The Whiskey Baron (20 page)

“I’m trying to get to Charlotte,” he said.

“You looking for work, you found it here.”

“Naw, I’m trying to get to Charlotte.”

“You got another five, six miles to go fore you hit the city limits.”

“You sure about that? Trucker that gave me a lift told me the same thing five or six miles ago.”

“Where you coming from?”

“South Carolina. I come in on this highway.”

“He must have dropped you way out.”

“Wasn’t nothing there but a few tobacco fields.”

“Must have gone out of his way to get you there, because they’s a hundred miles of nothing out there.”

“He said he was passing by Charlotte.”

The man scoffed. “This road’ll take you into the city. Another five miles, you can catch a streetcar wherever you’re heading. You looking for work, though, likely won’t find anything more promising than the mill here. They’re about the only ones hiring these days.”

Mary Jane thanked him, wiped his brow, and walked on.

W
illie had a dog named Charlie, some kind of collie mix with matted brown fur and sickleshaped nails crossed on each front paw. Charlie was about four years old and had shown up one day awhile back and the family began feeding him. He slept in the yard and would wander the streets as a vagrant on occasion, but somehow he always came back. He took to Willie because Willie, being young, was always interested in the dog and went out to play with him three or four times a day. The neighbors grumbled behind closed doors because the dog kept impregnating the bitches around town. Population control for animals meant tying a litter of puppies in a sack and dumping them in the river. Mean enough, but necessary for a good society, and the people of Castle County, at least in the city and the mill villages, believed they lived in a society. But some kinds of meanness you just can’t account for.

On Thursday afternoon, four days after the murder, Willie and
Charlie the dog were out playing in a field in the Upper Flat. Willie had him running after a stick, which Charlie ran after so fast his ears tucked back behind his head. He stumbled when he reached the stick, flopped over himself, snagged the stick, and sprinted back.

Willie worked six-thirty to three-thirty, a shorter day than his father and Quinn by two hours, and these afternoons were lonesome and slow, especially now that his grandfather was out of work. Abel lay in bed all day, tended by Susannah, and the house had taken on the tone of a hushed prayer for Abel’s convalescence. Anything louder than a whisper drew the cold eye of Susannah, and maybe a wallop to the back of the head.

Out and back, out and back, went the dog.

Until one run back, the stick right in the middle of his teeth, a rifle shot popped and the dog yelped, fell over, and skidded to a halt.

Willie stared at his dog, lying in a heap ten yards off. He looked around. The sun pounded against the hillside, a relentless blaze. The trees and shrubs were all still like images trapped in a photograph. No one was near. He ran to the dog and pulled Charlie into his lap. A groan from deep in his throat like some atonement for all the sackfuls of puppies he’d caused to be thrown in the river, like there was some maker in the world of dogs and Charlie was about to meet him. Charlie wheezed his last and then he quit and Willie held his dog, the tangles of fur and flesh, and wept.

What should have been a long weep was cut short by laughing on a nearby ridge. A boy approached with a twenty-two Marlin thrown over his shoulder. He wore shorts and a coonskin cap. “That’s a dead dog,” he called. Face-freckled and obstinate, peach skin. His head hinged back, and he laughed like a billygoat’s bah and said, “I killed that dog.”

Something rose up in Willie, a thing he didn’t understand in this world, and he clambered out from under the dog and ran toward the boy. Air shot out of his nostrils and a buzzing filled his head. Peach Skin quit laughing, but it was too late, for Willie was already scooping stones out of the red clay earth and hurling them at the boy.

One missed, but the next connected with his head. Peach Skin’s eyes bogged out and he turned to run, not even thinking that he might have the upper hand by holding a rifle.

Willie chased him down the hill, hurled more stones that popped off the boy’s back. He leapt over shrubs and slid on the hillside and onto pavement. Peach Skin occasionally glanced back, and at the edge of the village, his coonskin cap fell off his head. By the time they entered Down-the-Street, Peach Skin was sobbing and Willie was an unstoppable fury. He picked up another rock and launched it at the boy, but it missed and banged against the store building.

Peach Skin ran in. When Willie followed, one of the mill attendants stopped him at the door. He grabbed Willie by the shoulders and held him in the street. “Whoa, son,” the man said. “What are you doing?”

“He shot my dog.”

“I never,” Peach Skin said, peering out of the doorway. Onlookers had paused in their tracks to stare at the scene. A woman with a sack of groceries, a black man in a fedora who leaned up against a post and tried not to appear at all interested in the affairs of white folks.

“He shot my dog,” Willie said again.

He struggled in the man’s arms, and the man said to Peach Skin, “Son, why don’t you hand that gun over and we’ll check on this boy’s dog?”

Peach Skin looked for a moment like he might defy the grown-up, but the man straightened himself up. The boy hung his head and brought the gun over.

“All right, son, where’s this dog?”

As the onlookers went back to their routine, the three of them walked out of town. It came out that Peach Skin’s real name was Parham, and that he came from a family of coal miners from Eastern Kentucky who’d drifted south after a mine had shut down a few years ago. It was unclear whether they lived off the land in the forest or had found refuge in a shantytown. Either way, it was no life for a man willing to put in his day’s labor. Willie knew the mill would take care of you to some degree, as long as you were willing.

When they reached Charlie, the dog was already stiff with rigor mortis. The same stick he’d been chasing lay nearby, still damp from slobber. The mill attendant shifted his hat back on his head, looked at the boys, nodded to himself.

“You don’t know I shot him,” Peach Skin said.

“You want to tell me who else might have done it?” the man asked. He circled the dog, poked at him with the barrel of the rifle, and made a face. “I tell you what,” he said. “We can keep the police out of this, and you can pay this boy five dollars for the dog. I’ll give you your rifle back minus the shells, and everyone goes home. Or we can call Sheriff Chambers over to determine what kind of legal penalties he’d see fair. I reckon you ought to know he wouldn’t take kindly to a boy killing another boy’s dog, specially a boy without a permanent residence. Might send you to the county lockup for a few days to teach you a lesson.”

In reply, Peach Skin toed the dirt. He stared at the ground with his lips pouted until the man said, “Well?”

“If I was to admit it, I ain’t got five dollars to pay.”

“I could spot you, give this boy five of my own dollars and hang onto the rifle until you’ve worked it out. We can always use more sweepers at the mill.”

Peach Skin looked up, said, “Seems like I don’t have much of a choice, doesn’t it?”

The next day, Peach Skin was a sweeper in the Bell, same as Willie. Along rows of machines, through the fog and dust and heat, they and other boys traded by each other, Willie and Peach Skin smoldering. On Peach Skin’s first day, the Hopewell brothers took a smoke break behind the mill, leaned up against the shaded bricks by the rusted-out green dumpsters. The chainlink between them and the world jingled when the wind picked up. Beyond it a field of waist-deep ryegrass angled north, and blades of grass cut through the fence and jabbed into the mill property, closecropped weeds and dirt inside the complex, grave-colored and cinder-covered gravel closer to the pavement itself. The backlot tinted an ochre sheen like the sepia of motion pictures or the faded amber of an old daguerreotype. The noise of machines never far away, the call of men’s voices.

“How long’s he here for?” Quinn asked.

“I don’t know. Till he earns that five dollars for the attendant that’s got his rifle.”

“That’ll be at least a week, assuming the man don’t charge him interest.”

“That’s solid math.”

“Shut up. I’m thinking we need to get him. You don’t just go around shooting dogs. I don’t know how they did things wherever he’s from, but that won’t work here. He needs to know that.”

“What are we going to do?” Willie asked.

“I don’t know yet. But I’ll think of something.”

Willie waited on his brother’s word, but in the interim Quinn seemed more concerned with Evelyn. Only a week they were together now, but already the boy was smitten beyond all else. Couldn’t wait to get out of the house at night to sneak off with her, and Willie could tell that whenever someone spoke with Quinn, Quinn’s mind was off with Evelyn. He’d reply in monosyllables—yep, nope, mm—and his eyes would flutter around like he was thinking: “I got a woman here somewhere, where’s she at?” Only trouble was his woman was in town and under the thumb of Larthan Tull. Willie had never met Tull in the flesh, only seen him from a ways off, but he’d heard enough stories about the man that a ways off was too close.

On Saturday afternoon, Quinn surprised the family by taking his paycheck into town after work and driving home in a rusted, ten-year-old Model T. When he parked the machine in the yard, the bucket of bolts rumbled, hissed, and coughed before it quit running altogether. Steam hissed from under the hood, and the engine pinged. Willie was out first to see it, followed by his mother and father.

Quinn hopped out and waved.

“Oh Lord, what’d you do?” Susannah asked.

“Got me a car, Momma.”

He wiped down the hood with the sleeve of his shirt. She put her hand to her forehead like she was about to faint from a spell and said, “I see that.”

“Where’d it come from?” Willie asked.

“I bought it off a guy in town. Ed Sothesby had one for sale, Larry Scruggs’s uncle.”

“How much you pay for it?” Joe asked, walking over and running his tongue across his gums.

Still wiping the hood, Quinn replied, “I bought it with money I’ve been saving.”

“How much?”

“A hundred and twenty.”

Joe spat.

“But I’ve been saving that money for a long time. Outside the family money.”

Joe walked around the side of the car, kicked at a tire. “That’s a lot of money,” he finally said. “I reckon we could use a good car, but this thing won’t even get us to town.”

“Hold on, now. She needs some work, but she’ll run.”

“She won’t run a hundred and twenty dollars’ worth.”

“I’ll fix her up.”

“You know how much it’ll cost to fix this thing? You be better off taking it right back to Ed Sothesby and getting as much of your money back as he’ll give you. We can find us a car this bad for half the price.”

“What do you know about a car anyway?” Quinn asked.

Joe sucked his teeth, popped the hood. Underneath was a rusting four-cylinder engine with oil dripping out like water on cave walls. He said, “You think this car is going to get you somewhere with that gal, but I told you last week, Evelyn Tull is trouble. Trouble without a car, trouble with a car.”

“Daddy, will you leave it alone?”

Joe shook his head and turned to go inside, followed by Susannah.

Willie walked around the car while his brother studied the engine. Willie had never ridden in a car before. They never needed one because everything they ever wanted was near enough to walk. Their grandfather thought automobiles were some manner of sin, but their father just preferred to do things the way he always had. The boys—and all the boys they knew—were dreamers.

“Daddy’s right,” Quinn said. “I am going to have to do some work on it, but there’s no way to get this car for cheaper. Just needs some work, is all.”

And Quinn did work on it, beginning that afternoon. Willie helped him change the oil, lay on his back against the rocky ground, the ground hard and rough against him. “Hold this,” Quinn said, and handed Willie a plug before oil poured from the belly of the car. “I got to get this distributor adjusted.” Quinn fumbled with a socket,
trying to figure out which size would fit. Grease stained his fingers in the heat of the day.

“How you know all this?” Willie asked.

“I don’t know. A man just knows this stuff.”

Willie didn’t know this stuff, and he wondered if this was just some kind of magical knowledge bestowed on you when you reached a certain age. He watched his brother and tried to take the knowledge into himself. Damaged gaskets in the carburetor. Some problem that dealt with the manifold. New spark plugs. The list continued so that by the time the sun began to plummet toward dusk, all they’d managed to do was change the oil, tinker, and make lists of all that was wrong with the rickety automobile.

“She’ll run to town and back,” Quinn said, “but it’s going to take some time before she’ll be ready to carry me any farther.”

Quinn wiped his hands against his overalls, adjusted his hat. Willie sat on the bumper with grease imprinted on his skin as though he’d been tarred. Dirt under his nails, in the lines of his fingers, a stain of grease running up his arms. The smell of gas and oil and rust.

“Damn, this is going to be a chore,” Quinn said.

“It’ll be worth it, to have a car.”

“Hell yes it will. Then I can take Eve out anywhere, anytime. We might up and get married, move up to Charlotte.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“You only been sparking her a week.”

“Brother, sometimes it only takes a moment to know where your destiny lies. Might have to put fate off a few weeks while you repair your car, but then the world is stretched out for the taking.”

Willie imagined the globe in last year’s classroom, tried to picture it stretched out and flat, the continents oblong and bleeding into each other, New York and Europe and China all like stepping stones, and he could see Quinn and Evelyn dressed up for society, driving the new car, Quinn in a top hat and Evelyn in a cloche, Quinn’s head back and laughing as they wound down a road toward the city, toward sunset. Quinn could work in a skyscraper and carry a briefcase. Evelyn could be a movie star. They could smoke cigars with President
Hoover, dally about town like Clark Gable and Greta Garbo, beautiful and slick and rich. Was that where Quinn was heading? And how could Willie get into that life?