by Harlow Brown
"Legend ain't the right name for you, dude. Fury is more suiting. You always so pissy?"
"Look, I don’t know you, and frankly I don’t want to right now. I need some time to adjust to my new life and surroundings, and I don’t want to discuss my past or open up about my feelings like some chick. I just want to know the basics of making a still and distilling some moonshine, so I can make some money. I have a point to prove to Chief, and I fully intend on making that happen. He said all things in time, and I need to accelerate that time, so I need for us to hurry up and get this production on the move. I have someone I need to see. Also, I have to prove my loyalty to you guys. I'm more than willing to do that, as I’m loyal beyond a shadow of a doubt. But I need time to think, to adjust, and to learn. I don’t have time for making buddies and staying up late swapping stories about exes and painting our fingernails. If at any time you think I’m being a dick, just know that I probably am. I’ll constantly and continually, no questions asked, have your back. Never doubt that. I owe you a great deal, seeing as you were a part of the reason I'm here. I didn’t appreciate the brawl on the street, but now I see it was necessary. Do we understand each other?"
" I think you summed it up. You want to learn and not to make friends. I got it."
"Look, it's not that I don’t want to make friends. It’s difficult to explain, and I can't even if I wanted to. I want to call you and Chief friends, but I need space. I’m not some buddy-buddy guy. Just know that if I’m accepted into the Chosen Legion, every one of you will come before me. That’s just how I roll. I’m loyal and I have my friends’ backs when I know they have mine. Hell, even when they don't. I just don’t like to talk much. I don’t have a lot to say anymore." I finished my glass of sweet tea and flagged down the waitress for another.
Magnum didn’t say much of anything else for the rest of the meal unless it was to answer a question I had about the still or shine. He really did know his stuff when it came to making moonshine. I had to give him that.
I wanted to feel bad for the way I was toward him, but I just couldn’t make myself care enough to apologize. He knew when to stop, and I think he figured out that it wasn’t that I wouldn’t speak about things as much as I couldn’t. I didn’t question it, just let it go and appreciated the fact that he did too.
We finished our meal and headed back to the clubhouse. As we unloaded the supplies, my mind started racing, wondering what made Magnum just drop it so quickly. I figured he was entitled to his privacy just as I was asking for it. That meant no prying, and that was fine by me. I had all I could deal with already; I sure didn’t need someone else's drama too.
I followed Magnum with armloads of copper and bags of supplies to the basement, where Chief was. He lifted his chin to me. The clubhouse must’ve cost them a fortune—no one had a basement on a beach, but it wasn’t my business. I was grateful that the guys were willing to take in a stranger and show him the ropes of a lucrative business.
Magnum and Chief both got to cutting, soldering, shaping, and beating the copper pieces. The belly of the still was created with expert hands, and they polished and buffed the copper until it shone again. Once the construction was completed, we all went back upstairs to grab a beer.
"Tomorrow we’ll start a batch. You'll get to experience the magic of making liquor," Chief joked.
"Sounds like a plan. Are you done with me?" I said with a yawn.
"We're good. We’ll get the ingredients for the mash in the morning, we will use two vehicles and go to different stores. Be ready to go around eight, yeah?"
"Yeah, boss."
I headed up to the room that was now my new residence, stripped down to my boxers, and climbed into bed. Sleep claimed me, and the sight of my sweet Daisy filled my dreams.
Chapter 3
Fury
AFTER COFFEE, WE loaded into two separate vehicles, me with Chief and Magnum solo. Inside the store, we gathered our necessary ingredients of sugar, yeast, and cheesecloth, then added TV dinners, lunch meat, bread, and cheese. Chief didn’t say anything, just shook his head and grinned.
Back at the house, we got to work cracking the corn that Magnum purchased at a local feed store, putting it in buckets with water, sugar, and yeast. I hoped it tasted better than it smelled, because that smell alone was enough to steer anyone with a brain away from it. They had a batch ready that had been sitting for about a week, and it reeked of rotten corn.
“With today’s technology, you’d think there’d be a way to do this that smelled better. This shit stinks.”
Chief stuck his nose in the air and sniffed, then replied, “Smells like money, kid.”
We got the pot cooking and ran off a batch of moonshine. Chief poured some on a piece of wood and lit it. I looked at him like he’d lost his mind, my unexperienced brain not grasping why they would waste any of the liquid gold.
"The bluer the flame is, the purer the whisky. You know you have a top-notch product if it’s almost invisible." Chief demonstrated for me. "See there? Just a tinge of blue, but you can see the heat in the air. Watch this paper catch on fire," he said as he stuck the corner of a piece of paper into the clear part of the flame. I watched closely because I didn’t want them pulling one over on me, but that paper never got close enough to the blue part of the flame to catch. There were actually clear flames coming from the piece of wood.
"There’s a real science to this. Most people think it’s a bunch of country bumpkins who look like Popcorn Sutton out in the middle of the woods cooking whiskey," Magnum piped up.
"The profit margin is huge. That’s why we still do it. We sell it for $40 a quart, $80 for half a gallon, and we cut a deal for a whole gallon and sell it for $140 instead of the $160 it should be," Chief explained.
"So that’s how you paid for this place?" I asked.
"Partly. It was a family home. My uncle passed it to me because I was the only kid. But all of the upgrades came from shine profits."
I wondered to myself if any of them had gone to jail for getting caught but never asked. It wasn’t the time or the place. I'd ask Chief later on when Mag wasn’t around.
Drip, drip, drip, the clear liquid started filling up the catch container as it exited the worm. We were at the end of the batch. The first still, a fifty-gallon named Popcorn, ran off the biggest batch. Still two, Percolator, was our twenty-five gallon. Last but not least was our five-gallon still, Mighty Man. Our fifty-gallon still would likely produce about ten gallons of alcohol, Chief explaining that you could bank on around 20% of the vat size being actual shine. One full batch of whiskey from Popcorn alone stood to make us $1400.
Sitting in the basement with my newest allies making moonshine had me wondering how I let my life get so far out of control. How did I let drugs and bad decisions cost me my life as I knew it? How was it fair to Daisy? Why did she have to pay for my selfishness and stupidity? Now, because I was a dumbass, she was left to raise our son alone. I hoped for her sake that she found a partner who she loved as much as she did me, only I hoped he treated her better and loved my son as his own. She deserved more than I could ever have given her.
Trying to pull myself out of the funk I had fallen back into, I asked Magnum, "So when do we make a delivery? I assume you don’t just stockpile the liquor."
"Sometimes we keep an extra gallon or so on hand, but to answer your question, we make a run tomorrow. One of our biggest buyers is here in town, Sully and his puppet Jay. They buy a shit ton of shine from us."
"How do you transport it?"
"Well", Chief started, "we put it in two-liter Sprite bottles, gallon jugs that water comes in, and tried and true Mason jars."
That made sense. It was clear and would look like Sprite or water, depending upon which container was being used. Seems like they have it all thought out. "Do they know I'm helping? I mean, are they going to freak out if they see a new guy on the scene?"
"No. They know not to question us, and I gave them a heads-up that we have a prospect. The
y should be fine."
After all the liquor was bottled up, I loaded it into the van, hiding several gallons out of sight under the seats. The Chosen Legion had thought of everything, getting a fabricator to make some in-floor storage compartments, which was where most of the loot was stored. No one would think to look under the seats for a hidden compartment, and if they did, it wouldn’t be an easy thing to spot. The welder had done some of the best work I’d ever seen. There were no handles, so it looked like the original floor, and they stayed shut with magnets so there was no rattling. The members just used a bigger opposite-poled magnet to open the doors.
"You ready for your first run?" Chief asked me with a grin.
"Yes," I replied stoically.
"Load up. Magnum grab a couple of two-liter Cokes too, and some chips and snack cakes out of the cupboards. It’ll look like a grocery run should we get stopped."
Genius. Either they’d learned from previous experience or they were just smarter than I gave a bunch of bikers credit for. It didn’t matter though; these guys had street smarts I wished I would’ve had. Maybe then I wouldn’t be here to begin with.
We pulled up outside a little shop called Sunset Tattoo. I got out and walked in, spotting a timid redhead. "Uh, is Jay around?" I asked her.
"Maybe, who are you?"
"Just tell him he has a delivery, darlin'. I'm fairly sure he’s expecting it."
She walked off to the back and I heard her say, "I don’t know who it is. Some dude, probably six-foot-six inches, talks with a southern drawl. He says you’re expecting a delivery. Damn it, Jay, I said I don’t know. Would you get off your dead ass and just go see what he wants?"
She doesn’t take much shit from him.
She came back up front and resumed her place at the counter. "He’ll be right out. You can look around a bit or have a seat, whatever you want."
"You do ink?"
"Yes."
"I have an idea that I want to make into a tattoo. If I explain it, do you think you can put it to skin?"
"They don’t call me the best in town for no reason, mister."
"Got a pencil and a piece of paper?"
She slid it to me and I started sketching, drawing a window with the side of the wall shown too. In the window, there was a silhouette of a woman cradling her infant child facing the outside. There were some pine trees with a full moon that sat atop the tips of them. Down toward the bottom was a wolf howling at the moon. Under the sketch were the words ‘Look at that moon,’ something I used to tell Daisy when she was worried, upset, or just frazzled in general. It was my way of distracting her to free up her mind for a little while. It usually made her smile, which meant it worked like a charm.
When I was done, I slid it to her.
"I should be able to work with this. I can put in detail and shading to make it really stand out. It’s very thought out. Who is this?"
"A special person in another time, a lifetime ago." The truth spilled out of my mouth before I could stop it. Thank God it sounded like memories of a broken heart being replayed by a love-sick fool instead of what it really was. No way could I tell her what it actually depicted. I couldn’t tell anyone that.
"Let me guess, the wolf is crying out of pain and a broken heart, and the woman in the window is looking at the same moon, longing for her love to come back?"
"Something like that."
"Yes, I can do this for you. It'll take a lot of shadowing and intricate detail, so it won't be cheap. Where are you thinking you want it?"
"Name your price. I want it on the underside of my forearm."
"Seeing as it’s a large tattoo and all of the detail work it’s gonna take, you’re looking around six hundred dollars."
"Deal. When I save the cash, I’ll call you for an appointment. Do you have a card, miss?"
"Roxxi, and here you go." She slid me a card with her name and number on it.
"Who are you?" We both turned to the man coming out of the back .
"Jay, this is the man who said you had a delivery," Roxxi explained.
"What’s your name, who are you with, and what do you have for me?" Jay spouted off in his best attempt at being intimidating. Truth was I towered over the guy and would snap him like a twig if he pushed me.
"I'm Legend. The Chosen Legion told me to drop by. Your delivery is outside."
"I don’t know you. You new around here?"
"Look, asshole, I don’t have time for meeting your parents and all that warm and fuzzy bullshit. Either you come outside now and get your delivery, or I'm out and will resell it elsewhere. Choice is yours." I turned on a dime and walked out before I knocked the guy’s block off.
"Jay, just go see what he has for you. Sully’s going to be pissed if you screw up a deal. Don’t be dense," Roxxi said. I could almost hear her eyes rolling.
He made the right decision and came outside to inspect his shipment. "You got yourself a real winner here, boys. He didn’t take any shit I dished out at him."
"You knew who I was the whole time and still acted like that? Get your shit and give us the money. Next time don’t play with me. I don’t appreciate my time being wasted. I ought to tack on a twenty spot just to make up for the time I was explaining myself to you." This guy. There was something about him that I just didn’t trust. He was crooked, and I’d prove it. I had a gut feeling about him.
After we unloaded, Chief stopped for gas, leaving Magnum and me in the van.
"That was good work back there. Jay’s a dumb son of a bitch, and you handled him well. I have to be mean to him every time we make a deal. Just ain't got sense to poor piss out of a boot," Magnum said as he shook his head.
That warranted a chuckle out of me. I hadn’t heard that saying in a long time. It took me back to a time when life was easy, back when I first met Daisy. Upon that memory, the chuckles stopped abruptly.
"Dude, you okay? Looks like you seen a ghost."
"Uh, yeah, I'm fine. Just shaking off an old memory, that’s all. Not one I care to relive. Kind of hit me out of nowhere," I lied. I knew exactly where it came from. The same place all the other unwelcome memories of her came from. Deep down in my heart, in my mind. I was never free of them. The memories were both a blessing and a curse. I wouldn’t trade them for the world but would love to stop remembering them for just a little while.
I felt like I needed a break. I needed to get out of my head. The more I thought and remembered, the more I thought about not thinking and remembering. It was a vicious cycle, one I didn’t see breaking soon, if ever.
"You all right, man?" Magnum asked.
"Drop it. It's nothing," I barked.
"Whatever, princess. You're a moody fucker."
"What are you two bickering about?" Chief said as he got back in the van.
"Nothing important. Just that Legend don’t fit him at all. He needs to be Fury for real. All of the time. Dude is moody. And it's usually pissy." Magnum said without second thought.
"Fine, then. Fury it is," Chief confirmed.
I guessed I wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, seeing as they named me and all.
Chapter 4
Fury
Present Day
"WHAT DO YOU mean we’re having a house full of girls stay here?" I asked, annoyance clear in my tone.
"Whiskey has a situation that he needs help with. His girl is in some kind of trouble. She plays for a women's softball team, and they’re playing in a big tournament in Panama City Beach. He asked us for a favor, and that’s what brothers do. He’d do the same for you if you needed it, no questions asked, so get over it," Magnum said with irritation. "Damnation, you're the only dude I know who would be pissed about a house full of women. You need to loosen up and get a girlfriend. Or a fuck buddy. Something, geez."
"I assume Chief knows about this?"
"Nope. We were just going to welcome trouble to our doorstep without clearing it with the president." Magnum really was a sarcastic punk; however, that time he had me dead
to rights. It was a stupid thing to ask. But I was finally not thinking about Daisy every time I turned around, and now this shit.
I had been to see Daisy a handful of times in the years past, but I couldn’t speak, couldn’t get her attention. I couldn’t go hold my newborn son, Eric. I knew his name because I saw the stork sign staked in the yard with his birth weight and length—eight pounds and ten ounces, twenty-one inches. He was an extremely hefty boy, obviously taking after me.
He was almost four now. I checked on them still from time to time, though I’d accepted the fact that the situation just was what it was.
The hardest pill for me to swallow was when I saw another man at my house, kissing my girl and holding my boy. That hit hard, and I never really recovered. It made me more bitter and angrier. Was he a good guy? Would he willingly take care of them just like I wanted from the beginning? I didn’t expect it to hurt that bad when I saw it with my own eyes. It wasn’t his fault though. I wasn’t mad at him, or her, just still broken over the whole situation.
I’d never be whole again. My heart would always have a void in it that would never be filled. I hadn’t been back to see them since the night I saw their shadows in the window about two years ago. That was my sign that she was okay and she’d moved on, just as I wanted. She’d moved on and I never would. It was my fault it was happening anyway, so it was only right that I be the one to suffer for eternity.
I’d accepted the fact that I’d be lonely all my life. That was fine. I had my brothers, my club, and my bike. I didn’t need anything else. I could always find a side fling for a night or two when I need it. No strings attached—we didn’t exchange numbers, and usually didn’t exchange names. Unattainable and nameless. That was the way it had to be for me nowadays.
I couldn’t be responsible for the downfall of another woman. Clearly I couldn’t be in a regular relationship, one that had no secrets. My entire life was a secret. I couldn’t undo that. I’d always be a mystery to most because I was incapable of honesty and having feelings—ones of love and acceptance, anyway. The only ones I had an abundance of were self-loathing and anger. There wasn’t enough room in my cold, dead heart for love and affection for anyone other than Daisy and baby Eric, the two people who could never know how much I still loved them.
