The Whiskey Baron (22 page)

“Shorty, this boy’s been dominating all week,” Lester said. “Must have taken a pretty penny off Joe here the other night.”

“I’d believe it,” Shorty said. “Joe, when was the last time you played pool? Before the war?”

“Must have been. I was playing terrible next to this pro.”

“Y’all laugh,” the Kid said, his voice hoarse and cracked. “You old men’ll still be playing here when they close, but I’m just killing time till tonight.”

“You got a date?” Lester asked.

“Maybe so.”

“Watch out now,” Lester said as he bent over the table to take his shot. “Little man might be getting some.”

“That’s right. I’m going out with Caroline Mahoney.”

“That the middle Mahoney girl?” Joe asked.

“No, her younger sister.”

“She must have been ten years old last time I saw her.”

“She’s filled out since then, probably even had her monthlies by now,” Lester said.

“Going for that young stuff, eh Kid?”

“Hell, he is the young stuff.”

“She’s old enough,” the Kid said.

Lester sank the eight, and shook his head. “I hear she’s already made her way through a couple of young bucks in town. Boys older’n you. You think you can compete?”

The Kid said, “Only difference between a virgin and a woman is you don’t know if a virgin’ll like it. With a woman, you know.”

“That’s pretty profound there,” Joe said. “Where’d you figure that out?”

“Profound nothing,” Lester said. “She’ll be comparing him to those town boys. The woman might like it, but when she gets itchy and sees Kid here don’t measure up, she’ll find herself some other man that does. A woman’s a crafty devil, and don’t you forget it.”

“Tell that to my oldest,” Joe said. “He’s in deep with a town girl himself.”

“Seems like I heard something about that,” Lester said. “Kid, you know anything about Quinn Hopewell?”

“Naw, he and I don’t run in the same circle.” The Kid picked up the stick and leaned over the table.

“Wait a second,” Shorty said. “Did you say Caroline Mahoney?”

“That’s right.”

“Hoo-hoo, boy, she and I went rolling together a few weeks ago.”

“I’ll be damned,” Lester said. “Kid, you ain’t got a shot in hell, now that this stud’s taken her to the barn loft.”

“Oh yeah, I remember her now,” Shorty said. “Whoa buddy, she’s a quick one. Shouldn’t be tough if you want to knock her box.”

“You’re just funning me,” the Kid said. “Don’t be talking about my new girlfriend that way.”

“Girlfriend? How long you been going out?”

“Tonight’ll be the first, but I might make a steady commitment here.”

“Good luck to you,” Shorty said.

After the Kid left, Lester asked, “You really go out with that young girl?”

“Hell naw, I just wanted to get a rise out of him.”

The men laughed and carried on with their game. They closed down the bar a few hours later and stumbled out. On their way up the hill to the road, Shorty bumped up against Joe and said, “Shoot, I never knew you was this fun. You ort to’ve been coming out with us all along.”

“No reason I can’t start now.”

The men trudged up to the road, the air still blazing hot, the sky hazy and the crescent moon peering through a break in the clouds like someone grinning from the heavens. The three men set out for town, Lester advertising whiskey at his house and Joe tight enough to want to find some trouble, Abel and Quinn and Mary Jane long forgotten. He said, “Why don’t we try to find the Kid, see how his night is going?”

“Where you think he’s at?”

“Where do all youngbloods take girls they want to spark?”

There were only two places young men could be counted on to bring a young woman in Castle, one being along the river near Abigail Coleman’s farm and the other being across town by the city pond.

“He’s probably at the pond, but that’s a long way to go if he ain’t,” Lester said. “I say we try Coleman’s farm, cause that way if we don’t run into him we can at least stop by and see about getting a drink from the widow.”

They set off along the railroad tracks toward the Coleman farm. Dark chattering in the woods, umbrella foliage overhead. Along the tracks they shushed each other whenever one tripped on a tie and landed in the trackside underbrush, guffawing underneath, a silent cackle. The night air was warm. One or two stars winked through the clouds, and cirrus wisps streaked across the sliver of moon. No sound from the woods except the three men shuffling along. Near the trestle, they sobered enough to hunker down, and in the starlight they could see a couple necking on a blanket by the riverbank.

“Cawaw, cawaw,” Shorty called.

Joe and Lester snickered, but the couple on the blanket was too deep in their endeavor to notice a rumble in nature.

Lester squeaked out, “Ay-ay-ay-ay,” in a high wail that no couple could ignore no matter their ecstasy, and the three men ran down the
slope like incarnate savages and fell upon the young smoochers in their embrace so that they had mere seconds to pry themselves apart to confront their would-be assailants.

Only when the men neared did they see this couple was not the Kid and Caroline Mahoney, but rather Quinn and Evelyn.

“The hell,” Quinn said.

“Sorry, boy,” Shorty said. “We thought you was someone else.”

“Good, then you can get the hell out of here.”

“Now hold on here.”

“Go on, you perverts. I’ll kill you, you don’t get out of here.”

Joe said, “That’s no way to be talking, son.”

The boy squinted at him.

“You don’t recognize your pappy?” Lester asked.

“God.”

“You got that right.”

“Daddy, what are you doing out here?”

The liquor still swirled in Joe’s head. He knew this was the moment for him to put a stop to Quinn and Evelyn, that maybe now was a time to right his life, this last week a detour, a stumble from grace rather than an actual fall, but something turned inside him. Quinn had him on the defensive, asking what was he doing out here, a question Joe couldn’t answer. He said, “Shorty just got out of jail today. The three of us was celebrating.”

“Evening,” Lester said, still agog from the melee and the whiskey. “Ma’am,” he said to Evelyn.

Shorty said, “Hey, you all ain’t seen anyone else out here, have you? We’re looking for a kid—what’s his name, Lester?”

“I don’t know. Kid, I reckon. Cope’s his last name.”

“He had a date with the youngest Mahoney girl, left us at the Hillside to get his shoes shined or what have you.”

“We ain’t seen no one.”

“That’s all right. We figured we didn’t see him, we’d hit up Widow Coleman for a drink. You welcome to come with us.”

“Not tonight,” Quinn said, still eyeing his father.

Joe sighed. “I wonder what your momma would say, me and you out here like this tonight?”

“She wouldn’t like it.”

“I reckon not,” he said. He leered at Evelyn, standing petite beside his son, and he felt a stirring in him, remembered for a moment what it was like to be Quinn’s age. He thought of Susannah in the barn loft, thought of Evelyn on the highway the other night. He put his arm around his son and said, “Hell, I reckon we’re both in trouble then. Hopewell men, trouble’s in our blood.”

“I should be going,” Evelyn said, backing away.

“Don’t rush off on our account. We were just leaving.”

“You go on with them,” Evelyn said. “I can find my way home.”

“You can come, too,” Quinn said. “You don’t need to rush off.”

“My daddy thinks I just went to the pharmacy for a soda, and they’re long closed. I need to get on.”

Joe watched his son walk off with Evelyn.

Lester said, “Your son sure is taking a risk, ain’t he?”

Shorty said, “He wouldn’t be no kin to Joe and Mary Jane if he didn’t take risks like that.”

When Quinn returned, the men had a campfire blazing, three logs lit and orange sparks zinging into the night. They’d procured a jar of moonshine from the widow’s stash, and they grew somber, reflective. Joe was still drunk from the bar and nearly asleep by the fire when his son returned. He waited in apprehension, for Quinn had never seen him this way. Something new for the both of them.

“There he is,” Lester said.

“What are you doing back here?” Shorty asked. “Pretty woman like that, it’d take me half the night to say goodbye to her.”

“He knows what he’s doing. No time to waste, gets right down to business.”

Quinn sat next to his father, and Joe eyed him as he passed over the jar of shine. His son grimaced as he took a sip, the liquor no doubt setting fire to his throat. He coughed.

“Whoa now,” Lester said.

The logs were ashy and scales of glowing coals coated their undersides. Joe added another to the fire. The damp wood crackled, hissed. Billows of smoke swirled around the men.

After a time, Shorty said, “Did you at least give that gal a goodnight kiss?”

Quinn smirked and took another sip of the whiskey.

“Oh, he did! Look at him!”

“You’re in trouble now,” Joe said, his voice thick and slurred. “You better think of a plan for when Larthan catches you.”

“He won’t catch me.”

“The hell he won’t,” Lester said. “Likely the man already knows.”

“He don’t know.”

“That man’s not all human. I’ve heard tell about how he knows things he couldn’t have no way of knowing.”

“He’s just a man,” Joe said.

“I’ve heard he’s supernatural.”

Lester said it so earnestly that all of them quieted and let the words hang in the air. Smoke blew into Quinn’s face, and he coughed. Then he and Joe burst out laughing.

“You don’t believe me?” Lester said.

“Shit no,” Quinn said, waving at the smoke. “You’re drunk as hell.”

“You watch yourself, youngblood, and you too, Joe. Two Hopewells pissing off Larthan, he’s liable to take a dislike to your whole family.”

“That may be,” Joe said. “He’s a mean son of a bitch, and I don’t approve of Mary Jane running whiskey for him.” He turned to Quinn: “Or you dating Evelyn. I don’t approve of it. But damn, Lester, there’s a difference between a mean son of a bitch and the Devil himself.”

“You can deal with a man,” Lester said, “but when the Devil comes to collect, your days of wheeling and dealing are over. Now you tell me, when Larthan Tull shows up at your door to collect, can you deal with him like a man, or does he collect like the Devil?”

A
t the mill, they all stored lunches in a row of cubbyholes in
a
front closet, and Peach Skin’s lunch was easy to spot. He brought it in a rusty lunchbox that had a hole corroded into one side of it. The guys teased him about it, but he kept saying, “My father gave it to me, my father gave it to me.”

Willie hadn’t slept all weekend in anticipation of today’s vengeance, but this morning, when the deed was to be done, his bowels were knotted and his knees were weak. Quinn had agreed to do the hard part, to find a dead rat in town and slice it into small slivers. During a break in the day Willie was to sneak into the closet and put a few slices of the raw rat meat onto Peach Skin’s baloney sandwich.

All morning he swept the weave rooms, he kept his head down and brushed with the broom while the other boys joked and horsed around. In room #6, his grandfather’s chair was empty, no one yet to fill the slot. It seemed likely that Abel would finish his days on his bed in the front room of their house. Quinn worked in the card
room, where Willie didn’t go, but he did sweep past Peach Skin once early in the day. This was his third day on the job, and he had four more to go until he could get his rifle back. Watching him, Willie lost his nerve. The men ragged on Peach Skin so badly—first about his lunchbox, then about his Kentucky drawl, then just to rag on him. Willie felt sorry for him and wanted to back out.

But at ten o’clock, Quinn found him on break.

They shared a cigarette outside, in the shade of the building’s east end. A wire fence separated the mill property from a pasture, the grass beyond the fence wild and unkempt, there solely for grazing cattle, whereas the grass on the mill’s land was littered with dust, bone dry, gravy brown, and trampled near to death.

They watched the mill boss’s Packard cruise up from town, slowly, and turn into the graveled drive of the mill. Quinn stood with his foot propped against the mill’s wall, and Willie sat Indian style in the broken earth. His legs were greasy and chafed from the way the denim rubbed against him, and he thought maybe he’d be better off becoming an Indian when he grew up so he could walk around in the summer heat with nothing but tiny drawers and a feather in his head.

“I don’t want to do it,” Willie said.

Quinn took a puff and stared off into the farmland. “We’re already rolling. It’s happening.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes you can.”

“He’s having a hard enough time.”

“Good. He deserves it.”

“Maybe he doesn’t.”

“Jesus, Willie, he shot your dog.” Quinn smacked the back of his head. “What’s wrong with you?”

Willie thought of Charlie, limp and bleeding, and of Peach Skin’s harsh laugh, and he nodded.

“Atta boy,” Quinn said, and he handed Willie a folded-up newspaper. Inside were the bloody slices of rat meat, which smelled rancid and sour when Willie peeked at them. Across the meat was the tail, the prime indicator that, yes, Peach Skin, you bastard, you are eating a rat sandwich.

His brother exhaled a plume of smoke, flicked the cigarette into
the dust, and pushed off the wall. Willie scrambled to follow him into the mill. He slunk into the front closet and lay several slices of the stinking rat meat between the two slices of baloney, and his hands shook with the dastardliness of the deed. He placed the tail over the top and let the end dangle out of the bread so that Peach Skin wouldn’t have to take more than one bite that he could still spit out before realizing his lunch was ruined. They weren’t trying to poison the poor boy. This was just the first in a series of pranks to make his life miserable.

The Hopewell brothers didn’t tell anyone about their plan, but they did make sure to get a good view of Peach Skin while he was eating his lunch. Their father ate quietly across the cafeteria, not noticing what the boys were up to. Peach Skin sat with one of the foremen—a burly, cold man—and pulled out his sandwich.