Hell on Church Street

by Jake Hinkson

  Van turned to me and stared for a while. His thoughts revolved around something else entirely, though. Some distant concern preoccupied his mind, but I couldn’t tell which troubled him, the past or the future.

  Finally he told his nephew, “My point is that someone has to worry. She’s reckless. It’s not disloyal to point that out.”

  “I suppose we have different ideas about worrying, then. And recklessness.”

  “Well, I suppose we do, but you might consider that Doolittle trusted me. Perhaps you should, too.”

  “I trust her because she’s my family, Van. You’re a glorified business associate.”

  Van shook his head. “I’m as much your family as she is, Ian.”

  Ian laughed, something I wouldn’t have thought possible. “Where were you when my father took off? Where were you when my mother died? Where was Doolittle? Uncle Leon? Where was Aunt Lacey even?”

  “We all pitched in, Ian.”

  “Yeah,” Ian said flipping his dead cigarette butt out the window. “I don’t remember that. What I do remember is Grandmom.”

  “She wouldn’t let anyone see you, Ian!” Van slid to the edge of his seat, staring at his nephew. “None of us. She kept you out here in the middle of nowhere. I’d drive out here and she’d send me away. Ask Lacey. It happened to all of us. Every time I saw you, you were an inch taller and twenty pounds heavier. We got to see you once, maybe twice a year.”

  “I’m sure you tried really hard.”

  “Ian, I’m telling you. Ask anybody. If Doo were here he’d tell you the same thing. You were this skinny five year-old boy, and she took you up here to the house and locked the door, and when you came out again you were twenty years-old and the size of a mountain.”

  Ian shifted in his seat. “What exactly are you trying to say to me, Van?”

  Van sighed. “Nothing, Ian.”

  “No, tell me.”

  Van shook his head. “Forget it.” He slumped back in his seat and stared at me. “What do you make of our little family dramas, Brother Webb?”

  “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

  Van stared at me a little while longer. Then he leaned back and shut his eyes and said, “That’s the first time Tolstoy’s been quoted in this vehicle, I’ll bet.” Then he was quiet.

  We drove in silence for the better part of an hour. My mind, which is usually running, was calm. Or numb. I wasn’t worried about dying. I wasn’t thinking of heaven or hell or the Cards or Angela. I wasn’t thinking of anything. We wound deeper into the dark hollers of the Ozark mountains, so that rock and a dark canopy of trees replaced the night sky. Van slept, or pretended to sleep, and Ian drove, his shoulders wide and rigid as he sat pressed over the wheel.

  Finally, he turned off the two-lane blacktop, and we jostled down a dirt road. Dirt and gravel rattled against the bottom of the SUV. Sitting up, Van looked back at me. I couldn’t see his face.

  Ian turned off the dirt road and climbed a grassy slope into the trees. When the grass ran out at the trees he stopped the SUV.

  Ian climbed into the back, slid the back door open and pulled me out. Van got out behind us. The night sky shone through the treetops, and blue moonlight soaked our skin. Ian nudged me toward the trees.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I walked with the two of them at my back.

  Ahead of me black trees crisscrossed their own wavering shadows like swaying prison bars. The forest swallowed me with every step I took. As the Norris family marched me through the brittle Arkansas winter woods to my death, I simply shut down. My hands were cuffed in front of me, and I lifted them to push branches aside. That was the extent of my caring.

  I did think it odd that neither of the Norrises thought to get in front of me. The smartest thing, it seemed to me, would have been for Van to lead the way with me in the middle and Ian in the back. But they barely seemed aware of me.

  And that, really, is the point isn’t it? Even to my murderers, I was insignificant.

  “What are you trying to say?” Ian’s deep voice asked.

  “What?” Van’s voice was thin, scared of the shadows and the distant night murmurings through the trees. “I didn’t say anything.” Then, “Jesus, it’s been a while since I’ve been here.”

  “Back in the car. What you were saying about Grandmom, about her being crazy.”

  “Forget it, Ian. It doesn’t matter.”

  “It seemed to matter to you back there. That’s what worries me about you, Van. You’re duplicitous. That’s why she installed you as the lawyer in the family.”

  “I went to law school, Ian. That’s why I’m a lawyer.”

  A gust of wind rattled the branches like talismans. “That’s the other thing about you that worries me,” Ian said. “You think you’re your own man. An intelligent man would know better.”

  I stepped over a log and stumbled a bit and Ian’s giant hand swallowed my elbow and straightened me.

  “Keep going,” he said.

  I kept going, and Van said, “I am my own man, Ian. And I’m not afraid of you.”

  In all honesty, at that moment, I was more worried for Van than I was for myself. Like a man shouting advice at a movie screen, I wanted to warn him, wanted to tell him to shut up.

  “Van,” Ian said, “you shouldn’t be afraid of me. You should be afraid of her.”

  “She’s an old woman,” Van said, but his voice trembled as if he were afraid she might hear him.

  In front of me, the trees began to thin out, and then we were in a clearing. There wasn’t much to it, just some grass and stones, all of it black and gray with night. The Norris family graveyard. My graveyard.

  Van moved to my left, looking at the ground. “I haven’t been here in…since that night. Since that Thanksgiving.”

  “The night she saved the family,” Ian said, moving to my right.

  Van made a sound like a laugh in the bottom of his throat. “I guess. Before that, we were an abused family. After that, we were a pack of murderers.”

  “You are weak,” Ian said. “She’s so right about you. You would rather have stayed a victim. You, her eldest son, would have left her a slave to the most disgusting monster that hell ever vomited into this world.”

  Van stood with his hands on his hips, hanging his head to contemplate the ground where his father had been rotting for decades. “I was barely seventeen years old, Ian.”

  Cold moonlight burned on Ian’s smooth scalp and massive shoulders. From the darkness his voice, heavy and thick, said, “At seventeen, I would have died for her. I would have bled every drop of my blood before I let another man touch her.”

  Van pulled himself up straight and looked at Ian. “That’s what she wanted. That’s why she took you away from us.”

  “Go on, Van. Say what you want to say.”

  As quietly as possible, I took a single step backward. The two silhouettes faced one another like thick, heavy shadows.

  “You poor dumb bastard. I’m saying she kept us away from you so she could grow you into her own little solider.”

  “You must be insane to talk to me this way.”

  “I must be.”

  “You, who would let a man beat her in front of you. You, who were conceived in a drunken rape.”

  “She told you that?” Van asked. Then he shook his head. “What am I saying? Of course, she did.”

  Ian squared himself even as his cavernous voice began to crack. “She told me. She told me about the night of their wedding, how her father had given her to that…man, that preacher’s son who everyone loved and respected. She told me how on that first night he got drunk and beat her and used her. And she told me how you were born from that night.”

  “Jesus, Ian. You could have been such a good kid.”

  Ian was quiet a moment, but I heard a sound that might have been emotion dying in his throat. Finally he said, “You, the bastard of the monster who…raped that precious woman.”

  Van said, “She t
ook you off and now she’s done this. She’s infected you like she infected all the ones she gave birth to. Only worse.”

  Ian started toward him, a colossus in the night. His voice, bewildered almost to the point of amusement, rose on a tide of anger. “You must want to die. To talk about her this way to me, you must want me to kill you.”

  “Ian…”

  “You must want to die.”

  “No. I don’t,” Van said, and raised a gun in the darkness and shot Ian five times in the chest.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  I don’t remember hitting the ground. I just recall the explosion and Ian’s yelp, and then I was on the ground, tasting dirt and leaves.

  Silhouetted against the night sky, Van stood, his arm outreached, still pointing the gun at Ian. A wisp of gunpowder floated on the breeze above me.

  Ian lay on the ground, clawing at the grass. One foot dug into the dirt like he was trying to climb out of a hole. A low moan escaped him with a final breath, and then he was dead.

  Van walked over to him and knelt down. For a moment, he just crouched there, staring at the big dead man. Then he felt for a pulse.

  My every muscle was in disagreement as to what to do. Charge him? Run? Lay there and wait and see? Paralyzed, I did nothing. But though my body couldn’t will itself to action, I did feel something. Only later, thinking back on it, was I able to decipher the feeling. And it was this: a reawaking of fear. I had thought I was ready to die out there in the woods, but then when the shooting started, I ducked.

  And there you go: Nobody wants to die.

  “He’s dead,” Van said. His voice was clear and remorseless.

  I didn’t say anything.

  He turned around and walked over to me. I pulled myself up to my knees.

  “Please,” I said. “Please, Van.”

  He bent down, and I could finally see his pale blue face in the darkness. The gun dangled from his right hand.

  “What do I do with you? That is the question.”

  I started to say something, but he shook his head. “No,” he said. “Just get up. Let’s go back to the car. No talking, though. Let me think.”

  I did as he said and, leaving Ian dead in the grass, together we tripped back through the darkened woods. When we got to the SUV, we climbed in without a word. Ian had left the keys in the ignition, and Van started it up and backed out of the clearing. As we bumped down the road, I tried to hold my tongue, but the fear in me was real and rising, feeding, as fear does, on the newfound hope I had. It was too much for me.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  Van shook his head. Though he was the family lawyer, he was the only Norris I’d met who wasn’t a talker. I knew I’d have to make my pitch and run the risk of irritating him.

  “I’m going to be honest with you, Van,” I said. “I’m not sure why you did what you just did. I can assume, that in part, it comes out of years of conflict in your family. But I also assume—I also assume that it was driven primarily by self-preservation. It was like you told your mother, killing me is a bad idea. It only draws more attention to your family.”

  Van drove with one hand on the wheel. The other hand, in his lap, held the gun.

  “Think about this,” I said. “What happens if I disappear? What happens if I go away? Won’t the storm follow me? Doolittle, the Cards, all of it points at me, and if I go away it all follows after me.”

  “You’re making a good case for getting rid of you permanently, you know.”

  My Adam’s apple jerked, and I had to swallow before I could say, “Yes. But think of it this way: As long as I’m running, they keep chasing.”

  “And when they find you? Which they always do, in the end. What’s to stop you from talking about what just happened?”

  “Futility,” I replied. “The futility of my situation. The day I don’t show up to work, I’ll be wanted for double homicide. And arson. And statutory rape. Maybe second degree murder for Doolittle. What would be the point of trying to sell you to the police? Even if I wanted to sell you out, who would believe me? I’d be the world’s worst witness. And anyway, I know you’re too smart to leave Ian out there. You’ll move him. You’ll have an alibi in place. I don’t doubt you could have me killed in jail. Why would I bring down your wrath?”

  We came to the end of the road and I was thoroughly confused about where we were. Van stopped for a moment and we were still on the road. To our left, another gravel road led up a hill into more trees, more darkness. He stared up that road for a while. I didn’t know if he was contemplating taking me up there to kill me, but I was no longer numb to the thought of death. I thought of Ian, big and breathing and mean, lying out in the woods, his body stiffening in the night air. I’d survived Doolittle. I’d survived Ian. I was ready to fight Van if I needed to, and when he turned left and followed the road into the trees, my hands tightened into fists.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “I think you are more right than you know. I’m going to turn you loose and deny I’ve even met you. First, though, we have to make a stop.”

  We crunched up the gravel road until it gave way to a smooth dirt drive leading to a big ramshackle house. The house was two stories, with a wide front porch and big frame windows. The house was dark except for the porch light. In the distance, I could see a barn and a jumble of old vehicles rusting in the dew.

  Van cut the lights and pulled up slowly near the house and sat there a moment.

  He looked at the house and dug a key ring out of his pocket. He uncuffed me, and then he slid another key off the ring and handed it over to me.

  I took it.

  He pointed at the house. “My mother,” he said.

  I looked at the house.

  He pointed at the furthermost upstairs window. “Up there.”

  He took a deep breath.

  “What?” I said.

  “I want you to go up there.”

  I stared at him.

  He stared back.

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Your own mother?”

  Van took another deep breath. “We’re not exactly the Waltons, Brother Webb.”

  I shook my head and tried to hand the key back.

  He frowned like I’d offended his intelligence. “At this late date, do you really want me to believe you have any reservations about going up there and smothering a little old lady in her bed? A little old lady who, by the way, will have us both tortured and killed if she finds out about Ian.” He nodded at the key. “Go on. And keep this thought in mind: she’s the worst problem you have.”

  “So, if I do this?”

  “Then I drive us back to town. You’re free to do whatever you want—though if I were you, I’d run like hell.”

  The weight of it started to press down on me. “I suppose Ian and your mother, both their deaths will be following me too now?”

  Van smiled. I guess he couldn’t help himself, but for the first time I was sure he was a Norris. “They can only execute you once, Brother Webb.”

  “Christ,” I swore.

  “It’s your call. It’s the best deal you are going to get, though. I let you go and you get my mother off your back. If she lives long enough to find out Ian is dead, she’ll burn Arkansas to the ground looking for you.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said. What else could I say? I knew he was right.

  Van said, “She’ll be asleep by now. She’s not one of those old women who stays up all night. She likes her sleep. Always has. Go in the front door, the stairs are to your left. Top of the stairs, take another left. The last room on the right. Her hearing aid will be on the table next to her teeth. Do it fast, and let’s get out of here.”

  I squeezed my fist around the key, opened the door and got out of the SUV. I walked around the side and started up to the darkened house. Somewhere off in the woods I heard a dog, lonely and cold. The key felt heavy in my sweaty palm. I
switched it to my other hand. My neck ached.

  When I got to the house, I climbed the porch steps quickly. Easing the key into the front door, I looked back at Van. I could make him out in the moonlight, his face drawn and sad. I don’t know what he was thinking. I suppose he assumed life hadn’t given him many choices.

  I knew life hadn’t given me any choices. I opened the door and stepped inside.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  It smelled like an old woman’s house. It was the smell of carpets in need of a cleaning, of shelves layered in dust, of years of meat frying in the kitchen. It was the sharp stink of cat urine. It was the accumulation of memory and age, the neglect of now for the comforting stupor of then.

  I waited at the door, taking in the smell, letting my eyes adjust. I thought of being in the Cards’ home. I suppose that comparison was inevitable. The difference for me, of course, was that I’d not entered the Cards’ home to kill them. Despite what anyone might say, I snuck into their home to burgle it for Doolittle.

  But I snuck into Bertie Mae Norris’s home to kill her. That old woman was the only person I ever set out to kill.

  As I stood there in her foyer, though, I was thinking less about Mrs. Norris’ life and more about her house. When I’d snuck into the Card home, I knew my way around. I’d been there. But I’d never stepped foot in Mrs. Norris’s home in my life. Van’s instructions slipped past me like a tossed off phone number.

  I knew I was looking for stairs. As my eyes adjusted to the house’s mix of darkness and moonlight, I could tell that the foyer led into a large den. There were a couple of sofas, a coffee table, a painting over a hearth. To my right, hints of moonlight slanted through some kitchen windows and shone down on a cat sitting on the counter. He stared at me, unagitated but not altogether uninterested. The shadows beneath the table moved.

  It was another cat. A fat one. He strolled across the kitchen’s hardwood floors and walked up to me, nuzzling my leg. I reached down to pet him, and he twisted his head into my palm and plopped down on the floor at my feet as if he’d loved me his entire life.