The Bootlegger’s Legacy (2 page)

Jane had been tormenting the boys for months. Recess had become hell. Much of it consisted of threats, but the boys had seen her in action. She had pummeled Ray M so bad he had to go to the nurse’s office. He was out of school for three days. Jane was gone for a few days, too—to everyone’s relief.

The only way to improve their position was to form an alliance. Once the boys made their bond, cementing the deal with a ritual handshake and spit, they stood up to her in a frightening display of little boy courage. She left them alone from that day on, and Mike and Joe had been best friends ever since.

Joe parked in front of the hardware store and sat in the car for a while, not wanting to tell Mike how bad things really were. The store had belonged to Mike’s father for more than twenty years and something of a town institution. The original owner, before Mike’s dad bought it, opened in the current location sometime in the 1930s. But times change, and a new Walmart down the street had cut the store’s business in half overnight. Mike’s dad had died about ten years ago, so at least he hadn’t had to see what had happened to the “best little hardware store in OKC.” As the store declined, Mike’s drinking increased. There was probably little Mike could do to help his business, but what he was doing was the opposite of helping.

Joe entered the store and was once again struck by the feeling it had to be hundreds of years old. Everything about the place seemed to be from another era. Even the old cash register was more antique than functional. The store was crammed full of a variety of merchandise, some of which hadn’t been moved in years. On the other hand, if you needed a part for a thirty-year-old washing machine they just might have it. There was comfort in being inside the store—like it was a wonderful part of your past you had forgotten.

“Joe, come on back and give me the good news.” Mike was standing in the doorway of his small office and didn’t look so good. His eyes were bloodshot, and he hadn’t shaved. He had a strange look about him these days, like he wasn’t quite real. There were times it seemed like Mike was an actor in a movie, playing himself. Never a real sharp dresser, now he looked like he should be sitting on the sidewalk outside the store with a bottle in a paper bag rather than occupying the owner’s office.

Mike had inherited a strong physique. Standing at least six foot two, he was often mistaken for an ex-football player, though he’d never been good at sports. Wearing his hair cut short gave a no-nonsense quality to his demeanor. Developing a small stomach was about the only change to Mike’s physique since high school.

Joe went into the office and took a chair at Mike’s desk. He began, “The loss last year was a lot more than you can stand. You have no cash, you’re past due with your suppliers, you owe back payroll taxes to the IRS, and the bank note is four months past due. Mike, you’re broke. I’d be surprised if the bank doesn’t call your loan and put you out of business.” So much for small talk.

Mike just stared off into space. After a short while he turned to Joe, “What can I do?”

“You’re going to need to get some cash—I would say somewhere around $25,000—in order to keep things from imploding. You don’t have much time. The most important thing is to stop the losses—you can’t keep digging a hole and filling it with borrowed money.”

Mike looked dejected. He was quiet. It was evident that this was hard for him to take. His expression reflected something worse than just disappointment.

“My gut tells me you need to shut the business down. Use the $25,000 to buy some time to get a plan in place. I don’t think you can sell the store. So, more than likely, your only option will be bankruptcy and liquidation.” Joe was Mr. Doomsayer today.

Mike erupted “What kind of fuckin’ friend are you? Is that the best you can do?”

“Look, if it was up to me I’d wave a magic goddamned wand and make everything perfect—but I don’t have a wand and, if I did, I’d use it on my own fucked up life.” Joe and Mike shared some stress issues.

“Mike, you can just walk away and lose everything, or you can try to get some cash and have an orderly closing—maybe save your house and some of your other assets. But I think the store is gone. The climate for your type of business has just changed too much. There are plans for a Home Depot only ten minutes from here—what would that do to your business? You need to try and protect as much of what you have as you can and then get on with something else.”

“Something else? Listen to you—you know there’s nothing else for me. I’ve worked in this stupid business since I busted out of college. I don’t know anything else. Maybe I could get a job at Walmart and slowly starve to death. Samantha—I’m sure she’ll understand. We’ll just have to downsize and learn to like living in a mobile home. None of her snotty friends will even notice we’re suddenly white trash.”

Samantha Allen, Mike’s wife, had been his high school sweetheart. She was the prom queen, football queen, home coming queen—pretty much queen of everything. And she was gorgeous. Mike had always felt lucky that she was his wife, but he was also intimidated by her beauty. He’d developed serious insecurities about himself because he hadn’t lived up to her standards.

The room was quiet. Joe felt bad for his friend and at the same time thought he had done very little to prevent the mess he was in. Mike had always lived way beyond his means. If he had a good year and made $50,000, he would spend $70,000—mostly on things and people he could live without. Mike’s wife seemed to think that they actually had money, and she lived just that way.

“Mike, I can loan you maybe $5,000 or so. I’m only going to do that if you can come up with more, so you can have a chance to work out a plan that will let you get out of this business without a complete collapse.”

“I don’t want you loaning me money. Why make you more miserable just to give me a few more hours before I go down the tubes? I need a way to make some big bucks, and fast—not just keep borrowing and struggling from one month to the next. I need a plan.”

Joe agreed: Mike needed a plan. They made a plan to meet for a drink around four that afternoon at Triples, a local bar and restaurant down the street from the hardware store. That wasn’t really a plan at all—it was more like an old bad habit that should be broken—but it was the best they had right now.

Driving back to his office, Joe began to think about how Mike could make some quick money. They were both forty-four—the perfect age for nothing. If you were going to be one of the successful people you read about, it would have already happened. Now there wasn’t much to do except wait for some sort of miracle or death. Joe knew his fate. Working late, drinking too much, and wondering what might have been. The problem Joe had was that even if he was able to start over, he wasn’t sure what he would do differently. He had no vision of what an ideal life would look like, although he was pretty sure lots of money would help. He just wasn’t very interested in much of anything.

Joe knew that Mike thought he’d hit his peak when he married Samantha. She was the most beautiful girl in their senior high school class—Mike had hit the jackpot. But it seemed to Joe that Mike had never really been happy after they were married. He’d won the prize, now what did he do? After all, there was something very contradictory about the fact that he worked in his father’s hardware store and was married to the most beautiful woman in the world. It felt unreal, and Mike seemed almost to be waiting for her to leave him—or maybe his behavior was a way to get her to leave. The pressure of his marriage seemed to be all in his head, but it was as real as could be to Mike.

Although they lived beyond their means, Mike and Sam still lived a modest lifestyle. They didn’t have a mansion or drive fancy cars. They lived a few blocks from the hardware store, on Hudson just off Eighth. Their house was older, in a nice neighborhood. Mike had always planned on fixing it up more than he had. Someday he’d get around to that—well, maybe. Their whole life had a demoralized quality to it that made itself felt in every one of their interactions. Everything was stretched very thin. They were waiting on something, but they didn’t know what.

Oklahoma City, Oklahoma

At 4:15, Joe walked into the darkened confines of Triples looking for Mike. He was over in a corner booth, obviously already headed toward drunk, sipping his usual scotch and water. Joe slid in and waved a finger at the bartender, who immediately begin fixing a gin and tonic—his usual.

“How long have you been here?” Joe wasn’t sure he would stay if Mike was already beyond discussing anything.

“Just a little while. I have had only a couple of drinks—so don’t get all high and mighty on me!” Mike made an ugly face as he said his piece. Under more normal circumstances, Joe would have left to avoid the conflict headed his way. He’d seen Mike like this before. But today he felt he needed to help Mike the best he could.

The bartender brought his drink, and Joe sat back and sipped without comment. In a little while the tension seemed to let up some. Mike was still sulking, but he was doing it with a more pleasant expression on his face.

Joe had given thought to Mike’s financial problems. Without some surprise he didn’t think there was much hope. Mike was like a lot of people, including Joe—he had borrowed as much as he could in order to live the life he wanted to live, right now—to hell with the future. Credit cards had been a way to live beyond their means and enjoy the good life. Everyone did it—why not him?

Joe had counseled Mike several times about the debt and the declining revenues of his business—even when he felt like a hypocrite doing it. Mike would just shrug his shoulders and say, “Everything’ll be better next month.” It never was.

“Let’s get to it, okay?” Joe prodded Mike. “Do you have any assets you can sell?”

“Everything is hocked to the max. Even if I could sell something, it’d just go to pay off debt—there wouldn’t be any cash.” While not a surprising answer, at least Mike seemed lucid and over the anger Joe had encountered when he first arrived.

“How about Samantha. Does she have any assets or family money she could get?”

“Well, even if she did, I wouldn’t ask. I’m sure she’s already planning her life after we’re done. My guess is that she’s hidden a tidy sum somewhere that I can’t reach so once everything starts to collapse she’ll have a nest egg to use when she starts over without me. I know she got some money from her brother’s estate after he died—she never told me how much, although I’d guess it was considerable.”

“Well shit, what kind of deal is that? She’s your wife. That’s as much your money as hers, and you need it—now!” Joe was stunned that Sam would have her own funds and not be helping deal with the family’s financial woes. She and Joe had never got along, so it was easy for Joe to think ill of the bitch.

“Maybe legally, but I’m not going to pursue it. I just don’t want to talk about that—it’s not going to happen.”

Mike was beginning to lose interest in the conversation. You can only talk so much about your failures. Eventually it becomes pointless.

“There is something that could be—oh never mind, that’s crazy.” Mike seemed to be drifting again.

“Crazy? This whole conversation is crazy. Listen, Mike, I know we’re different. I’m not much of a risk taker, but crazy is the mess you’re in right now. You have big financial problems, and we’re in an expensive bar sucking down costly drinks. Is that crazy? If you have any ideas, even crazy ones, now’s the time to hear about them.”

“Okay, okay stay calm. This is a strange area for me. You know my father kind of lost his mind before he died. My mother stayed with him until the last few months, when she couldn’t take it anymore. She asked me to help her with him. During his last years he and I had become a little closer, although he was always distant with me. Or maybe I was a little bit distant with him, I don’t know. Anyway she asked me to help.”

“I looked around for a place he could be moved to. There just wasn’t much that was very pleasant. Then there was an incident with him and my mother and I started to worry about her safety. So, I decided he had to be moved to a nursing home. Putting him in that nursing home was the hardest thing I’d ever done. It felt like I betrayed him. Because of that I didn’t want to be around him, and when I was he seemed to just talk nonsense.”

Joe knew some of this about Mike’s dad. He’d heard from other people that Mike’s whole family was just a little weird. Mike’s dad, Patrick Allen, had been something of a legend in the 40s and 50s, when he’d been the biggest bootlegger in Oklahoma. Joe had always thought the stories were exaggerated, because the man he’d known was a grandfatherly, easy-to-be-around kind of guy. He was much older than Mike’s mom, although he was always energetic, very outgoing and friendly.

“Come on Mike, what’s the crazy part?”

Mike looked worried, then finally spit it out. “My dad kept telling me he had buried millions from his bootlegging days, but that he couldn’t remember where.”

“Millions—as in dollars?”

“I guess. Much of this I think was just him losing his mind toward the end. I mean, I knew the stories, that he’d been a big time bootlegger in the past. I thought they just amounted to him arranging a few bottles of something for his neighbors. I asked my mother, and she said he never was into selling whisky. That was just a bunch of rumors made up by people who were jealous of my dad’s success selling insurance and buying his own hardware business. Anyway, I never knew what was true.”