by Taylor Brown
“He works for me, don’t he?”
“You know what I mean. Extra.”
“Your stuff pays. But it ain’t that good.”
Granny let the quilt slip. Her breasts hung heavy as doves from her chest, upturned and pert, the nipples hard as stone pebbles in the slight cold of the house. Breasts men had come from counties all around to see. To touch, if they had the means.
“Ain’t it?”
Eustace’s nose twitched slightly, seeing them, and then he turned on his heel.
“You should of tried that a hour ago,” he said. “When I would of gave a shit.”
He clomped through the door, out of the house. Granny lay back on the bed, blowing smoke as the door of his truck slammed home.
“Hour? If three minutes is a hour, I’m old as Christ.”
* * *
A tap on the window. Rory bolted upright. He’d had his head on the ribbed knuckles of the steering wheel, trying to will away a steel knot of headache, some irregular clash of whiskey and Jesus in the front part of his brain. When he saw it was the girl, his body jumped as if electroshocked. He rolled down the window, pulling off his hat.
“Didn’t mean to make you jump,” she said. “It’s just I seen you in there.”
Rory swallowed.
“Seen me?”
She nodded. “Last week, too. You’re new.”
“I am.”
“You dance pretty good,” she said.
His stump throbbed.
“Considering,” he said.
She cocked her head, as if she did not understand, then thrust her hand through the window.
“Christine,” she said.
“Rory.”
They shook. Her skin felt charged—the thinnest envelope, holding air or spirit or light.
“Pleasure,” he said.
She pulled a lock of hair across her mouth and crossed her feet, twisting shyly in place.
“You gonna be here next week?” she asked.
Rory swallowed.
“Are you?”
* * *
He did not notice the gauges at first, thinking as he was of the girl’s face. The touch of her hand. The way he could still feel her fingers on his arm, as if she left traces of herself on whatever she touched. The way her body moved inside her dress. How badly he wanted to examine its workings, the genius of its engineering. To move the limbs, gently, through their range of motion. To test the suppleness of her calves and feet, her hands and arms, and taste the sting of her skin, the red dart of her tongue. To set his ear against her belly, listening to the growl of her insides.
White bolts of vapor erupted from the hood.
“Shit.”
He hit the brakes.
The hood was hot to the touch. He lifted it and batted through the steam, twisting off the radiator cap with the help of a rag. His flashlight showed it was at least a gallon low. He traced the coolant hoses and found a neat gash in one, made possibly with a blade. He got a roll of duct tape from the tool kit in the trunk and banded the hose, then refilled the radiator from the canteen he kept in the glove box.
All the time he was thinking of the girl, so bold. There was the way she thrust out her hand in introduction, speaking through her shyness, the mask of her hair. She seemed fearless in comparison to him. He could hardly even remember his own name.
“I come every week,” she’d told him. “I’d go crazy otherwise.”
“Crazy?”
“It gets it all out, the fears and worries. The week’s demons. Burns you clean.”
Rory felt tears sting behind his eyes. He didn’t know why.
“You work in town?”
She nodded.
“Up at the hosiery mill. A looper. I sew the toes on socks all day.”
Rory thought of the rows of women sitting in ladder-back chairs, bent in front of sewing machines. It hurt him to think of her there.
“But that ain’t my passion,” she said. “Of course it isn’t. I’m not content to be sewing toes the rest of my life.”
“What’s your passion?”
“Hats.”
“Hats?”
“Hats,” she said. “Like the ones that cover your head. I make pillboxes and jockeys, cloches, calots, fascinators. Mainly from old ties and coats and dresses. Look, I made them all.”
She swept her hand, and Rory saw the ladies’ hats floating in the night, decked with feathers and orchids. They sat rakish and fine upon the heads of these working ladies in their plain dresses, their bangs curled wetly against their foreheads from the heat of dancing.
“I got a good little industry going,” she said.
“Looks like it.”
“They ain’t the only ones. I got the fancy ladies in town lining up. I done a custom one this year for a lady going to the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs. She was wearing it when Hill Gail beat out Sub Fleet by two lengths.”
Rory rubbed the tatty brim of the black bowler that had been his grandfather Anson’s. The crown was scarred by decades of use, lashed by the low-hanging branches of horse paths and carriage rides.
“I never thought much of my cover,” he said. “Maybe I ought.”
“You know hatmakers used to use mercury vapor to size the felt of their hats. Caused all kinds of problems. Amnesia, shyness, even red noses and toes. That’s why they say ‘mad as a hatter.’ Did you know that?”
“I didn’t. You don’t use mercury, do you?”
“Why, you think I’m mad?”
“No, ma’am. I, I just—”
Her hand touched his arm.
“I was just kidding.” She’d looked up, into the dark, as if her name had been called. “You should come back next week,” she’d said. Then she was gone.
Rory closed the hood of the Ford, wiped his hands, slid behind the wheel. The car shuddered back to life, and he continued on down the road. The trees shone a stony white in the headlights, an irregular colonnade leading toward the drowned world of the lake. The moon hung halved in the black sky, the stars made as if by shotgun blast.
There had been harsh times, he knew, when the government came to flood the valley in ’31. People did not want to give up their land, the homes their great-grands had built, nor have their ancestors exhumed, their bones trucked to alien soil. They did want to lose their copper pots, which lined every cool creek. The whole valley once smoked like a vent in the earth, people said, the blue smoke of a hundred still-fires spread dusky and ragged across the sky. Whiskey was life. It fed and clothed. A single mule, which could carry only four bushels of corn out of the valley, could carry twenty-four bushels’ worth of corn whiskey to market.
The valley people fought. There had been government trucks turned over and set alight, and trees spiked against the loggers’ saws, and dozers and tractors driven into the river, where they sat strange and fossil-like as the waters frothed over their wheels and buckets and blades. Loggers had to be brought in from out of state to clear the land, and they were jumped and beaten when they moseyed down side-trails for a piss or left their worksites for the night, in the parking lots of the honky-tonks and nip-joints that edged the valley. They were beaten with hickory clubs and ax-handles, with stones and bricks and steel-toed boots.
There was talk of this becoming a second Whiskey Rebellion, like the one of the 1790s, when George Washington trotted out a federal militia of fifteen thousand men to suppress insurrectionists in western Pennsylvania. There was talk of the national guard being brought in, as they were for the Battle of Blair Mountain in ’21, when an army of miners in red neckerchiefs rose up against strikebreakers in West Virginia. Rednecks. When war-surplus bombs were dropped by hand from hired aircraft and air corps bombers out of Maryland flew reconnaissance patrols up and down the hollers. But in the end it was not the army that poured into this valley but nightriders with hoods and torches, dark wings of them that swept through the trees like some herald of the coming flood. They fired homesteads and hanged rousers, dynamited sti
lls and threatened women and girls. In a matter of days, the will of the valley was broken. The clearing crews worked unabated, and the river rose bubbling through the land like a flood of old, dark and inexorable as blood from a wound. The valley was drowned.
The road led into the water now, knifing pale into the shallows, and a man who didn’t know better could drive right on into the lake at speed. A number of drunks, out-of-towners mainly, had done just that, more than one of them found still upright in the driver’s seat, hands on the wheel as if driving themselves straight into another world. Just before water’s edge stood a lone mailbox, watched always from the woods, where the county’s cut was left. This money kept whiskey coupes passing freely through the tangle of local prowl cars, kept the federal men on the hill-roads outside of town.
He rounded the last bend before the lake and felt a cold stone drop into the pit of his stomach. There was Sheriff Win Adderholt’s Oldsmobile 88 parked slantwise in the road, a white coupe rumored to be as built as any blockader’s. The pale body glowed against the trees, the chrome mouth grimaced in threat. Some strange whale beached from the lake depths. The sheriff was leaning on the hood, one foot on the bumper, smoking a cigarette.
“Shit.”
Rory rolled to a stop, the two cars parked nose-to-nose, black and white, as if to fight. He left the motor idling and hit the parking brake before stepping out. Sheriff Adderholt wore a gray suit, tailor-cut, with a gray felt hat on his knee. He rubbed the brim with his thumb. He looked like a lawyer or big-city businessman but for the star pinned in his lapel, the leather of his face.
“Evening, Sheriff.”
“Mr. Docherty.” The Sheriff nodded. “Running a little late, aren’t you?”
Rory leaned back on his own hood and crossed his arms.
“Little car trouble is all, sir. Seems somebody poked a hole in one of my coolant hoses.”
“Is that so?” The Sheriff threw down his cigarette and stood from the hood of his Olds. The pearl butt of his service revolver peeked from behind a lapel. “Seems you been running into a lot of trouble down here of late.”
“Now, Sheriff—”
The Sheriff held up a hand. “I’m not saying it’s just you, Mr. Docherty. We had other boys with tires slashed. One boy had sugar poured in his tank. Another found a snake in his car.”
“A snake?”
The Sheriff nodded. “These issues, son, it’s the kind of a thing that attracts attention.”
Rory felt the big engine thumping beneath him, like something trying to beat its way out of the hood. The Sheriff looked up at the sky. The half-moon, twinned, floated in his horn-rimmed glasses. He held his hat almost over his heart.
“I been mulling it over, son, and I come to a conclusion on the matter. The house-to-house deliveries are over at the End-of-the-Road. I’m forbidding them.”
“Say what?”
“From now on, you’re going to run a tank, emptied at a single location.”
Rory was standing from the hood.
“You want us to build a tanker? We might as well be running wet every second. Revenuers don’t got to catch you but with a drop. Intent to sell.”
The Sheriff nodded, sucking his teeth.
“I hear your concerns, son. But the thing is, I ain’t asking you this. I’m telling you.”
“Telling me or what?”
Adderholt’s face hardened.
“Or you won’t sell a god-damn drop in my county again.”
Rory was starting to see the shape of this thing.
“What about payment?” he asked.
“On delivery.”
“Ten a gallon.”
The Sheriff whistled. “See now, those are retail prices. We’re talking wholesale now. Seven-fifty. But you won’t have to go door-to-door.”
“Eustace won’t like it.”
The Sheriff leaned back on the hood and crossed his arms, holding his hat.
“I don’t hardly give a shit what Eustace likes, son.”
“I’ll have to talk to him.”
The Sheriff leaned forward, arms crossed.
“You do that. You go and tell him you’ll be here this Saturday with a wholesale tank.”
“Will I?”
“You will.” The Sheriff nodded up the road. “Old repair shop, out behind the old filling station.”
“The church?”
“Gone before the service starts. It’s all been arranged.”
Rory looked back up the road, thinking of the place. Someone had recently hung a handwritten sign in between the garage bay doors: CHURCH OF THE NEW LIGHT.
The Sheriff was watching him.
“You ain’t hanging around those people, are you?”
Rory shrugged. “I could be.”
The Sheriff was standing close to him now.
“Don’t. They’re trouble, the lot of them. That pastor especially.”
Rory looked into the dark shape of his reflection, twinned in the man’s glasses.
“If he’s trouble, what are you?”
The Sheriff put on his hat, straightened it.
“I’m his brother.”
CHAPTER 11
Granny was awake before the cock’s first crow, the windows yet dark, the eastern ridges scarcely dawn-edged against the night sky. Something wasn’t right. She’d been waked. She set her feet on the floor, the planks ice-cold, the window of the woodstove glowing the dullest red. There it was again: the sound of the roof-timbers groaning. There was something up there, heavier than a squirrel or raccoon or opossum, creeping spider-slow across the cedar shakes, and she thought: panther-cat. She crossed to the mantel and took down her single-barreled shotgun, loaded with triple-aught buck, the gun she’d had since she was ten. She slung the leather belt of shells over her shoulder and cocked the hammer with her thumb. She checked that the door was barred, and she was stepping back across the floor, gun in hand, when a scream rent the air like a woman murdered, a blood-scream so high and terrible it seemed her very own, and she raised the shotgun toward the point in the roof where she judged the creature to be crouched. The scream died in what sounded almost like a snigger, a stifled chuckle, and she was already pulling the trigger.
The sound was deafening in the enclosed space, the house trembling, her ears ringing in sustained alarm, and she felt the cedar splinters and dust on her upturned face before she heard or felt the thump of something hitting the ground outside. The spent shotshell zipped smoking from the chamber as she breeched the gun, and she took a new shell from the leather belt slung across her shoulder and slid it home and snapped the gun straight and headed for the door. She slid the heavy oak plank from the iron locks and pushed open the door, the pre-dawn cold stinging her through the thin shift she wore, the rock-salted steps clapping beneath her bare feet. She wheeled around the near side of the house, finding nothing, the ridges limned in now greater light, and then she was around the back of the house, the mountain high and dark before her. At the edge of the meadow she saw the understory swaying and let loose with a second spray of shot, chasing whatever it was into the woods.
She stood breathing hard in the paling light, suddenly cold. She searched for signs near the house, her breath smoking, and found no spatter of blood bright in the meadow-grass nor any tracks, neither hoof nor paw nor boot. When she finished, the peak above her was burning white-gold under the new sun, torrents of dawn-light breaking down its slopes and ridges, seeping into its clefts, spreading in broken shields down the mountain and into the meadow like something liquid. Commandant, the big speckled Java cock, hopped down the chicken ladder. His chest was puffed out, his wings tucked behind him like a pair of clasped hands. He looked sideways at her with one beady eye before lengthening his neck and crowing over his dominion.
Granny spat in the grass.
“Little late for all that, now ain’t it?”
* * *
The sun sat perched upon the serrated blade of the eastern ranges, chasing night out of the hollows an
d ravines, when Rory’s coupe came rumbling up the drive. Granny sucked her teeth as he came up the steps.
“You feed them hogs?”
“No, ma’am.”
“You feed them chickens?”
“No, ma’am.”
He stooped and gave her a kiss, then walked through the door.
“Christ, woman! The hell happened in here?”
She could picture him standing there in the main room, his face peppered in light, then standing aside to see the sun-shafts lancing down from the constellation she’d blown in the roof. She lit her pipe.
“She-cat, likely. Though I never heard tell of one that amuses itself.”
Rory was back on the porch.
“How you know it was a panther?”
“Boy, you think I never heard a panther-cat scream of a night?”
“And you shot at it?”
“I wasn’t gonna lullaby it to death.”
“You blowed a hole in the got-damn roof, you know that? Big enough to fill a number-nine washtub when it rains.”
“I guess you best get to patching it, then.”
“Hellfire, were there even tracks?”
She sniffed. “Don’t leave much sign in that oat grass.”
“You sure you weren’t dreaming?”
“Dreaming? Listen here, son, I known what it was I heard. They was something on that roof and it wasn’t no damn squirrel or raccoon like you think. It was man-sized, at least, yowling bloody murder across the mountain. A cat or someone playing at one, ’less you think a woman got stabbed to death on that roof. You might of heard it, too, you wasn’t out hunting split the whole damn night.”
“Split—? God, I don’t have to listen to this.”
He tromped back in the house, and she could hear him banging around in the kitchen.
“Or was you at church again?” She cocked her head toward the open door. “Getting you’ cock hard for one them Holiness Christers?”
He came back out on the porch with a biscuit in his teeth. He was putting on his jacket. He fought to get one of his arms in right. He took the biscuit out of his mouth. His face was red.
“Why don’t you just calm it the hell down,” he told her. “I got places to go.”
