“That’s what I want to talk to you about.”
“Spit it out! You make your own hours now, do whatever you please, I’d say you’re grown enough to say what’s on your mind.”
I looked down at the table. He wouldn’t hear me out now. In the clearing he’d be more open to talking.
After I’d cleaned the dinner plates I followed him out into the woods. As I worked in the fire-lit shadows there, I watched him and his injured hands fumble with the tasks he had once done so easily. Striking a single match was near impossible for him, and despite my offers to help, Pa refused to take charity and wasted a good two dozen matches before the fire caught.
I tried to pretend it was just another night shining, like the ones we’d enjoyed for so many years. It wouldn’t take. Even the smoke off the fire smelled more like a memory than anything real. In my gut, I knew I’d never enjoy shining again.
“Pa, I’m working on a plan.”
He was using his fingers to spread red clay against a crack in one of the still’s pipes. He stopped and waited.
“If we sell all the shine we got, maybe we would have enough money to get out of the business.”
He looked at me and moved his cheeks back and forth like he was swishing the idea around in his mouth. I bit my lip and waited.
Finally he said, “What is it, boy? You want Salvatore to drown me too? Shoot me with a bow and arrow? Put wires in my ears and electrocute me? We can’t get out now.”
I kicked a stray log back into the fire. “But it would be a lot of money. And we need to get out.”
Pa sighed and rubbed a sooty hand across his eyes, leaving a dark streak across his face like a raccoon.
“Look, I understand what you’re trying to do. And if we sold all the shine we’ve got, we would have some money for a while. But only for a while. Then what?”
“Then maybe we could get that white house. We could just farm,” I said quietly.
Pa walked around the condenser barrel, dragging a sharp stick across the ground.
“It’s a nice idea. And I know you want to help.”
He let out a bitter chuckle and held up his bandaged arm. “But the last thing I want right now is more of your help.”
Here I was trying to do something and all he wanted to do was make me feel rotten.
“But you haven’t even considered it,” I said.
“And you haven’t even considered the fact that I sold that place once. This is thousands of dollars we’re talking. If I shined for ten years we wouldn’t have enough for it!” He flipped the stick end over end into the dirt, where it stuck and shuddered like an arrow.
“I counted everything we’ve got in the tree,” I said.
“You did?”
“And I talked to Mr. Yunsen.”
The firelight reflected off Pa’s eyes as they grew wide. “What for?”
“To see about prices. He says we could get almost three times the price we usually get. Prices are sky-high because nobody’s stood up to Salvatore.”
I caught the spark from the fire in Pa’s eye, and for a second I thought that the last part had triggered something in him.
“And you’d get some money if you sold this place too. Maybe you could even do a trade for the white house.”
“This place ain’t worth a quarter of that other one,” Pa said with a scoff.
“But what about with this place, all the money from the shine in the tree, and you sell the still? Scrap the copper?”
I had gone in all or nothing. Sell the shine, sell the still, sell it all. And the still would bring a good sum of money, but its real value was something different. No still meant never moonshining again. Pa stared into the fire, shaking his head.
“What exactly do you think old Salvatore would say if I told him, ‘Thanks, but I retired’? You tried telling him no once, remember?”
Rebecca had been the only one with a possible solution, so I threw it out there. “We’d have to get him in trouble,” I said.
Pa turned and sputtered, “In trouble with who? His buddy the sheriff?”
“What about the government? Somebody higher up than the sheriff. If he’s as bad as he seems, I bet they’d want to get him.”
“What, like the Feds?”
I nodded. “Exactly!”
Pa responded with equal energy, but not the kind I had hoped for. “Nobody wants to help us. We’ve been breaking the law for ten years!” he yelled.
I remembered I’d said almost exactly the same thing to Rebecca.
“Maybe they would, Pa. Somebody.”
There was a whole world of people out there. I’d seen it myself now.
He glared at me. “Maybe you ought to go back to the house.”
“This is no good, Pa, none of this. And I’m not just gonna sit around waiting for more trouble to come down on our heads.”
He stood just two feet away staring into the fire, but he could have been two towns over. I knew the talk was finished. I turned and started winding my way back toward the house. It had not gone like I’d hoped, not even close. But as I pushed through the damp pine needles, I felt a spark of pride inside. As I crossed on through the night I thought that whatever happened now, at least I’d told him what I thought.
THAT NEXT MORNING, I made the walk to school, glad to have an escape from Pa’s pigheadedness. School was a good place to think, and even if I was still an outcast there, I did have Rebecca.
I reached the schoolyard a little early that day and found her sitting on a bench with a pair of girls I didn’t know from the older class.
“How’s your pa doing?” Rebecca asked.
I froze. The two older girls seemed to pick up on my unease and stared at me as I stood there dumb.
“Um, he is fine.”
Rebecca said, “Cub, I got to confess something to you.”
The two girls started giggling. One of them made kissy noises.
Rebecca elbowed her and said, “Oh stop it, Francine.”
I stood there awkward as ever. Rebecca hopped off the bench and started walking me away from everyone, toward the maple tree. That of course sent Francine and her friend into a fit.
“Cub, so I maybe did something that wasn’t so honest. I might have done a little spying.”
I waited, and then the words just came pouring out of her.
“But this whole business about Salvatore and the gangsters and making moonshine sales and running from the law is so danged interesting that once I started listening I just couldn’t stop!”
Hearing her say the name “Salvatore” jarred me. My life had two sides now and I didn’t want them to touch. And Rebecca was here trying to mix water and oil, and at school no less where the whole world could hear.
Off behind me, Miss Pounder started clanging on the school bell and I almost jumped out of my boots. I glanced over my shoulder. People were heading inside. No one seemed to be paying us any attention, but my heart felt like it was about to thump out of my chest. I should have been mad at Rebecca for “listening,” but all I wanted was for her to be quiet.
“Let’s not talk about it here, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, but it’s just so crazy! It’s like they’re filming a gangster movie and you’re in it.”
I shook my head hard and threw a finger to my lips.
“Heck, you’re the star!” she said.
“Look, I’ll explain it later, but I’m begging you just not to talk about it here. Making moonshine was something we had to do. We’re not criminals.”
“The heck you aren’t!” Shane bellowed, storming out from behind the maple tree. “Ooh I knew you were trash, and now I heard it from your own mouth. I got the evidence now!”
A chill ran down my arms and I stared at his smirking face, wondering how much he had heard.
Rebecca scoffed. “What do you care anyways, Shane?”
No, no, no, I thought. Deny it. Say it was a joke.
Shane said, “My pa himself gave a sermon about how
good families have to stick together against bad ones. And now I got a confession.”
“My family’s not bad,” I muttered, but he just kept grinning at me, smug as can be.
From the school door, Miss Pounder yelled for the three of us to get inside.
“Yes, ma’am,” Shane called out, then jogged in. In a daze, I made my way in and to our class. Rebecca walked with me and said something, but I was in such a state of fright I couldn’t even hear what she was saying.
I watched the gossip begin to spread during first period. Shane turned around at his desk and told Jackson, who sneered at me from across the room. Jackson told Martha, who told the Bowery twins. By recess, I was positive that every student in both classes had heard me and Pa were moonshiners, and I gave it about a fifty-fifty chance the teachers now knew as well. As I trudged back in for arithmetic, I half expected Pounder to be waiting for me with handcuffs. As I headed to my stump, I caught words like “Mafia,” “gangster,” and “killer” in the classroom buzz. The whole lesson, all eyes were on me, but I just kept my gaze glued to the blackboard.
At lunch I tried to find Rebecca outside but was swarmed by Russ and his friends.
“Cub, is it true your pa is wanted by the cops?”
“How many guns do you guys have?”
“Are the coppers going to put your pa back in the big house?”
I shook my head and pushed past. Rebecca wasn’t around and I ended up sitting alone at the edge of the pines, alternating soggy bites of a cheese sandwich with bites of my fingernails, fuming in the shadows.
I’d told Rebecca my biggest secret, and it wasn’t even enough for her. She had to snoop around my meeting, then treat it like a game. She had seen Pa’s burned-up hands. This was no game. And now because of her big mouth, not only were we at extra risk, but folks at school treated me like some carnival sideshow freak.
After school she was waiting for me at our normal meeting spot for the walk home. I walked right past her.
“Cub,” she called. “Hang on. I shouldn’t have blabbed.”
I turned and faced her. “Or spied while I was talking with your grandpa.”
She nodded and walked up slowly to me. I stayed where I was.
“Yeah, or that. And I’m sorry.”
“Fine,” I said.
She stared at me for a long moment, then smiled slightly, shaking her head in disbelief.
She said, “You just don’t understand what a kick I got out of hearing all that wild stuff. All morning I was waiting to talk to you about it, just suffering because it was so exciting and I knew I couldn’t say a word to anyone but you.”
Jail. The orphanage. The only family I have getting burned so bad by this evil snake of a man that he almost died.
“ ‘Suffering’?” I said. “You know nothing.”
I walked on by myself.
Pa wasn’t there when I got home, so I made a halfhearted check on the garden then dropped into the porch rocker, feeling wore out and unsure of everything. Pa was too hardheaded to know a good plan when he heard one. And Rebecca, the one person I thought I could trust, had ruined things for me at school, and maybe even worse. I sat there staring up at the gray curls of cloud above, feeling wretched and solitary until I reached a point where my mind just couldn’t go on anymore.
“Wake up, boy.”
The voice rang out right in my face and I snapped to attention, eyes popping open wide. Pa’s face was right there in front of me.
I rubbed my eyes and stared. Was he smiling? That had become almost a foreign practice at our house. Maybe I was still dreaming.
“Where were you, Pa?”
“Went to talk to Yunsen. I wasn’t too happy about him talking to you, but he meant well. I saw Rebecca there too.”
“Great,” I groaned.
I got up from the rocker to go lie down inside.
“Hang on there. I’ve been thinking about what you said last night.”
That woke me up. I sat back down.
“You have? You seemed so mad about it.”
He gave me a funny look.
“I seemed mad? Boy, you were the one with your blood boiling. I never seen you that…Well not mad exactly. But I’ve never seen you so danged strong-headed.”
You could call it strong-headed, I guessed. But I’d been mad too.
“And that got me to thinking,” Pa went on. “I ain’t slept a bit, just weighing things up to see if maybe there was some sense in what you’d said. I even went to visit your ma to see what she thought of your idea.”
This could be good, I thought.
“And she agreed it’s a pretty fool plan, but that it does have some good parts. But then I talked to that horse skinner I know. Cost me two gallons, but I got some good information.”
He leaned in, eyes wide, and said, “This Salvatore fellow is working for the North Side Gang. He’s under Nicky Merlino himself.”
Nicky “No Shadow” Merlino and his crew had made a name for themselves in the papers. They were powerful, violent, and battling the one and only Al Capone, the boss of the bosses, for the liquor trade. How could this possibly be good news?
“Maybe the Feds would get him,” Pa said. “He’s a big fish. There could even be a reward!”
“That’s what I was saying, Pa. They’d arrest him. And we get rid of the shine. Get that farm.”
Pa shook his head and raised his palms up to me. “One thing at a time. We focus on Salvatore for now. Then we’ll see.”
I jumped up out of the rocker and said, “No. Don’t you see? The same thing will just happen again. If we keep on living here, we’ll never stop shining.”
Pa stepped back, staring at me wild-eyed. Neither one of us had expected me to flare up like that.
“I thought you’d be happy about this,” he said. “Heck, it was your idea.”
To be honest, I couldn’t square it either. I should have been glad. But every time I caught sight of the backs of his hands, every time I saw those papery strips of red skin peeling off, I knew inside me that we had to get out of shining forever. And seeing the way he’d come alive out there at that old farm, everything had felt perfect like the old days. It was like he had already forgiven me.
I said, “I just want to put things right. And I can.”
He sighed and said, “Look, I can ask about that white house. I’ll ask. But you got to tell me one thing first.”
“What?”
“When did you get to be so dang stubborn? I’ve known mules who were more agreeable.”
I grinned at him. “Yeah, I wonder who I got it from.”
He smiled back at me.
“We can do this, Pa. We can get out of all this. Away from Salvatore. Done with shining for good. But it’ll take the both of us.”
“The both of us?” he said, the smile falling off his face. “That means you don’t go sneaking off behind my back.”
“Of course not.”
He pressed his lips together for a long moment.
“Maybe we can give it a shot,” he said slowly. “I will say that I like the sound of it. Honest living. No more burns. Farming.”
Things were far from perfect, but at least we were fighting on the same side again.
OUR PLAN WAS STILL MISSING a key ingredient, and we headed for Mr. Yunsen’s to see if he could help us with transport. I hadn’t told Pa what people were saying at school and hoped Rebecca wasn’t at her house. I could only deal with so many problems at a time.
On the walk, Pa said, “It’s dangerous. Salvatore has partners up North. A whole gang of ’em. And I don’t think the sheriff will be too happy with all this going on right under his nose. Everybody will take a good look at him too.”
“So let ’em. If we’re not shining anymore, he can’t arrest us.”
Pa sighed. “I think the sheriff has his own understanding of the law. And this business with the Feds is going to be tricky. We made fools out of ’em for years,” he said with a sad laugh.
We reached the Yunsen home, and Rebecca was nowhere in sight. I sat next to Pa at the big formal table and we told Mr. Yunsen everything: our plan for Salvatore, our new life farming at the white house, and how we needed his help transporting the barrels we had stored in the tree.
Mr. Yunsen heard us out. I explained how I’d done the numbers and that it wasn’t some crazy dream. Pa played up the story by twisting his burned hand in front of Mr. Yunsen’s face like some horrible claw.
“I wish I could help, Earl,” Mr. Yunsen said. “Because I truly admire what you are doing. Not one person has stood up to Salvatore and his organization, and that goes for shiners and police alike. But I retired from the bootlegging business on account of my duty to Rebecca. I cannot risk arrest.”
Rebecca. As much as I wanted to be mad at her for this too, I couldn’t. She and her grandpa had to look out for themselves.
We offered him money, offered to fix up that giant house, we offered everything we could think of. But as time wore on, we had to give in. There was just no convincing him. My plan was crumbling already.
“We’ll just have to sell it some other way,” I said. “Maybe local.”
Pa said, “It’s almost a thousand gallons. And you said it yourself, the good prices are in other towns. We can’t walk it there,” he said. That wooden sound had come back into his voice.
I knew exactly four people with an automobile—Mr. Salvatore, the sheriff, Mr. Yunsen, and the man who hitched his Ford to that old mare. At the moment, the horse fella looked like our best bet.
Mr. Yunsen shifted in his seat and said, “Once again, gentlemen, I do apologize that I can’t be of assistance. It’s just, well you understand, family first.”
Pa slumped lower in his seat and said, “Maybe I should just give Salvatore the first batch like he wanted. Then we’d have a while to figure things out.”
We had a week and a half before Mr. Salvatore would be back for the first load. The memory of him making himself all comfortable on our porch made me shiver. I wanted him out of our lives as soon as possible.
I pushed my chair back to leave, and Mr. Yunsen nodded awkwardly to us.
Moonshine Page 10
