Nightwoods (9 page)

CHAPTER
  7

L
ATE DAYS OF SUMMER
. A social occasion in a raw new clearing at the edge of town, the margin where everything turned to jungle and sloped steep to the high peaks. A couple dozen vehicles parked between the bulldozed ground and the road. Chevys and Fords mostly. A few outlier cars, like a low-slung Hudson coupe and a tiny pink-and-white Nash Metropolitan, and even a weird pale yellow Vauxhall. Also the worn-out green pickup with sideboards.

A full moon peeped over the ridges to the east, and the sky was dark enough to show one bright planet. But plenty of light left for shooting. Everybody stood around with pistols in their hands, hats on their heads, and cigarettes drooping from their mouths. Men in jeans and flannel and khaki in front of a red clay bank still showing teeth marks from the D6 blade. Lots of beer, and a few nostalgic mason jars of corn liquor. Burnt matchsticks pinned paper targets to the bank. White background with thin black concentric circles around a dense black center hole. Their rows against the red wall looked modern and artlike. Or to another turn of mind, not at all artlike. More like problems in geometry class requiring a solution, and the correct answer was a perfect empty hole through the black dead center.

Bud, new to town and drawn to congregation, had driven by and then turned around and parked. He mingled about, hoping to overhear gossip about Lily’s family and where the kids might be, having already struck out earlier at the barbershop and the pool hall. In short order, he became more than half drunk on handouts of beer and a very generous paper cup of Wild Turkey.

He lacked a gun, but that didn’t stop the bully in him from needing an airing. He walked over to a short slim man with a sweaty Pabst in his left hand and a big .45 like a brick in his right. The little man leaned against its weight. Bud said the first thing that popped into his head.

—Hey Lit, some of these old boys say your feet’s so small you buy shoes in children’s sizes at the store that sells Florsheims.

Lit smiled, raised his eyebrows, and sipped his beer. He moved up real close into Bud’s air. Inches apart. The top of his head level with Bud’s collarbones.

—Which ones say that?

Bud took one involuntary step back. He said, Nobody.

—Nobody said it? You just took a flying fuck of a guess at my name and where I buy my shoes?

—Somebody might of said something. I don’t recollect all the specifics. It was supposed to be funny.

—Funny? It’s the same shoes for less money. You ought to feel funny paying full price.

Bud looked down at little Lit, his angle against the weight of his big pistol. Drawing himself together, remembering his higher degree of suavity among the hillbillies, Bud said, Slim, you need a twenty-two. It would fit your hand better. One of those purse guns.

Lit closed the back step Bud had taken. He reached his .45 out, and Bud took it from him and turned it from one face to the other and studied it, like a message might be written in the diamonds of its grips.

Lit switched his beer to his shooting hand and pitched the half-full can toward the clay bank. It rolled, spewing, just a score of feet.

Lit said, Can you hit that?

—In my damn sleep.

—Well then, if it’s that easy, can you empty the clip into it?

—Step back and watch me.

Bud squared up and started shooting, pulling the trigger as fast as he could jerk it out.

The first round hit the can fine and knocked it spinning up against the bank. Then with every shot, the .45 began rising on him, like it wanted to haul back and strike him in the forehead. He fought to hold it down, and he lost. By the time the clip emptied, the barrel pointed about where the moon would be come midnight.

Lit said, Yeah, that’s how I figured.

—Shit. Let me see you do it.

Lit took back his empty pistol and packed it in its holster and snapped the flap over it.

—I tell you what, Lit said. When you can do it, I’ll do it.

Lit walked away. Immediately, several shooters came over to Bud with fresh beers. One of them said, Natural mistake. He was off duty and out of uniform.

—Off duty from what? Bud said. Pumping gas?

Laughing and delighted, they talked over one another, telling the new man the famous story about Deputy Lit and the burglars. How when Lit was first hired, many people around town thought him a figure of amusement due to his size. But that ended one night when three men set out to rob the dime store in the dark hours after midnight. The burglars carried guns for some fool reason. Lit surprised them in the alley as they came out the back door with their loot. Nineteen dollars, mostly in ones, from the cash drawer. And a brown paper sack of stuff they had scooped in leaving. A fat roll of a thousand Daisy BBs, a hawkbill knife with a fake bone handle, a red-and-white paper cylinder of Royal Crown pomade, and a pink rabbit’s-foot key chain. So, altogether, make it twenty-three dollars and change. It shouldn’t have amounted to much trouble at all. A fine would have taken care of it if the magistrate was in a good mood. Except when Lit turned his light on them and told them that they were under arrest, one of the burglars misjudged and pulled his pistol. Lit was afoot and off duty, making one last check of town on his way home. He had his flashlight and nothing else. Nevertheless, the flashlight was longer than Lit’s lower arm from elbow to fingertips, heavy with D batteries stacked down its black metal sleeve. When Lit was done, all three men ended up in the hospital, and the one that pulled the pistol nearly died. He never thought right from that mistaken moment forward. Even now, you could see him most days sitting on the bench outside the pool hall, a slow simple fellow with a deep pink dent in his forehead, smiling at everybody, a friend to mankind. Afterward, a rumor passed around that Lit had been a Ranger in the big war, which meant he could kill you barehanded ten different ways without breaking a sweat.

—Shit, Bud said at the end of the story. Shit, shit, shit.

One of the tale tellers, struggling to keep his mouth straight, said to Bud, You know what I think?

—What?

—Lit must have taken a shine to you.

So, Bud reckoned, a bad move for starters, calling attention to himself with the law. But don’t look back. You make your mistakes, and then fuck it. You don’t dwell, you move forward.

And sure enough, as night settled in and the marksmen quit shooting their guns and drank more beer and ran their mouths, they taught Bud something welcome. They bitched about how difficult and expensive it was to get beer and bonded liquor, this being a dry county with nothing but vast national forests and several layers of other dry counties at every quarter of the compass. You either had to drive hours to reach the outer world or else pay the one bootlegger a horrendous markup. It took Bud about three seconds to recognize a ripe situation. And then a day to find the Roadhouse and learn that it served drinks, the local law looking the other way. And only one more day to learn the bootlegger’s name and pay him a friendly visit.

OLD JONES WAS A BALDY ELDER
who had cut his teeth on moonshining back at the edge of the previous century. He wore pressed bib overalls and a starched white shirt and a black suit coat. Farmer below, businessman above. He sat rocking on his porch, looking at the view across the valley. Said he was thinking about cutting open a watermelon if Bud cared to have a slice.

They ate the melon spraddle-legged, letting the juice drop between their feet and disappear into the porous porch boards. Jones got pretty talky about his early days of moonshining, the copper kettle and copper coil. Eluding revenuers for decades and never serving a day of time. Even now, cooking off about fifty gallons every fall when the evenings grew crisp and he and his white-headed buddies wanted to get away from the wives and camp out in the high mountains for a couple of weeks, running their coon dogs and recollecting lies from their youth. Oh, the happy late nights holding fresh bottles of corn liquor up to firelight and complimenting one another on the fineness of the bead. Now the money was in bootlegging. Hauling bonded stuff. No art, just commerce.

When Bud grew weary of listening to folklore and turned to business, he bore down pretty hard. Times have changed, was his main theme. Less bullshit, more profit. The new world had gotten dangerous, and Bud embodied the new. In the end, he nudged the bootlegger into retirement with a combination of fairly specific threats and promises involving a slightly vague percentage of an expanded liquor empire run by Bud on sharper modern lines. Long story short, the former bootlegger could sit in his porch rocker and do nothing but collect a monthly check.

—Good God, Jones said. Don’t you know this is a cash business?

Bud left with a little brown leather shirt-pocket address book. Inside, a long list of standing orders reaching forward into infinity from everybody in town interested in getting their liquor without committing themselves to a day’s drive. Two fifths of Smirnoff every two weeks. One of Johnnie Walker Red and two of Bacardi monthly. Half gallon of Popov weekly. Page after page. Each order with a name and a number, if you considered 7 and 14-G to be phone numbers, which Bud didn’t. So, what a happy surprise when actual liquor customers answered his calls.

By the end of his second week in town, Bud had made four long runs in the pickup and found himself amazed at how fast you make friends when you’re the bootlegger. Amazing, as well, to be gainfully self-employed so soon after arriving in town wondering how far he could stretch a pocket of greasy bills from his gas station stickups if he lived frugal, which was never likely to happen. Yet, in a matter of days, he had income.

Jones’s little brown book made the new vocation possible, so Bud stopped by one afternoon and peeled off a few twenties as a first fraudulent percentage for the old boy, who was an entertaining little shit when you compared him to the run of regular people. Sat on the porch with him, drinking a tumbler of his shine mixed fifty-fifty with lemonade, and Jones told every bit of local gossip he knew. Always an appealing trait, but especially now, when anything about a couple of new kids would be so interesting.

When Bud finally got ready to leave, already down the porch steps on the way to the truck, the old man said, You ever wonder why there hasn’t been but one bootlegger in this end of the county?

Bud said, Nope.

Old Jones said, Twenty years ago, if you’d come to my house saying the things you did last time, you’d have found yourself at the bottom of the lake by midnight.

STEADY MONEY GOT BUD
to wanting a Mercury, equipped with every hot nonstock item a car can have in regard to carbs and cams and transmissions and hubcaps. A Hurst shifter with an eight ball. Kind of car that could twist the speedometer off the end without breathing hard.

But then he took a woman he’d met at the Roadhouse to the drive-in one night,
Thunder Road
, which proved so instructive that Bud fended off her groping at his trousers to attend to the lesson. Robert Mitchum had a shit-hot car, and the movie showed exactly where that got him. Dead was where. Glorious, but nevertheless dead. Fact of nature, hot cars draw trouble. So, better than getting away from the law in white-knuckle races over twisted mountain roads was never having to run because you looked plain as dirt and they paid you no heed.

Next day, Bud settled for getting the truck’s radio and gas gauge fixed. He bought a brown canvas tarp to cover his load and a dozen bales of hay to strew for camouflage in the bed. As for cash investment in his new business, that was it.

He wanted to feel the glow of his accomplishment, but he made the mistake of projecting his thoughts into the future. He ran the numbers in his head, and found that hauling liquor paid considerably better than lubing boxcar couplings, but even if he worked until he was as old as the former bootlegger, he’d never make back what Lily took from him. And he’d always live like he had the muzzle of a gun to his head, those two idiot kids with their grubby fingers on the trigger.

CHAPTER
  8

—I
MAGINE, LUCE SAID
. What if a locomotive pulling flat-cars loaded down with fresh-cut logs came chugging through right now. You’d smell dirty coal smoke and cinders. And then, when the cars passed, new-cut oak and poplar and maple, all crisp and clean. The ground shaking and the rails clacking against the big wheels and the sleepers shifting under the weight.

The children paid no attention to Luce but stood with their heads bent, studying a fanned branch of hemlock needles. They began backing slowly away, as if the branch were dangerous, a bear or snake.

—Luce said, What is it?

Dolores and Frank turned and continued walking down the sunken bed of an abandoned narrow-gauge logging railway from early in the century, which even now made a good trail for the daily jaunts through woods and fields they needed as bad as a high-strung pair of spotted bird dogs. It drained their energy into the ground like electricity and settled them.

Luce kept hoping that if she talked enough about the relict places she had discovered in her days of freedom, language would rub off on the children. And they seemed to like the walking, and would follow creeks and streams for great distances, slogging through them as if they were trails. Wet to the knees, mossy underwater stones shifting beneath their feet, they bobbled along and for balance waved their arms like lunatics. And if they weren’t doing that, they had to be herded down the curves of trail to keep them from making one of their straight-line marches, regardless of terrain impediments, like they were being pulled by a string down some passage nobody could detect except maybe dousers with their wise twitching sticks crossing and parting to find underground watercourses and other transmissions of unknown powers.