by James Ross
Since then I’ve told people that one night I walked all over Corinth with a dollar in my pocket and couldn’t get a drop of liquor. They all say it’s a lie; nothing like that ever happened in Corinth. But it was so that night. Finally I decided to go home by way of Smut Milligan’s filling station and get a pint there. It was out of my way, but I knew if Smut Milligan was still alive he had liquor somewhere around him.
His filling station was about two miles from Corinth, on the Rocky River road, where Lover’s Lane crosses it. It was out in the woods, and had the name of a tough place. Milligan sold liquor, and a lot of gambling went on down there. He was outside the Corinth city limits and the town cops couldn’t do anything with him. I guess he kept the county officials paid up, for nobody ever raided him.
It was dark when I started down the river road. Several cars passed me, but folks won’t pick you up at night and I got over next to the ditch and walked. There aren’t many houses on that road, and the ones I passed were all dark. Mostly there are fields along the road, and at that time they were stubble fields in the main, with now and then a cornfield or a cotton patch. About halfway to the filling station there was a stretch of pines on the left side of the road. They had been thinned down to make them grow faster and they looked strange that night. There had been a few lightning bugs all along the way, but when I got to the pine woods it looked like there was a million in there, working as hard as they could. A million lights coming and going. A funny thing about a lightning bug’s light is that it doesn’t really light up anything; it just makes a quick glow. The woods looked as dark as ever, and the lightning bugs looked like a lot of little eyes in there. I walked as fast as I could and still not be running.
Smut Milligan’s filling station was about fifteen feet off from Lover’s Lane and it was sunk down a little below the level of the road. It was a wooden building, painted yellow, and had a tin roof. It wasn’t very large, but Smut lived in the back of it. He had a lot of merchandise in it; as much as there is in a general country store. But he sold more liquor than anything else. All around the filling station on the left side there was a big woods, full of pines and oaks. The river road was on the right. The land down there was gritty and rocky; there were iron rocks back of the place that were as big as a house. Smut had a car shed about twenty feet back of the filling station. There was a mulberry tree beside the car shed.
It was usually a busy place on Saturday nights and Sundays, but this was a Wednesday night, I think. When I got there Smut was sitting out in front, on a nail keg. The only other fellow there was Catfish Wall, a nigger that made liquor for Smut. Catfish was sitting there in the dust before the door, whittling away on a hickory stick. It looked like he was making him a walking-stick.
There were a couple of lights out in front, but back in the filling station it was dark. Smut Milligan stretched his arms and yawned.
‘Hello, Jack,’ he said.
‘Hello, Smut,’ I said. ‘Hello, Catfish.’
‘How you, Mr. Jack?’ Catfish said.
I pulled a keg over next to the gas tanks and sat down, facing Smut and Catfish. Smut Milligan was sitting hunched over his nail keg, and he had his arms folded across his chest. He was a big, rawboned fellow, that was dark-skinned like a Croatan, or a Cherokee. His hair was black like an Indian’s too, and he was careless about having it cut. He had his sleeves rolled up to his shoulders and the muscles on his arms stuck out bigger than the muscles on the legs of a lot of men. His fingers were uncommonly long, with knuckles so big that it made them look like chair rounds.
‘How’s business, Smut?’ I asked him.
‘Dull. Mighty dull,’ Smut said. He yawned again. When he yawned I noticed the long muscles moving up and down his neck.
‘You be interested in selling a pint of liquor?’ I said.
‘Rather sell a gallon,’ he said. ‘But any amount. Any amount. What’s your taste tonight, Jack?’
‘Give me a pint of rotgut,’ I said.
‘Got some powerfully good Cream of Kentucky,’ Smut said. ‘Dollar and a quarter a pint. Spring water for a chaser, throwed in free.’
‘A dollar’s all I got,’ I said.
‘Got some mighty fine corn, too,’ Smut said, stretching again. ‘Some Catfish run off last April when the moon was just right. Got bead and body. We done named it the Breath of Spring. Cat, get him a pint of the Breath.’
Catfish whittled on the stick awhile longer; then he shut his pocket knife and stuck it in his overall pocket. He took hold of the stick and got up, slow as Christmas; it seemed to me like it took him two minutes to get up off the ground. He wasn’t drunk or anything. Just a long, lazy nigger that probably had a basket full of hookworms inside him. He went around the side of the filling station.
Smut and I sat there, quiet as two knots on a log. It was still down there toward the river. You could hear the mosquitoes singing, ‘Cousin, Cousin,’ just before they bit you. When they got their beaks full of blood they’d fly off singing, ‘No kin, No kin,’ just like humans.
Catfish came back and handed me a bottle that had spider-web designs on the back of it. I screwed off the top and offered the bottle to Smut. He shook his head. The liquor smelled like spring had a pretty strong breath that year. I took a quick slug anyway, and I could feel the bottom of my stomach firing up. The water ran out of my eyes and I had to spit.
‘Anyway, it’s got power,’ I told Smut.
He took a cigarette out of his shirt-pocket. He rolled it around in his hands, then stuck it in his mouth. ‘It’s got everything,’ he said. ‘And it ought to have everything. Catfish put a little of everything in the beer that liquor was run from. Damnedest boy I ever seen for throwing extra stuff in the beer.’
Catfish grinned a little. ‘I likes to dabble in beer,’ he said. ‘I likes to speermint and see what all kinds new flavers I can git.’
Smut lit the cigarette and instead of throwing the match away he held it until the flame was almost to his fingers. Then he wet the first two fingers of his left hand and took hold of the burnt end so it would burn all the way up and he could tell if his sweetheart loved him or not. The match burned out and went black. There wasn’t any red glow left. Smut threw the match away.
‘She loves me not,’ he said. ‘Oh, well, nuts to her. Yes, sir, Cat certainly loves to dabble with beer and liquor. A artist, in his way.’
The liquor was pretty raw, but inside me it felt all right. I took another drink, a big one. For a minute it choked me, and the water ran out of my eyes; then it sort of settled and I was all right.
It was lightning off in the northwest, but it was too far to hear the thunder. Most of the time it was still, but sometimes a little breeze would spring up and rattle the leaves on the oak trees. They sounded dry as dust. It was late July or early August, and the leaves weren’t supposed to sound like that then. But that’s the way they sounded: brittle. That was the way I felt that night, too. Brittle, and dry-mouthed, and a little uneasy. Like I was going to do something that didn’t have anything to do with anything I’d ever done before.
I took another drink out of the spider-webbed bottle. I looked at the bottle when I’d finished my drink. It was about a third gone. I set it down beside me on the ground. I was getting a little tight then.
‘It’s a damned shame the way they sell land for taxes in this county,’ I said. ‘They might know I’d pay my taxes if I had the money.’
Smut took another cigarette out of his shirt-pocket. He didn’t offer me one.
‘Advertise your land for taxes this time?’ he said.
‘In the Enterprise today,’ I said.
Smut struck a match on his shoe and held it to the cigarette. He held this match like he did the other one, to see if his sweetheart had changed her mind. This time there was a strong red glow after the flame went out.
‘Loves me now,’ he said. ‘Must want to go to a dance. Oh, well, Jack, you know how it is. Around the Courthouse all they care about is getting their
salaries and graft. To hell with the Little Man for all they care. Just so they get theirs.’
‘They’re fixing to put me on relief,’ I said. ‘It’s a known fact that I can’t pay my taxes now. Nor this fall either. The boll weevils stripped my cotton.’
Catfish woke up and yawned. ‘Cotton don’t bring nothin nohow,’ he said. ‘Time you pay for the seed, the guano, and all, you owe somebody money for the priviledge of workin yo own cotton. I done quit cotton.’
‘What you mean, “quit”?’ Smut said. ‘You ain’t started yet. I doubt if you ever done a day’s work in a cottonfield in your life.’
‘Use to raise it. Time of the war when cotton were forty cent a pound I clear over a thousand dollar in Marlboro County, in South Callina.’
‘What’d you do with it?’ Smut asked.
‘Throwed it away. Lived high as a kite till the money was gone. Had a Ford machine, a talkin Victrola. Kept a jar of liquor on the kitchen table, day and night.’
‘You got that now,’ Smut told him.
‘There’s nothing to farming nowadays,’ I said. ‘Not even a living.’
‘Not for the little farmer,’ Smut agreed.
‘Now, if I was out of debt I could get along,’ I said. ‘Or if I could borrow enough to get some more land—some good land—and some farming machinery.’
‘Why don’t you borrow from the Federal Government?’ Smut said.
‘Because I already owe more than the place’s worth,’ I said.
‘Why don’t you sell your farm and get you a job at public work?’ Smut said.
‘If I sold it and paid up my debts I wouldn’t have a dime,’ I said. ‘Getting a job’s a tough proposition. I’ve already tried it.’
‘I know they’re hard to get,’ he said, and stretched his arms above his head. ‘But you got more education than the average fellow around here.’
‘I just had one year at Yadkin College,’ I said, ‘and that was a waste of time. I didn’t pay them anything, so it wasn’t a waste of money. But I’d ’a’ better been down here making liquor, or something. Yadkin College ain’t much of a college, but the year I was there I learned a lot of new ways to spend money, and no new ways of making any.’
‘It’s a proposition, all right,’ Smut said.
‘I got to do something,’ I said. ‘This advertising my land for taxes has got me worried.’ But it was LeRoy and his bill that was worrying me the most.
Smut propped his chin in his hands. He twisted his mouth around, and it looked like he was considering something.
‘Tell you what, Jack,’ he said. ‘I might be able to give you a job.’
‘I’ll take it,’ I said. ‘When do I start?’
‘Any time. Only I don’t know whether you’ll like it or not.’
‘I’ll like it, all right. What’s it doing?’
Smut looked around him like he was afraid somebody would hear him, but there wasn’t anybody else there except for Catfish, and he was nodding.
‘Tell you what, Jack. I’m going to branch out. It don’t look like it tonight, but fact is, I been making good money down here. Mostly over the week-ends. I’m going to broaden out down here.’
‘You going to put up a bigger filling station?’ I asked. It didn’t look like the best spot in the world to me. It cornered on the river road, and that was a paved highway that went on to Miami, in the long run, but by the time cars got as far down as Smut’s place they were going pretty fast and didn’t stop often.
‘Not a filling station, exactly,’ he said. ‘What I had in mind was a sort of roadhouse. You know, dine and dance. ’Course I’ll have to sell liquor, and a little gas.’
‘You think a roadhouse’ll pay in this country?’ I said.
‘Damn right,’ he said. ‘I know it will.’
‘I’ll take a job with you,’ I said.
‘I got in mind a place to cater to a higher type than I’m catering to right now,’ Smut said. ‘These cotton-mill hands don’t do nothing but buy a little corn liquor, drink it, and then puke it right back up on the premises.’
‘They’re the main ones that come down here, though,’ I said.
‘Oh, they’ll keep on coming,’ he said. ‘But that’s all right. A roadhouse has got to take on all comers. What I want to do is to get the hosiery-mill workers to coming out here. They’re the folks that make what money’s made in Corinth.’
‘They spend it too,’ I said, ‘but most of those knitters like to ride around with their girls after they get off work. I reckon they’ve just been figuring that this place was a little too rough to bring a girl to.’
‘That’s the main reason,’ Smut said. ‘But you let me fix this place up and get it to looking streamlined and they’ll be right down here with their gal friends. Just changing the name of it from filling station to roadhouse would get some of them down here. You got to have a certain tone about a place to get suckers of the hosiery-mill type.’
‘You sure have got them figured out,’ I said.
‘I been studying them,’ he said. ‘I know I can make a road-house pay.’
‘How was you aiming to use me?’ I said.
‘Why, you can help me run the joint. I got to have some waiters and cooks. You might be the cashier.’
‘You sound like it’s all planned out,’ I said.
‘It is,’ Smut said. He twisted his neck around and spat in the direction of Catfish’s shoes. ‘I used to work in madhouses after I quit going to school. First and last, I worked in a lot of roadhouses. The folks that run them made plenty. Plenty.’
‘Were you ever a bouncer?’ I said.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I was a bouncer all up and down the Pacific Coast. I never had much trouble.’
I looked at his arms and I believed him.
‘I guess you won’t need me till you get the place worked over, will you?’ I said.
‘Why, yes,’ he said. ‘I could use you. I got a lot of dodging around to do in the next few weeks and you could run the joint for me part of the time. How much wages was you expecting?’
‘How about thirty dollars a month?’ I said.
He shut one eye and looked down at the ground. ‘That’s a little steep. I’ll furnish board and a place to sleep, you know,’ he said.
‘I can get board and room and thirty dollars a month in the CCC,’ I said.
‘It ain’t very good board there,’ Smut said. ‘How about twenty-five dollars a month to start with?’
‘Make it twenty-seven fifty,’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I can’t do it. Twenty-five is the best I can do right now.’
‘All right,’ I said. ‘When do you want me to start?’
‘How about Monday?’
‘Monday suits me. How about borrowing your pick-up to bring my trunk down here then?’
‘You can have it Sunday,’ he said.
‘All right. I’ll see you Sunday afternoon,’ I said. I picked up the bottle of liquor and got up to go.
‘Don’t rush off,’ Smut said. ‘It ain’t late yet.’
‘It will be when I get home,’ I said, and I started back up the road.
2
SMUT MILLIGAN WAS A couple of years older than I was, but I knew him pretty well. His first name was Richard, but everybody called him Smut. I don’t know what his last name really was. He didn’t know either. He was adopted by Ches Milligan and his wife when he was a baby. Ches Milligan used to run a grocery store in Corinth. His wife ran him. When she had his spirit broken—from what they tell me—she took a notion to go to an orphanage in Raleigh and get a baby there. She wanted a boy baby. She liked to tell males where to head in.
Smut was three or four years old then, but from what I’ve heard he never paid much attention to Mrs. Milligan. He was a tough kid in school and played hooky a lot. In the fall he’d traipse off to hunt muscadines and in the spring he went fishing in Pee Dee River, and sometimes in Rocky River. He gave the Milligans a lot of trouble.
The old lady probably wished she’d let him stay in the orphanage. But she died when he was about sixteen. From then on Smut didn’t have any argument about what he did.
After his wife died Ches Milligan had plenty of freedom. But he was sort of lost and took to drinking. Right off he married the widow Bolick, a bossy woman, but she died on him in six months’ time. Ches was used to being told what to do, and having so much bad luck with his wives put him out of heart. He got to drinking so much that he lost his business. After a while he lost his home too, and then he put on a protracted drunk. He cashed in his insurance policies and stayed drunk till that was all gone. When he sobered up about all he had left was a shotgun and one shell. He cut the barrel off the shotgun and put the shell through his head.
Smut had been living on the streets for some time then, and Ches’s killing himself didn’t make much difference to him one way or the other. He must have been eighteen then, and he was grown. He hung around Corinth that summer, working in filling stations and playing baseball on Saturdays. That fall he went off to Harrell Junior College, but they kicked him out as soon as the football season was over.
He kept that up for a couple of years. In the fall he’d go to some little college and play football. After the football season was over he’d come back to Corinth and hang around till spring, when he’d go back to another college and make his board and room playing on the baseball team. In the summer he could always make enough to live on by playing baseball with some mill team. He wasn’t a bad baseball player, but the big league scouts that hang around this section never paid much attention to him. He was a sucker for a curve.
When Smut was twenty-one or twenty-two he left, and I didn’t see hair nor hide of him for three or four years. Then in 1935 he came back. One Saturday afternoon I walked into the City Bowling Alley. He was running the joint just like he’d been there all the time.
