The Moonshine War

by Elmore Leonard

  Frank Long came into the light holding his grin. "You recognized my voice, didn't you? Well, I guess you should, we was in the same tent, how long?"

  "Fifteen months."

  "That's right, nearly a year and a half. Son, I'd known your voice too. Jesus, I heard it singing and telling stories enough, didn't I?"

  "Well, not too much."

  "You tell these boys stories, Son?"

  Goddamn him, what was he doing? Son forced a grin and said, "Listen, what I want to know--I thought you were still in."

  "Mustered out last fall. I had a bellyful of it."

  "I was wondering what--"

  But Mr. Baylor, at the top of the steps, called out just loud enough to get their attention, "Son, we never known you was a singer."

  Son glanced up. "He means with the other boys in the outfit."

  "Oh, I thought maybe you'd sing us a song." Mr. Baylor kept watching him. He could see it or sense it--he wasn't sure which--that Son was holding back and didn't feel comfortable in this man's presence. Son knew something about the man. Or else the man knew something about Son. Mr. Baylor was curious and he was old enough that he could be blunt and not care what anybody thought.

  He said, "Mr. Long, my name is Mr. Baylor and I'm sheriff of this county. Where abouts are you from?"

  Frank Long touched the funneled brim of his dark hat. "Well, sir, I'm from all over the state, you might say."

  "I might not" Mr. Baylor said, "I'm asking you where you're from."

  "Most recently? I guess that would be Frankfort."

  "They say it's a pretty town, though I've never been there," Mr. Baylor said. "Tell me, what do you do in Frankfort?"

  "I work for the government."

  "Is that the state government?"

  "No, Sir, the United States Federal Government."

  "I see," Mr. Baylor said. "Well now I add up all that information and you know what it tells me?

  "No, sir, what?"

  "It tells me you're a Prohibition agent."

  Frank Long stared up at him. "That's pretty good, Mr. Baylor, you got a keen eye, haven't you?"

  "And nose," Mr. Baylor said. "Let's see your credentials."

  Long reached into his back pocket for his billfold. Flipping it open he said, "They give me this--card with my picture on it. Not a good likeness though. And they give me Sweetheart." His right hand came from inside his coat gripping a .45-caliber service automatic. He glanced at Son and the men watching him. "You never see one like this? I know Son has in the Army. This beauty will stop a man in his tracks and set him back five paces."

  "Boy," Mr. Baylor said to him then, "are you threatening anybody?"

  "You asked me for my credentials."

  "I see them," Mr. Baylor said. You see mine up there leaning against the wall. Shotguns and high-powered rifles."

  "Yes, Sir."

  "Any law needs upholding in this county, I take care of it."

  "I see that too," Long said, his gaze sliding over to the whiskey barrel. "All these people here your deputies?"

  Mr. Baylor was as courteous and nice as anyone had ever seen him. He said, "Yes, they are, and I'll tell you something. They ain't ever seen a Prohibition agent before."

  "Is that right?"

  "Yes," Mr. Baylor went on, "a revenue man is a rare bird in this county. I mean it's so rare some old boy sees one, you know what he's liable to do?"

  "What's that?"

  "He's liable to shoot it and have it stuffed and put over his fireplace."

  Frank Long shook his head, grinning. "Man, I don't think that would feel so good, getting stuffed."

  Bud Blackwell felt it was time he got into this. He said, "You know what we stuff them with?"

  But Mr. Baylor wasn't having any Bud Blackwell smart-ass talk right now. He didn't need any Bud Blackwells sticking their nose in his business. He said, "Bud, get Mr. Long a drink of whiskey."

  Frank Long looked appreciative. "Well, if you force me to take one."

  Mr. Baylor waited until Long was handed a jar and watched him drink some of it. "Kind of good, isn't it?"

  "This is all right," Long said, nodding, studying the jar.

  "It'd be a shame to pour it on the ground," Mr. Baylor said. "Wouldn't it? Just cause some dried up titless old women don't believe people should drink whiskey."

  "Isn't that the truth?" Long finished the whiskey and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. "Mr. Baylor, as you say, a man is paid to uphold the law. But that don't mean he can't appreciate the finer things in life."

  Mr. Baylor said, "Have another drink, Mr. Long."

  "I don't mind." He handed the jar to Bud Blackwell for a refill and waited for Bud to take it. "No, sir, you had me wrong. I was passing through, I thought I'd stop and visit is all."

  Mr. Baylor adjusted his steel frame spectacles. "I was going to say before, maybe you ought to get your visiting done and start back to Frankfort before it gets too late."

  "Well, it's up to Son." Long looked over at him. "I got me a room at the hotel for a day or two."

  "It's a good one," Mr. Baylor said. "Hotel Cumberland."

  "It seems nice and clean."

  "Good food in the dining room. Say, have you had your supper?"

  Long hesitated. "Well, I had me a little something."

  "Son," Mr. Baylor said, "Your friend here's hungry. That's a long car ride from Frankfort.

  "Don't be nervous these boys here staring at you. As I said they never seen a federal man close up."

  Long grinned, shaking his head. "Listen, underneath this suit there's just a plain old mountain boy. I did most of my growing up down in Harlan County."

  "Is that right?"

  "Yes, sir, till I went in the U. S. Army." "Son," Mr. Baylor said, "you going to have Aaron fix something?"

  Son was staring at Frank Long and had been looking at him since the moment he heard the man's voice in the darkness and felt the tight little warning stab deep in his belly. He had listened to Long and Mr. Baylor, every word, as the two of them warmed up and relaxed and if Son wanted to he could pretend everything was just swell and talk and smile and wait for Frank Long--some other time, not this evening--to start hinting and leading up to it, the way Bud Blackwell had started fooling with the idea just a little earlier. Or he could push it in Frank Long's face right now, call him and get it out in the open.

  Or, he could think about it some more, not being hasty and maybe regretting it.

  Yes, he could think about it and waste time and lose his nerve and in a few minutes he'd be grinning and nodding at everything the son of a bitch said and his face would begin to ache from the grinning. So do it, Son decided. Jesus, do it, will you?

  Still looking at the man, he said, "Frank didn't come here to eat supper."

  Long's eyes opened, momentarily startled, then his expression settled and he watched Son calmly.

  "He didn't come here to visit or talk about old times," Son went on. "He came here to find my dad's whiskey."

  Some of the men looked at each other, hardly believing it. Mr. Baylor said, "That old story. Never mind that, Son. Let's get your friend here fed."

  "He's not hungry for anything to eat." Son kept his gaze on Long. "He's got on his mind a hundred and fifty barrels of whiskey that's going to come of age this summer--a hundred and fifty barrels of eight-year-old John W. Martin corn whiskey. Isn't that right, Frank?"

  Long said nothing; there was no silence for him to fill because Mr. Baylor was already pressing in. He said, "Hell, folks have heard that story and forgot it a hundred times. Who's going to prove John Martin ever put away any whiskey? Son, if he run that much and it's unaccounted for then your daddy drank it is all. Why I remember him drinking two-three gallon a week, drunk it 'stead of water. These boys all know that."

  Some of them nodded and E. J. Royce said, "Why he'd a sure drunk it afore he ever hid it."

  "No," Mr. Baylor said, "that's a story nobody can prove as fact."

  Son was pa
tient. He waited and said to Mr. Baylor, "I appreciate it. But Frank already knows about the whiskey."

  "I suppose he's heard the story, sure," Mr. Baylor said, "same as everybody else. But that don't make it true."

  Son waited again; there was no hurry. He said, "The difference is he heard it from me. One time in Louisville we'd gone in from Camp Taylor, I told him the whole story." Son paused, looking from Frank Long to Mr. Baylor. "You want to know something else? Soon as I told Frank, a second after, I knew I should have bit off my tongue and I started telling myself it was all right because he was probably too drunk to remember any of it. But you know what? Right then, back of some stores in the dark where we'd been doing our drinking, I knew some day Frank was going to come looking for the whiskey."

  Nobody said anything. Son's gaze moved slowly from the porch, past the men in the yard to Frank Long. He waited a moment before saying, "But Frank's not going to get it. Not Frank or anybody."

  Chapter Three.

  They said it was toward the end of 1922 and into 1923 that Son Martin's father ran his hundred and fifty barrels of top-grade moonshine and put it away to age a full eight years.

  They said he must have been planning it because he bought his white oak barrels three or four years before he ran the whiskey, bought them used at the time the Prohibition law closed the distilleries. They said John W. Martin put up the whiskey as an insurance policy. The old man wasn't going to buy any government Liberty bonds for savings, because it was the government that had taken Son into the Army and lured him into staying after the war was over. He wasn't giving the goddamn government anything. But he would have something to give Son once he got tired of marching around Camp Taylor playing soldier boy. Something worth more than any paper Liberty bonds.

  Maybe the old man had put away the whiskey, maybe he hadn't. All anybody knew was the old man and Aaron and some kin of Aaron's had kept three stills working every day for a year. They'd seen the smoke curling out of the yellow pines above the Martin place and they knew he didn't sell more than a few dozen half-gallon jars during that time.

  So, people said, he must have put it away: probably down a mine hole somewhere. While he was stilling, the old man mined coal more than he'd farmed and they said it must have been part of his plan: dig shafts to hide the barrels in, then cover them up with brush. As a final twist of the story, it was a mine that killed the old man, collapsed and suffocated him to death, not two months after Son had come home from the Army.

  Mr. Baylor explained this to Frank Long in the Hotel Cumberland dining room late Sunday morning, Mr. Baylor watching Long eating his fried eggs and ham and hominy and finally calling Lila Holbrook over and ordering a plate for himself, with some hot coffee.

  "I want you to understand it," Mr. Baylor said and waited.

  Long's eyes raised from his fork. "Understand what?"

  "Here's a man had a farm and a nice family, a married son helping him work the farm, two daughters married and living in Tennessee. Everything's just fine till the war come along. Son goes in the Army in 1918. The next year Son's wife, Elizabeth, and his mother both die of the influenza, both of them within a week of each other. Son decides to stay in the Army and the old man is alone."

  Frank Long dipped his biscuit in the runny egg yellow. "What's there to understand?"

  "I mean the old man working and hoping all these years."

  "While Son was taking it easy in the Engineers."

  This wasn't something he understood clearly or was sure he could explain, but Mr. Baylor said, "Son had his own reason for staying in, not wanting to come home to an empty house."

  "He never talked about his wife any."

  "He never talks much about anything," Mr. Baylor said. "That's his way. His daddy was like that. What I'm saying now, what the daddy worked so hard for was his, his to sell or leave to Son or drink it all himself if he felt like it. Which is what might've happened."

  "I reckon you have all kinds of theories," Long said.

  "Why they could have sent it to market for all anybody knows."

  "A hundred and fifty barrels?"

  "There's ways. They could've paid somebody and shipped it out by railroad, hidden down in some coal. Next time you see it it's in a warehouse in Cleveland, Ohio."

  "But they didn't," Long said. "They left it to age the eight years."

  Mr. Baylor put on a laugh. The steel frames of his spectacles glinted as he shook his head. "I see you don't know anything about whiskey. Four years, eight years, what's the difference in the taste?"

  "Maybe nothing, but if the customer believes eight-year-old is better he'll pay for it, won't he?"

  "All right," Mr. Baylor said. "Nobody around here has ever seen a trace of that whiskey. Some boys have looked for it. I mean as a game, to see if they could find it, not to steal it. If it's there, it's Son's and nobody else's. Now these smart boys have prowled Son Martin's tract for years and they haven't smelled out a single jar of anything the old man run."

  "Then they haven't looked in the right place." Long cleaned his plate with a piece of biscuit and stuck it in his mouth. "Or they come on it and not said anything."

  "I'd known," Mr. Baylor said.

  "I reckon you're going to keep talking as long as I sit here."

  Mr. Baylor hesitated and came in from another direction. "You claim to be his friend?"

  "If he don't mind my working for the U. S. Government."

  "All right, if you're his friend, what'd you tell on him for?"

  "They already knew." Long saw Mr. Baylor squinting at him, looking him straight in the eye. He said, "If a hundred people around here know it, a hundred here to Frankfort can know it too."

  "You're telling me the federal authorities know about Son's whiskey and they sent you to find it?"

  "That's what I'm saying."

  "What're you going to tell your superior?" "I haven't looked yet, so there's nothing yet to tell."

  "Tell them it was a story somebody made up. I seriously advise it."

  Long sucked at his teeth. He pulled a cigar out of his breast pocket and bit off the end. "Mister, I believe you told me you're a law officer."

  Mr. Baylor was ready. "And I believe you told me that don't stop a man from enjoying the finer things in life. Well, let me put it this way," Mr. Baylor said. "People around here have built their stills and drunk whiskey for more than a hundred years. They believe if a man plows the ground and sows it and raised corn, it's not the place of another man to tell him he can eat it but he can't drink it. That's what we think of your Prohibition law."

  "I'm sorry to hear that," Long said easily. "You know I can call on you to help me if I want. I got authority to use you and all the deputies I need."

  "You see how many you get."

  "Well, I don't know." Long drew on the cigar and exhaled the smoke in a long slow stream. "I was thinking I'd get me some of the stillers to help me."

  Mr. Baylor stared at him. "Like the Black-wells and the Stampers maybe?"

  "Anybody operating stills."

  "I want to be there when you ask them."

  "Mister," Long said, "I'm not going to ask. I'm going to tell them. They help me find Son's whiskey or I start busting their stills."

  "You got a short memory from last night. Once Son told why you'd come, there was some of them would have shot you full of holes and put you under." Mr. Baylor straightened and was silent as Lila Holbrook placed his breakfast in front of him. He wasn't sure now he wanted it; he'd already eaten breakfast at home. He saw Frank Long looking up and smiling and shaking his head when Lila asked if he cared for anything else. As she moved away, Mr. Baylor said, "You think about it, you'll recall I got you out of there last night. If I hadn't been there they'd have shot you or run you off in the woods nekked and that's a fact."

  "They saw my gun," Long said. "If a man had drawn a pistol they'd have seen it again."

  "Well, a cocky boy like you, I guess you could bust stills all by yourself."

&nb
sp; "Or call Frankfort for help," Long said.

  "Tell me something." Mr. Baylor was looking him straight in the eye again. "What do you get out of this? You get a five-dollar-a-month raise? Or they see what a sweet boy you are, they make you state Prohibition director?"

  "That'd be something, wouldn't it?"

  "Or, you've done your arithmetic and you see a hundred and fifty thirty-gallon barrels, that's--"

  "Forty-five hundred gallons," Long said.

  "At five bucks a gallon." Mr. Baylor paused, staring across the table at him. "Twenty-two thousand dollars. That right?"

  "A little more."

  "And the bootlegger he could make, I reckon a hundred and twenty-something thousand. That the figure you get?"

  Long shook his head. "Not if I capture it. Poured on the ground, the figure comes to zero."

  "Would it please you to see that?" Mr. Baylor asked. "What I mean to say, what is it makes you happy about doing this job?"

  "I don't get anything more out of it than my pay."

  "Then you must want to see some good boys without a means of making a living and watch their little children go hungry. You want to take food off their table and see them get cholera and rickets. Is that it? Listen, I'll tell you something, boy, they used to farm, every one of them, but on the night of May 30, four years ago, it started to rain--"

  "Jesus, I know about the floods."

  "Goddamn-it, I said it started to rain, I mean rain like it never rained before, all night it never stopped. The creeks overrun and filled the hollers and washed out timber and crops and livestock and roads and houses that had stood a hundred years. Now you can replace those things, but it also peeled away all the topsoil and that you don't replace. You don't grow a market crop on limestone either, or in wore-out pasture fields. So you grow a little corn for stilling and buy whatever other grain you need and pray God some drunken boy don't come along and shoot holes in your cooker. I'm saying, without stills some people around here would starve to death."

  Frank Long was looking past Mr. Baylor's left shoulder, through the wide opening of the doorway into the lobby. He said, "That Mrs. Lyons is a good-looking woman, isn't she?"

  Mr. Baylor leaned into the table; he moved aside the cold eggs he didn't want anyway. "Did you listen to what I was telling you?"