by Jake Hinkson
“I don’t know how to answer that.”
“How about you give it a shot?”
“I needed it.”
“Why?”
“That’s none of your business.”
He shakes his head. “You made it my business when you sent this dumb-ass to my place to steal my money. Harten here burned down my statue.” He points the bat at me. “That means you burned down my statue, and since this shithead ain’t got no money, you’re going to reimburse me.”
“Okay,” I say. “How much is that? How much do I owe you?”
“Five thousand dollars.”
“Five thousand?”
“There’s no way your stupid statue cost that much,” Brian says.
Weller turns and points the bat down at Brian. Standing next to the front pew, just outside the glow of the spotlight hitting the stage, Brian looks pale and indistinct in the penumbra. Weller tells me, “You two guys owe me five thousand dollars. That’s what I want.”
Brian looks at me, scared.
I’m trying to think of how to answer him when Weller suddenly walks down the steps.
He stops beside Brian. Looking around, taking in the large sanctuary, with the high cathedral ceiling and the rows of pews, he says, “You know, all I got to do is tell people the truth when they ask what happened today. Brian Harten torched my statue and robbed my safe because the preacher put him up to it. And you know what everybody, including the cops, is gonna want to know? They’re gonna want to know why Reverend Richard Weatherford, of all people, needed twenty grand so bad he’d enter into a criminal conspiracy to commit arson and robbery to get it.” Weller turns to Brian and tells him, “I guess the preacher won’t be throwing the dry vote your way, after all, Harten. All he talked you into was some jail time.”
With that, Weller walks down the aisle and into the darkness, his shoes scratching against the carpet.
I hurry down the steps, past Brian, his face gone white and blank. “Mr. Weller?” I call out. “Tommy, wait. Let’s talk about this.”
I follow him into the foyer, a well of orange light shining in from the parking lot lamps. Our footsteps clack on the cheap linoleum.
“Please, wait, Tommy.”
He reaches for the glass doors.
I grab his arm and pull him back. “Just wait a second and hear what—”
He yanks his arm away and raises the bat.
Palms raised, I circle around him and block the front door. My body is hot, and the glass is cool against my back.
“What are you doing?” he says. “Get out of the way.”
“I can get you the five thousand.”
“Price has gone up.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Five thousand was the back-there price,” he says. “Now we’re at the ‘I’m about to walk out the door’ price.”
“Which is what?”
“Why don’t you tell me? But you better make it goddamn amazing because I’m about to walk out this door and get in my truck.”
“Look, I don’t have a lot of money laying around. But I do have a lot of money coming through this place every week. I could set some aside for you. I’m talking about a week-in and week-out, fifty-two-weeks-a-year revenue stream. Just take one minute and really think about that.”
He doesn’t say anything, so I keep going, scrambling for words, for ideas, to pull him in.
“There are other things besides the collection plate . . . The building fund, for instance. You’re part owner of Arkansas Integrity Lumber, right? Right? So I talk the church into doing an addition, with Arkansas Integrity as our materials supplier. Plus, I could sweeten that deal for you, too, shave a piece off the top of the building fund for you? And what else? Events. Your pizza place is the new exclusive supplier of all our youth events from here on out. That’s every Wednesday night and Sunday night . . .”
He laughs at the pizza thing, which is good, because at least I’ve got him talking to me.
“You bribing me with pizza money?”
“Here’s what I’m saying. I’m saying you take a piece of the offering plate every Sunday. You take a piece of the youth group event fund every week. You take a piece of the building fund. You’re pretty much part owner of the church at that point. That’s for-sure money. Suing me? That’s maybe money. Maybe you get it, maybe you don’t, but it’s less money and more hassle. And trashing my name around town? That won’t put a single dollar in your pocket. But you do it my way, then you get a piece of everything this church does week-in and week-out for years to come. Are you really gonna walk out the door and leave all that money sitting here? Over a statue?”
Weller props the bat on his shoulder like a ballplayer casually taking in a view of the field before the game.
“How much does the church collect in a given week?” he asks.
“It depends on the time of year. After Easter and Christmas, there’s always a spike.”
Brian walks up behind Weller.
“You stick around,” Weller tells him. “I ain’t done with you yet.”
Brian says nothing to that. Instead, he reaches out and pulls the gun from Weller’s holster, points it at his back, and squeezes the trigger.
When the gun claps, we all jump. Weller drops the bat, and it rolls to my feet. He slips to one knee on the linoleum, the back of his shirt spotted black in the orange light. As he struggles to get up, he looks at me, cursing, his eyes as round as election buttons.
Brian holds a hand to one ear, and I realize that my own ears are ringing. He stares at Weller, down on one knee, like he’s watching a child have an operation.
“Oh, Jesus,” he says. “Tommy . . .”
“What the fuck, Brian,” Tommy spits out with the last of his bluster. He feels his chest. There’s no bullet hole. He tries to reach his back where the pain and blood is, but he can’t. “What the fuck,” he says again, but this time more in fear than anger. He looks at me. “Help me up.”
I stare at him.
He’s wobbly, feeling his chest as if he’s having trouble breathing.
“Help me up, goddamn it,” he says again, his rough voice cracking. Trying to sound reasonable, he says, “C’mon, now. I’ve been shot. We need to get me some help. Help me, now.” He grabs my arm.
I look at Brian. “What did you do?”
His face is ashen and wet at the same time. He puts a hand to his forehead. “Jesus Christ. Jesus fucking Christ.”
Weller gulps a breath and pulls at my arm. His thick, heavy hand is shaking and wet. “We need to call somebody.” Then, realizing that he can do it himself, he reaches to his pocket for his cell phone.
“Tommy, stop,” Brian says. He steps over to us and picks up the bat at my feet.
“Brian,” I say.
Tommy Weller grabs my arm again, but I pull away from him and back up to the wall.
Weller fumbles for his phone, but Brian hits him in the face with the bat. I press harder against the wall. Weller falls over, crying and covering his head. Brian makes an ugly yelp, like he’s just burned himself, and he swings the bat over his head like an ax, knocking a hole in the drop ceiling panel, and chops Weller on the back of the neck. Weller cries out, trying to cover his neck. Brian stops and stares at him, dust from the ceiling floating down on all of us, and then he takes a breath and grits his teeth and steps back into a swing, and this time he hammers a dent into the top of Weller’s skull.
Lowering the bloody bat to his side, Brian just stares at him. We both do.
Weller reaches for his head—gently, slowly—but he’s disoriented. He touches the cheap checkered linoleum instead. He caresses it with his fingertips.
TWENTY-THREE BRIAN HARTEN
Me and the preacher don’t say a fucking word to each other. We just listen to Tommy breathe, and we stare at the gash in his skull. It looks like there’s a bloody mouth that suddenly opened in the middle of his hair. I bend over and look at his eyes. Nothing. He takes a breath. I wait fo
r him to let it out, but he doesn’t.
My own heart is thumping. My ears are ringing. “Oh, Jesus.” My eyes tear up, but Tommy’s just stare out at nothing.
The preacher is looking at me, at the bat in my hand.
“I had to,” I say. My voice cracks when I say it.
The preacher turns around and looks out the glass double doors of the church, at the little grassy slope between the empty parking lot and US-65.
That’s when I realize I can see the highway from where I’m standing.
I didn’t think. I didn’t think about that at all.
I say, “No one drove past, right?”
The preacher stares out there without blinking. Then he shakes his head.
I drop the bat against Tommy.
The preacher’s face is piss orange in the lamplight. I realize he’s breathing harder than I am.
I wave at the doors. “Can people see in here?”
“I don’t . . . I don’t think so.” He turns and looks at the doors. “Oh, God.”
“You sure about that? Think. If anybody did drive past, could they see in here from the road?”
“I—I don’t think so. At night, you can’t see anything but the glare of the lights.”
“Okay,” I say. “Okay. Lock the doors.” I wipe my tears away and bend down to grab Tommy’s feet.
“What?”
“The doors, lock the doors.”
He looks at them. He looks back at me. I think he’s going to say something, but instead he steps over to the doors and locks them.
I take a deep breath. “We got to move him,” I say.
The preacher looks at Tommy, the walls, the hole in the ceiling, the floor. He shuts his eyes. When he opens them, he says, “Let’s get out of the way of the doors. Just in case.”
I nod and take hold of Tommy’s ankles. They’re hairy and still wet with sweat. There’s a men’s room on one side of the foyer and a ladies’ room on the other. I drag Tommy toward the ladies’ room, smearing black blood across the floor. When I drop the feet, Tommy’s lungs let go of his last breath. We both stop and stare at him until we’re sure the fucker’s not going to start moving.
My hands are slick with Tommy’s sweat, and my gut feels like it’s boiling. I try to think about what we should do next, but I can’t think about anything except Tommy’s sweat starting to dry on my palms.
The preacher says, “We need something to wrap him in, to contain the blood. We need to move him, but we need to wrap his head and chest, at least.”
“Yeah . . .”
He says, “There’s a clothes closet. Donations for the needy. We can get some of that and wrap him.” He points at the big church hall. “It’s through the sanctuary and—”
“You go get it,” I say.
“You want to stay with the body?”
I don’t want to stay with Tommy. And I don’t want to be here alone if somebody with a key drives up.
“Where is it?” I say.
“Go through the sanctuary, go through the big double doors to the right of the stage. Go down the hall until you come to another set of double doors, go through those. The storage room is the first door on the right. Says ‘Samaritan’s Closet.’”
“What?”
“‘Samaritan’s Closet.’ First door on the right.”
I start to leave, but I stop at the door. “You . . . ain’t gonna run off and leave me with a dead body, are you?”
“No. Are you?”
“No.”
“Good. Do I look panicked to you, Brian?”
Actually, he doesn’t, not anymore. He looks like the same guy who’s been kicking my ass at county board meetings for the last few months.
“No.”
“Then go get the clothes. I don’t think there are towels, but there will be sweaters and shirts, things like that. Get something to wrap around his head and put over his back. Hurry now.”
I hurry through the big church hall. It’s spooky, quiet and dark, with the spotlight hitting the stage next to a big cross. I’m walking up the aisle in the dark— i was eight years old, my mom was sick and my aunt took me to this church to pray for her, and i prayed, and the old preacher said step out from the aisle if you want to be saved from hell, and i stepped out and walked up here and asked him to pray for me and my mom, and he said he would, but he said do you want to be saved, and i asked do i need to, and he said yes but not today, today i can just pray for you and your momma, and i said thank you— and I get to the double doors and go through. The place is dark, but since some of the windows are visible from the highway, I don’t want to turn on any lights. I take out my cell. The cracked screen still glows, and I use the light to creep down the hallway. Crooked shadows bounce over the walls with every step I take.
The office door on the left reads, “Richard Weatherford, Senior Pastor.” Door on the right reads, “Prayer Room.” Then a men’s restroom. Drinking fountain. Women’s restroom. Farther down, a door on the left reads, “Church Secretary.” Taped to the wall is a poster of a baby sleeping in an American flag slung from a cross. Then a door that reads, “Dustin Fields, Youth Pastor.”
I come to some double doors. Aluminum with little windows. I peek through and see another long creepy hallway. I open one of the doors. On the right is a wooden door with a plate that reads, SAMARITAN’S CLOSET.
I open it up. It’s a closet with big plastic storage tubs sitting on shelves with labels scribbled in Sharpie on pieces of masking tape. Boys Shirts, Girls Shirts, Boys Pants, Girls Pants, Baby Clothes. There’s a bunch of them. I find one marked Sweaters and pull out a couple of neatly folded sweaters. In a tub marked Misc, I find a black housecoat with no belt.
I get my stack of stuff and hurry back through the double doors, and I’m a couple of steps down the hall when they slam shut behind me. I yelp like a dog and drop the phone. It lands facedown, and I have to get on the carpet on my knees and feel around for it in the dark. When I find it, I swing the light back at the door. I just stare at it until I’m sure nothing else is going to happen.
TWENTY-FOUR RICHARD WEATHERFORD
There was a moment—I saw it in his eyes—when he realized that we were going to kill him. Tommy looked up at me, and his eyes clearly asked me, Are you going to let this happen? And I know he saw Yes on my face. Before that moment, it never occurred to him that Brian and I valued our circumstances more than we valued his life.
It never occurred to me, either.
Now, the reality of the peril I’m in has scrubbed my mind clean. I’m aware of what must happen next, and I’m aware of the danger that this corpse poses to me. The prospect of discovery sends an electrical charge across my flesh and clarifies my thinking. I’m scared, but I’m not panicked. I know, with simple clarity, that these are the most dangerous hours I have ever lived.
Perspiration covers me like a new layer of skin. My body is manifest. My breath and my bowels and my blood. I am alive. Despite the danger I’m in—no, because of it—I’ve never felt my own living so intensely. I’ve always thought of the body as a humiliating trap of disease and pain, but now at last, at last, I realize that I am nothing but a body.
My senses are raised. I’m overwhelmed by the odors of cleaning agents and blood and sweat. The silence of the church is punctuated by my own breathing and the whispers and creaks of the building itself.
Until this moment, I have lived my life in the future, in dreams and fears and hopes and anxieties. I’ve lived in preparation for tomorrow, and for next year, and for eternity itself.
Standing over this dead man, however, I realize how wrong I’ve been.
I stare at his curled hand, and then at my own hand.
We are meat for the slaughterhouse floor.
TWENTY-FIVE BRIAN HARTEN
He’s standing right where I left him, and he’s staring at his hand like a fucking idiot.
And there’s Tommy dead on the floor—tommy at the bar cracking peanuts with one hand dropping the shells
with his pinkie and flicking the nuts in his mouth with his thumb, tommy laughing so hard he wipes tears away—and I have to piss so bad. The door of the ladies’ room is open, and I drop the clothes and push through it and barely get my dick out in time. The piss runs out of me, and I’m light-headed.
When I flush and come out of the bathroom, the preacher’s leaning over Tommy, wrapping the robe around his torso.
“I don’t know, man,” I say.
He yanks at the robe. “There was no belt for this robe?”
“No.”
“That’s too bad. It would help to secure it around him.”
“I said I don’t know about this, man.”
“What don’t you know?”
“About this. I fucking killed him. I fucking killed Tommy. I mean . . .”
He nods like he’s heard this before, like it’s all a part of being a preacher. “You stepped away for a few minutes,” he explains, “occupying your mind and your attention with a task. Now that you’ve stepped back into this room, you’re shocked by the reality of it all. That’s understandable. But nothing’s changed from the moment you stepped out of the room. It hasn’t gotten better, and it hasn’t gotten worse. Nothing’s changed. We still have to deal with it.”
He pulls a T-shirt from the pile and wraps it around Tommy’s head like a bag, tying the bottom. He stares at it a second, stands up and goes into the bathroom, opens the little cabinet door under the sink, and fishes out a box of small plastic trash bags. He walks back over to Tommy, kneels, and using a couple of bags as gloves, starts to slip a third bag over Tommy’s wrapped head.
Seeing his head all wrapped that way, I can’t breathe. I have to gasp for air.
The preacher glances up at me and nods to himself. His voice is calm. “Don’t look at this. Look at the wall. Good. Take a breath. Maybe you’d feel better if we discussed our plan.”
I catch a breath and let go of it slowly. Then I say, “We don’t have a plan.”
“Well, then, let’s develop a plan.”
“What do we do, man? I don’t know . . .”