Hell on Church Street (19 page)

I’d love to say I remained quiet to protect the pretty young mother-to-be, but there’s no point in trying to convince you that I’m a decent human being. I wasn’t fearful for the girl, but when Ian attached himself to me and whispered that he’d kill her, I knew he would. It deflated me. My last hope was gone.

Climbing into the back of the SUV, I had every expectation I was about to die. And most of the time, to be completely honest, I wish I had.

Chapter Twenty

After I’d been handcuffed in the back seat, we pulled out of the garage. As we slipped off toward the mountains, Ian rolled down his window and lit a cigarette. Van sat next to him and watched me. Soon we were out of town completely and, as Ian followed the road hugging the black side of some mountain, they sat silhouetted in the moonlight and dashboard lights.

“That went well,” Ian said.

“I’m glad you think so,” Van said.

Ian regarded his cigarette for a moment. “You worry too much, Van. It’s bad for your heart.”

Van shook his head.

“What?” Ian said.

Van shook his head again.

Ian said, “What?” again.

“I have to worry,” Van snapped. “I’m the only one who does. It’s my job in this family. You heard what she was saying back there. That’s not new. She’s not coming up with fresh insults, Ian. Those insults are fifty-seven years old. She’s been saying that shit my entire life, but I’ve always had to be the cautious one.”

“It seems to me that Doolittle did pretty well looking out for himself.”

Van snorted. “You really think that, don’t you?”

“What?”

“You and her both…”

Ian glanced at me in the rearview mirror. He asked Van, “Are you watching him?”

Van turned and looked at me. “Yes,” he said, but then he turned back to Ian and said, “You and she both act as if I’m inessential. Doolittle at least understood my function in the family.”

“
Grandmom
runs this family.”

Van sighed. “Sure.”

“Well, doesn’t she?”

Van rubbed his face. “Oh Doolittle,” he said prayerfully, “
you
got off easy, man. Death is the only respite.” Then to Ian he said, “She’s an old woman, Ian. She’s just a mean old woman. Yes, she is still as strong as a hurricane, and, yes she’s crazier than the rest of us—which is saying quite a goddamn lot—but at the end of the day she’s just a mean old woman.”

“So who runs the family?”

“Doolittle was running the family. I was running the family.”

Ian sucked on his cigarette while cold air poured through the open window. Van and I shielded
ourselves
from it, sat away from it, or put our shoulders to it, but Ian sat there and let it wash over him like wind across a glacier.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I was r—”

“Let me tell you why you don’t know what you’re talking about. Doolittle is gone. That means we need a new field general. Because that’s what Doolittle was. He was a field general. You? You’re a captain maybe. I was a captain, too. But
Grandmom
is the President, Van. You’ll do good not to forget that.”

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.”