Appalachian Intrigue

by Archie Meyers

  The boys saw sacks of cornmeal, sugar, and yeast stacked beside a cord of firewood and watched as the wood fire under the cooking pot heated the fermented corn mash. Heat created a gaseous vapor that was drawn into one end of a copper tube and intoxicating liquor dripped out the other end. The moonshine was hand-carried in gallon jugs from the still to the bootleggers’ cars and would eventually be sold in one-quart fruit jars through the back doors of roadhouses.

  Dex and Hoagie had seen this type of still in the past, but some were even cruder. Several years earlier, three deaths had been linked to poisoning from consumption of moonshine that was being distilled in an automobile radiator. That may have slowed down consumption, but it certainly had not stopped it.

  The soft gurgling of the spring and the crackling of the fire were the only sounds as three overall-clad mountain men sat silently waiting for the jug under the tube to fill up. Dex and Hoagie’s youthful boldness, together with a mistaken belief that they were obscured from view, allowed them to calmly observe the whiskey-making process. The three men at the still hadn’t seen the teenagers crawling into place behind the boulder, but the fourth man—a lookout sitting thirty feet up in a large sweet gum tree—did see them. The mountain’s early morning silence was shattered by the sharp crack of a rifle, and debris exploded from the rock the teenagers were using for cover. Their boldness quickly disappeared, and Dex yelled, “Run, Hoagie, run!”

  Hoagie didn’t need the encouragement. In a heartbeat they were in an athletic sprint, careening recklessly down the mountain. Hoagie, although not nearly as athletic as Dex, stayed surprisingly close on Dex’s heels for the first few minutes, but when Dex looked back over his shoulder, he saw that Hoagie was starting to lag behind. He knew that if they stayed on the main trail, whoever was after them would probably catch Hoagie.

  Dex yelled back, “Hoagie, get off the trail. Go straight down the mountain.”

  They both veered off the familiar, well-worn path and sought the concealment of thick underbrush. When Dex realized that the shooter was just scaring them away and had never been following them, he stopped to allow Hoagie to catch up. While he was waiting, Dex thought back several years to when there was always three of them involved in their mountain adventures. Marie Murphy had been the third member of the teenage trio, and even she could outrun Hoagie, but then Marie could also outrun most of the boys in the neighborhood.

  Dex and Marie had been inseparable as they grew up next door to each other, but when they were freshmen in high school, she moved to Atlanta with her parents. Dex hadn’t seen her since. He was glad Marie wasn’t on the mountain with them that day.

  Marie had been like a sister, although she looked and acted more like a brother. It wasn’t that she was unattractive; it was just that her athletic ability, androgynous appearance, and complete disinterest in making herself look more feminine made him not think the same way about her as he did about other girls.

  Marie could throw a baseball as well as any of the boys in the neighborhood and was a much better all-around athlete than Hoagie. Although he had always thought of her as just one of the boys, Dex knew that the tall, skinny tomboy with pigtails was, despite her boyish appearance, a girl, and he didn’t think girls should have to dodge bullets. He smiled when he thought about how highly she would have resented him trying to protect her just because she was a girl.

  A few months before Marie moved to Atlanta with her parents, Dex noticed that the pigtails disappeared and curves that hadn’t been there before began to develop. He still didn’t think of her as a girl, not a real girl anyway, but he did notice that some of the boys at school were beginning to pay a lot more attention to her.

  Dex had a hard time believing it had been over three years since Marie last joined them on one of their mountain treks. Thinking about her while he was waiting on Hoagie to catch up was the first time she had crossed his mind in a while. He hadn’t forgotten her; he had just moved on in his life and been totally consumed by high school and, particularly, athletics.

  Dex had always been the de facto leader of the threesome, and even though none of the three would have had any idea what de facto meant, they depended on Dex, and he felt responsible for them when they were on the mountain. While he was waiting on Hoagie to catch up, he had time to replay the scene in his head. Since the shot had come from behind them and their backs were clearly exposed, he knew they would have been fairly easy targets if the shooter had really wanted to hit them.

  He was smiling and casually leaning against a tall oak tree when Hoagie finally caught up and sprawled on the ground at his feet. Hoagie was breathing heavily, sweating profusely, and his voice was raspy from the exertion. The initial shock of the gunshot and the long scramble down the mountain had taken a toll on him.

  “Dex, I don’t know why you’re smiling; there’s nothing funny about almost getting killed. That wasn’t a toy gun; the bullet ricocheted off the rock right beside my head.”

  Dex rolled his eyes. “Hoagie, those hillbillies could hit the eye of a squirrel at a hundred yards. If they’d really wanted to kill you, your fat butt would already be in a hole up there and they’d be shoveling dirt on top of you. They just don’t want people snooping around when they’re making moonshine.”

  Dex had no way of knowing then, but the next time he was exposed to gunfire it wouldn’t be just to scare him.

  The boys walked the rest of the way down the mountain since they no longer felt threatened. Just before reaching the valley, Dex suddenly stopped and said, “It was Snake.”

  Hoagie jumped and looked all around him, “Where’s the snake?”

  “No, dummy, there’s no snake here. I’m talking about up on the mountain. Did you get a good look at the guy at the still wearing that shabby red baseball cap? It was Snake Wilson, I’m sure of it.”

  “I thought he was still locked up somewhere in a juvenile detention place. You couldn’t have seen him.”

  “That was three years ago. We were freshmen when he was arrested and sent away for having a gun at school. He’s obviously out now. I’m sure that was him sitting on that wood pile.”

  “Dex, everyone thought he brought the gun to shoot you. You’d just kicked his butt in that fight at the bus stop, but I still don’t know what the fight was about.”

  “I didn’t tell anyone but the principal why we were fighting, because I had promised not to tell. But that was a long time ago. If you swear to never repeat the story, I’ll tell you what the fight was about.”

  “Dex, have I ever repeated something when you asked me not to say anything? I am not going to tell anyone. I’m just curious because I had never even seen you talk to him before you beat the crap out of him in front of half the student body.”

  “The day before the fight, he followed Marie home and attacked her at her house. She hit him in the head with an empty flower pot, and while he was dazed, she ran next door and told me. I went after him, but he was already gone when I got there, and I couldn’t find him.”

  “So that’s why you pounded him so bad he had to go to the hospital?”

  “Marie was upset and embarrassed. She said she could never go to school again because he might attack her again, and she was afraid all her friends would find out about it. I told her I would make sure Snake never harmed her again and that no one would ever know what happened. I caught him in front of school the next day and unloaded on him. Unfortunately, a lot of our classmates were there waiting on the school bus and saw the fight. They all wanted to know why we were fighting, so I just said that he had done something I didn’t like.

  “I know that he swore to several people that he would get even with me. Several people told me he brought the pistol to school to shoot me, but after he was arrested, I never saw him again until a few minutes ago. If you remember, Marie moved to Atlanta a few weeks later. There wasn’t any reason for people to know what
started the fight.”

  Chapter 3

  The day Dex became an orphan, his parents had left him with his grandmother while they went boating. They were filling the boat with gas at a marina dock when something ignited the fumes. The resulting explosion and fireball engulfed them and sank their boat, along with several others that were docked in close proximity.

  Dex’s only surviving relative was his father’s widowed mother, Gwendolyn Martin, whom he knew as Gigi. She took the five-year-old child into her home and raised him as if he were her own. Gigi’s husband had died a couple of years before Dex was born, and she was living on social security and a little income from in-home clothing alterations she made for neighbors. Fortunately Dex’s father had a twenty-five-thousand-dollar life insurance policy with a double indemnity benefit for accidental death. The fifty thousand dollars was helpful, but it was still a financial struggle for Gigi.

  When he was older, Dex helped financially by mowing the neighbor’s lawns, delivering morning newspapers, and performing other odd jobs. The resolute determination, which was later so evident in athletics, was first noticed by the customers on his paper route. He ignored the cold, damp winter mornings, picked up the papers before daylight, and pedaled his bicycle up and down the neighborhood hills to make sure his customers received their papers before breakfast.

  Dex was the best athlete in the neighborhood long before his size caught up to his ability. He and his friends played sandlot baseball during the hot summer afternoons, and in the fall they poured the sand out of the tow-sack bases and converted the vacant lot for football. After Christmas each year, they moved to a friend’s backyard, where a makeshift basket was nailed to an old oak tree. The basket was originally placed low enough for the pint-sized players to reach it with the ball, but each year it was nailed a little higher on the tree.

  When Dex was finally old enough to ride his bike to the neighborhood recreation center, he could still barely get the ball to the regulation height basket, but he spent countless hours practicing. At first he had to beg the older boys to let him join their game, but as he grew taller, he was one of the first ones chosen when pickup teams were selected.

  Through hard work and innate athletic ability, Dex developed into a very good basketball player. However, by the time he reached high school, he had decided that football was his first love. He enjoyed the physical contact and even thrived on the preseason, two-a-day practices that most players dreaded.

  Bob Delaney, the head coach, called him aside after the first couple of weeks of practice.

  “Dex, I’m impressed with your ability and courage, but you’re only fourteen and some of the seniors outweigh you by over fifty pounds. I don’t want you to give up, but it’s probably going to be next year before you get any playing time. We’ve got three upperclassmen fighting for the quarterback position, and you told me you were dead set on being a quarterback.”

  “Coach, don’t give up on me. I’ll try harder. I want to play.”

  Dex worked harder than he had ever worked in his life over the next few weeks, and a few days before the season opened, the coach talked to him after practice. “Dex, you’ve surprised me and all the other coaches. We’ve never had a freshman start a football game here, but you have earned the chance. You are going to start at quarterback Friday night.”

  Dex weighed only 145 pounds and was still a couple of inches shy of six feet, but he made up in desire and ability what he lacked in size. That night he impressed everyone with his courage. He stayed in the pocket until the last minute before releasing the ball, even when he knew he was going to get clobbered. In that first game he completed ten of fifteen passes, and one was a forty-five-yard bullet for the touchdown that won the game. He immediately became the most recognized member of his freshman class.

  During his four years in high school, Dex grew six inches taller and gained over fifty pounds. He started attracting college scouts when he was just a sophomore. Meanwhile he and Hoagie remained best friends. Hoagie carried his tuba in the marching band as proudly as Dex carried a football. They were both talented in their own way, but Hoagie couldn’t throw a football and Dex was tone deaf; they shared friendship, not talent.

  Dex’s first steady job was as a lifeguard at the River City Country Club in the summer between his sophomore and junior years in high school. The members’ daughters congregated around his lifeguard stand in their skimpy bikinis, but he secretly despised the snobbish prep school debutantes. He would have rather kissed Hoagie than date one of them. Their parents were not very subtle in their condescending attitude to all the club’s employees and were particularly tactless in letting Dex know that their daughters were off limits to the club’s “hired help.” Dex ached to tell the members and their daughters just what he thought about all of them, but he endured the indignity without comment because he needed the job.

  In his senior year, the River City Wildcats lost only one game. When the season was over, Dex held several personal school records and was honored with a number of regional athletic awards. The colleges that had been recruiting him for three years stepped up the pressure. He received scholarship offers from over ten colleges, but after discussing it with Coach Delaney and others, Dex narrowed the potential choices to three Southeastern Conference schools: Auburn, Alabama, and Georgia. He understood how fortunate he was to have options, but they made it difficult to decide on a single school. After visiting several schools, Dex finally chose Georgia because he liked the campus, coach, and program. There was an added incentive in his selection: Hoagie had already accepted a band scholarship to Georgia.

  Dex’s commitment was the lead story on the local sports page, and newspapers all over the state of Georgia picked up the story. It was the first time the Bulldog fans saw a name in print that would later become very familiar to them.

  Marie hadn’t seen Dex since moving to Atlanta, but when she saw the article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution, she cut it out and saved it. Over the next few years, she saved an extensive collection of articles about her former neighbor’s football career, for reasons she didn’t even try to understand.

  Even though Dex had decided on a college, he still had to get through the remaining months in high school. In the whirl of activities before graduation, the incident at the moonshine still became just another event that hurtled past, along with the senior prom, May Day, baccalaureate, and graduation.

  That summer Dex returned as a lifeguard at the country club, to the delight of the members’ daughters. In the first week, he met Marcy Bennett, a new waitress who had also just graduated from high school and was working to earn money for college. She told him she was getting the same “You’re not one of us” treatment from the club members. The shared experience of having to deal with the members’ rude arrogance created a common bond between them.

  Dex and Marcy spent their lunch breaks together laughing at the snobbish, egocentric members who strutted around the club trying to impress each other in their cutesy golf and tennis clothes. Marcy and Dex dated throughout the summer, and although they enjoyed each other’s company, what they enjoyed most was that their relationship irritated the hell out of the debutantes.

  Chapter 4

  On a Saturday in late November, two days after Thanksgiving, the distinctive aroma of barbeque was drifting throughout the crowd that had gathered for the final game of the season. Georgia’s tailgate parties were legendary, and the noise created by hundreds of fans at the various pregame parties had been intensifying since midmorning. About an hour before game time, the crowd—now thoroughly sated with barbeque and booze—started putting away the tailgate paraphernalia and moving toward the entrance gates of Sanford Stadium. By kickoff, the pandemonium inside the stadium had intensified to a deafening roar as almost one hundred thousand “Dawg” fans filled every seat from the field to the highest tier.

  It was the last game that Dex Martin
would ever play between Sanford’s fabled hedges. Over the previous four years, the strong-armed quarterback had demonstrated unparalleled athletic and leadership abilities in an offense that was well-fortified at every position. A combination of talent and confidence in his own ability had made him a four-year starter and endeared him to the fans. It was a foregone conclusion that he would be an NFL first-round draft choice, and it seemed inevitable that after today’s game he would simply have to wait for the draft to become the game’s next twenty-two-year-old millionaire.

  Georgia was undefeated, ranked third in the national polls, and heavily favored to win the day’s game with in-state rival Georgia Tech. Tech was unranked and not in the same conference, so the game had little significance outside the state. But national polls and athletic conferences had little to do with the excitement surrounding this annual game. It was all about pride and bragging rights in the state of Georgia.

  Just before game time, Georgia’s mascot, a snow-white bulldog with an acronym for a name and a face that only a Georgia fan could love, waddled onto the field dressed in his red game sweater. When Uga first appeared, everyone knew the kickoff was imminent, and a deafening roar erupted from the crowd.

  While the teams huddled on the sidelines, the captains met in the center of the field for the coin toss. Georgia won the toss and elected to receive. As Dex trotted to the sideline, he pointed to the stands where the band was seated. The tuba player stood up and pointed back. This had become a ritualistic pregame salute between the Georgia quarterback and his best friend Hoagie Hogan.

  The kickoff went deep into the end zone and was not returned. Georgia started from the twenty with a draw play that was stopped at the line of scrimmage. A sweep around the left side lost five yards when someone missed an assignment. On third down, Dex scanned the defense; the Dawgs needed fifteen yards. He expected Tech to be pinning back their ears and coming for him, and he noticed the weak side cornerback inching toward the line. He stood up and shouted, “Martin, stay in and watch thirty-four.” He didn’t wait for the fullback to respond, he simply barked out the rest of the count.