"Bullets, Booze and Bastards"

Hell on Church Street by Jake Hinkson

I’d been working three weeks at a plastics factory down in Mississippi when the foreman—a bucktoothed redneck named Cyrus Broadway—made the mistake of calling me a lazy asshole. Now, I might be lazy, but I’m also one mean son of a bitch. I’ve spent time in jails and drunk tanks all over this country, everywhere from a dusty cell at the edge of the Mojave desert to a damp, padlocked shack on an island off the coast of Maine. And nobody gets away with insulting me, even if he thinks he’s just kidding. By the time they pulled me off Cyrus Broadway, I’d smashed his face to sausage. His big horse teeth were laying next to him on the factory floor.

I didn’t wait around to talk to those Mississippi cops. I left that night and snaked my way up through Louisiana, into Texas and wound up lurking around a Texaco just outside of Sallisaw, Oklahoma. I tried to keep a low profile, but after a couple of days of not eating, I started looking for somebody to stick up. I scoped out a couple of women, but sticking up women is usually more trouble than it’s worth. Cops respond faster when there’s a woman involved, and if things go bad and you have to rough up a woman—hell, cops love tracking down a woman-beater and kicking the shit out of him. Makes them feel like they’re good guys.

So I waited. I let the women go. The teenagers. The couples. The old man with a van full of dogs. I waited, but I was getting impatient.

When I spotted the fat guy, I knew I’d found my mark.

It wasn’t just that he was fat. He was eating his way, and quick, into being too fat for regular clothes. Fat swelled off every part of him and stretched his white dress shirt like a balloon. His hair had faded yellow stains at the tips like he’d dyed it blond at some point.

But there was something else about him, something else that marked him as a loser. It was how he moved. He carried himself like he’d already had the shit beat out of him that night, like every step he took was a battle he was barely winning against gravity.

He parked his beat-up station wagon at the end of the row. As I watched from the shadows, he climbed out, opened the back door and dug his wallet out of the coat hanging off the seat. Without locking the car, he stumbled inside. I watched through the window. Behind me, the interstate was dark and quiet. Occasionally a car passed in the distance and then disappeared back into the black silence. At the counter, my big, fat, easy mark checked his watch and rubbed his eyes. He bought a pack of caffeine pills, three packs of cigarettes, and 24 ounces of Dr. Pepper. He pointed at some chicken wings under the heat lamp, and the cashier piled a heap of them into a box.

As the fat guy came out, dragging himself back to his car, the cashier settled down onto his mop bucket behind the counter so he could watch television. I was pretty sure he couldn’t see a thing over the counter. I pulled the gun from my jeans. For the moment, there were no cars at the pumps. When the fat man got his car door open, I stepped from the shadows, slipped up behind him and shoved the gun into the saddlebag of cellulite drooping over his belt.

“Stay calm,” I told him, “and get in the car.”

He didn’t move. Behind us, the interstate didn’t make a sound.

I jabbed him with the gun. “Get in the fucking car.”

He clutched the door with one hand and rested his other hand on the roof of the station wagon. In a high-pitched voice he said, “Why don’t you just take my money and car now?”

I pistol-whipped him—hard, but not too hard, making sure to get some of his ear into it. He slumped into the door and the hinges groaned and the whole damn car tilted. He didn’t make a sound, though.

I jammed the gun barrel against his skull. “Get in the fucking car.”

Cupping his bloody ear, he climbed in, and I got in behind him. The car reeked of cigarettes and coffee. He started it up and backed out, still holding his ear, not moaning or crying, just holding it like he might be listening to a seashell.

We pulled away from the station and everything was dark inside the car except the green glow of his dashboard. When he pulled to the edge of the parking lot, I said, “Go left” and he did. I had in mind a little field about a mile away where the lights from a cord factory shined down off a hill. It was impossible for anybody up there to really see what you were doing in the field, and if there weren’t any drunk teenagers down there, you’d be all alone.

We were about to pass the turn-off to the interstate and I told him, “Keep going straight.”

As soon as I said it, he swung the car onto the turn-off and floored the gas.

“Straight, goddamn it,” I yelled, but he just picked up speed. I went to hit him again, but he leaned forward, as far as his blubber would allow. The thick roll of fat on his neck pinched out between his block-shaped head and round shoulders. He was so crammed against the wheel he could barely steer, and we ripped through grass and gravel and shot onto the interstate beside a diesel. I flung myself forward on the seat and wedged the gun barrel behind his right ear.

Over the diesel blaring its horn at us I yelled, “I’m going to blow your goddamn head off!”

“And then what?” he asked. The wagon looked like a piece of shit, but it had some get up and go. We were already doing ninety and the diesel’s headlights shrunk behind us.

I pressed the gun to his shoulder. “You don’t have to die right away,” I said. “Slow down.”

“Happy to,” he said. He slowed down a little, but we were still cruising along.

“Jesus,” I said. I wiped some sweat off my lip and rolled down the window. “Stop the car.”

“No,” he said.

“What?”

“No, I’m not stopping the car.”

I shoved the gun against his head, really digging the barrel into the soft part just behind his earlobe.

“This again?” he asked, pressing down on the pedal.

I almost laughed at that. Resting my gun against his seat, I said, “Okay then. What the hell do you want to do now?”

He took a deep breath. “Give me a second,” he said. “All this excitement’s hard for a fat man.” He took another breath, let it out through his nose and pointed the rear-view mirror at me. His eyes were puffy and bloodshot. “You wanted to rob me,” he said.

The pale green dashboard lights glowed on his face. He looked damn near dead.

“Yeah,” I said.

“That’s not going to happen.”

I leaned forward and tapped the back of his head with the gun. “That’s up for debate.”

“I’m not going to let you rob me,” he said calmly, “but I’m willing to give you some money. A pretty good amount of money, actually.”

“What are talking you about?”

He nodded and settled back into his seat, his head bumping the gun as if it didn’t mean anything. I dropped the gun to my knee, but I kept a finger on the trigger. He peeled the cellophane off his cigarettes and pulled one out. He gestured to me. I shook my head. When he lit up, the car filled with smoke. It smelled pretty good.

“On second thought,” I said, “give me one.”

He pulled out a cigarette and handed it back. I lit it with my own lighter.

He said, “Let’s look at your predicament: I’m driving. I’ve made it clear I’m not just going to just pull over and let you stick me up.”

“I still have the gun here,” I reminded him.

“Of course,” he said. “And I’m still driving. That makes us about even, I’d say.”

“Except that I’ll probably survive a crash,” I said. “And you won’t survive a bullet through the back of your brain.”

“Good point,” he said. His voice was high and girlish, but firm. “Hold that thought. We’ll come back to it in a minute. Right now we’re at an impasse. You want to rob me. I won’t pull over. If I run us into a tree or off an overpass, maybe you’ll survive, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll just lose an arm or a leg. But what if we change things up?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if we make a deal, changing this from a robbery gone bad into a business proposition?”

I flicked ashes on his backseat. “I’m listening.”

“What you need to understand is that I’m not above giving you money. I can give you three thousand dollars right now. But I want something in return.”

Neither of us had opened a window to let the smoke out, and the car was like a rolling gas chamber.

“And what do I have to do for this money?” I asked.

I turned around for some reason to see if we were being followed. Everything was fucked up. We weren’t being followed, but I was starting to get worried.

“Where are we going?” I said.

“Driving,” he said. “Just driving.”

I stared at the back of his head and thought about it. Something was wrong with him, but, on the other hand, I really didn’t have a dime in my pockets. I couldn’t make him stop the car without wrecking it, and if he did wreck it I might be fucked up and hurt out in the middle of nowhere. I couldn’t really do much except wait and see what happened. At least we were moving away from Oklahoma.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Geoffrey Webb,” he answered. “What’s yours?”

“What do I have to do for this money, Geoffrey?”

“Nothing. Just ride along with me for a while,” he said. He checked his speed. “Yes. I’d say just three or four hours at the outside.”

“Just ride around with you?”

“Just sit back there. I haven’t talked to anyone in a very long time.”

I stared at him. “And?”

He shrugged his big shoulders and took a short drag off his cigarette.

“What are you not telling me?”

“Look,” he said, “I—what’s your name?”

“Right,” I said. “I’m going to tell you my name.”

“I find it hard to talk to someone if I don’t know his name.”

“I guess you’ll have to find it hard,” I said.

He smiled in the rearview mirror.

“Okay,” he said.

“You sick or something?”

He shrugged. “Not physically.”

“This sounds a lot like bullshit to me, Geoffrey,” I said. “This sounds like you’re taking me into some damn trap or something.”

He nodded, cracked his window and flipped his butt out. “That’s not the case, but I guess I can understand your paranoia. You’re a bad man; I get it. You don’t know me from Adam, and here I am offering you money to ride with me for a while. You think about it for a minute, though, I’m sure you’ll see how absurd the idea of a ‘trap’ is.”

“Where are you going?”

He pulled a greasy napkin from a wadded-up fast food sack and dabbed blood from his ear. “Arkansas.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Ever been there?” he asked.

“Couple of times.”

“What’d you think?”

“Nothing there but weather and sweat.”

He smiled. “Well, I’m sure you can make do,” he said. He dug out his wallet and tossed it over his shoulder. “It’s a simple proposition,” he said. “The three thousand is in there.”

I opened the wallet. It was fat with hundred-dollar bills. I didn’t count it, but it looked to be about right. I looked back up at him. My hands were sweaty for some reason. I knew I could beat the shit out of Geoffrey Webb. I’d already smacked the hell out of him, but he had taken it like it was more inconvenient than anything else. He wasn’t afraid of me and he wasn’t afraid of the gun, either.

“Okay,” I said. I slipped the gun in my coat pocket. “Just drive and shut up for a minute. You make me jumpy blathering on.”

He didn’t reply to that at all, and we rode for a while in silence. Oklahoma rolled past like a flat black nothing.

I watched him in the rearview mirror. He glanced at me and then back at the road.

“What’s your deal?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

He smiled. “You wanted me to stay quiet, I thought.”

“I changed my mind.”

“Good,” he said. “I haven’t had a real conversation in years.”

“Hard to believe, talky fucker like you.”

“I’ve always been a good talker. Talked my way out of a lot of trouble. A lot of trouble.”

I could believe it. I’d known plenty of con men, guys who could talk the stink off of shit. And Webb talked like a con man who’d been out of business for a long time but still had some juice inside him.

“Then what’s the problem?” I said.

“There’s a level of trouble you can’t talk your way out of,” he said. “Some trouble is like a cancer. It just grows inside you. Nothing stops it. It just keeps growing and growing, eating everything it touches.”

“Then what?”

“You die.” He took a deep breath and lit up another cigarette. “But I’ve been living like I was dead for years now. I’ve been a walking shadow, like Shakespeare wrote about.”

“Shakespeare.”

He looked at me in the rearview mirror.

“Yeah, I’ve read a few books,” he said. “I used to read a lot. I used to do a lot of things.”

“So what happened?”

“The story of my life?”

“Whatever.”

He shrugged. “The story of my life is I lived, I fucked up, and I’m going to die. I’ll probably go to hell.”

I stubbed out my butt on his car seat. He didn’t seem to notice. He was too busy listening to himself talk.

“That’s cheery, I know,” he said, “but it’s the truth. I’ve been living like a termite for years now: smoking, eating shit, working the nightshift at a supermarket. No kind of life. No friends. No family. The only emotion I ever feel anymore, when I feel anything at all, is fear.”

“Fear of what? You obviously ain’t afraid to die.”

“No. But you can get to a point where you’re more afraid of living than dying.”

He sat there silent for awhile. I didn’t have anything to say to that. Life sucked, sure, but what else was there? Nothing?

“Living like a termite is my punishment,” he said.

“For what?”

“Sins.”

“Which ones?”

“You want to know?”

“Ain’t got anything else to do until we hit Arkansas.”

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “I’ve never told anyone, but I’ll tell you. You look at me and you see a fat slob, a sucker, a potential victim. Right?”

I just stared at him.

“Fine,” he said, “I’m not an intimidating man. Believe me, I know. But I’m not talking about being intimidating. I used to be the safest man you could imagine. At one time, years ago, so many people loved me and trusted me you wouldn’t believe it. I’ve known the kind of trust that few people are ever afforded. And I betrayed it. So now I guess I deserve the termite life I’ve been living. I deserve to die the way I’m going to die. I betrayed everyone who ever trusted me, and God saw fit to cast me down with the termites. No amount of forgiveness or understanding will change what I’ve done.”

He glanced back at me.

I told him, “Pass me those cigarettes.”

As he passed a pack back to me, he smiled the oddest smile. “I’ll tell you why I’m going to hell,” he said. “You’ll soon agree I deserve it.”