Shiner

by Amy Jo Burns

  BRIDGE

  In the weeks after Briar wed, rumors spread about what had befallen the missing driver of the white Silverado abandoned beside Trap’s favorite fishing hole. A few folks had spotted Briar lurking around the Silverado the morning of his wedding, but no one had the guts to ask White Eye if he’d done something unholy. He was too revered to be questioned, but Flynn wasn’t. Folks expected him to answer for Briar, to account for his sins or provide an alibi. Flynn only told them he wasn’t Briar’s keeper and nothing more.

  Soon enough, people stopped asking.

  Time passed. Ivy married and had a baby. So did Ruby. Flynn didn’t see much of anyone in those days. In the summers Flynn worked. In the winters he drank. He’d moved out of his parents’ house into a squat hunting cabin near the peak of Violet’s Run, just beneath the razorbacks. The cabin hid behind a stand of pines, small and cozy with a stone chimney and a decent stream behind it. The house—a quiet member of his family for generations—was the home he’d dreamed of giving Ruby if she’d been his bride.

  Flynn was determined to find a way to run shine in the winter to keep himself from wallowing. A few months after Ruby and Briar had married, he built a copper pot in the middle of his kitchen and experimented with brown sugar and wheat in his mash. To keep the bubbling wheat warm while it fermented, he fashioned a square crib out of wood, stuffed it with hay, and nestled his mash barrel inside it. His corn was no good in the cold, and none of it lasted long anyhow. He dreamed of summer days where the corn fields reached beyond his grasp, and he could almost taste the river of shine he’d make from it.

  Things became something like good for a while. Flynn perfected his craft. He drank it. He went fishing on Sundays. He missed Ruby. That much he expected. But he also missed Briar—the snake hunts, the hollowed fighter jets and creek jaunts, even the arguments. Flynn had never known a fiercer companion, and he couldn’t reconcile in his heart how to love someone while hating him, too. Flynn didn’t know what they’d named their daughter. He’d only heard from his mother that they’d had a baby girl nine months after they wed. Hen also told him that Briar’s mother had passed away in her sleep. Briar had no family left now.

  Soon after the wedding ceremony, Briar whisked Ruby away to a dilapidated cabin deep in the marshes. As boys Flynn and Briar had hiked up to the marshes once to kick through the swamp, search for snakes, and dare each other to invade the abandoned house.

  “Ain’t nobody could live here,” Flynn had said back then, in awe of its barrenness.

  “I could,” Briar had answered.

  Sherrod had heard that Briar paid for the property with his mother’s wedding ring—a fee so paltry because no one wanted such a spooked piece of land.

  He didn’t want to be noticed; he didn’t want to be easy to find.

  Folks on the mountain figured it had to do with his gift, his intimacy with God. Only Flynn knew the truth. Briar was afraid. He knew if the lawmen ever found him, he’d go to prison. Worse, he’d lose Ruby. So he limped his way into the deep mountain to save his own skin.

  Had it been guilt, Briar would have turned himself in. Flynn guessed as much. Shame had a way of making a man abandon what he once held dear, while fear would make him cling to it. Briar, in all of his white-eyed glory, would never stop grabbing hold of his wife.

  Without much company to speak of, Flynn might have become an immortal recluse—the kind from which ghost stories and legends are built—if he’d been able to cure himself of worry for his lost love. He wondered at it every night around the meager fire he used as a stove, a heater, and a furnace for his whiskey. If he could just see Ruby, he thought as he swizzled the mash with a two-by-four. It had clouded into a thick corn soup, and Flynn sipped it with his palm. Good and bitter, it was just about ready to run.

  Flynn had wanted to give Ruby all the cash he had in his pockets, as if money could cure what ailed her. Besides, he had more money than he knew what to do with. It wasn’t much, but he didn’t need much, either. Mostly he survived on deer jerky and his mother’s gingersnaps. Other than that, Flynn grew what he cooked, cooked what he drank, and drank more than he ate. He found no reason to spend his earnings on himself, and he didn’t dare put it in the bank. So he kept it in a jar he’d painted black, then another, then another, then another, in a hole he’d dug beneath the porch of the hunting cabin.

  He had no occasion to dig it up until the night of the raid. Three years after Briar married Ruby, Sherrod got arrested at a new still site he and Flynn had opened near the base of Logger’s Nook on the east side of the hills. It was getting harder to find strong, untainted springs for the still now that the coal treatment plant had contaminated much of the mountain’s water. The creek near Logger’s Nook was one of the strongest streams left. The law busted through their camouflage saplings after dark, while Flynn was down the mountain delivering a case of moonshine to Teddy’s Tavern. He’d left Sherrod alone at the still and planned to return at dawn. When he reached the site, he found trampled moss where a pack of men’s boots had torn through the land. Even worse—that dulcet scent of cooking corn had vanished. The copper still had been shot up with holes. Sherrod’s bucket lay tipped on its handle, and Patsy, their hound, sat panting beside it. Sherrod was nowhere to be found.

  Flynn surrendered thirteen jars of cash the following day in order to bail his father out of jail. Things weren’t looking good. A lifetime of tax evasion and bootlegging off the back of his boat appeared to be catching up with Sherrod. On the jagged road home, he said just one thing, over and over:

  “I ain’t going to jail.”

  He declared it loud, then soft, then loud again, like the call of a circling crow. But something else ransacked Flynn’s mind as they left Trap’s city limits for their cabin in the hills. How in the hell had they gotten caught?

  “What happened, Daddy?” he asked.

  Sherrod spit out the window. The violets along the roadside were just beginning to bloom. “I did something stupid.”

  “What?”

  Sherrod leaned back and closed his eyes. “Sold a few buckets to a stranger out of my Chevy.”

  Flynn swerved around an elbow turn. They didn’t do business with strangers. “Why?”

  “He offered a hundred and fifty dollars a bucket, and I haven’t been paid that in years, not since folks started choosing dope over whiskey.” Sherrod sniffed.

  “Why does that matter? It wouldn’t have led him to the still.”

  Sherrod glowered. “I gave him the five buckets we agreed upon, and he asked if I had five more. I wouldn’t have done it if all the springs around weren’t spoken for already by that treatment plant and folks still paid us what we’re worth.” He shook his head. “That fool must have followed me back to the site.”

  Sherrod was sentenced to eighteen months in prison for possession of a firearm and repeated bootlegging, set to begin before the week’s end. Flynn wished upon wish that he’d gotten caught instead. Eighteen months was pennies to him. Two seasons of shine and nothing more.

  His mother kept to her rocker and cried when they returned home.

  “Don’t worry, Hen,” Sherrod said.

  “You’ll die in there,” she answered.

  Hen said what Flynn didn’t have the guts to. It would kill Sherrod to bow to another man’s rules.

  “It’s my own fault,” Sherrod said, heading for his Chevy. “Now, just leave me be.”

  Never had Flynn been so filled with dread. He decided to appeal to the magistrate first thing in the morning. Take me, he’d say. I’ll tell you where the stills are. I’ll give you my money. Just take me.

  But Flynn never got the chance. The next morning he set out in search of his father’s Chevy and found it next to his daddy’s smallest still near the silo at the cow pasture, the one he reserved for his personal whiskey. Sherrod’s body lay there in front of the stone furnace, crooked and outstr
etched, a jar in hand. Flynn took one look and knew exactly what his daddy had done. He’d drunk the first pass of liquor—full of methanol—undiluted and toxic. And here lay his father in a puddle of his own sick, dead. Sherrod had always told Flynn that whiskey wasn’t worth a life, but he’d meant Flynn’s life. He saw that now. Shine was Sherrod’s life. All of it.

  Sherrod was light enough for Flynn to carry him the whole way down the hill, past the cow pasture, and back to the house. He laid him out on the couch in his favorite overalls and comforted his wailing mother. Flynn cleaned the dirt from his daddy’s fingernails. He combed his beard, used a soft cloth to wipe the mud and vomit from his face. Then he searched in his old room for the book of Robert Burns’s poetry that Ruby had gifted him, and he placed it between his father’s clasped hands.

  Flynn buried his father in a downy grove atop a crest of sugar maples on the eastern edge of his property, a spot that presided over the rolling hills full of trees. Many folks from Trap buried their loved ones there. His mother offered a prayer, and together they covered the grave with fresh dirt and larkspurs. Flynn took Hen back to her cabin, waited with her until she fell asleep. He returned home well after midnight, only to find a lithe silhouette tilting in the rocking chair on his front porch.

  It was Ruby, with a newborn nestled next to her in a laundry basket.

  Flynn mopped the grime from his neck. He was almost afraid to speak, lest it break the spell of her rocking. So he lit a match, touched it to a candle he kept in the bed of his Tacoma.

  “Ruby?” he called out into the dark. “You all right?”

  She stood, hands on her hips. Sweat wept from her temples. Her cheeks were sunken, her hazel eyes fiercer than Flynn remembered them.

  “Flynn,” Ruby said. Her thicket of hair caught the breeze and danced at her waist. “I’m real sorry about your father.”

  “Thank you.” He wanted to grab her, hold her, whisper to her, cry with her. But he remained still, holding the candle.

  “And I’m real sorry it’s been so long since we’ve seen you.” She looked at the infant beside her, then up again. “Why ain’t we seen you in three years, Flynn?”

  The silence slayed. Flynn cleared his throat. With Ruby in his sights, he felt grieved, frightened. She looked ghostly and wrung out. Her dress was a gray color Flynn had never seen her wear, and the edges of her skirt were rimmed in dried blood.

  The baby stirred, and Ruby bent to gently jostle it back to sleep.

  “Ruby,” Flynn tried again. “What are you doing here?”

  She opened her mouth to answer, but nothing emerged.

  “Come on, now.” Flynn set the candle into a glass hurricane that hung from the eaves. “You can tell me.”

  “I need you to take the baby,” she said. “Care for it. Raise it.”

  Flynn kept his voice soft. “Where’s Briar?”

  “Asleep.”

  “He doesn’t know you’re here?”

  “Leave Briar to me,” Ruby snapped, then kneaded her forehead. “Sorry. I ain’t slept.”

  “Here.” Flynn handed her the flask from his back pocket. “This will help.”

  Ruby tipped it up and drank. “So?” she asked. “Will you take him?”

  A boy, Flynn thought. Briar had a son. Flynn buckled at the envy that swam inside him. He’d never felt the need for a family before, not while he’d believed that the woman he loved was content making a family with someone else. Now that he’d lost his daddy, Flynn’s heart felt lost at sea. He could use a ballast, a son to hold fast to. But taking a child from Briar was underhanded and cruel—even if he didn’t deserve Flynn’s kindness.

  “I don’t know how to take care of a kid, Ruby,” he said. “Let alone Briar’s boy.”

  “You’re lonely here, ain’t you?”

  “That ain’t a good enough reason.”

  Ruby sighed, ragged. “You’re the only person who will care for him better than I can—and I just can’t. Wren is only two years old. Please, Flynn.”

  Wren. So that’s what Ruby had named her daughter. Ruby’s stare, dry and shredded, rubbed Flynn raw. He watched her and felt trammeled with grief. Ruby seemed—above all else—hungry. But this hadn’t unsettled him. Ruby had always known hunger. What Flynn found in her face that hadn’t been there before was fear.

  “This ain’t for Briar,” Ruby said. “He won’t care one way or the other, I promise you. This is for me.”

  Ruby was right, Flynn realized. Briar loved his wife and his God, but he cared only for himself. The day of the strangling had proved it. Flynn thought about that last afternoon he and Briar spent together, Flynn so Ruby-crazed that he couldn’t see straight. And he guessed he’d been wondering these past few years if his love had faded into all his solitude. Into all his whiskey. It felt different—a thousand notches had worn into tongues and grooves, forming a labyrinth in his heart—but love still remained.

  “All right,” Flynn said. “I’ll take him.”

  Ruby nodded, and the moment hung without beginning or end. Flynn wanted to get swallowed in it, to never return to a life where his father lay dead. He wanted time to reverse in on itself, to go back to the lightning storm so Flynn could board up Briar’s windows. Then he’d have a shot at Ruby. And he’d still have Briar.

  Ruby turned her shoulder to leave. Reason grabbed hold and told Flynn they might never be alone again.

  “I have something for you,” he said, pulling his wallet from his back pocket.

  “Flynn,” Ruby said. “I ain’t in need of your charity.”

  He handed it to her anyway. “Open it.”

  She opened the wallet and drew in a breath. Her pearl-handled switchblade lay flat in the center of her palm. Flynn had kept it with him since that night at the Saw-Whet Motel when Briar found it in the bed of the Silverado. The knife had become a relic of what Flynn once hoped for—a shared life with his beloved—and an emblem of a tarnished youth, departed. Now that he had Ruby’s boy, he no longer needed such a grave vestige of the past.

  “Flynn,” Ruby whispered. “Where did you get this?”

  Flynn shook his head. “Don’t worry.”

  Ruby’s voice gave out. “What . . . what did you do?”

  Flynn blew out the candle, swore to Ruby the story wasn’t his to tell. Sometimes there’s no redemption left, he told her. Sometimes there are only lost things, getting found.

  CODA

  After Ruby faded into the woods, the baby boy woke. Flynn had never been so unsure what to do, with a howling infant cradled in his elbow. He fed the baby a bottle of formula that Ruby had left, and he ate, and ate, and ate. The boy nodded off. Flynn still didn’t know what to do, so he slipped the baby into a pillowcase and cushioned him in the crib of hay he’d built for his winter moonshine.

  Flynn decided this baby was all right, as far as infants went. Coral cheeks, an old man’s stare. Fingers and toes small enough to lose. Flynn reclined on his bed, kicked off his boots, and watched the boy breathe. He remembered what Sherrod had called him when he was young.

  “Listen, Sonny,” Sherrod had said on the day Flynn had first seen a copper still. “I’m gonna teach you how to shine.”

  Sonny, he thought. A good name given by a good father. That’s what he would call Ruby’s boy.

  He looked at the empty black jars he’d opened to bail Sherrod out of jail, left in a crowd in the corner of his bedroom. There were four more stowed under his porch, each of them like a sinkhole in his chest. Why store money in jam jars while Ruby and her girl went hungry? He decided to keep two of the jars for Sonny and mail the rest to Ruby at Ivy’s trailer, with no return address. If the cash appeared anonymously, Flynn hoped she’d take it. From that day onward, Flynn sent her half of everything he had.

  As years passed, Flynn grew thankful for the company Sonny gave him. He hoped Sonny would one day become his
partner—the same way Flynn had been Sherrod’s—even as he feared that his beloved way of life was dying. By the time Flynn reached his Jesus year, just thirty-three and already feeling older than a grandpa, conditions had gotten tougher than ever for moonshiners. Farmers grew more reluctant to surrender their sweet corn, purchasing sugar in bulk set off alarms, and planes flew low to the tree line in search of camouflaged stills.

  None of that bothered Flynn as much as the mountain’s infatuation with opiates did. Heroin gave folks the kind of community they’d once found in church—one with a leader and some loyal followers, a shared resolve to outlast another long winter. Just like Flynn, everyone in the hills hoped to divine some way to feel less alone.

  But Flynn would keep faith in his whiskey, even if no one else would. He did his best to stop himself from mulling over how Briar might have made a decent partner, if he’d never gotten struck by lightning.

  If Briar had never done what he did.

  Flynn determined not to cast himself down over it. He found his chronic sadness a comfort. His whiskey told a story; it sang out a sweet and bitter tune. He wholly devoted himself to it. Moonshine was Flynn’s art, his wife, his mistress, his life. His heart never grew back the strength to fall in love with another woman, but it fell for his moonshine over and over again every spring.

  Flynn loved his whiskey so much that he shied away from describing its flavor. And yet every customer asked him to do it. Flynn never flowered his words the way Briar did, but he’d learned a thing or two from his old friend’s elocutions. Folks didn’t want details as much as they wanted to be told a story. And Flynn packed a tale in every bottle—the same story, in fact. When prospective buyers got around to asking after the taste, Flynn told them about Ruby instead.

  “It tastes like heartbreak at midnight,” he’d say.