Dry County

by Jake Hinkson

  He just stares at me a moment before he says, “What?”

  “I have a situation of my own. And I need some assistance. I think you could help me.”

  “What kind of assistance are we talking about?”

  I have to force a breath up from my chest before I can bring myself to say, “Financial.”

  “You’re shaking me down.”

  “I wouldn’t call it that. I’m coming to you with a proposition. I can help the vote go your way.”

  “In exchange for some money.”

  “Well . . .”

  “That’s a shakedown. What you just said—that’s like the legal definition of a shakedown.”

  I put my shoulders back and try to stand up straighter. “Call it what you will—what would you say to my proposition?”

  “I would say that I don’t have any money.”

  I blink at that. “Oh.”

  Wind rattles the stalls.

  “I’m poor,” he says. “Did you not realize that? You’re out here trying to extort money from a poor man.”

  “I just thought—”

  “How much you want?”

  “I need thirty thousand dollars.”

  He blinks, opens his mouth to speak, but can’t find the words. Finally, he brings himself to say, “I don’t have anything, Preacher. I’m driving my ex-wife’s car. I can’t even pay child support. All my prospects for cash are tied up in the store . . . and you drag me out here to the fucking car wash to ask me for thirty thousand dollars. I mean, I’d be pissed off right now if I wasn’t so fucking dumbfounded.”

  I look over at the dripping stalls. I don’t know how to respond to him. I cross my arms, but it feels awkward, so I drop them to my sides.

  “Why,” he says, “didn’t you come to me two months ago with this deal? I mean, why wait until I’m going bankrupt?”

  “I didn’t need it two months ago. I need it now.”

  “How come you don’t just pray for the money?”

  I let that go.

  He stares at me. “What’s to keep me from telling everybody about this?”

  I nod as if we’re just discussing possibilities. “Do you think anyone would believe you?”

  “Yeah, I bet they would.”

  “I think it’d be a bad bet to assume that anyone would believe you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m a pillar of the community and the pastor of the biggest church in this county. And while I need some money off the books, I’m doing well financially—probably one of the better-off people around here. That’s who I am. You, though, you’re broke. You just said so yourself. You’re a guy sliding into bankruptcy because he tried to open a liquor store in a dry county. That’s who you are. No one would believe that I would come to you for money. And no one would believe that I offered to help you turn the county wet. People would just assume you were trying to smear me out of spite.”

  He shakes his head and starts to leave.

  I grab his arm. “Wait.”

  “Get the fuck off me, man,” he barks, shoving me away.

  I stumble back against the minivan. To stop him from leaving, I say, “I can help you get your store.”

  That stops him.

  Regaining my balance, I ask, “That’s the bottom line, isn’t it? If you leave here, what do you get? Think about it. What do you get? Nothing. If you went out there this afternoon and trashed me to everybody in town, it wouldn’t get you any closer to getting your store.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if I go down in disgrace today, it won’t flip a single vote on the quorum court for you. But if we work together, I can help you.”

  “How you can’t just suddenly go, ‘Never mind. Now I’m supporting the wet vote.’”

  I shake my head. “What you never understood,” I tell him, “was that you were never going to get anywhere in this fight once you made it about wet versus dry. Once you said it was about the freedom to buy a drink, you made it a moral issue. And the dry side was always going to win the moral argument. We had doctrine and tradition in our corner. But the dry side isn’t some monolith. It’s made up of a lot of different people. Different ideas. Different priorities, economic and otherwise. I know where the fracture points are in that coalition. Good Lord, do I. I had to keep them all together. I guarantee you that there are votes to be had on the quorum court just by driving a wedge between Tonya Hooper and John Floyd Jr. over the shale gas debate, between the appropriations for water quality control and the fight for more extraction permits. I bet you didn’t know that . . . Of course not. Forgive me for saying this, Brian, but you’re in over your head. You are. But I can do it. You said so yourself that I was the one who made this vote go against you. Well, I promise you I can make the vote go for you just as easily.”

  He says, “Okay then, how about you do that for me. You help the vote go my way, and I’ll keep this meeting quiet.”

  “I still need the money.”

  “And I still don’t got any money, Preacher.”

  “It’s a condition, Brian. I have to have it. If I don’t get this thirty grand, off the books, as soon as possible, then I can’t help either one of us. Get me the money, and I can turn the vote around for you.”

  “And how long would it take you to turn the vote around?”

  “I don’t know. Could be a few months. Could be less.”

  “A few months? I’m about to lose my ass today.”

  “It could be less. Either way, if you can hold on, Brian, I can turn the vote around.”

  “And you’d do that?”

  “Yes. Look at it this way, Brian: if you get me this money, then I have no choice. I’ll have to help you get the measure on the ballot.”

  He steps away from me. One step.

  I shut up because I can tell he’s thinking. He’s thinking, and I know the look in his eyes. Like any natural-born salesman, I know when I have someone. God forgive me, but it’s a look I know because I’ve seen it many times when leading people to the Lord. No offer of salvation seems implausible to a man desperate to be saved.

  He bites his lip. He rubs his forehead.

  “I still don’t have any money . . .”

  I nod.

  I let him come to it on his own.

  “But,” he says finally, drawing a deep breath, “I might know how I can get some.”

  SEVEN PENNY WEATHERFORD

  I walk into the laundry room and take some clothes out of the dryer, fold them, and place them in a basket. I asked Matthew and Mary to bring home whatever they wanted washed this weekend, and I find their dirty clothes and linen in Big Blue. I run a mixed load of their coloreds, and then I take the basket of clean clothes upstairs.

  When Matthew and Mary went off to college, Johnny and Ruth took over their bedrooms. When the older kids are back from school, they share the rooms with the young ones, and I’m happy with how this arrangement has worked out. Johnny’s always worshiped Matthew, and Ruth treats Mary like a vacationing celebrity, so it’s rather like the older ones are mentoring the younger ones. The only person left with a bedroom of his own in this house is Mark, and he seems content to be by himself.

  He’s sitting on his bed right now listening to Elvis Presley sing gospel. This interest in Elvis’s gospel recordings is new. Mark’s musical tastes have always run toward Christian rock and pop, but he tends to discover a single group and get locked into it and obsessed with it exclusively for months or years on end. Hillsong. MercyMe. Casting Crowns. He doesn’t listen to a million bands, but he’ll listen to one band a million times. I think this intense focus has something to do with his desire to understand the world around him. He wants a full accounting of things. Of our children, he’s the only one who does prodigious Bible study. I think it might be the only book he’s ever read, but he reads it almost every day.

  And now he’s obsessed with Elvis.

  Richard never noticed the musical quirks of our second child, and when I pointed the
m out to him, he said, “That’s right. I guess he’s a completist.” He thought it about it a moment more and said, “That’s good. Shows dedication.”

  This has been our way as parents, I think. I observe our children and explain them to Richard, and he passes a judgment.

  Elvis is singing a song I don’t know. It’s a big production number.

  “I have your clean clothes,” I say, placing the stack at the foot of Mark’s bed.

  “Thank you, Mama,” he says. Of the children, he’s the only one who calls me Mama. When they were little, Matthew hated it. He thought it sounded babyish, and he demanded that Mary address me as “Mom” the same way he did. Mary, who loved both her brothers but saw that Matthew was dominant, acquiesced. So “Mama” has stayed a thing between Mark and me.

  “What song is this?” I ask, sitting down.

  “‘Reach Out to Jesus,’” he says.

  “I don’t know it. It’s pretty.”

  He nods.

  “You like Elvis, Mama?”

  I shrug. “Sure. Who doesn’t?”

  He nods. The song crescendos. The next song is a jumpy piano number.

  “You’ve been listening to a lot of Elvis lately,” I say. “Why?”

  “They call him the king of rock and roll.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But he does gospel. Did you know that?”

  “I knew he did some.”

  “He does a lot. I didn’t know that. I thought he just did secular.” He mangles the word secular. I don’t often hear his speech impediment, but secular has a u in the middle as well as both an l and an r, so his pronunciation is a clunky chain of incorrect sounds. I don’t correct it. Richard still corrects Mark’s pronunciation sometimes, even now that he’s on the verge of turning twenty-one, but I don’t see the point. Mark has other things to contend with. Torturing him over the letter r seems pointless and even a little cruel.

  “Did you know he was a twin?” Mark asks.

  “Who?”

  “Elvis.”

  “Elvis had a twin?”

  “At birth, but something went wrong in his mama’s belly and the baby died.”

  I stare at my boy a moment. He’s a sensitive soul, my second born. There’s so much locked inside him that he can’t get to, yet he feels things so deeply sometimes. He’s never been able to make sense of what happened to him when he was born. I’ve explained to him that he stopped breathing for a time, and that hurt him, but God had a plan and delivered the perfect Mark to us. Sometimes I think he believes me, looks in my eyes and knows I’m telling him the truth. Other times I worry that he sees a different idea in my husband’s eyes.

  Penny, that’s an awful thing to think . . .

  I shake my head and stand up. I can be so unkind to Richard.

  I kiss Mark’s forehead, pick up my clothes basket, and carry it to my bedroom. I hang up some of my blouses. I pull out a couple of Richard’s folded dress shirts. I hang up two that he might want to wear tomorrow and place the rest in his dresser drawer.

  I put away my underwear. Then his.

  How odd that I touch his clothes but never touch him. I know the most intimate details of his body, yet he’s hidden that body from me for years. Why is he so ashamed?

  I take a deep breath, as if I’ve just run up a hill. I know he’s not ashamed of his body. He’s stayed fit, like his father. Neither of them has ever been the beer-drinking type, nor have either of them ever compensated for the lack of alcohol by becoming sugar junkies. At forty-six, Richard’s among the fittest men in our church. He’s proud of that fact. He’ll make little comments about some of our heavier members. Even somebody like Randy, whom he loves, Richard will joke around with him, teasing him about his weight. I don’t think Randy thinks anything of it, but I know why Richard does it. He just likes to remind people of their faults. He can’t help it. It’s the first thing he looks for when he meets someone new.

  I walk into our bathroom to put away some towels, and I’m stopped by my reflection in the vanity. How odd that they call it a vanity. I have no vanity as I stare at myself. I’ve kept in reasonable shape. I’m not much larger than I was when we got married. I was never thin, and I’m not fat. I’ve always been a healthy average. But when I lift up my shirt, my midsection looks sixty or seventy years old, battle-scarred from five pregnancies and one late-term miscarriage. My belly will never be the same, a messy patchwork of loose flesh and C-section scars.

  I thought of having it fixed, but the only thing I can imagine that would repulse Richard more than my body would be the cost of a surgery or two to fix it.

  My body. I hold up my hand and stare at the veins running through my palms. I stare at the thick white scar at the base of my right thumb. I don’t know how the scar got there; it’s just something that happened to me before I reached an age where I could remember things. How odd that we’re bodies and people at the same time. I stare at myself in the mirror again. It seems like most of life is about trying to figure out how to be both a body and a person.

  As I finish putting away the towels, my phone buzzes on the counter. I reach for it, thinking it might be Richard, but it’s a number I haven’t seen in years. Sandy Loomis. For a moment, I just stare at her name. Then I answer.

  “Hello?”

  “Penny, it’s Sandy Hadden.”

  Her maiden name. She dropped Loomis when she divorced Gene, our music minister. He had to leave the ministry because of that.

  “Well, hello, stranger,” I say, trying to sound friendly. I go into the bedroom and sit down on the bed.

  “Hello,” she says with a laugh.

  “Happy Easter.”

  “Happy Easter to you, too. How are things? I know it’s been a couple of years since we talked.”

  “That’s right,” I say. “I’m good. I was just thinking about you, actually.” While not strictly true, it is true that in some sense I’m always thinking of Sandy when I assess my body. Even in our town, where obesity is common, Sandy stood out. “How are you?”

  “I’m great,” she says. “I work at a little theater in Little Rock.”

  “Oh, I thought you were in Missouri.”

  “Well, I landed there for a minute after Gene and I split up, but after a few months I moved here to take this job.”

  “I see. And you work in a theater? Live theater?”

  “Yeah. It’s cool. I mostly do office stuff, but they’ve also let me start dressing sets. You remember that I dabbled in that kind of thing?”

  “Of course. You worked on the sets for the Passion Play, didn’t you?”

  “That’s right. I think that doing that stuff was the only thing I really liked about being in the music ministry, in fact.”

  “Yes. Well, I recall that you did a very nice job. What kind of things do you work on now? What kind of shows?”

  “Well . . .” She hesitates. “It’s not the kind of thing you’d like, I don’t think.”

  I frown and lean back from the phone. Who is she to assume she knows what I like?

  “I like lots of things,” I say.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just, I don’t know if you’d approve. For instance, the latest thing we’re working on is an all-drag production of Oklahoma! called Oklahomo! You think that would be up your alley?”

  It takes me off guard, but I laugh a little. “Ah . . . I see your point. Well, I . . . I hope you’re having fun, at least.”

  “I am. I really am. I guess marrying into the ministry wasn’t a good idea. That life wasn’t a good fit for me.”

  “I guess not. But you’re okay now?”

  “I really am. I mean, life ain’t perfect, you know, it never is, but I’m in a good place with myself.”

  “That’s nice,” I say. “Things are good career-wise, health-wise . . . ?”

  She pauses and laughs. “Are you asking if I’m still fat?”

  “Well, no, I—”

  “Hey, it’s okay to ask. My weight was the main
thing I thought about from the age of nine to the age of twenty-nine. I certainly know that people at the church talked about it.”

  “I don’t think— I know that everyone always liked you, Sandy.”

  “Oh, I’m not so sure about that. But I didn’t much like myself in those days.”

  “But now you’re good?”

  “Yep, now I’m fat and happy. I think changing up my life helped me a lot. New city, new friends, new job, all that. But I also just got to a place with myself where I said, ‘Sandy, girl, this is what you look like. You spent twenty years crash-dieting and crying about it. Let’s try not giving a shit and see how that works.’ Turns out it works great. Hell, I even lost a couple of pounds once I stopped kicking my own ass about it.”

  I ignore her use of profanity, and I say, “That’s great, Sandy. I’m happy to hear it.”

  She asks about me, and I tell her about each of the children. When I finish, she says, “But you? You’re okay?”

  “Sure,” I say. I’m aware that it comes out halfhearted, but I don’t try to compensate for that by saying anything else.

  There’s a pause, and she says, “Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. I guess we were never really close.”

  “Well, I’m not really close to anyone,” I say. “I guess I always felt I had to hold myself a little apart from people. I hope that doesn’t sound cold.”

  “No. I know what you mean,” Sandy says. “Being a preacher’s wife is a twenty-four-hour-a-day job.”

  “Yes. It is. That’s exactly right. And I like it. I’m not complaining. But it takes a lot out of you. It’s like being a politician’s wife. To a lot of people, it barely looks like a job at all, but it’s like that thing Ginger Rogers said about dancing with Fred Astaire.”

  “‘I did everything he did but backward and in heels.’”

  “Exactly. The ministry is a business of relationships. I have to manage every relationship Richard does, but I have to do it without the imprimatur of being an ordained minister. And I have to always be sweet and nice and all that.”

  “You have to be a lady.”

  “Right.”

  “You literally have to do it in heels.”

  We both laugh at that. “Exactly.”