The Whiskey Baron (29 page)

Willie crept after him, along the ill-lit highway, a skulking figure like a bobcat on the prowl. Quinn fired up a cigarette, and ashes flecked off the ember in the breeze. A train pulled through, slowed for the curves of town, but did not stop. Late-night boxcars rattled on their way to somewhere else. Soon Quinn and Evelyn would be on the way to somewhere else, too, and for the first time Willie tried to picture leaving the Bell. He’d never considered his future, just assumed he would grow up to work in the mill, which is what boys
did—that or the military—but he liked living here. Not as much as he liked his grandfather’s farm, but work in the mill was fun. Sure, there were bullies like Peach Skin, but they were a part of life, and Willie had never before considered running away as a means of dealing with conflict. He’d never considered leaving, but as sparks kicked up along the train tracks, as he listened to the pulse and hum of the cars skimming along, he wondered what the future held. Would he too run off to somewhere else? He felt deeply alone as he trailed his brother, cut off from something essential, though what it was he could not say.

It neared two o’clock when they reached the corner of Main and York, and Willie hung back at the corner as Quinn sauntered past the palatial homes until he reached the one marked Tull. Willie crept into a neighbor’s yard, everything dark like the mouth of some demon waiting to swallow him. He sneaked under magnolias, through the thick grasses—fescue, rye—and cowered in some hydrangea bushes at the side of the neighbor’s house. Quinn stood in Tull’s side yard, staring up at a second-floor window at the front of the house. He picked up a stone and tossed it at the black glass, and the glass cracked like a gunshot.

Willie held his breath, half expecting Tull to barge out of the house in a rage, ready to throttle Quinn. But no one came to the window, so Quinn threw another rock and waited. Then he crept onto the porch, and Willie cringed when a board groaned under his brother’s weight. Don’t, Willie thought, but he remained in the bushes, watched as Quinn found the door unlocked and glided into the house like a rat burrowing through a crack between two boards. He watched the upstairs window for a light, for motion, but nothing came. No one on York Street stirred, and he began to feel tired, his eyes sore. The bushes smelled bitter, and bugs crawled over his skin, but he ignored them. He stood from his haunches and eased to the side of Tull’s house, leaned up against the wall and strained to hear noise from above.

Lights flashed from Main and a car turned onto York Street. Willie dropped to the ground just as the long black car pulled into Tull’s drive. Tull himself got out and stumbled up to the porch, stomped his
boots, opened the door. This was it, Willie knew, the moment where Quinn would meet his comeuppance. All the nights of carousing around, the sins of the flesh, the dangers of Larthan Tull. And here Willie was, on the train ride to Hell right alongside his brother. He fumbled around the ground and found a pinecone, which he hurled up to the second-floor window. The cone scratched against the glass and fell softly to the ground. Willie picked it up and threw it again. Nothing.

He ran to the porch and saw Tull had left the door open. He peered through the screen, but the house was dark. He opened the screen and slid inside. The house smelled like dust and old wood. He paused to listen for movement and waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness.

Somewhere downstairs, a hinge squeaked, and boots stomped in an uneven shuffle, toward Willie and up the stairs. Willie eased into the house, saw the shape of the stairs and the legs of a man disappear into the second floor, what looked like a rifle at the figure’s side.

“Well, well,” Tull said. “Why don’t we take us a walk?”

Willie looked around him for a weapon. In the kitchen he found a steak knife and a skillet on the counter. He grabbed them both.

Quinn and Evelyn came downstairs first, followed by Tull with a rifle aimed at their backs. Even in the dark Willie could see Tull’s eyes were wild and crazed, and that no matter what happened this would not end well. They marched toward the front door, and Willie crept behind them, the knife in one hand and the skillet in the other. To stab the man in the back or wallop him in the head with the pan. He clenched the knife, imagined the blade sinking into Tull’s flesh, but he decided the skillet would be more effective, knock him out cold. He tucked the knife into his shorts and took hold of the skillet with both hands.

But he must have made a noise—a scuff on the floor with his shoe, or maybe his shadow flickered into Tull’s sight—because right as he raised the pan, Tull veered and struck him with the butt of the rifle. His head banged against the wall, and a hand gripped his throat.

C
hambers owed Alma some time together, but until things settled with Tull and the federal agents, he could be found working long past dark. The station cleared out, and he worked into the night, alone with nothing more than a sandwich, his bottle of whiskey, and a new novel by a Georgia writer named Caldwell. The novel was about the antics of a dirt-poor family and Chambers laughed at the familiarity of the characters. The story could take place on the north side of Castle as easily as South Georgia—the same red clay, the same folks hammered by the Depression, the same choices between struggling on the farm or moving to the mill. When he reached the end he quit laughing and set the book aside and felt disgusted with the author for showing him his world in this light. Life was rough all across the country, no doubt about it. Banks closing, fortunes dissolved. Folks said electing Roosevelt in a couple of months would be the country’s way out, but Chambers mistrusted the sentiment.
Hoover was supposedly a genius—his whole campaign in 1928 had been one of solutions, direct action to solve our nation’s woes—yet he’d been unable to make headway. Roosevelt’s New Deal sounded like just another pipedream to Chambers.

In many ways, Castle had been lucky. Business was good, there was work in the mills, and the cotton company took care of its people. Gave people a place of their own. Folks were poor here, but they’d always been poor. They never had the money in the bank to lose, so while some people up north had lost their entire life’s savings, it was business as usual for people here. Assuming nothing got worse—another war like the last, another flu outbreak, or something Chambers couldn’t imagine. This past summer the stock market had hit its lowest point yet, and no one seemed to know when it would end. Banks were out of money and across the nation people were being thrown into the street. It was like dark waves of doom traversed the country with currents of bad news, and it was only a matter of time before the waves crashed over Castle and hit home. Or maybe it was like a wound that wouldn’t clot, bleeding that couldn’t be stanched no matter what bandages you pressed against it. That was how Jimmy Boy Coleman had died when Chambers had shot him, and that was how his own boy had died, in the war. Shot in the hip, and the bullet sliced through an artery, and he wouldn’t quit bleeding. Chambers’d had to make a dozen phone calls to get that much out of the army, facts he’d never told Alma. Why had he needed to know so badly? His boy was dead, so wasn’t that enough? No, he thirsted for the grisly details as if in knowledge he could take on his dead son’s pain.

On Friday night he went on home to Alma earlier than usual, drove with the flask of whiskey between his legs. He could feel something in his blood, a sensation he got on occasion when a tough puzzle was challenging him. That same sense of longing for the gristle. Gnawing at him. He swigged the whiskey, and his head buzzed. He never used to drink so much, in the office, on the job. He wasn’t sure how much people in town knew—the office girls surely knew about the whiskey he kept in his drawer—but as soon as folks became displeased with him, maybe because he wasn’t solving the Hillside murders fast enough, or maybe if the whiskey trade dried up
here, when something happened the newspaper would run a story about Chambers. The headline would be lurid—Corruption in the Sheriff’s Office, maybe—and all of Chambers’s faults would come out on display. They wouldn’t throw him in jail for drinking, but they would take his badge. No matter. He was finished after this term anyway. Maybe he would take Alma down to the coast after all, or maybe he’d move out west, get lost on a ranch somewhere in Texas or New Mexico, and spend his last days driving cattle.

At the house, he left his boots and his gun at the door and trudged upstairs where he found his wife asleep on her side, the sheet covering her wide hips, her mouth open. Sound asleep. She’d always been a solid sleeper, never troubled by what ailed the world. Two minutes of stillness and she was out for the night. He envied her that, himself one to lie awake into the clockless hours, a lifetime of unsettled rest. He slipped out of his clothes, slid under the covers. The whiskey had numbed his mind near to the point of making the room spin. A febrile sweat broke out and made his skin clammy. The sheets were cool and luxurious, and nothing had ever felt so good. When he sidled up against Alma, she shifted to allow for his arm to slide beneath her. Her mouth closed, and he even thought he saw her smiling.

Then he all but blacked out in the bed next to her, but he didn’t sleep long before the phone rang to wake him up. He lay in bed a moment, his mind cloudy with the vestige of some dream, a mood, a memory. The sound refused to go away, so he rose to answer it.

“Hello?” He struggled to clear his throat.

“Sheriff, this is Wilma Meacham. You up?”

“Nearly.”

“God bless you,” she said. “Something’s going on at the Tull place up the street. I heard some banging around. The lights are all out, but I definitely heard noises. Woke me up.”

“I’ll be up there directly.”

When he’d hung up he scratched his head and went to splash water on his face. Alma didn’t stir or ask him what the story was this time. She continued sleeping like the dead while he got dressed. He was still drunk, knew he wasn’t in any condition to go out. Sweat clung to his neck like dew. The room was no longer spinning, but he
felt woozy and off kilter. He’d slept on his bad arm, and now the arm wouldn’t respond to signals from his brain. His fingers limp, his wrist and forearm tingled, the arm from the elbow down mere body with no life with which to grasp. Electrical pulses misfiring in his feverish brain, an accumulation of energy that perhaps he harnessed and used to careen into the night. He sped through town until he reached Tull’s place, and along the way his left arm ached as blood started to flow back to his hand.

When he arrived, the white house was gloomy and silent, blocked partly from the street by spindly limbs of water oaks, the banana leaves of magnolias, the white columns and upstairs windows seeming to make a face, the front doorway a maw, the gateway to Hell itself.

Chambers held his hand to his revolver, crept up to the porch, and peered through the windows only to see nothing but blackness. He knocked, drew his gun. No one answered, so he eased the screen open, tested the door. Unlocked.

The floor in the entryway creaked as he stepped inside. He shut the door behind him and allowed his eyes to adjust to the dark. This was the first time he’d ever been in here. Tull’s home looked like his own—a couch, a coffee table, bookshelves with dusty classics. A grand piano, a portrait of Tull over the fireplace. In it, Tull’s face was stoic, his eyes boring out of the canvas like bullet holes.

Near the kitchen, a dark sticky spot on the floor gave him pause. Blood, not fully dried. No other signs of a scuffle. Everything in its place.

He continued to sweep the downstairs, and then, finding nothing, he moved upstairs. No one was there, but in one of the bedrooms a rope dangled from the wood of the bed frame and a crumpled blanket was on the ground. Definitely not a good sign.

Finding no one, Chambers drove out along Highway 9 to the river, where he turned onto Woodridge Road and circled Coleman’s farm. Off toward the Bell, the shadow of the mill’s smokestack loomed over the treeline, always a beacon. He saw a light shining on the riverbank, but he let it pass. Some kids out sparking or drinking or carrying on somehow. No reason to bust them tonight. What was left of the night. He needed to find Tull.

He drove on, and in front of the Hillside the tires crunched on the roadside gravel. Lights were on inside the inn, a few cars parked in front. He knocked. A moment later, someone asked, “Who’s there?”

“The law,” he said, in no mood to play along. “You don’t let me in, I’m going to fetch the revenuers.”

The door opened. Young Tommy Cope took a few steps back when he saw Chambers had his pistol drawn. He must look a sight, woken half-drunk to scour the town for Larthan Tull, his body braised by the liquor and the heat and the fatigue of it all. He didn’t even want to know why this teenager was running the bar tonight.

“Larthan here?” he asked.

“No, Sheriff, he ain’t. Hasn’t been here since twilight.”

“Where’d he go?”

“I don’t know. He was here when I got in. Said he had some business to take care of. Had a few drinks and left.”

Chambers scanned the room. The usual drunks, Lester playing pool, Shorty in a booth in the back, and across from him Joe Hopewell. Chambers hadn’t spoken with Shorty all week, not since he’d let him out, and although he didn’t think the man had had time to get messed up in whatever Tull was planning, he decided he ought to ask anyway.

He stumbled across the room and stopped in front of the booth. “Evening, gentlemen. Mind if I join you?”

“Go right ahead, Sheriff,” Shorty said, and Joe slid over to make room for him.

Both men drunk, he could see that from here. It felt good to sit down, the wood of the booth cool against his back. He said, “Either of you seen Larthan today?”

“No, but you ort to talk to his boy,” Shorty said, nodding at Joe.

“Why’s that?”

“Seeing that Evelyn.”

Chambers looked at Joe. Joe shrugged.

“Larthan know that?”

Joe shrugged again. “I told my boy to stay away from her, but what can you do? He’s near seventeen. He’s his own man now.”