Moolah and Moonshine

by Jordan Castillo Price

“I guess so. Someone must’ve put the moonshine in my hand.”

  “What if there’s some big, scary farmer on the original side of the tunnel and he blows us away with a double-barrelled shotgun ’cos he doesn’t know who the heck we are?”

  Sam considered that idea. “I don’t think so. I’ve got a feeling this tunnel goes back to the basement. Your basement. In our time.” He leaned in for a kiss—and it was easier now, now that they’d done so much more than that. There was a rightness to Sam that Emmett hadn’t felt in ages with someone new. He turned and put an arm around Sam, and the scratchy wool of the vest even felt right. They kissed with the laziness of two new lovers with time to kill, and when they finished the kiss, Sam whispered, “If we don’t go back, if we turn around and sneak back out the thirties end of the tunnel, nothing says we have to stay in Kansas.”

  That hadn’t been the plan. The plan had been to wait until Mustache Man was probably asleep, slip past him, spend some money, and sneak back in when the coast was clear. Emmett expected himself to be shocked. He wasn’t. “We could ride a riverboat down to New Orleans and gorge ourselves on chicory coffee and beignets before Hurricane Katrina. We can sail down to Havana, lounge around in Bermuda shorts and smoke cigars before the Bay of Pigs. We can see the Twin Towers.”

  “Those were built in the seventies.”

  Emmett’s heart did that funny little leap it had when Sam had first kissed him—yes, it was Sam who’d instigated the whole thing. Emmett had always wanted to be adventurous. He just needed a little help. “Okay. I figure I’ll be…what? In my seventies, myself. If I go easy on the Cuban cigars and beignets, I could visit the World Trade Center.”

  “Or Europe. Think of everything that got bombed in World War II. We could go see it before it’s gone.”

  Sam rested his head on Emmett’s shoulder. “We could see the Eiffel Tower.”

  Paris.

  Emmett gazed down the tunnel into the blackness that led back to the horrible house. It seemed like the choice should be obvious. Sam. Paris. A world where he’d be safe from emailed jokes with three-page headers, at least for another sixty years or so. It was an obvious choice, actually. It was just more painful than he’d ever imagined.

  His family, he hoped, would eventually get over the shock and the grief. And Rosemary would have Paris to help her forget. Emmett would have worried about the news ruining her trip—but, come on. It was Paris. She’d have plenty of distractions to keep her occupied. “Do you really want to do this?” he asked Sam.

  Sam looked up, cupped Emmett’s jaw, and pulled him into a slow, sweet kiss.

  “I think,” Emmett said, “if we want to stay, we’ve got to prove ourselves. Make sure there’s no turning back.”

  If he’d been expecting Sam to back down from the challenge, he would have been disappointed. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

  The thought of closing the door to one possibility to keep the other open felt so right to Emmett that he didn’t even bother shielding himself from the reemergence of his modern underwear. He and Sam strode back toward the basement of the horrible house, not quite side by side (since they wouldn’t have fit in the narrow tunnel that way) but as close to it as they could—with Emmett in the lead.

  Emmett had hoped they would find something, an old pipe, a scrap of wood, but the tunnel was totally empty. It didn’t matter. When they reached the door to the still’s hidden room, the ceiling began to rain gravel from the mere vibration of their footsteps. Emmett reached up and touched it. A cascade of dirt sifted down and covered his shoes.

  Sam put a hand on his shoulder. “Look.”

  Emmett looked down. Sam’s flashlight lay flush against the tunnel wall, nestled tightly, nearly invisible. Emmett checked his lantern. It felt strange. Like maybe it wasn’t a lantern. Maybe it was a plate with three guttering tea lights on it. No. It couldn’t be. Emmett told himself he was not holding a plate. You didn’t hold a plate dangling under your hand, after all. He closed his eyes and recalled the pendulous feel of the lantern, its heft, its weight—and yes, it was still there. The lantern.

  The door to the past hadn’t closed—but that didn’t mean it would remain open.

  Emmett gave Sam a shove toward the Mustache Man’s storeroom. “Go.”

  Sam hesitated.

  “I’ll be right behind you.”

  Sam’s shoes scraped against the gritty floor as he took one step, then another, and finally, he began to run.

  Emmett made a fist and punched into the ceiling. A hole opened as if a thin crust had been all that was holding it together, and gallons of dirt, wheelbarrows full, poured in through the hole. He coughed and staggered back. The lantern—definitely a lantern—swayed in his grasp. He punched into the ceiling again, and clawed out a handful of dirt.

  Rocks began to rain down, and sharp-edged shards of concrete. Emmett backed up, twisted his foot on a hunk of debris and nearly went down. But he caught his balance and knocked a few more holes in the ceiling.

  “Emmett, come on! It’s gonna give!”

  Emmett strained to hear among the clatter of the rocks and dirt. Maybe there was something, he decided. A groan. A shift.

  The tunnel floor was uneven with dirt, now, and Emmett had to crouch to keep from opening even bigger holes in the ceiling with his head. The grit in the air was thick like smoke. Emmett climbed a few yards toward Sam and opened up a few more holes, then looked back over his shoulder. He searched for the flashlight, but saw the spot where it had been was now covered in scree. Even as rocks pinged off his shoulders, something inside Emmett lifted, and he knew he was ready to embrace the past. His future.

  The ceiling rumbled.

  “Emmett!”

  Emmett turned toward Sam, and ran.

  SIX

  Emmett struggled for breath. His back was pressed against the wall, Sam was sprawled on his chest, and the air was stale.

  A stroll on deck to get the blood flowing and work out the kinks in his back was probably long overdue.

  However, a stroll on deck would entail prying himself from the bunk, putting on clothes and leaving their cabin—and he’d grown incredibly fond of the cabin. He settled his chin on Sam’s head instead, and told himself he’d take that walk…later.

  “Okay,” Sam said. “Try this one: Have you seen my cousin? He is tall.”

  Emmett wracked his brain. “Avez-vous vu, uh…mon coussin?”

  “That’s great…if you’re looking for your pillow.”

  Emmett sighed. “You know, even if by some miracle I managed to ask the right question, chances are I’ll never be able to follow the answer. I should have signed up for Smile and Nod 101.”

  “And there’s that legendary Emmett Russo optimism. Who hooked up with an optometrist that got his prescription right?”

  “After five sets of glasses I couldn’t see through….”

  “At, what, ten bucks apiece? And who found some great underwear?”

  “Which I have to wear inside-out so the elastic doesn’t pinch.”

  “So I’m sure you’ll pick up enough words to get by. Millions of people speak French every day. Why not you?”

  Why not Emmett? Certainly far stranger things than the acquisition of a new language had happened to him. In the months since The Moonshine, as the two of them had come to call it—because being any more specific about the impulsive journey they’d taken together made their heads spin, and they’d decided it was healthier not to examine it too closely—Sam had proven himself shrewd in the art of forcing Emmett to let go of his preconceptions.

  Time moves forward. There was one preconception they couldn’t help but slough off. And Emmett did his best to cling; he woke every morning figuring he’d be alone in his horrible house with nothing but the smell of cabbage for company. But one day as they were walking by a soup kitchen in Poughkeepsie, he caught an actual whiff of boiled cabbage, and it turned out it smelled very little like his basement stairs. Go figure.

  “I think I have a
mental block about this whole ‘cousin’ thing,” Emmett said.

  “Just until we see what’s safe.”

  “Come on, we’re two Americans traveling abroad. Of course we’d stick together like glue. No one would expect anything else.”

  “I know, I know. But we’ve got to be careful.”

  “That’s a remark about the last conversation I killed, isn’t it? How was I to know Velcro hasn’t been invented yet? Here’s the really cool thing about this trip—if I slip up again, we can blame it on me saying something stupid because I’m an American, have a good laugh, and no one will know the difference.”

  Sam brushed a kiss against Emmett’s chest, absently, in the way of a lover who’d been with him so long that the small gestures had become unconscious, like breathing. “I guess we can get away with calling one another mon ami.”

  Emmett hooked his heel around Sam’s calf and drew Sam’s leg between his. Their bodies entwined. “I’m sure we’ll figure out the safe neighborhoods soon enough. It’s Gay Paree, right?”

  “Please tell me you didn’t dream up this whole trip based on a scene from Victor/Victoria.”

  “No…but you have to admit, there’d be a certain je ne sais quoi to taking a cue from Julie Andrews about reinventing ourselves.”

  “If worse comes to worse, I suppose you could always shrug and speak in French clichés.” Sam raised his head and Emmett captured his lips. Their tongues twined in a languorous exploration.

  As their arousal began to burgeon, Sam turned his face away and brushed the tickle of Emmett’s mustache from his upper lip. Emmett had offered repeatedly to shave, but Sam pointed out it had taken him over two months to grow an authentic looking ’stache, and insisted it helped him blend in. More importantly, Emmett suspected the fashions of the day might have been a guilty pleasure for his beloved history major, though he never called Sam on it.

  When Emmett caught his own refection in a mirror, he felt like a vacationer getting his photo taken in a tourist trap of an old-timey portrait studio—but since the locals never looked at him funny, at least not until he opened his mouth and made a remark about Velcro or called something “cool,” he figured it was in his best interest to let the barber do whatever he thought was best.

  If Sam happened to get off on the feel of a big mustache brushing the base of his cock, all the better.

  “How about this?” Sam murmured against Emmett’s jaw. “Have you seen my friend? He is tall.”

  “Avez-vous vu mon ami? Il est grand et beau. Now here’s one for you.” Emmett trailed his fingers over the bare curve of Sam’s hip, thought for a moment, and said, “Waiter, I’d like to order the fries.”

  JCPBooks e-books are priced by the word count of the story only. Any end matter or sample chapters are a bonus!

  About the Author

  Jordan Castillo Price wouldn’t mind vacationing in the past, but she wouldn’t want to live there. She’s sure she would languish without her iPod and her Post-Its.

  About this Story

  I have several friends whom I pester for story ideas. My friend with the very old farmhouse was my brainstormer for this story, and our conversation went something like this:

  “I need to figure out where a bad smell would come from in an old farmhouse.”

  “A dead animal.”

  “Okay, but I don’t want a dead animal in the scene. Is there anything else you can think of? Some other weird smell?”

  “…A dead animal.”

  “Right. Something other than a dead animal.”

  “Gosh, I’m sorry. That’s all I can think of. Dead animal.”

  Luckily, after I grilled her for several more hours she remembered the rotten cap on the pipe.

  I found out in another torture session that this particular friend has also been struck by a weird phenomenon called ball lightning. I’ve yet to find a story to insert that into—but never fear, there’s plenty more stories in these fingertips just itching to get out!

  A Sample from Petit Morts #4

  Other People’s Weddings by Josh Lanyon

  “I’d rather be dead than wear this!”

  Griff dropped the latest issue of Elegant Bride as Madeline Dalrymple burst from the dressing room cubicle, shot across the showroom floor, and slammed out the front glass door of Venetian Bridal Gowns. Her exit bore an unfortunate resemblance to a big purple balloon flying wild after being jabbed by a pin.

  Mallory, Madeline’s sister, appeared at the mouth of the hall to the dressing rooms, looking exasperated.

  Sometimes Griff suspected that brides deliberately picked the worst possible dresses for their bridesmaids and maids of honor. Or maybe it wasn’t deliberate. Maybe it was subconscious, a paying back of old scores, a testing of true devotion. The Watters & Watters strapless sheath of lilac layered over hot pink chiffon would have flattered Mallory’s tall, slim, brunette beauty, but it just made short, plump Madeline look like a Purple People-Eater after a good meal.

  “Well?” Mallory said to Griff.

  “Well?” Griff returned blankly, with an uneasy look at Sasha, co-owner of Venetian Bridal Gowns. Sasha raised her shoulders infinitesimally. After twenty years of dealing with brides and bridesmaids, she didn’t bother trying to understand, she rode the whirlwind the best she could—and cashed in at the end of the ride.

  “Go after her,” Mallory ordered. “Are you my wedding planner or not?”

  Mallory’s idea of Griff’s job description was a cross between a personal assistant and confidante. By the second week of accepting the job of coordinating Mallory and Joe Palmer’s nuptials, Griff knew he’d made a deal with the devil. Possibly literally. But the Dalrymples were Binbell’s wealthiest family, and Dalrymple-Palmer wedding was going to be the social event of the season—plus he needed the money. In these days of economic hardship, prospective brides might not be willing to cut costs on dresses or cakes or hair stylists, but hapless wedding planners all too often fell under the heading Optional.

  This, however, was different. Griff was experienced enough to know Lord help the mister who comes between a bride and her sister. “I don’t think it’s my place—”

  “Of course it’s your place,” Mallory snapped. “Whose place would it be? You need to get her in line before she wrecks my wedding.”

  “She’s still wearing her three hundred and forty-five dollar bridesmaid dress,” Sasha pointed out mildly.

  Now and again co-ownership seemed like more trouble than it was worth. Griff choked back words he would regret once he started juggling utility bills on the space next door, and pushed out through the glass door. The jaunty notes of the Wedding March followed before the door closed and cut them off.

  The L-shaped strip mall, locally known as Wedding Aisle, consisted of Venetian Bridal Gowns, Skerry Weddings, and Guy’s Tuxedos. On the hook of the “L” was Betty Ann’s Crafts and Supplies. It was, as they said, a match made in heaven.

  Maddy’s blue Sebring convertible was still parked between Griff’s classic red VW Beetle and Mallory’s BMW Z4, but there was no sign of the runaway bridesmaid. He ducked his head inside Skerry Weddings, but Mallory was not hiding out there. He walked around the buildings to the end of the strip mall.

  Maddy was walking up and down the asphalt drive behind Guy’s, smoking a cigarette. She looked up with raccoon eyes at Griff’s approach and snorted. She had stopped crying, which was a huge relief.

  “Fuck, Skerry. Don’t you have any pride?”

  “Look.” Griff spoke awkwardly. “Mallory’s sorry if she didn’t seem sympathetic, but it’s too late to change the dresses. This is the final fitting.”

  “She’s not sorry,” Maddy spat out. “She wants me to look like a fucking circus freak. She deliberately picked the dress that would make me look worst. You were there. You saw. She could have picked the dress I liked, but oh no! It had to be something only her and her anorexic friends could wear.”

  Griff managed not to sigh. It had seemed that way to h
im too, but experience had taught him the sister dynamic was a weird one. A decade of organizing other people’s weddings had made him very glad he’d been born an only child.

  He said patiently, “Mallory’s wedding is the most important day of a woman’s life, so naturally she wants everything to be perfect. The way she always imagined it. You’ll see when your turn comes.”

  Maddy’s tear streaked face screwed into an expression of disgust. “First bullet point: I am never getting married. And if I did get married, it wouldn’t be in one of these big fat geek weddings. Second bullet point: her wedding day is not the most important day of a woman’s life. Do you honestly believe that shit?”

  Er…no. Not really. Not exactly. He believed in marriage, obviously. Believed in commitment. A wedding was an important symbol of commitment, a significant milestone, but the single most important one? No. How could it be when most women married men, and most men didn’t consider their wedding the most important day of their lives?

  Then again, he arranged weddings for a living so….

  He was still trying to think of a compromise answer when Maddy said scornfully, “Don’t you find it ironic that all these people who despised you and made fun of you in high school hire you to do their weddings?”

  Griff flushed. He said defensively, “High school was…a long time ago. Everybody does things they regret.”

  “They don’t regret anything they did,” Maddy retorted. “They thought you were a joke then and they think you’re a joke now. The gay wedding planner. They’re laughing at you.”

  This attack caught him off balance—not least because he and Maddy were not close. There had been three years between them in school, and whether Maddy believed it or not, her family and her money ensured she had never truly been the social outcast she imagined. For a moment he was right back there. Right back in Mrs. Dodge’s tenth grade biology class, struggling not to cry because no one wanted him for a lab partner. No, because Hammer Sorensen had humiliated him once again with a cruel but accurate imitation of Griff’s light voice and slightly affected speaking manner. The horror of breaking down in front of the goggling, giggling class. Like falling in the snow in front of a pack of wolves.