The Whiskey Baron (27 page)

“I’ll be all right in the morning. Go on back to bed.”

These were painful memories, so tonight she pushed them away. She reached up and grabbed Quinn’s shirt, pulled him back down.
As he rested his head against her and closed his eyes, she thought perhaps they could get out of here, away from her father, and start their own life. It didn’t have to be the way it was, the Hopewells in the village and the Tulls in town, and no contact between the two.

Quinn said, “Forget about him. He can’t love you like I can. What do you have to say about us?”

She ran her fingers up his shirt, her hand warm and tickling the flesh of his abdomen. “I love you too,” she said.

She held him close and felt tight in the throat at the sight of him, a stirring of need with him beside her, warm and earthy. A happiness that made her want to cry, her father be damned. Everyone here be damned. He pressed his lips to her ears and told her again he loved her, whispered that he wanted to take her away, to start a new life together in the mountains. Maybe Asheville, where the air was cooler and you could see ice and snow in the winter. She clung to him as he whispered this story. He would take up farming, grow squash and tomatoes, hew a crib out of a felled poplar, raise a family together. “Let’s do it,” he said. “Let’s get married.”

After she left she hurried out of the woods because the choiring of the crickets was beginning to unnerve her, the sunken sun casting long shadows in the grass and burnt husks of harvest leaves. Although the air still simmered around her, her skin was cool to the touch, goosebumped, inanimate. She thought about their plan. Quinn had been squirreling away money for months, most of which he’d spent on the car. But he had enough left over, he said, to make a move. “We could leave this weekend,” he said. “Head up to Asheville on a morning train, and on Monday I could find me a new job.” Her heart had fluttered at the thought, the two of them making a home for themselves. There at the river, his warm and rough hand on her midriff, his fingers rubbing softly against her ribs and the dry grass tickling her neck, she was ready to follow him anywhere. She did love him. She’d never been in love before, had always stayed too close to home to fall in love. Girls went out—to the pharmacy for sodas, to the river to swim, to a town dance—and that’s where they met boys, out on Saturday nights.

Yes, it would be trouble leaving her father and this town. She’d grown up in Castle, in a comfortable house with white columns and spreading branches of elms and magnolias in the lawn. Houses in her neighborhood were like private shrines to this or that minor god, protector and savior, and although she didn’t fully know her ancestry, she had the upbringing of an aristocrat. While her father bottled sodas and brewed whiskey, she learned the finer points of Chopin, the history of political philosophy. And now she was fifteen, grown beyond the insular world of York Street. She was playing a dangerous game with Quinn Hopewell, a boy she’d known most of her life—in school, in church—but for some reason she’d never looked twice at him until two weeks ago, when he’d seemed to emerge a man, a sturdy, stable man. Now his face was all she saw when she closed her eyes. She felt ready to give herself up to him, to follow him out of her house, off York Street and away from Castle, to wherever the world might take them.

When she got home, her father sat rocking on the porch. The wood of the runner beat against the wood of the porch. His eyes were closed until she came up, and then without raising his head, he opened his eyes and watched her, a movement almost imperceptible had she not been waiting for it. A man whose intensity lay in his eyes, curious, intelligent, unforgiving. The rest of his face still. The evening light burnished and sad. Slats of shadow from the eaves grated his face, but she could still see that he was drunk. Unlike when she’d found him alone with the whiskey bottle, his eyes were mean today, watchful.

“Where you been?” he asked. He slurred when he spoke, but his voice still commanded the same high power of which he was capable.

“Down at the river,” she said. The air around them was still. Bugs flittered around them—mosquitoes, moths, flies—and even though a chill had settled on the evening, she felt hot in her spine.

“With that Hopewell boy?”

Her heart beat in her chest and her mind was blank. Now was the time to speak, but she had nothing to say. Her father had never turned on her, in all her years and despite all the meanness of which she knew he was capable. He’d never turned on her, but now something had broken. The crack had been there for weeks, a hairline fracture
in which she’d wedged a chisel that she slowly tapped against with each night at the river. Now, the crack had splintered open, and she had no choice but to carry through and pray.

As Tull rocked, the runners continued grinding against the planks of wood on the porch.

Vrrruppptt. Vrrruppptt. Vrrruppptt. Vrrruppptt.

He said, “I told you already not to be seeing him.”

“Well I am.” She took a breath. “We’re in love and we’re leaving together.”

He quit rocking. His hands clenched the arms of the chair, and then, like a rattler trapped in a corner, he rose up and struck, slapped her across the face.

Something seemed to have taken possession of him, some darkness that clouded his eyes and made her afraid for the first time. So this was what it was like to be on the other end, in a bad business with Larthan Tull. He grabbed her shoulder and she lurched forward, stumbled, and he shoved her into the wall by the front door. He called her a slut.

“You don’t even know it, do you?” he asked, towering over her like some obelisk commemorating the lives of the dead. His eyes boiled with hate and hurt. “You’re a slut and you’re never going to be anything. You’re ruined now.”

And he struck her again, this time hard enough to knock her to the ground.

She woke in a dark room, her head bruised and aching. No, the room wasn’t dark. She wore a blindfold and was tied to a wooden beam, a bedpost. The thick rope dug into her wrists, and she lay hunched over her legs, her arms pinned above her head and holding her in a half-sitting position. A fire ran up her back when she got up, and she fell back against a wall. The room was hot and dank, and she sweated through her cotton dress, could feel the dampness on her back and behind her knees like morning dew.

Something thudded nearby, below her. She could tell she was upstairs and could hear someone—her father—stomping around downstairs. The rattle of dishes in the kitchen. The slam of a door, followed a few moments later by the cough of a car engine, the crunch of wheels against gravel. Then silence.

The rope was starting to cut off the circulation in her wrists, and she tried to spin her hands around to find an angle of slack. She kicked around with her foot, found the bed, and realized she was in her room. She shifted and leaned her head against her arms, and though the rope tugged against her wrists, she felt tired and eventually drifted into an uneasy slumber.

She dozed. She woke. She dozed. All in darkness.

T
ull left her there and drove to the plant to meet Depot for the weekly load. His body quivered as though he hadn’t eaten, and he told himself to snap out of it. She was dead to him, he thought. Why even bother tying her up? Why not let her go to the Hopewell boy, or to the dogs for what he cared? He banged his hands against the steering wheel and swerved in the road. “Straighten up,” he said aloud. Business, he thought. Deal with Depot and the whiskey now, and the business with Evelyn would be there when he returned.

He had the money from Mary Jane and had been planning to leave the man to Aunt Lou—she would tell him that without money, they had no business, and that would be that, nothing left for him but to pack up with that widow whore and move somewhere he might be wanted—but now Tull wanted blood. Why should a man presume to take advantage of another and get away with it? It would
make Tull look stupid, not to follow through and take care of Mary Jane thoroughly. Maybe send a message to the youngblood Hopewell while he was at it.

Still, a second voice told him to leave it to the law or let it be damned. Now might be a good time to retire. To hell with Evelyn and the factory and Aunt Lou. Sell off what stock he had, catch a train somewhere else. He’d overstayed his welcome in Castle and forgotten the law he’d learned in his youth: You can’t depend on people, so hold your cards close, hedge your bets, and cut loose when the moment presented itself. Now was that moment, said the voice. You’re on your own. Time to run.

Instead he walked into the plant with a .38 caliber, a satchel with five thousand dollars, and some extra instructions for Depot. He sat in the cool of twilight, rolled a cigarette, smoked. The factory’s smokestacks rose up like twin pillars of Babylon, steam coughing and circling the lot, machines that ran all night, the smell of burnt potatoes from the cooked sugar. A train rolled through town, the wheels kicking up the occasional spark. The clatter of the rails, the hum of the machines.

Depot drove up in a gray Packard.

“Howdy,” Tull said. “You got springs supporting that trunk?”

Depot grunted.

“I got about two hundred gallons already set out for you, if you think you can carry that many.”

“I can carry as many as you got.”

Tull spat and said, “Come on, then.”

He led Depot through the gates of the factory, and the smell of burning sugar—home fries on a griddle—blasted them. He hit a switch and lights flickered on, revealing rows of machines, vats of liquid connected through tubing, boxes of supplies stacked neatly against one wall. Glass bottles along a chute and boxes for them to go in. This was the main floor, and in the back rooms he had barrels of fermenting beer, copper kettles, a closet full of shine. The same recipe his daddy had used, and his daddy before him. Straight from the mountains of East Tennessee, a family farm back when the government left you alone.

“It’s back here on the loading dock.”

On a pallet were scores of gallon tin cans filled with whiskey, all ready to be sent to Aunt Lou. Without Ernest and Lee, Tull had been backed up for the past two weeks and needed someone reliable to get something done. He’d have to hire better when it was all over. Depot knew the business of brewing whiskey and running a bar, but he’d never run a load before. Tull wanted him for this run in particular. Apparently, he had no qualms about killing a man. Whatever the reason he’d shot Ernest and Lee—whether they were plotting against Tull via Aunt Lou, or whether they’d just insulted Depot’s mother—he’d shown a lack of judgment, a good lesson for Tull that no matter how long you’d known a man, and however competent he seemed, if you wanted something done properly, you had to reinforce your expectations constantly. Maybe thirty years ago you could get away with any kind of operation, but the laws had closed in on everything in the twentieth century. You had to comply to do business anymore. Mass production, mass consumption, mass regulation—these were the products of the Industrial Revolution.

Tull said, “While you’re in Charlotte, I’ve got a little janitorial work for you.” When Depot made no reply, he went on, “I’ve done some asking around, and it doesn’t figure, Mary Jane shooting Ernest and Lee that night. In fact, Widow Coleman tells me they weren’t even planning to hit up Aunt Lou.”

“That’s a lie there,” Depot said. “They were plotting the whole thing out in the back booth.”

“They may have been drunk, knowing them. Men plot all manner of things when they’ve imbibed. You know that.”

“And I told you they’d already approached me about buying some of their liquor.” The barkeep hung his head. “You told me to handle it.”

“You tried, for sure,” Tull went on. “That shows some loyalty. You know who butters your bread and you were trying to do the right thing. Taking some initiative. I respect that, but the most important thing, when you go down that road, is don’t miss.”

Tull pulled out the .38.

“Hopewell is going to meet with Aunt Lou tonight. She’s a loose cannon, but she knows you’re coming and she knows why. Hopewell
doesn’t. If the man’s body ends up in the river, well, I don’t want him found alive.”

In the darkness, Depot squinted, but otherwise held still. Then he took the pistol.

“Why don’t you pull your car around the alley? It looks rough, covered in grass and all, but you can slide back to this loading dock here, and we’ll load her up.”

After Depot walked out, Tull raised the gate on the loading dock, and a few moments later the Packard eased behind the factory, its wheels crunching against the loose gravel. After they loaded gallon after gallon in his trunk, the shocks sank, and the tail end sagged. Then Depot got in without a word, started the car, and pulled out the way he’d come in.

Tull watched him drive off with his whiskey, into the cooling twilight, leaving behind a lonesome, broken man. Tull heard Bessie Smith’s blue moan on evenings such as this. Time was speeding up on him, and he seemed to care less and less. It wasn’t that he was mellowing in his middle age like a good scotch, but rather growing flat like stale beer. No one knows you when you’re down and out, Bessie sang, truer word never spoken. You take out your friends for a mighty good time. You buy them bootleg and spot them for a game of cards, but once the bottle runs dry and the money’s gone and the cards are filed away, those friends drive off with a piece of your soul, leave you in your castle to contemplate living and dying. You could build a business, but businesses die as fast as a person does in this world, and once death comes for you, you don’t have anyone—not your mother who, if things have gone according to their natural order, has been long gone herself, nor your wife nor your children. You could tie your daughter to the bedpost to keep her there, but what would happen when you let her go? She would abandon you, as daughters should. Maybe there were some lucky folks out there who had someone to hold their hands into old age, but even then the reaper would come and pry you away from all you love. The Technicolor world of your childhood fades to black and white or the monochrome sepia hue as forty or fifty years slip by and transform you from a cocksure young buck to an old man alone, until perhaps in those last moments, as the
curtain falls and the screen fades, you get a glimpse once again of the bright colors from long ago.