Henry was in the backseat with his hands pulled together by a thin cord of rope, sat looking out the driver’s side window at the two men who just put him in the car. They were dressed up fancier than him, and they were kicking his hard-dug dirt back into the hole he took it from. Their big dark suits stood like rain clouds against the flat granite sky above the headstone rows, looking for all the world like a pair of mourning parishioners but it was too early yet in the day for a funeral and there wasn’t any church service on Tuesdays. He tried the door handle but it was locked from the outside, and he banged on the window and hollered for them to let it alone. The men either didn’t hear him or they ignored him altogether, picking up his shovel before jogging back to the car and tossing it in the trunk. The driver bent over to brush the dust off the leg of his trousers before both men opened their doors and sat roughly in the front like it was the finishing step of some pre-rehearsed dance.
The driver adjusted his rearview to look directly at Henry and turned the key in the ignition. “Morning, Hank,” he said. Henry saw the corner of his eyes wrinkle in the mirror and knew he wasn’t in on the joke, the man was being rude and the smile was at his expense. But Henry was raised polite and would not deny the man his expected reply.
“Good morning,” he said. He did not appreciate the stranger using his nickname, reserved for family or for friends that he’d been around since he was a boy. Now he was a man coming up on thirty years old with a job and a driving license and a little house beside the church and he preferred the more grown up ‘Henry’.
The driver reversed out of the dirt lot and turned south onto the road that ran past the graveyard and back into town. The other man took a silver case from the inside pocket of his jacket and put a cigarette from it into his mouth before lighting it and blowing out a cloud of tobacco smoke into the cabin. The driver waved in front of his face and blew out clean breath to clear the air and smacked him in the chest with the back of his hand, gesturing at the window before rolling his own down. The other man protested briefly, pushing the driver’s hands away but rolled down his window to let out the smoke and the dusty summer breeze run past Henry’s head in the backseat.
“We talked to Mrs. Levy this morning,” one of them said, he couldn’t tell which. “Nice lady, real helpful. When you weren’t home she told us where you would be at and it didn’t barely take any convincing.” The passenger let out a short ugly laugh with another plume of tobacco smoke and hung his elbow out the window like a teenager. Henry said nothing and stayed quietly looking out the driver’s side window at the burial plots receding into the woods behind the church, warm yellow lights in the windows blinking on as the first of the alarm clocks shouted into the slate gray dawn, fresh cut squares of grass laid out front of ranch style houses steadily shrinking as they drove further towards town.
“And then there you were, digging right where she said.” He glanced up at the rearview and met Henry’s gaze again, eyes still twinkling with amusement. He made a hard right at the intersection, blew past the stop sign, hand over hand on the steering wheel as the back tire skips over the curb and Henry is thrown hard into the driver’s side door, grunting softly as his elbow slams into the armrest. The man on the passenger side turned around in his seat to look back at him and let out another ugly little noise like he’d been punched in the windpipe. Henry got a clear look at him for the first time. He was squat and broad, built like a bulldog with short arms and a trenching bucket for a head. He had small, mean eyes, and his smile carried less humor than the driver’s, a cruel little line smeared across the bottom half of his face.
“You’d think with what they take in taxes they’d be able to patch the roads out here once in a while,” he looked sideways to the driver for approval but his punchline was denied so much as a titter and he turned back to face the windshield, discouraged. He pulled another cigarette from its case and fumbled with the lighter a minute before he managed to light it. Henry allowed himself an imperceptible chuckle at the man’s clumsiness. I’ll bet his bite is something awful, he thought, but nothing could come close to the bark on this one. Just wants the driver to call him a good boy and scritch him behind the ears.
The car stopped at a red light and the driving man looked up into the rearview again. “Hank, I imagine you’d like to know why we were looking for you this morning.” The laughter in his eyes had fallen to a strange sort of pity, and Henry had a feeling like a trout flopping around in the bottom of his belly.
“Some sort of trouble, I reckon,” he said.
The man’s crinkled crows feet returned for a moment and he exhaled sharply through his nose. The light turned and he moved the car through the intersection, past the last of the shopfronts and brick buildings, the greengrocers and the furniture store. The grass patches once again grew long and wide, bungalows sloping back from the road on either side, toys in the yard, the odd truck tire hanging from a bough thick enough to bear the weight of a swinging child.
“Have you talked to Francis in the last little while?”
Henry’s back stiffened and the trout in his belly flopped like it had just been slit down the middle without a bash on the head first. “I ain’t seen him in a while,” he said.
“We’re having the exact same issue then, Hank.”
The houses had now given way to swaths of field and forest, sprawling fluorescent under the light of the towering yellow sun. A commercial truckyard down a long gravel drive off left, a locomotive weaving through the trees off the starboard side like a great steel snake. The air had gotten hot and thick now inside the car and the men up front had taken off their hats and jackets and laid them down the middle aisle between the seats. Henry was sweating heavily in the back seat, pushed as far into the passenger side as possible to get as much shade cover as he could. Even as fast as the car sped down this narrow rural road, the breeze was not enough to keep the heat from being nearly unbearable.
“The problem is that Francis owes a friend of ours some money, and when we went around looking for him he wasn’t anyplace we could find him. So the decision was made that we come pay you a visit instead.”
Henry held his arms above his head, trying to wipe his dripping face with the arm of his short sleeved shirt. He could taste the dirt salt sweat on his lips and his eyes stung with perspiration. “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said. “I ain’t seen him since it thawed enough and we could bury Mama. If he owed your friend some money I’m sure he’d pay him, he’s a good man and he makes a good living.” The man in the passenger seat let out a low chuckle.
The driver slowed the car down almost to a stop. “I’m afraid this is where we start to disagree, Hank,” he said.
He turned left onto a narrow dirt road shaded by a tight canopy of crowded leaves glowing neon green a few feet above the hood. Henry was glad for some reprieve from the sweltering July noon, but he felt completely separate from the world outside the car. Like he was being swallowed down the emerald throat of some giant beast, menaced by the heartbeat of this living place from which no creature could emerge. Henry started to feel scared.
“You dumb sonofabitch,” the bulldog growled from the front seat. “Your brother was a little too fond of the dogs at the track and now he’s skipped town and left you with the bill. Now we’re taking a drive out of town and we’ll find a way to settle his tab.”
Henry got angry then. “Now that don’t make no damn sense,” he bristled. “I got dogs home and he don’t like them none at all. Not a lick.”
The passenger erupted into a fit of howling, knee slapping laughter, wiping tears from the corners of his eyes before plucking another cigarette from the case. The driver made no sound, smiling his slow pitying smile into the rearview mirror. “Not that kind of dog, Henry,” he said. “Betting dogs are a different kind.” He pulled the car into a circular clearing in the woods and turned it around to face the way they’d come in, sliding it into park and turning the key all the way to the left before taking it out of the ignition. “Shall we?” he said, to no one in particular.
Both men exited the car and the short one whipped around to Henry’s door, grabbing him roughly by the elbow and forcing him out of his seat into the dirt beside the vehicle. “Stand up,” he barked, and Henry pushed himself upright with his bound hands, leaning on the car for balance. The bulldog grabbed his arm again, leading him to the middle of the clearing where the other man stood, smoking a cigarette of his own.
He was taller than his partner, his dull eyes held in a long gray face that terminated in a weak chin and protruding Adam’s apple. Tight black curls peeking out from under his hat, he was maybe ten years older than the passenger, and weathered like an old war memorial. There was a quiet grace in him, a professionalism that was evident to Henry, especially in contrast to the bulldog’s brash demeanor. He nodded at him solemnly. “Come on, Hank. There’s still some unpleasantness yet.” And he took hold of the other arm.
The walk to the killing place was not a short one, and the tall man took pains to explain the situation to Henry as plainly as he could while the short man trailed behind carrying the shovel. “When our friend lent Francis the money for his bet,” he explained, “it was with the understanding that he would be expected to pay it back regardless of the outcome of the wager. He understood what the consequences would be if he could not, for whatever reason, pay back his loan.
“I understand.”
“We had tried on several occasions to collect, but your brother was hard to get hold of. In our last conversation we explained to him if he continued to evade us, this debt would be inherited by his next of kin. His wife, his daughters, and so on. He understood these consequences as well.”
Henry nodded.
“It’s unfortunate, but it’s the way business is done. When we visited his house, it appeared they had left in a hurry. Francis, wife, daughters. The whole lot, gone.”
“And Mama was buried in the spring.”
“She was.”
The sun had fallen from atop its perch, the sky growing a deeper blue behind the wispy remnants of the morning’s cloud cover. The scorching noon heat had cooled in its fever, no longer baking the rocks and the rust red dirt of the forest floor through holes in its ceiling. Bird calls glittered through the canopy, singing their whip poor will song to the doomed man being escorted through the woods by his two caretakers.
“Well, if I can pay Frankie’s debt, that’s not such a bad thing.” Henry said. They had arrived at a spot in the wood where the roots were not tangled and the ground was clear of brush and the tall man untied Henry’s hands. “In the fall sometime Mrs. Levy’s son would visit and he’d bring a rooster with him but it weren’t for them to eat. They’d say some prayer over it like they gave all their bad thoughts and all their sins onto this chicken and then they’d kill him and they wouldn’t have their sins anymore. It didn’t seem too fair to the chicken, but then Mrs. Levy would come down to my house with the meat and I wasn’t gonna say no to a gift. The sins didn’t make it taste different or nothing.”
He looked up from the ground and met the gaze of the tall man. “I would take my brother’s sins then. He ain’t a bad man, he’s just a little dumb with some things. And I know them all think I was the dumb brother and Frankie’s the smart one but I know we just dumb in different ways even though that’s what everybody said but that’s alright.”
The three men stood in the reddening light of the afternoon, orange beams sent down from the heavens through gaps between the ash trees cast a carpet of waving shadows at their feet. The birds had stopped chirping and lay silently in wait, the wind rushing its staticy breath through the topmost layer of foliage. None of them said a word for a long while.
“Well,” the bulldog said finally, “we just got one job left for you Hank.” He speared the shovel into the ground between them and stomped it with the heel of his boot so it stood up on its own. “We need you to dig a hole for us, boy.”
“No.”
His face pinched in at the eyebrows and his thin wire mouth tightened even more. “I’m guessing you don’t hear all that well, so I’ll repeat myself.” He pulled a pistol from inside his coat somewhere and pointed it at Henry. “Get to digging, Hank,” he said.
Henry shook his head. “It’s Tuesday, I don’t work Tuesdays. You’re gonna kill me anyways, I’m not digging no graves on my day off.”
The bulldog laughed another grisly mean laugh and lowered his gun. “You dumb sonofabitch, you was digging when we picked you up this morning. Don’t lie to me now, it’s not polite.” He pointed the muzzle in Henry’s face and cocked the hammer back. “Dig.”
Henry shook his head again. “That was a favor. Mr. Levy got sick and so Mrs. wanted to get the work out of the way early in case things turned for him. I ain’t digging no graves on my day off for no overgrown bulldog and his handler.”
The short man chuckled to himself and looked towards the tall one, who did not acknowledge him. He huffed and set his sights back on the doomed man. “Have it your way. Goodnight Hank.” and he squeezed the trigger. Henry’s head snapped back, bits of brain and skull spraying the wide oak behind him as the bullet came out the top of his head. He fell backwards onto the ground dead with his lifesblood pooling around his crown, little red rivulets draining off the broadleaf ferns that haloed him.
The day approached dusk now, the air alight with the buzz of a thousand winged insects hovering. The wind had slowed and the trees seemed out of breath, leaning heavy against each other like wounded men. The sun had begun its long descent below the horizon, stretching the pine shadows east as the tall man lit another cigarette.
“What do you propose we do now?” he said stiffly.
The bulldog looked at him, surprised by his tone. “We’ll just dig the damn thing ourselves, Eli.” He took off his hat and jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his stained white shirt. “There’s two of us anyway, we'll have a hole in half the time he would’ve.”
The tall man flicked the lit cigarette at him and lit a fresh one as he pat the ember out on his trousers in alarm. “You dumb sonofabitch,” he said, “we’ve only got the one shovel”.
This is the first fiction published on this substack and we hope it won’t be the last. Bigmac McCarthy is not only a vital part of what we do here at RC, but he’s also a great singer/songwriter and just recently, he started his own substack .