by Jake Hinkson
“What if I get pregnant?” she said.
That certainly had never occurred to me. I didn’t know a lot about that kind of thing. “Can’t you take pills?”
She looked at me like I was crazy. “Where am I going to go to get birth control?” she said. “Why don’t we just put a commercial on channel eleven?”
“There’s no reason to be sarcastic,” I said. “What about condoms? I could drive up to Black Bear and get some at Wal-Mart.”
She asked, “They sell condoms at Wal-Mart?”
“Of course they do.”
She chewed the inside of her cheek. “How do you know?”
I stared at her. “I’ve seen them there,” I said. “I saw them one time in the pharmacy area.”
She nodded, and I moved closer to her and took her hand. “I told you,” I said, “there’s only been you. There’s only you, always.”
I leaned forward to kiss her, but she pulled away.
“Please, baby,” I said. “You’re all I think about.”
She stood up. “You think you’re not all I think about?” she asked. “I can’t read or watch TV. All I can do anymore is think about you. But it’s all…happening so fast. It’s happening really, really fast for me.”
“I know,” I said. I went to her and put my hands on her shoulders. “You’re my wife. I can wait for you.”
She grinned. “I should go,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“Are you mad at me for not having sex with you?”
“No,” I lied. “I just love you and want to express it to you. I don’t take that lightly.”
She said, “I don’t either.”
“Well,” I said.
She sighed and kissed me. “You know I love you,” she said. “I’m desperately in love with you. I cry at night thinking about you.”
“Then make love to me,” I said.
She smiled and hugged me, hugged me for a long time like a little girl. Then she said, “Let’s make love.”
Chapter Seven
Enter the villain.
The villain of the sad story of my miserable life is not, as I once thought, Oscar. Oscar, that little shit, would come back to haunt me later, but at the time he was simply the first brief obstacle I had to overcome. The swiftness with which I did away with Angela’s love for him only confirmed that she was meant for me. The villain is not even Brother Card, who was a far more formidable opponent but was also, in the final analysis, a goddamn fool. No, the villain would turn out to be Timothy “Doolittle” Norris, the sheriff of our county.
I met him the night of our Valentine’s Day banquet. The banquet was a tradition at Higher Living Baptist Church. It had been designed by some youth minister in years past as an alternative to more worldly get-togethers (read: get-togethers in which the kids might end up exchanging fluids). It was a lame event, to be sure. Essentially, it was a normal youth meeting with pink tinsel taped to the walls, a bowl of red punch and a couple of baskets of candy hearts. Our church had held onto the old Baptist belief—now defunct in many Baptist churches—that dancing was wrong, so instead we played some contemporary Christian pop music very low on a little jam box and the kids milled around and tried not to think about sex.
Everything was going well for me, and not just in the area of Angela. The youth group, much to my surprise, was growing. We’d acquired several new kids into the fold (which did not include Oscar, who had not come back), and I’d even baptized a few.
The night of the banquet we had a good turnout. I was sitting in a corner listening to some saucer-eyed anorexic prattle on about her SAT scores, when Nick Hargrove, the youngest of our deacons, that “bright young man” Sister Card had introduced me to, brought over a burly, bowlegged man to meet me.
“Brother,” Nick said, “this is Doolittle Norris.”
“Good to know you,” Norris said, extending his hand. His flushed cheeks and silver hair gave him a friendly, good old boy vibe, but he pretty well crushed my fingers. “I hear good things about your youth group.”
“Thank you,” I said. I had not heard good things about his sheriffing, but I didn’t mention it. He’d narrowly won reelection the year before, and the gossip around church said his family supplied most of the county’s marijuana and meth. I must have looked surprised to see him because he told me:
“My boy Tim is seeing one of the girls in your group. Figured I’d come check it out. Do a little, you know, hands-on parenting for a change.”
Ah, I thought. I looked over and saw Tim, a quiet kid with droopy lips and jumbled teeth, sitting with a scrawny little brunette named Arial. Interestingly, my impressions of him had been that he was a very nice kid.
Doolittle Norris told me, “He likes it here a lot.” He smiled when he said it, and I couldn’t tell if he was making fun of me or his son.
“Do you attend church anywhere?” I asked pleasantly.
He smiled at—not with, but at—Nick. “Naw. Never had much use for it to be honest.” Nick winced like he had an upset stomach, and Doolittle Norris jerked his head at the young deacon. “You know Nick here is my brother-in-law? Married my little sister. He kinda rescued Lacey from staying a Norris all her life.”
“It’s not that,” Nick began. “Lacey still—”
“Don’t matter,” Doolittle Norris said, waving it off. He told me, “Nick and my sister don’t much like it, the way I think about things. Some folks are into having people tell them what’s right and wrong, and some ain’t. I just never was.”
“Yet you’re the sheriff,” Nick countered.
Norris shrugged. “Job’s a job. Man’s gotta eat.” He looked at me. “Ain’t that right, preacher?”
I started to stammer, but Nick jumped in before I could get a word out.
“I don’t get your point,” he said. “There’s still a right and a wrong, and that right and wrong is set up by a god that is going to hold us accountable.”
Norris shrugged again just to piss off Nick. “Ah, nobody knows what God thinks. I figure if God has anything he wants to say to me, he can go ahead and say it.”
“Maybe he already did, in the Bible,” Nick shot back. He rocked on his feet, hands at his sides. Nick liked to argue with people, and I could tell that unlike a lot of people—me for instance—he wasn’t afraid of Doolittle Norris.
Norris laughed and swatted that away like Nick had asked him to dance. “You go on ahead and believe that if you want to, but I don’t have time for it.”
Nick’s thick eyebrows were bunched together like they itched. “I can’t believe you’d say these kinds of things in the Lord’s house.”
Norris laughed. “You want I should come in here and stoop and bow like a damn hypocrite? You think God would prefer me to lie?” He looked at me and smiled. “Sorry if that offends you, preacher.” He seemed to be laughing at me when he said it.
Nick shook his head. He glanced around the room, already too irritated to have a civil conversation with his brother-in-law. I saw my chance to make some points with him by picking up the argument.
“I can’t agree with you, of course,” I told the sheriff. “The word of the Lord is as relevant today as it ever was, but you’re honest and I admire your honesty. We’ll be praying for you.”
He chuckled, slipping his thick hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Well, you do that.” He seemed amused by the entire conversation and jerked his head in the direction of his son. “Tim seems to like it here, and I guess it keeps him out of trouble.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” I said.
As I was speaking, Angela came in with the pudding sisters and looked over the banquet table. Someone had baked a chocolate cake and the girls began cutting off pieces from it. She didn’t glance my way.
“Ain’t that the preacher’s daughter?” Doolittle Norris asked me.
“Yes,” I said.
“Tim and her were sweethearts wh
en they were in kindergarten.”
Amazingly enough, this information made me jealous. I was destined, I suppose, to hate every man or boy who had ever spoken to her.
“That’s funny,” I said.
He smiled. His eyes were the color of polished steel, and they locked on me with a cold intensity. “She’s got kinda big since then,” he said, “but I guess you don’t mind.”
I stared back at him for a long difficult moment. Nick was oblivious to what was going on, and Doolittle Norris just smiled at me. I recovered myself and simply shrugged.
The sheriff said, “Well, I should be heading out, I guess.”
Nick piped up, “Not yet, I hope. You’ll miss what the youth minister here is telling your son every Wednesday.”
The sheriff jeered, “I’m sure it’s exciting stuff, but I got to go serve and protect. Y’all have a good evening.” With that, he moseyed over to his son and announced he was leaving. The scrawny boy nodded, and Norris moseyed out the door.
Nick sighed and brushed some lint off his red polo shirt. “Well,” he said, “that was Doolittle.”
“Your family,” I said.
He snorted. “Barely. Lacey barely speaks to them anymore.”
“Why?”
Nick jerked his head in the empty space Doolittle Norris had occupied. “You can see for yourself. And Doolittle is, in some ways, just the tip of the iceberg.”
“Really?”
He closed his eyes. “His mother…”
“Mrs. Norris, I presume.”
Nick looked at me. “Mrs. Norris indeed. I don’t want to be… Look, I don’t want to be unchristian about it. I would never say that anyone was beyond God’s reach. But Mrs. Bertie Mae Norris, is…the only completely evil person I’ve ever met.”
“That’s incredible. Lacey is so sweet.”
“And she’s as different from her mother as the sun is from the moon. Lacey’s a woman full of the Holy Ghost and she’s a beautiful soul.” Nick cocked his head and grinned sadly. “But she’s had to struggle to overcome her past. The same way a lot of us have.”
“Including you?”
Nick looked around the room like he hadn’t heard the question. Finally he said, “My dad was…” And he let it die.
“I didn’t know that about your father,” I said. “I wouldn’t have guessed it.”
Nick’s face pinched up soberly. “Oh yes. My old man was a piece of work. Alcohol and women. Never home. It’s like he studied to be the classic example of a bad father. The only good thing he ever did was leave my mother and me when I was about twelve. Years later, when I met Lacey’s mother, I recognized the type.” He waved his hand. “Sort of. My father was terrible at being my father, but Bertie Mae is…bad. The whole family is bad news.”
“They’re a legend around here,” I said.
“They should be,” he said. “It’s like the Arkansas mafia or something. Word is, they control most of the meth labs in the Ozarks. They cook it up there and ship it down here. That’s the rumor, anyway. I have no firsthand knowledge of that, of course, but the family is certainly involved in criminal enterprise and has been for years.”
“How’s Lacey feel about it?”
He shrugged. I could tell he didn’t like going into those kinds of places. Nick was Mr. Get Things Done. He didn’t like this kind of talk.
“Just keep praying,” I finally said.
“Absolutely. And let it go after that.” He clapped his hands. “I think I’ll go get some punch.”
After he’d gone off, I milled around talking to parents and kids, watching different kids pairing up, watching Angela and her friends giggling like fools in the corner. I rarely spoke to her in public anymore and she rarely spoke to me, although when we were forced into a situation where we had to talk in public she was as cool as a spy about it. This, of course, filled me with desire. A few times that night we met eyes across the room and smiled and then dropped it. I knew we had to be careful in public. Doolittle Norris had shaken me a bit with his insinuations.
The banquet wound down with a mass exit of kids and parents at nine-thirty. Angela and her friends looked ready to drift out a little later, so I went up to them.
“You all leaving?” I asked.
Angela nodded and smiled. “Yeah. We’re going over to Mary’s to watch movies.” She was dressed very proper that night, with moderate make-up on, her hair back in a ponytail, gray sweater and knee-length skirt.
“Sounds like fun.”
They all smiled and nodded as they inched toward the door. Angela narrowed her eyes a little as if to say, Don’t be obvious. Don’t embarrass me. I knew then for sure that the pudding sisters didn’t know anything about our late nights.
“Well, have fun,” I said.
One by one, the other families collected themselves and left until I was alone in the church. The ladies had done the dishes and the men had folded up the chairs, so all I had to do was go through the building, turn off all the lights and lock up for the night.
It took me longer than usual to lock up the building, but when I stepped outside I was surprised to see a truck idling beside my car in the otherwise empty parking lot.
The driver’s side window of the truck rolled down and there was Doolittle Norris with a cheek swollen with tobacco, a spit-cup on the dash. A book on tape played loudly: something about the invasion of Normandy.
“Hello,” I said, with an unmistakable quiver in my voice.
“Howdy, Brother Webb,” he said. “You ready to talk about the preacher’s daughter?”
Chapter Eight
Doolittle Norris was smiling, smiling like a villain, glorying in my squirming.
“What do you mean?” I asked. Might as well fight it for a little while.
“Climb in,” he said, nodding at the passenger side. The book on tape droned on about giant waves sweeping men into the sea.
“It’s a little late for me,” I said.
He shrugged. “It ain’t so late. I bet you Mister Brother Card is still up.” He took the cup off the dash and spit and scratched his nose.
“He probably is,” I said.
“Then get in and let’s you and me chew the fat for a little while.”
My scalp itched and my back felt chilled, but I walked around the truck and climbed in. It was a huge tank of a thing, with a dashboard full of lights and a long bench seat. It felt as if he and I were in different time zones. Norris slid the spit cup into a plastic holder by his knees and backed the truck out. Then he gunned it to the edge of the parking lot, let some cars pass, and flew out the opposite direction toward Fenton Road. There was a little American flag on his radio antenna fluttering sharply in the wind. We sped past gas stations and houses and long, lonely stretches of trees, and all the while the man on the tape talked about American soldiers being gunned down before they even got to the beach.
“Could we turn that off?” I asked.
Norris shrugged and turned it off. When he reached over to hit the button on the tape player I noticed for the first time there was now a gun clipped to his belt. He noticed me notice it and smiled.
“Last line of defense between me and the bad guys,” he said.
“What’s the first line?”
“Pure heart,” he said. “And the right intentions.” He spit into his cup. “And the law, of course. Can’t forget the law.”
“What do you want?” I asked. I meant to sound tough, but I sounded weak and stupid.
Norris pulled a nasty handkerchief from a pocket and dabbed at his mouth. “Right. Straight to the point. That’s the way I like it myself.”
We passed the Dyess aluminum plant and Norris said, “See, here’s the thing: I drive around town a lot at night. Keeping vigil, you know. Protecting and serving into the wee small hours of the morning. It’s mostly boring. Occasionally, you run off some niggers who drift out of their part of town into ours. Occasionally, you rough up some mouthy teenagers. But mostly, you just ride around. That’s
why I listen to my books. Gives me something to think about on the lonely nights.”
I wanted to say, The way I hear it you’re never bored. I hear you spend your time micro-managing the drugs coming into the county. I hear the people you beat up are the drug dealers who aren’t giving you a piece of their action. I didn’t say anything, of course.
“I’m watchful, though,” he said. “For instance, one night I saw this girl walking down Church Street. Teenager. Kind of on the thick side. So I’m about to pull over and talk to her but before I can, what does she do?”
He waited until I said, “I don’t know.”
“It’s funny you don’t know, because she went to your house. So I’m thinking, that’s the house old lady McCarthy gave Tim’s church. Youth minister’s house. And so, being concerned for the wellbeing of what looked to me to be a minor, I hung around. Waited for an hour or so—during which time, by the way, the lights never come on in the house. Darkness. Then, finally, she came out and I followed her home. I drove past her, waited behind houses, stuff like that and she never noticed. Went straight to the preacher’s house.”
“It’s not what you think,” I said.
“Course not,” he said. “I got a dirty mind unwashed by the blood of the Lamb. I know that. But I kept watch the next night, and the next—made it part of my nightly rounds—and she went back a lot.”
Okay. So here’s the thing: I know that earlier I might have made it sound as if she’d only come back to see me a few times. I suppose it was more than that. Looking back on it now, I think it was more than that. But the truth is nothing bad was happening there. We were in love, after all.
Most people wouldn’t accept the truth, though. I knew that. And I knew Norris wouldn’t accept the truth. So I lied, and he just laughed when I explained the lie, explained that she and I were friends and that we were only talking about problems with her father and school and life. He didn’t believe me at all.
“Sure. Sure, I know,” he said as we slid back onto Church Street. “You were doing your duties as a minister, late at night, in the dark, with a chubby, underage piece of ass. I completely believe you, but the question is: will her daddy?”