He should wait. Couldn’t be too eager, for if he had in truth just discovered Baer Creighton’s savings account, danger lurked at every approach. While observing Creighton over the last few weeks, Ernie had seen Cory Smylie fire a few shots at Creighton and haul ass just before Creighton charged, waving a pistol in the air and returning fire into the cave. Cory had been barely able to run a straight line, tripping and stumbling over roots and rocks, and was lucky to have escaped.
Afterward, Ernie had watched from eighty yards as Creighton painstakingly rigged mantraps around the cavern Cory had hidden inside.
What kind of traps had Creighton set around his deciduous bank account? Pits filled with spikes? Deadfalls suspended in the trees?
Ernie leaned against the hemlock. Would it make more sense to approach in daylight and risk being seen? Or dusk, and risk not seeing Baer’s inevitable traps?
He knew a man who was close to Stipe, yet unambiguously conscious of his poverty. Burly Worley would be more than happy to go after the gold and he wouldn’t fear the dangers.
Burly Worley was close to a mule already. Ernie recalled meeting him. A frustrated dog owner had pulled a pistol and shot an already mortally wounded dog. This was entertaining carnage, but afterward the man fired twice more into the air and called the owner of the victorious dog a cheater. Of all the fear-frozen men, Ernie alone drew the man’s gaze—and wrath. Burly Worley had acted upon the man’s distraction, and dropped him with a quick punch to the neck. Later, he’d credited Ernie with being the only person there with the stones to act, and had praised his coolness to Stipe, making him welcome to linger after the events while the men stacked pallets.
Worley was honorable enough to edify another man. He was not jealous. He was close to Stipe, and he was unemployed.
Ernie backed from the tree and circled out the way he’d come in. This was good. This was unexpectedly good, the kind of windfall that changed the dynamic of… everything.
Chapter Twelve
First I kindle the fire under the boiler. It’ll take a while to get the coals glowing, but not so long I can be idle while the tank sits empty. Every now and again I listen for the sound of a rock avalanche or a tree whip-snapping fifteen feet of barbed wire across some fool’s nuts.
“Well Fred, we got to keep the lookout for a sniper.”
Fine, Fred says.
“Or maybe you oughta keep an ear out.”
Yeah. I’ll do that.
The fifty-fiver on the end is apple mash. Sits on blocks high enough to fit a bucket under the nozzle. Ants crawl all over it, sucking up sugar that seeps through no matter how tight I twist the knob. I fill a bucket and dump it in the boiler. Mash is sweet and rich.
Another bucket and that’s all she’ll take.
The trick is one hundred seventy degree. Keep the mash a quinnyhair above and alcohol boils off while the water stays mostly behind. Vapor escapes in the copper coil, rests in the doubler—nothing but another pot where water condenses faster’n the likker—and out the other side spits some apple brandy a fella could burn in his lawnmower if he was too dense to drink it.
Flames lick around the boiler. I clamp the lid and sit on a stump. Hungry enough to eat the quills off a porcupine’s ass, but food’s at the house.
S’pose I’ll drink.
Been a few hours but part of me’s still in Mae’s house. She lit up like a deck of firecrackers when the grocery boy Mike backed Merle’s truck to the porch so he wouldn’t have to carry all them bags so far. Bree and Morgan screamed and ran back and forth. Joseph wanted in on the fun and let out a wail.
“What is this? What did you do? Baer? What’s this?”
She had a half-pissed look and I guess it was shock because she about suffocated Joseph between them boobs while she was hugging me hard and beating my back with her fist. Scared me to tell her about the tab I set up with Merle.
I had a woman like that I wouldn’t take her money.
The fire’s died enough for some of the heavier logs to fit. This’s where the coals’ll come from. I shove a couple, light a lantern and hang it from a jig in a hemlock. Just enough light to keep the operation efficient. I sit on a stump thinking a watched still don’t boil, talking to Fred and generally miserable. Every twig breaks or pinecone falls has me reaching for Smith.
A still makes a particular sound approaching the perfect temperature, like a teapot right before the water boils. You’ll hear about all manner of impressive operations where the stiller’s welded a thermometer to his cooker, valves all over. Truth is all it takes is a place to cook and a place to condense. My operation’s basic as they come, built by an old-timer died long time ago. A ten gallon kettle with a fitted lid. I use a leather gasket and seal it with ten C clamps. The copper tube’s fitted to the lid and coils fifteen feet, with a doubler midway.
The shine that drips out the other end’ll generally hit a hundred-sixty proof, plenty high for everyday consumption. Though another run’d refine it almost perfect.
The boiler ticks, expansion sounds. Already vapor twists through the tubes but without the pressure to keep it moving. Little longer.
Ah, hell, Ruth. What’s this all about? All these years and not a damn word? Your life ruined and mine nothing but cooking mash in the woods.
I got thrown out of high school in tenth grade. Seemed school was more about telling me what to think than how to think. I had my own mind. They knew when I looked at a teacher I thought he was fulla shit. Only thing worthwhile was Ruth—though I never once said hello. Her hair shined like a sunset off’n water, and her smile’d turn a dick into a baseball bat.
She was Larry’s girl and everyone knew it. I left school and didn’t think on her. I got a job pumping gas and changing oil—basic maintenance at the garage. Had free rein over the junkers in the back lot and more money than a sixteen-year-old had any right to. Larry and Ruth was together most two years, and by then I wondered if I’d ever do anything more than pump gas and clean windshields. Had a muscle car and an attitude, but couldn’t afford to move out my mother’s house.
Larry went to college. Ma said he’d marry Ruth.
One day Ruth swung by in the car the honorable Preston Forsyth Jackson bought her. Oh, how she missed Larry. She talked like we’d been pals since God said light. She smiled. Locked her hands and straighted her arms, and poofed them titties between her elbows. She twirled her hair. Rubbed a bare shin agin a bare calf, and my eyes about fell down in the seat with em.
Larry and I looked alike, I told myself. She sure missed him. But they’s nothing in the world so beautiful as the curve on a woman’s calf.
Aw hell, accourse she knew what she was doing. All women know men is hard-wired. May as well run electrodes from a man’s nads straight to a billy goat. She knew that.
Later I heard her father’d warned her off Larry. Only thing for Ruth to do was track down another Creighton, the gas station greaser with a black Chevy Nova. She knew what she was doing. But I didn’t know what she was doing and to me she was a walking, talking pinup girl, but different from every person I’d ever knew. They was never any red. Never any juice. She never give a lick of either. She maybe had a hoor’s heart but she was flat unpretentious.
Ruth swings under the gas station canopy in this cherry mustang, paint gleaming. Chrome dripping off both ends. She sits behind the wheel and does that thing with her arms.
“You’re Larry’s brother,” she says.
I don’t say a word, and that’s what she wants. She wants my eyes buried right where they are.
“I’m empty,” she pouts. “You want to fill me up?”
“Uh.”
I stumble to the gas tank and I’m looking off the other way because I caught her eye in the rearview scoping me scoping her and adjusting my tool ‘cause it’s bending my trousers. It’s evening and I’m twenty minute from done. They’s a drive-in just down the road.
“You want to catch a flick?” I still ain’t met her eyes except on accident. I
want her so bad I could spring a leak. “They’s an Eastwood movie,” I say. “Hang em High.”
“A Western… ”
“I’m done, twenty minute.”
She looks at my greasy hands. My clothes with sweat stains at the pits and grime across the belly.
“Maybe I can take off now and meet you in a few.”
She looks through the windshield. Purses her lips. “Or maybe we could just meet at the lake.”
The lake. We was real young, Larry and me used to go there looking for panties and bras got left in the grass and trees, on the rocky beach.
The lake.
I’m cool now. I got my cool. “The lake?” I croak. Clear my throat. “An hour?”
“Make it two. Those hands better not have any grease on them,” she says. “Where they’re going.”
She drove off. I never collected money for her gas and shelled out for it myself.
Boiler’s got a ring says the mash’s gleeful and saucy. A spit sound comes out the copper tube, and I’m in business. Few minutes, the jug under the copper’ll fill with the fieriest brandy in the county. I stir the coals. Add a chunk of dried cherry.
The lantern sputters. Something rustles leaves, maybe a squirrel.
All that with Ruth is ancient history. Now I got to think on Stipe’s dog, what had his teeth in my neck. I got to figure out if I can win a war against Joe Stipe.
Chapter Thirteen
Mae packed Joseph into the car seat. The chest harness clasp was tiny and stiff and the belt safety clip chafed his thigh. She cushioned his leg with a Tempur-Pedic mattress sample she’d received in the mail.
She wouldn’t have needed to make the trip if landlady Smotherman had ever answered her phone. The check came in the mail and as long as it did, the house was fine.
But the house would collapse sooner rather than later, perhaps with Mae and the kids inside. It was a rattrap. Figuratively—it had mice, not rats, and plumbing issues. The shower drain took Liquid Plumr the way Cory took Coors. The kitchen sink burped like a baby after a bottle. And Mrs. Smotherman—who had no husband but had to make a living, and found her calling as a slumlord—had apparently put her money into bribing inspectors instead of fixing the home.
Mae had delayed paying once, in protest. She’d stationed pen and paper beside the telephone and for two weeks, every time she remembered an item in disrepair, jotted it down. You want your rent? Fix the roof. A leak soaked the statistics text on my nightstand. I left the book open and didn’t wake until water had been dripping on it so long that even after I dried it page by page with a blow dryer, the print looked like an Escher watercolor. So fix the damn roof and replace my statistics textbook. And the shower drain—Liquid Plumr won’t touch it. I step into a shower and climb out of a bath. Disgusting. Especially three days a month. And I’m sick of that buzzing in the walls when I flip on the living room light. The wires are going to short and burn the house to the ground with my babies and me inside. Have you no conscience?
The phone call never came.
She received a letter from Smotherman stating Experian and TransUnion had been notified. Further delay in payment risked legal action. Mae responded that further delay in fixing the house risked legal action, too. Days later she worried about her credit score and the future launch of her as-yet-undecided business, and double-stapled a check to a polite fuck-you letter.
“Heading out?”
Mae rapped her head on the car ceiling. Baer stood behind her.
“Hi, Uncle Baer.” Mae hugged him, smelled whiskey. His brow was wrinkled and his eyes had a perpetual squint, as if their job was to categorize and they were skeptical from the outset.
“I was going to the grocery,” she said.
“More groceries?”
“For greens. And I was going to see the landlady.”
“You ought to. This place needs tore down and put up new.”
“That would disrupt her cash flow.”
“Something particular need fixing?”
Mae extracted the list from her purse. “Items one and four.”
“Says here the drain and the roof.”
“The shower drain is clogged. Liquid Plumr won’t touch it. And the roof over the bedroom. I get splashed with cold rain one more time I’m liable to find a gun and shoot her.”
“You don’t have a gun?”
“No, I don’t have a gun.”
“Kids in the house? Single woman, don’t have a gun?”
“What would I do with a gun but shoot somebody?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. What’ll you do, comes time to shoot somebody and you don’t have a gun?”
Mae watched his eyes shift to her cheek. The swelling was mostly gone and her makeup covered the bruise.
“You had a gun yesterday, he wouldn’t have done that.”
“He would’ve taken the gun, just like the money.”
“Nah. See? You can’t shoot somebody with money.”
“Uncle Baer… ”
“Tell you what. You want me to walk over and see Smotherman, get this shit straight, or you want me to take an hour and fix the roof and the drain myself.”
“An hour?”
“’Bout that. After I get a couple supplies.”
Mae hugged him. “Oh wait. I still have to go to the grocery. You want me to take you into town? What kind of supplies?”
“No, no. I’ll walk. Keeps me young. I’m just headed to the hardware. And the grocery. You going to the grocery?”
“For greens.”
“You got baking soda and vinegar?”
She nodded.
“I’ll get everything I need and be back in a half-hour. I’ll visit Roy Maple, and he’ll hook me up fine.”
“Roy Maple?”
“Main Street hardware. You young’uns go to the Home Depot. Us old’uns go where we know people.” Baer turned, and stopped after a few paces. “Back in a half-hour, so.”
“Thank you, Uncle Baer.”
Mae returned from the grocery. She opened the car door and the sound of a hammer greeted her. Baer hunched on the roof, his back to her. She looked for his ladder—he must have placed it against the back wall.
Mae worked Joseph free of the seat clasp. She led Morgan and Bree inside carrying a bag of greens and other produce. Merle had been sweet—other than his entire conversation between “Hello, Mae” and “See you later, Mae” being a parenthetical grilling on how strange Baer had been acting. That his dog had been almost killed and he’d given Merle money for her groceries. And Baer was quiet. And clearly a fight was brewing, because Merle saw Stipe and his boys talking with Baer, and you can see when Stipe’s boys are looking for trouble. Basically every time you saw them.
What the hell was Baer into? That’s what Merle wanted to know.
“I haven’t noticed anything strange,” Mae said. She glanced out the window. Studied her wristwatch for a prolonged ten seconds. “But I was wondering if you’d let me interview you and look at your income statement for an MBA class I’m taking?”
“Income statement? I file a ten nine nine and a schedule C, same as anybody.”
“Oh—okay.” Although running the store’s expenses through a Schedule C was like asking Richard Petty to do Talladega in a Model T. He’d win, of course, but it would be a marvel.
Merle took the hint. He gave Mae the original slip with seventeen dollars and a handful of change deducted, and she left—stepping past sweet old yammermouth Cora Winetraub, whose furtive brow hinted the delight she’d experience gossiping to all of Gleason that Mae had a line of prepaid credit at the grocer. Funny how the bluehairs clutching their Bibles and judging people like they were taking notes for the Big Guy never read the section on gossip. Wives be not slanderers.
Cora was a spinster; that was it.
And, lest Mae parry with spirituality and escape guilt-free, she reminded herself of the scripture against prejudging blue-haired women, though the exact verse didn’t come immed
iately to mind.
But what the hell was Baer into?
Merle’s observations about Baer’s dog and the fight brewing with Stipe were enlightening.
Cory attended those dog fights. He’d told her it was sport and the dogs were like men. They loved fighting, if only for the glory of battle. Barbaric, she’d said, one more link to our caveman past. And Cory said, well, then your daddy’s a caveman, and that makes you a cave girl. He’d flashed his dimples. It was time to get laid.
The steady thunk of Baer’s hammer on the roof reminded her she’d had a headache all morning stemming from an acute coffee deficiency. She opened the front door and led her tribe inside. Put away the groceries and five minutes later stood below Baer, back far enough from the wall to see beyond the eaves.
She called up to the roof, “I’m putting on a pot of coffee. You want to stay for supper? I’ll cook something special.”
“’Preciate you,” Baer said. He continued hammering. “But I got to look on Fred.”
Who would name a dog Fred?
“You sure? I’ll cook some of that chicken. With collards.”
“Tempting.” Baer laid the hammer on the roof. “All done.”
“All done? That fast?”
“It was mostly a problem with the seam between the regular roof here and the gable. It was cracked, and I caulked it but good. Lifted up under where the shingles was loose, replaced a couple the worst. Only real concern’s falling through.”
“Where’s your ladder?”
Baer nodded at an oak tree with a limb that hung close to the roof.
“You climbed the tree?”
“Well sure.”
“How will you get down?”
“Same way I come up.”
Mae shook her head. “This is crazy. You need any help?”
“Help? What for?”
“I don’t know. You want me to call the ambulance?”
He waved her off. She waited on the porch, partly hidden by the eaves, where she could see him climb down the trunk, limb to limb, holding a caulk gun and a hammer in one hand and the tree in the other.
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