The Moonshine War Read online

  This is where he was when the La Salle came up out of the hollow with the foxhounds yipping, leading the way. Son didn't recognize the car, so he didn't get up. He didn't move. He sat with his arms on his raised knees and his hands hanging limp. He watched Frank Long open the front door on side and get out.

  He watched the driver in the tan suit come around the front of the car. Son had to look at that suit again, wondering why the man didn't wear a smaller size, so he wouldn't have to roll up the cuffs of his pants like that.

  He watched the dude and the good-looking young girl get out of the other side and come around the back of the car: the dude wearing a straw hat cocked to the side and a brown striped suit that was snug around his heavy chest and stomach, the dude looking like he should be carrying a sample case of jewelry or ladies underwear. Next to him Frank Long looked like a skinny old-time Baptist preacher.

  Son watched the four of them gather to stand looking up at him, Frank Long two paces in front, the spokesman. Well, he could talk if he wanted, though Son knew already who was in charge of the party. He had a fairly good idea about the boy in the tan suit also and wasn't fooled by the suit being too big for him. The only one he couldn't figure out was the girl, who stared right up at him and didn't look away when he shifted his gaze toward her. There was a bold little thing. Maybe not so little either. Son didn't nod or speak because it wasn't up to him, it was up to Frank Long.

  Frank said, "I might as well introduce my associates here and get to it, seeing how you're so busy. This here is Dr. Taulbee, he's a scientific whiskey expert who's come to sample your supply for the government and give it a grade and tell whether it's any good or not. This little lady is Miss Miley Mitchell, who is Dr. Taulbee's expert assistant and secretary, you might say. And here you have Mr. Dual Meaders, come here as a special investigator to help us capture your daddy's whiskey, if you force us to do it that way. And folks," Frank said then, looking up the stairs, "this is Son Martin, my old army buddy."

  Son still didn't move. From the top step he could see them all and didn't have to turn his head to study any one of them.

  "Son," Frank went on, standing relaxed, with his suit coat open and his thumbs hooked in his vest pockets, "Dr. Taulbee here has a proposition I think you're going to like. See, I got to thinking, why start a lot of shooting and trouble when maybe there's a simple legal way to settle this. Your daddy went to a lot of work to run a hundred and fifty barrels and maybe you, as his heir, are entitled to something for it, even though you're breaking the law by having it. As you know, possessing is as much against the law as making." Frank waited.

  But Son didn't give him any encouragement.

  "How's that sound to you? A proposition."

  Dr. Taulbee shifted his weight and shook his head and moved up next to Frank Long to put his hand on Long's shoulder and give him a friendly shove. Grinning in the morning sunlight Dr. Taulbee said, "Frank, you old horse, you're doing as much good as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. You ask how it sounds, you haven't told him anything."

  "I'm getting to it," Long said, standing straight now, serious.

  "Well, you sure take a while." Dr. Taulbee looked up at Son Martin, giving his honest-to-God, good old-boy smile. "Don't he though? We could be out here till suppertime before he'd have it told, I swear." The down-home drawl rolled out naturally and Dr. Taulbee moved in closer to plant a polished shoe on the bottom step.

  The girl had her hands on her hips and was moving about idly, a step this way and that, looking down at stones and kicking at them lazily with the pointed toe of her pumps, then looking up and squinting in the sunlight and brushing her dark hair from her forehead. She wasn't dressed for being out here; she wore a skirt and jacket and pearls and little earrings. She was really pretty. Son decided she was pretty enough to be an actress or a singer. While the one in the tan suit kept looking up at the porch, nowhere else. He wasn't dressed for being here either, but he didn't look like any actor or singer. Or like a federal man or a special investigator. He didn't change his expression or seem to be aware of the heat or the sun glare or the dust that would blow across the yard when the wind came up. He kept his eyes raised to the porch.

  "My," Dr. Taulbee said, "but it's getting warm. I wonder if you would have a cold drink of water in the house."

  "Water's over there." Son nodded toward the pump standing in the yard, a few feet from the corner of the house.

  "Well, friend, if you'll let me have a cup then."

  "Cup's on the pump handle."

  "Yeah, I see it now," Dr. Taulbee said, maintaining, with an effort, his friendly down-home tone. "Miley, be a nice girl and fetch the old doctor a cup of spring water, if you will please."

  Miley stared at him a moment before walking over to the pump.

  Dr. Taulbee kept his friendly gaze on Son. "What I was thinking, if we could go inside, out of the heat, I'd like to tell you about this proposition Frank mentioned. I guarantee you'll be interested."

  "I don't think so," Son said.

  "Well, you'll want to hear it before you say yes or no for sure, won't you?"

  Son shook his head.

  Dr. Taulbee held on. "My friend, that doesn't make any sense. A man comes to you with a deal, you want to at least have the courtesy to listen to it, especially if it's going to save you a lot of trouble and maybe even your life. You understand what I mean?"

  "There's no deal," Son answered. "No chance.

  Dr. Taulbee's easy expression vanished. "Mister, you get tough with me, I'll tear your goddamn scrub farm apart and if I don't find what I want, I'll hang you from that porch beam--you hear me?"

  A smile touched the corners of Son's mouth as he stared at the man. They looked at each other and got to know each other without a word being spoken. It wasn't a long moment in the silence between them, but it was there and it was enough. The squeaking, air-sucking noise of the pump handle broke the silence.

  Miley called over, "I can't get this thing to work."

  "Forget it," Dr. Taulbee said.

  "I haven't pumped water since I was a little girl."

  "I told you forget it!"

  Frank Long shifted his position, impatient now. He said, "Son, listen to us, all right? I guarantee you'll want to think on what we tell you."

  "Is it your idea," Son asked "or this scientific whiskey expert's?"

  "Both of us together thought of it." "Frank, you showed us a badge when you marched in here." Son looked over at Dr. Taulbee. "I want to see the paper that says he's a scientific whiskey expert."

  "There ain't no paper says he is."

  "Then get off my place."

  "Son, I'm telling you that's what he is, hired by the U. S. Government."

  "Or hired by you?"

  "Son, you're getting into things that don't matter when all we want to do is lay this deal on you."

  Dr. Taulbee said, "Dual, if you're tired of standing with your finger in your nose, look for where a man would hide a hundred and fifty barrels of shine."

  "I been thinking about it," Dual said. "Now wait a minute," Frank Long said.

  "He's going to listen to us. Aren't you, Son?" "If you say it and leave," Son answered. "Dual," Dr. Taulbee said, "do you take that kind of talk?"

  "Not since I can remember. No, sir, I didn't ever take it from any east Kentuck farm hick."

  "If he talks like that again, what're you going to do?"

  "I could shoot his ears off."

  "Show him your gun, Dual."

  "Right here." Dual pulled the .38 out of his suit coat and pointed it at Son's face. "You see it, mister?"

  Son didn't say anything.

  "I asked if you see it."

  "You better answer," Dr. Taulbee said. Son nodded. "All right. I see it."

  "There," Dr. Taulbee said. "He's going to be a good boy now and he wants us to go into the house and have some coffee and a nice talk. He's saying, 'Yes, sir, Dr. Taulbee, I certainly want to listen to your deal 'cause, goddamn, I
get my ears shot off I won't be able to listen to anything.' Isn't that what you're saying, boy?" Dr. Taulbee was grinning, his old self again.

  "Come on," Frank Long said.

  Dr. Taulbee looked at Miley who was sitting on the board cover of the pump well. "Honey, you'll make us some coffee, won't you?"

  Dual shifted his position for the first time. He said, "I don't want any. I'm going to start looking around."

  Dr. Taulbee reached over to slap him on the shoulder. "If that's what you want to do, you go ahead."

  "It's what I come for," Dual said. "Seein's I'm the special investigator."

  The way Dual Meaders had it figured, the one hundred and fifty barrels were hidden somewhere close to Son Martin's house. The stuff had been out of sight for eight years, though during that time people had been roaming all over the Martins' land playing find the whiskey. Most of them would have stayed up in the hills looking for two reasons. Because they'd be afraid Son would catch them if they got too close to his house. And because the old man had dug coal up in the hills and a mine shaft was the logical place to hide that much stuff--if it was all in one place. Dual wasn't sure about that. It could be spread all over.

  Where he'd like to start looking was right in the house. While they were talking he'd kept studying the house, the way it was built against the side of the hill with its high front porch. Under the house itself was a cellar--and a stone wall of that cellar could be covering an old mine entrance that burrowed straight into the hill, which wouldn't be a bad place to hide it; where you could live on top of it and know the second anybody came looking and got warm.

  When they had all gone up the steps and into the house, Dual squatted down to look under the porch. There was no need to duck under; he could see there was no opening in the stone foundation--hunks of limestone chunked together with mortar. So Dual walked around, past the pump, to the side of the house.

  There it was, the wooden door to the cellar angled against the base of the house. The door creaked on rusty hinges as he lifted it, then pushed it over to let it bang hard against the ground as sunlight filled the stairwell and formed a square of light on the floor of the cellar. Going down inside Dual had a kitchen match in his hand ready to strike, but there was enough natural light to show him everything there was to see: shelves of quart and half-gallon fruit jars, shelves of jars from floor to ceiling, cases of jars, and jars lined on the shelves and filmed with dust. All of them empty, waiting to be filled with moonshine.

  He didn't find any corn meal or sugar--they must have kept that at the still. He felt along the stone wall that would be against the hillside and didn't find any loose stones to indicate an opening: which shot his idea of the stuff being buried under the house.

  But he did find something that surprised him: a new looking Delco Farm Electrification System, the motor-generator and the row of glass batteries taking up half of one wall. Looking it over, Dual was thinking it was an expensive outfit to light up an old farmhouse that one man lived in. He felt along the wall and traced the wire going up through the ceiling to the room directly above him. Well, maybe this Son Martin was ascared of the dark and liked plenty of light. Dual grinned at the idea. He wished he could grin like Dr. Taulbee, showing teeth like big square pearls, but his own teeth were crooked and tobacco stained and he didn't much like seeing them himself. He had brushed them every day the first couple of months he worked for Dr. Taulbee, but the brushing didn't make them any whiter, so he had quit.

  There wasn't anything else down here.

  There wasn't much out in the barn either. Walking inside Dual could tell this wasn't the place: a back-country barn that wasn't much bigger than a two-story house, weathered and starting to fall apart; like the owner didn't plan to be here long. The floor was hard-packed dirt; no boards might be covering a big hole underneath. A stack of baled hay filled a corner of the buildings. Something could be behind or under it, but Dual wasn't going to go pitching hay bales around with his new gabardine suit on. Some other time. There was nothing here in the dirty smelly place but the hay and some grain sacks, empty stalls and stiff harnesses and hackamores hanging from pegs.

  Up the ladder was half a loft. Stepping back to one side of the barn Dual could see there was nothing up there. Out the window were two mules in the yard, nuzzling the ground, penned in there by a split-rail fence that looked like they could knock over if they wanted to. Christ, get this job done and get back to Louisville where things were going on, that was the ticket. Dual never did care much for farms; there wasn't anything to do.

  He had spotted the roof showing way up on the slope in the trees. As they drove into the yard Frank Long had said that's where the still was, in a house Son Martin used to live in.

  So Dual Meaders trudged up there from the barn--a long walk in the open sunlight, the dusty pasture steeper than it looked--feeling the muscle-pull in his thighs and sweating under his new suit like a goddamn field hand before he reached the trees.

  Dual noticed the grave over a couple hundred feet from where he stood: the grave and the post and the little fence, close to a steep rocky section of the slope. He studied on it a minute before saying to himself, "It's a funny place for a grave with a light post, but you ain't going to get a hunnert and fifty thirty-gallon barrels in a six-foot hole," This Son Martin was a spooky gink with his goddamn lights everywhere.

  By the time Dual had made his way up through the pines and brush and had clawed through the tangled laurel, losing the path about every time he turned around, he had his new suit coat open and was wiping dusty sweat from his forehead and out of his eyes. Woods might look cool and fresh from a distance, but he didn't like any part of them. In the trees and thickets, with hardly any breeze seeping through, it was close and steamy and, Christ, there was an awful sour rotten smell hanging over the place. Dual located the source of the smell: over to one side of the little house, where they had cleaned out their mash barrels and left the fermented grain to rot. Christ, there would have to be some awful drunk snakes and lizards around here.

  The house looked like it was about to fall off its stone foundations that leveled the porch at the two front corners. There wasn't much of a slope here in this clearing; it was like a bench on the slope, with pines and stone outcrops towering way above. Dual looked at the two windows and the wide open door and the smoke wisping out of the chimney pipe: not much smoke, probably burning dogwood or beech. Two barrels of mash stood by the door. Dual glanced at them as he stepped up on the porch and went inside, expecting somebody to be here because of the smoke, but the still was working all by itself.

  It was about as clean and orderly a still as he'd ever seen, a first-class copper outfit you could take a picture of and say under it here's how to do it, boys: fifty-gallon capacity cooker with a low fire burning in the grate and a gleaming copper gooseneck coming out of the cap to carry the steam over into the flake stand: an open barrel filled with limestone spring water, water so clear Dual could see the worm of copper that was fitted to the gooseneck and coiled down through the fifty-gallon barrel. Inside the coil the steam was right now being cooled by water and condensed into the clear moonshine whiskey that dropped from the spigot into a half-gallon jar.

  About six gallons a day they'd draw, Dual decided. He preferred aged amber-colored whiskey every time, but this stuff didn't look bad, probably because the place was so clean.

  He stopped outside on the porch and looked over the small clearing, then noticed again the two barrels of mash by the door and bent over the nearest one. A crust that looked like dried mud covered the fermentation taking place inside the barrel.

  "When the cap falls that mash is ready to run."

  Dual came around with his revolver out of his coat and put it square on Aaron standing with the shotgun across the crook of his arm, standing a few yards away in the clearing that had been empty a moment before.

  "You put your ear close on the barrel,"

  Aaron said, "it sound like meat afryin'. Few mo' da
ys we pour off the beer and cook it."

  Dual said, "Boy, lay that shotgun down."

  Aaron grinned; lazy, slow-moving, head-shaking nigger, he seemed barely to shift his stance, but in the movement he came around enough so that the double barrels on the Remington, angled across his arm, were pointing directly at the man on the porch.

  "You want something in my house?" Aaron asked him.

  "You're pointing that at me, boy."

  "No, suh, it pointing out of my arm."

  "I'm telling you you're pointing it at me." Dual held the revolver in front of him and hadn't moved. "No nigger points a gun at me, boy."

  "Mister, I ain't pointing the gun, it pointing itself."

  "Put it down."

  "I like to, but my finger is caught in the trigger. I'm afraid to move it."

  "I'll plug you right between the eyes, nigger. You see that?"

  "Yes, suh."

  "You want me to do it?"

  "No, suh, cuz if you do, I'm afraid this old shotgun will fire off and blow them mash barrels all to hell and anything standing close to them."

  Dual Meaders had never felt such a terrible sharp urge in him. He felt if he didn't fire, if he didn't squeeze his wet hand on the grip and keep squeezing it, he'd rush the nigger and tear him apart with his fingernails. But the twin barrels of the shotgun, the round black 12-gauge holes, were as real as the terrible urge and they held him, like a wild animal caught in a headlight beam, and saved his life.

  It was not worth dying to kill a nigger. Not when there could be another time to do it. Any time he wanted. Let the nigger think about that for a while.

  "No," Dual said, "I don't want anything in your house. But I'm going to come back again sometime. I expect you know that."

  Aaron nodded. "I expect I do."

  Dual holstered the .38 and rebuttoned his coat, lingering there, waiting for the nigger to make a mistake. Finally he stepped off the porch and walked past him into the thicket. He felt all right now, calm and himself again, but Christ, that nigger was going to pay for getting him worked up like that. He couldn't believe it, the nigger standing there holding the gun on him. Christ, what was the world coming to?