The Wettest County in the World (26 page)

How’s business?

Maggie flipped his sandwich onto a blue plate, dug into a pot of stewed greens with a spoon, dropped a hunk next to the sandwich, and slid the plate in front of him. He bit into his sandwich. It was hot and the cheese buttery and crisp.

Maggie stepped off to the side and leaned on the grill. Anderson noticed that she had a towel draped so it wouldn’t stain her dress. She lit a cigarette and eyed the window.

Is Forrest around? he asked.

Nope.

Coming back anytime soon?

Couldn’t tell you.

Anderson polished off the sandwich in four bites.

You ever talk to Hal, Anderson said, over there at the County Line?

She turned and eyed him coolly, smoke billowing from her nostrils. That got her attention, Anderson thought.

I was just over there yesterday, Anderson said. Mentioned you used to work there.

She cocked her head at him, a slight line of concern in her brow. He found himself immediately confessing.

I want to know about that night, he said, what happened there. When Forrest was cut.

Why?

Because I’m a writer, he said.

Newspaper?

Yes and no. I write books. Look, I’m just interested in what happened.

Maggie stubbed out her cigarette. The footsteps upstairs seemed to be pacing back and forth, covering the width of the room in an even pattern.

What kind of car do you drive? Maggie asked.

What?

She nodded toward the window.

What kind of
car.
Do you
drive.

I got a ’33 Dodge.

She shrugged and folded her arms.

What? he said. What does that have to do with it?

I like to drive, Maggie said. I like to drive nice cars. I thought maybe you had a car I wanted to drive.

If I did, you would tell me about that night at the County Line?

Maybe.

Are you serious?

She looked at him with such a condescending look that Anderson felt humiliated. He stood up, his stool scraping and falling to the floor.

Say, what’s the deal here? he demanded.

The footsteps overhead suddenly stopped. They all stood quietly for a few moments. Anderson reached for his hat. As he dropped a dollar on the counter Maggie smirked and turned away in a swirl of violet and lace.

He found himself standing out in the lot by the petrol pumps, holding his empty pop bottle, his hand on the car door. The heat was intense and his car hot to the touch.

What am I doing?
He’s there.

Anderson heard a low sound, an undercurrent of something happening down in the hollow next to the station, a tumbled mess of creeper vine and strangled oaks, some kind of dull reverberations coming from the deep gully. He left his empty pop bottle on the hood of the car and walked over and stepped down into the hollow. After his eyes adjusted to the shade he saw that the hollow was half full of discarded five-gallon cans, piles of them, hundreds, thousands perhaps, warping and thumping in the heat.

T
HE NEXT EVENING
at Sunday supper Sherwood Anderson stood tensely in the yard, hat in his hand, watching his fellow boarders gathering on the back porch for a before-meal smoke. Through the windows Anderson could see the matron piling the sideboard with large cuts of pork shoulder and heaps of hot corn. She moved rapidly, drawing in and out of the lighted window, returning with steaming platters and then leaving again without an upward glance. The black maid placed a ceramic pitcher of milk on the table, wiping her hands on her starched apron, pausing in the lit frame to admire the set table. The men on the porch smoking and stretching, salesmen with yellowed collars, hard-sided cases of samples. They were ready to talk well enough. He clenched his fists as he thought of these rocking, yawning fools, buffing the toes of their shoes with a jacket cuff, joking with the matron and quietly cursing the country yokels who ignored their goods of sale. The ambassadors of the new America, the captains of capitalism. Peddling their cheaply manufactured wares while the craftsman stands alone in his garret, up to his knees in wood chips and no understudy, all the young men moving out of the towns and into the urban meat grinder. The love of the trade, the value of the craft: all going, all gone.

It was a fine summer night, almost cool, the clouds blue-black, rolling from the east.
Death in the Woods,
the dogs feeding on the body of the old woman. The animal hunger of man; this is something D. H. Lawrence knew well and captured artfully and without mercy. Dreiser, the master. At what cost are our ordinary, everlasting animal hungers fed?

In his room Anderson sat on the edge of the bed, eyeing his desk and the stack of notes there. He finished his drink and lay back, suddenly bone-tired.

Something loomed far above him, a sense of great weight, and he quickly opened his eyes. He put his hands to his face and felt his lined cheeks, the sagging jowl of his neck. There was a time I cut quite the figure, he thought. When he closed his eyes it came again, this shape looming above him; it’s dark mass like the end of light.

F
ORREST WATCHED
his younger brother step out of the white farmhouse. As he walked toward the car Jack pulled on a wool cap, yanking the brim low, his soft leather boots laced high, the brass eyelets buffed. Forrest turned from his brother and stared out over the fields pocked with brittle clover and cut cornstalks. In the valleys a sodden affair; the plants dried out by drought now lay floating in puddles of muddy ice.

Forrest’s legs were jackknifed in the wheel well, his knees cradling the steering wheel. In the afternoon light the ragged white scar across his neck glowed. Jack climbed in the car, moving aside a heavy revolver wrapped in an oil-stained cloth and a paper sack of canned beans, salt pork wrapped in wax paper, a hunk of baloney, a few large onions, potatoes, and two loaves of bread. Forrest gunned the engine and the car lurched down the drive.

T
IGHT IN A NOTCH
on the western ridge of Turkeycock Mountain a thin wisp of smoke rose through the still-dense tree cover. Above the ridge a stream ran fast down a series of exposed granite steps and into a small pool. The clear water was channeled through copper pipes down a small rise through a dense patch of trees into a small clearing bordered with heavy bramble and thick rolls of blackberry and pokeweed bushes, draining into the tops of oak barrels sitting on foundations of stacked brick.

Howard stood watching the water filling the condenser barrel. He stuck a couple thick fingers into the water and lightly tapped the coiled loop of copper tubing that spiraled into the darkness at the bottom of the barrel. The trees shook in the cold breeze that came down the mountain and Howard swayed with the wind, the soles of his muddy boots leaving the ground just slightly at the toes. A short silo-shaped cap daubed with a crust of baked mud sat on a squat blackened whiskey still, a contraption of ancient vintage, the ground around it blasted with soot and ash like some half-emerged knob of the earth’s burning core. The still bore the distinct V-shaped notches of revenuer ax blows, patched over several times. Behind the still a dozen mash boxes stood in two rows, half of them containing a roiling mixture of corn mash, rye, and malt. Piles of firewood, spare boards, shovels, grain bags, sugar bags, and empty cans littered the ground with patches of snow clumped in muddy waddles.

A man’s voice sang out in the distance and Howard stopped tapping the worm with his finger. He stepped lightly over to a wheelbarrow covered with burlap and retrieved an over-under shotgun and broke it open to check the load. A faint chilling mist from the waterfall drifted through the camp. Howard saw two men coming across the side of the mountain from the east, along a faint path that wound along the cliff face. Howard’s large features slid into a grin and he stood up and walked across the hill toward his brothers.

E
ARLIER THAT AFTERNOON
Forrest stood in a tobacco barn in Snow Creek and handed Henry Abshire a small packet of bills. Abshire looked exhausted, his face worn and eyes heavy.

I’ll do what I can, Abshire said.

I’m not paying for try.

Hell, Forrest, Abshire said. You owe us back pay…if people found out I was even here with you? Well, it just ain’t that easy. You know they gunnin’ for you now.

Don’t give a damn, Forrest said. Just doin’ same as always.

Well, then why you comin’ to me now?

This is different, Forrest said. This ain’t for me.

Forrest patted Abshire’s shirt pocket where he tucked the money.

You just take care of your end and we’ll handle the rest.

I can’t promise you anything, Abshire said.

I can promise you, Forrest said, if anyone tries to stop us, somebody will be hurt.

J
ACK FOLLOWED
the finger of car lights coming along the switchbacks of Chestnut Mountain across the valley. Howard squatted on his haunches, poking the fire with a branch. Forrest stood with his arms folded over his chest, his chin low.

You think, Jack asked him, that Cricket really drowned like they say?

Nope.

Then you think Rakes and his crew did it?

Forrest shook his head.

Think the man died by his own hand.

But why?

Maybe he was afraid.

Jack thought of his friend, his nervous smile, the crouching figure in the corner, his brutal loyalty.

Just can’t understand, Jack said, why he would go and do somethin’ like that.

Guessin’ he had a reason, Forrest said.

A breeze shifted low to the ground, the brambles and chokecherry bushes rustling, the cool air swirling around his ankles.

We got no way of understandin’ this world, Forrest said. We got about as much sense of it as that bird there.

He pointed up at a grackle in the spindled canopy. Forrest regarded the bird, his scar turning pink in the fading light.

There’s a lot that there bird don’t know, Forrest said. But it don’t change the fact that the world is happening to ’im all the same.

Jack shivered; his feet were cold. Goddamn brand-new boots, he thought.

Hell, Howard said, the only difference between Cricket and the rest of us is that he had the guts to do it. We’re just takin’ the long way round.

After a moment Forrest walked a few yards alongside the diverted stream, looking closely into the water. He fished a length of rope out of the water and following it upstream pulled up a half-gallon jar of clear liquid. Forrest poured the three of them a measure in some tin cups. Jack’s hand shook as he held his cup, and he cursed quietly and spat on the gnarled roots of a maple that bowed out over the hillside.

Weather stackin’ up, Forrest said. We gotta run it through the night.

The night stilled and they each stood next to a tree, placing one hand on the bark and lifted the cups of white lightning to their lips. It was well known you wouldn’t ever want to drink straight doubled and twisted corn whiskey without having a hand on something sturdy unless you happened to be standing in the middle of a flat, empty field, in which case you’d better sit down.

For a moment the three men felt like the mountain was shrinking under their feet. To Jack it seemed the deep intake of breath from the mountain, filling its cavernous lungs buried deep under miles of limestone and basaltic rock, the dripping caves and endless chambers of shimmering ice, fire, and movement, like he had seen in his dreams. Howard turned his head aside and sneezed three times.

Pure corn whiskey comes at you like a knifing, Cricket Pate had told Jack once: point first, sharp and hot all the way down. This wasn’t rotgut, the heavily sugared brew that mountain stillers produced for delivery to the bootlegger who would disperse it to the unsuspecting. A shiner’s private stock was made from the purest ingredients, the finest alcohol you could make, its taste and resulting effect unlike anything else in the world. A few ounces and even the hardest backwoods drinker, men who drank a pint or more a day for forty years, even giant men like Howard, felt it deep in their bones, as if something sucked the marrow out and blew in white fire. You opened your eyes again and the angles sharpened on things, the trees and sunlight coming together, the thunderheads to the north rolling with impotent fury; a man curled his hand and felt the steely power in his fingers, the dynamic strength in his legs, the hills shrinking before him, and he was filled with what can only be described as the infinitely possible.

The three men stood, waiting for the mountain’s gentle exhalation that would drive the wind down the valley and through the night. Jack raised his cup and opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

T
HE SNOW LET UP
sometime after dawn and the brothers set out from the base of Turkeycock Mountain in a convoy of four cars. They had Jack’s Dodge roadster, his ’28 Ford, Forrest’s Business Coupe, plus another Chevrolet coach that Forrest had purchased the day before, each car packed tight with between fifty and seventy gallons of white lightning. Howard would drive the ’28 Ford and Everett Dillon the Chevrolet, and they would hit the hard road 33 quickly and blast through Rocky Mount and over Grassy Hill and cross at Maggodee Creek. Most intersections and habitual routes were being watched, and they figured they would take their chances on speed rather than stealth. Floyd Carter and his Midnight Coal Company would pick up the load in a barn outside Roanoke.

They loaded up without incident and crept along the feeder roads at the base of the mountain. The air was crisp and still, the sun vague behind a haze of clouds, the roads untracked. They had to use snow chains until they reached the hard road, and to Jack the crackling, tinkling noise of the chains was unbearable. They crawled around Fork Mountain and got on the hard road near Sydnorsville. The road was lightly tracked, the macadam visible through the ruts, and the four men quickly got out and took off their snow chains, a difficult process with numb, wet fingers that required them to unhook the chains, then roll the cars off them, then stop to pick up the chains again. A few minutes later they set off, Jack in the lead. He pushed the Dodge up to forty, the tires spinning in the slushy ruts.

In another ten minutes they were on the gentle slope into Rocky Mount, Grassy Hill looming. Forrest directly behind, then Everett Dillon, then Howard in the rear. Jack noticed Howard had a jar in his lap when they left but he seemed solid. They were staying in a tight bunch and Jack pushed the speed up to fifty as they hit the cleared roads of downtown. They hammered down Main Street, passing the tobacco warehouse, its doors open and dark, a smokestack steaming. Two men in the doorway, a pair of idling cars in the lot, and as Jack passed he saw the two men quickly chuck away their cigarettes.

Here we go, Jack said to himself, and pressed the gas.

They were going sixty, the convoy stretching out a bit as Everett and Howard struggled to keep up, flashing by the courthouse, men standing on the steps, a few people struggling through the drifts along the sidewalks, turning to watch them pass, and Jack had the urge to hold his hat out the window in a grand gesture, perhaps shout something. On the north edge of town the roads were not cleared and Jack was soon up to his hubs and slowing as he lost traction. He stopped the Dodge and stepped out into the middle of the road and squinted down 33 back into town. The hazy morning sunlight and the contrasting snow glare made two indeterminate swaths of white-gray, and he shaded his eyes and squinted. Nothing seemed to be moving.

Chains, Forrest shouted, make it quick!

All four men set to putting on their snow chains. Kneeling in the snow Jack struggled with the chains, laying them out flat, then scrambling into the car to drive onto them. Howard was the last to finish, and as Jack watched his brother through the back window he saw a vibrating smudge coming from town, separating itself from the gray buildings and snowdrifts.

C’mon, Howard, c’mon!

Then Howard was up and in the car and Jack pulled out, the chains biting through the snow and the convoy lurched forward into the stands of pine that surrounded Grassy Hill. Before the first switchback, when they would bend into the pines, Jack craned his head out the window and looked back. Two cars had stopped at the same spot, and the drivers were kneeling at their tires, putting on chains. Jack brought the convoy up to thirty and after ten minutes they crested the hill without incident. The road down the northeastern slope was straight and nearly clear, the morning sunlight working on the snow, and Jack stopped again and leaped out of the car.

Mostly clear, he called to Forrest. Get the chains off and we’ll be faster down the hill.

Forrest nodded and relayed the message to Everett and Howard who stopped behind him.

Who is that comin’ on? Jack shouted.

Hodges, Forrest said. Some others.

Jack struggled to loose the chains, his blood pounding in his ears. They must have been expecting them to come through. His coat was constricting him so he shucked it off and threw it on top of the stacked five-gallon cans. There was a growing whine and groan of cars coming up the switchbacks and Jack scrabbled, his brogans slipping on the road, and jumped into his car to pull it forward. When he got out again he saw that he hadn’t pulled forward far enough and part of the chain was still pinned under the wheel, the hooks wrapped around the axle. He sat in the slush and pulled at the chain with both hands, hoping to jerk it out from under the wheel. There was a roar of engines and Forrest’s car pulled up beside him.

Jack! Let’s go!

Then Howard was standing beside him, bending, taking the wheel hub in his hands, then with a moan straightening and lifting, the hub rising to the top of the springs, the wheel coming an inch off the ground.

Get it off, Howard breathed.

Jack slipped down next to his brother’s feet and worked his hands under the wheel, feeling for the chains. The hot engine smoked, the smell of oil and axle grease filling his head. He found the hooks and slipped them off, inching back out from under the car. When Jack cleared the wheel he slapped at Howard’s leg and Howard released the car and it sank back on the road.

Hodges’s car crested the hill, another close behind, churning a wake of snow. Jack could see the dark shapes of the drivers hunched over the wheel. They were a hundred yards away and closing fast.

Go, go! Jack yelled to Forrest. We’ll catch up!

Forrest nodded and started down the hill, Everett close behind. Howard was rubbing his hands in the snow, his palms sliced open and bloody. He turned to the two cars steaming toward them, then back to his younger brother and waved Jack on.

Be right behind you!

Jack put his car in gear and began down the hill, Forrest and Everett disappearing down the slope. He watched Howard get in his car, Hodges slowing just behind him. A man opened the passenger door and stood on the running board, aiming a pistol. There was a puff of smoke and then a loud
thwack
as the bullet crashed into the back of Jack’s car. When Jack looked back he saw Howard grinning at him through the windshield like some kind of lunatic.

Don’t do it, Howard.
Don’t!

Howard put his car in reverse and gunned the engine, popped the clutch, and shot backward. Hodges wrenched the wheel to avoid it but Howard turned into him. The man on the running board was aiming another shot, clinging to the swinging door as the car swerved. Howard smashed into Hodges’s right front fender, crushing the wheel, the man on the running board flung forward like a rag doll against the open door and then whipped backward into the snow. The second car, brakes locked up, slid into Hodges, pushing the back end of his car into the ditch.

Oh damn, Jack thought, and slowed his car. Hodges struggled with his door, and the driver of the second car, whom Jack could see was another deputy, Hodges’s son, staggered out of his car, his hands to his face, blood running through his fingers. Howard tried to pull forward, his tires spinning in the snow. The man who was flung off the running board was on his knees in the snowbank by the ditch, digging through the drifts with his hands. Jefferson Richards.

Then a wrench of metal and Howard’s car inched forward, went sideways, then caught and came on up the road. Richards found his pistol and came charging through the knee-deep snow, his face a mask of fury, leveling the pistol at Howard’s car. Jack scrunched low in his seat and punched the gas.
Pock. Pock.
Jack gathered speed down the hill, going forty, sixty, the burning smell of brakes. A last look back: Howard floundering in a flurry of white, his car sideways, churning. He will make it, Jack thought. He will make it.

M
AGGIE WAS SITTING
on the bed in the upstairs room when she heard the cars whining down the hill. She walked barefoot to the window that overlooked the road. The sound grew, the gears changing, then Maggie saw the two cars charging down the road, Forrest and Everett. As they passed, Forrest slowed almost imperceptibly, a slight turn of the head in her direction, then he was gone. A third car, Jack’s Dodge, came soon after, the engine racing and Jack hooked over the wheel, his windows open. Then it was quiet. Maggie looked up the road, where it went up and over Grassy Hill. She lit a cigarette and pulled a chair to the window, pulling the heavy drapes close together to cut the draft. Not a sound from either direction. The heavy cloth allowed a diffused rim of winter light that she traced with her hand.

A car came roaring back from the north and pulled into the station lot. Everett parked the Chevrolet, jumped out, ran to his own car, and gunned out of the lot heading south toward Rocky Mount. Then another motor, coming down the mountain, and she couldn’t help parting the curtains to look. A 1928 pine-green Ford with Howard at the wheel, the back end crumpled, the rear window shattered, Howard’s bulky form filling the car, his face so intent on the road it seemed to Maggie that he was willing the car through the snow toward Maggodee Creek.

After the car disappeared around the bend Maggie went to her room and sat before the mirror, working a comb through her hair, over and over. When the gunshots came floating through the trees Maggie crawled into the bed, pulling the sheets up to her chin, and closed her eyes.

J
ACK CAUGHT UP
with Forrest and Everett as they slowed before the Maggodee Creek bridge. The thick stands of pine opened up in a rough egg-shaped clearing around the bridge, the hills on either side humped like shoulders. Forrest stopped about thirty yards from the bridge and Everett and Jack pulled up behind. A car was parked blocking the one-lane wooden bridge, Henry Abshire and Charley Rakes standing by the front. Another car behind had two men sitting inside, the engine running. The creek rippled as the dark waters passed over stone, a crust of ice on the edges.

Forrest got out of his car and walked back to Jack, standing by his window.

Howard?

Said he was coming, Jack said. He wrecked Hodges and the other, put them in the ditch.

Did you see him get away?

Last I saw it looked like he was pulling away, Jack said. Richards was there, shooting, but I don’t think he got ’im.

Forrest straightened and looked over to Abshire and Rakes. Rakes, leaning on the hood of their car, smiled and gave him a tight little wave. Abshire scowled and looked away.

Can you talk to them? Jack said. Think they’ll let us by?

Maybe.

What about Howard?

He’ll catch up, Forrest said. Do you have the gun?

Jack grabbed his coat off the seat and pulled the pistol out of the pocket. It was a .38 with a squeeze-handle safety mechanism, a gun Forrest loaned him.

Get out and put your coat on, Forrest said.

Forrest slipped a pistol out of his pocket and held it along his thigh.

Don’t do anything, he said, until I say.

As Forrest approached the bridge the other two men exited their cars, one cradling a Thompson across his body, the other holding a shotgun. Jack had never seen them before. Rakes said something to these men and slipped his coat back over his holster and put his hands on his hips. Abshire threw down his cigarette and walked out to meet Forrest. Jack walked up to Everett’s window.

Listen, Jack said, if something happens, you turn this car around and get back to the station. Just leave the car there and split. Okay?

Everett nodded, his hands gripping the steering wheel.

A
BSHIRE AND
F
ORREST
exchanged words, then Abshire turned and walked back to the bridge, shaking his head. Forrest turned and signaled Jack to put his gun away, so Jack put it in his coat pocket, his hand resting on it. Rakes nodded to the two men behind him and came striding across the clearing toward Forrest, walking right past him, heading toward the line of cars. The pistol felt slippery in Jack’s hand and he squeezed the handle safety a few times to get the feel. He noticed that his camel-hair coat was smeared wet with wheel grease and road dirt. Where the hell is Howard? Rakes came up and looked in back of Forrest’s car, then up to Everett’s car.

What you got in there, boy, he said.

Nothin’, Jack said. Just some groceries for the station.

Rakes straightened.

Wudn’t asking you.

Well, I’m telling you, Jack said, he ain’t got nothin’.

That so?

Rakes eyed the lump of blanket in the backseat covering the stack of five-gallon cans.

Whadya know, Rakes said, I guess he don’t have anything.

Then he moved on to Jack’s car, wiping away the frost on the back window and peering inside. The wide expanse of the small clearing seemed oppressive to Jack, and he squeezed the handle of the pistol and tried to keep his breath. Forrest must have fixed it; they would let them by. Easy, he thought. Rakes won’t do anything, not like this.

But you, Rakes said,
you
do, don’t you?