Hell on Church Street (8 page)

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 when 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.