Tommy will come in later to do his creative accounting.

  I could follow Frankie, maybe jump him going back out to his car after his last collection and then knock him on the head, but that’s too risky. This ain’t the movies. I’m pretty sure if you hit a guy on the head, all you’ll do is hurt his head. Wearing a mask wouldn’t help, either, because Frankie knows me.

  Nope, I need to make a distraction up front, get everyone out there, then sneak in the back and grab the cash.

  Saturday night about six or seven o’clock is when the most money is in the cash office. Tommy always folds over Friday into Saturday. So, the cash office should have the Friday take from both bars, plus today’s take from the pizza place and the car wash. Put that all together, and I should have enough to pay off the preacher.

  Maybe.

  The parking lot is starting to fill up.

  My cell phone buzzes. Roxie. I let it go to the messages.

  I fire up Roxie’s car and pull away.

  I head over to Walmart to buy a gas can. One of the first jobs I ever had was working here. Hated it. Pushed carts. There’s a shit job for you. Of course, now they have a little machine that pushes the carts. They send out one guy with the machine, and he can clean the whole damn parking lot in ten minutes without breaking a sweat. Back in my day, though, they worked us like mules. They kept two of us out there sizzling on the asphalt for the whole eight-hour shift. It was even worse in the winter, breaking your back wrangling ten or fifteen carts in the snow, freezing your balls off while the manager stood in the doorway with his arms crossed. There was no getting ahead, either. In the time it took you to corral ten carts from a parking lot the size of a football field, twenty people had already walked through the front door.

  Story of my goddamn life.

  I walk in, and the place is as busy as ever. I wave to the girl at the Customer Service desk. I forget her name, but she comes into Tommy’s Bar a lot. I should remember her damn name, but I can’t. We never really talked.

  “Hey, Brian,” she says.

  I keep goin
g, but I stop after a few steps.

  She knows my name. Of course she does. Every third person here knows me. Everyone’s going to remember seeing me.

  Shit.

  I spin around and hurry back toward the door. The girl behind the counter says, “Well, that didn’t take long.”

  “Forgot my wallet,” I say, and keep walking.

  Roxie calls again. I shut off the phone.

  I stop at a Citgo and buy a two-liter of Mountain Dew. Then I get out of Morrilton and drive for a while just to put some space between me and town. Don’t want to make conversation with anybody I know. Once I’m out where there’s nothing but blacktop and trees, I swing over the side of the road and empty the bottle in the grass.

  I drive all the way over to Birdtown, to a single-pump gas station out in the middle of nowhere. The station itself is just a clapboard shack run by a little old lady who’s been sitting behind the register since they discovered gas.

  I go inside to pay. The old lady’s got a horse face, and she gives me a creaky smile with a mess of long, skinny teeth.

  “Howdy.”

  “Howdy.” I hand her five bucks. “Five.”

  “Boy,” she says, “five dollars sure don’t get you much these days.”

  “Nope.”

  “First gallon of gas I ever sold cost fifty-eight cents. You believe that?”

  “Hard to imagine now, ain’t it?”

  “Sure is.”

  “All right, now, you have a good one.”

  “You, too.”

  I walk out to the pump, but I keep an eye on the old lady through the front window. She’s not paying me much mind. She’s gone back to staring at the cigarettes and candy.

  I unholster the gas nozzle and pull out the plastic bottle, but then I realize the goddamn spout on the bottle is too small. Gas will go everywhere.

  I pull out my pocket knife and cut the neck off the plastic bottle. Then I slip the nozzle into the new hole and pull the trigger and gas shoots in, filling it up double quick. It overflows on my hands.

  God-fucking-damnit.

  I stick the nozzle in the car and put in the rest of my five bucks. Roxie is going to give me hell, so much hell, for keeping her car out like this. Be lucky if she doesn’t call the cops on me. Wouldn’t that be the shit? She calls the cops and they pull me over while I’ve driving around with half a Molotov cocktail in the front seat.

  I get in, balance the jug between my knees, but the fucking thing slops all over me before I can get it situated.

  Pull out of the lot. Slow. My crotch smells like gas. Christ.

  Just down the road, I pull over, open the door, dump out half the gas. I don’t need the whole damn jug. Just need enough.

  Back at Tommy’s Bar, I don’t see Frankie’s car or Tommy’s truck, so I drive on by and pull off the road behind a rotted-out barn to wait.

  Not sure why they don’t knock down these old barns. All over this state, there are barns rotting on the side of the road. Warped gray boards and rusted tin roofs. Depressing. Barn like this, I always think about the farmer who used to own it, twenty, thirty years ago. Hell, maybe more. Maybe back in the Great Depression. At any rate, it was somebody’s dream at some point. Out here working his ass off. Then what happened? Ran out of cash, maybe. Or the bankers fucked him. Or maybe he just got old and died.

  Now, there’s a depressing thought. Either he was a failure and his barn is rotting on the side of the road, or he was a success and his barn is rotting on the side of the road.

  Cars keep pulling into Tommy’s parking lot. It’s what? A little after six now. He does good business. Always has.

  I punch the dashboard. What kind of sense does it make that a fucker like Tommy—a guy who’s nothing special on his best day—gets to have everything fall into place for him? In high school, the dumb fuck never opened a book. It’s not like he studied or worked hard. Even with baseball, he never really trained. I mean, not any more than anyone else. He’s just one of those guys who seems to catch every green light.

  Well, not tonight, Tommy.

  I can see Frankie pull into the parking lot. He gets out of his car with a limp backpack over one shoulder. The backpack is mostly empty, but at the bottom of it, I know, is a little pile of money.

  It won’t get dark soon enough. I’ll have to go down there while it’s still light out.

  There’s an old Walmart bag mixed in with the garbage on Roxie’s floorboards. I stuff it in my pocket. I grab the bottle and get out and stand there by the car. Look around. Nothing but trees and dirt. I take off through the trees. My heart is beating so bad my ears start ringing. I take some deep breaths, keep moving.

  No choice at this point. No option. This is what’s going to happen.

  Behind Tommy’s, the ground slopes, so I go down into a little damp gully back there and watch things. The back door is propped open like usual to help ventilate the kitchen. Tommy’s got a couple of Mexicans back there doing nothing but dropping onion rings and tater tots into crackling grease for hours on end, and the kitchen gets hotter than hell.

  I creep down the gully and take a look at the front parking lot. Maybe seven or eight cars, which is pretty normal this early in the evening. No smokers outside. No one by their cars.

  I take a deep breath and hurry up the hill, keeping one eye on the door. I pour the gas on the legs of the statue, splash some up on Tommy’s fake bronze balls. Then I take out my lighter and fire it up.

  I scorch my hand, but then the statue goes up in flames. Just like that, like the thing is fucking Burning Man.

  I take off running to the woods, and I’m almost to the trees before I remember that my crotch is soaked in gasoline. I duck behind a tree and check myself. Luckily, no fire in my pants.

  Black smoke is coming off Tommy’s statue now, drifting out over the trees. I ditch the bottle and start creeping back up the gully when I hear the front door of the bar open. Someone yells. Once I’m out of eyeshot of the front door, I run up the hill to the side of the building. Inside, there’s a ruckus, chairs scraping against the floor, yelling, cussing. I keep low by the windows as I run around to the back door and peek inside. I can see up the hall, through the window on the Employees Only door, across the bar, and to the front. Everyone is heading outside.

  I’m through the back door to Tommy’s office door. It’s locked, but I unlock it with my spare key. I shouldn’t have a spare, of course, but I do. I guess that makes me a bad person.

  The office is empty. Cash on the desk. Cash in the open safe. Backpack on one chair.

  I sweep the cash off the desk into my bag. Then I run over to the safe, pull out all I can, and throw it in the bag.

  Then I’m to the door. I crack it. Down the hall, someone runs out of the janitor’s closet slopping water as they hustle the mop bucket to the front.

  I’m out the back. Across the empty back lot. Up the hill. Through the woods.

  I’m running so hard my lungs are on fire. I can smell the smoke from here, can hear the yelling. I look back, but I can’t see anything through the trees. Which is a good thing. If I can’t see them, it means they probably can’t see me. Frankie James won’t stand out there cussing at Tommy’s burning statue for too long before he thinks to go check on the money he left in the office.

  I get to the road, see the old barn. I make sure no one is coming and dash across the blacktop and jump in the car.

  I don’t tear out, though. I ease out, heading down the road, away from the bar, like a man out for a drive.

  TWELVE RICHARD WEATHERFORD

  As we’re wrapping up the run through of the Passion Play, Mabel Lardner approaches me and draws my attention to the cross, where Cody Crawford is taking a selfie.

  We’ve been doing the Passion Play for as long as I’ve been pastor of this church, and in every production, Cody has portrayed the Lord because he’s the only man in the congregation with long hair and a beard. Despite having been divorced, Cody’s the natural casting choi
ce, and as a result, I have ignored occasional whispers about his drinking. He’s a good man and a faithful member of the flock, and since he’s willing to put on a loincloth and climb up on the cross every Easter, I try to cut him some slack.

  But I can’t have him taking a selfie.

  Mabel asks me, “Is that boy up there taking a photograph of himself?” She’s a squat, onion-shaped old woman, clutching her hands together in front of her as if she’s afraid she’ll split apart.

  “I think he might be,” I say.

  “I don’t think that’s proper, do you?”

  “I’ll go talk to him.”

  “I doubt our Lord felt photogenic at Calvary,” Mabel notes helpfully. “Perhaps you should tell Cody to consider that.”

  “I . . . will. Thank you, Miss Mabel.”

  As I’m walking over to Cody, Penny passes through the sanctuary with a couple of her Ladies’ Auxiliary acolytes in tow. She’s dispensing final orders about the proper cleaning of the Easter costumes. She sees me but says nothing.

  I wave at Cody. “Hey, Cody.”

  “Hey, Preacher,” he says. “We done?”

  “Yeah. Good job. Thanks so much for playing the Lord again this year.”

  “Heck, I’m just happy I can help out.”

  Dripping fake blood and real sweat, he climbs down from the cross. He’s put on a few pounds since last Easter, and he’s sporting a bit of a belly. I may have to talk to him about that next year, maybe ask him to diet. I don’t relish that conversation.

  The ladies are packing up their purses and notebooks and music sheets, and I speak softly so that they might not hear what I’m saying.

  “Cody, can I ask you, were you taking a selfie just now?”

  He smiles and nods and pulls the cell phone out of his loincloth. “Yeah, I posted it to Facebook.”

  “Yeah . . . the thing is, I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “Oh. Really?”

  “Yeah, I just don’t think it would be appropriate to have a selfie of you dressed as our Lord and Savior. It might be seen as rather flippant.”