At fifteen, Roy drove a moonshine getaway car like a pro. It was a 1940 Ford with a Lincoln engine. Black and rusted out along the rocker panel with one hubcap gone. The left rear fender got dented when revenuers got close and almost run Roy off the road. The windshield got cracked when he hit a low-lying limb. The car’s got a double gas tank, and one holds the shine. Roy drove with the headlights off in the dark heart of night.
I’d be the one to get the makings for moonshine. I got the secret recipe from old man Hector Hunt for the best hundred-seventy-proof white lightning in the county. He adds a special honey from a holler way off the beaten path, and I found where he got it. When Roy got tired of handing money to Hector, Roy and me helped the old man retire. Ownership changed hands that night, and no one noticed. Customers just want their shine.
There’s a lotta money to be made in shine if you do it right. And a lotta ways money gets used up. You gotta build the still and fix the still and pay off the law. At times the mash can go bad on you, if you won’t careful. Money flows out as easy as it flows in. Right or wrong, me and Roy never think to save for a rainy day, but we do wanna make the best shine. That takes the best ingredients.
Roy says, “I wanna do something once in my life I’m proud of.”
Me, too.
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Lester Jolly is the king of sweet corn in these parts. The lay of his land makes corn sweeter than most. Other farmers get four dollars a bushel for their corn. Lester gets more. But corn turned into moonshine brings in ten times that. The math’s easy to do; Lester is a bottom-line man, cept he’s got a four-legged problem that keeps him awake at night.
What happened was over a hundred years back, a grandson of Mr. Vanderbilt, that railroad tycoon with all the money in the world and some pretty stupid ideas, brought Russian wild boars with big tusks into these mountains so the wealthy folk could pretend they was big-game hunters. Before he done that, there won’t wild boars in our woods.
If that won’t bad enough, a bigger wild pig was brought in—the Eurasian boar, they called it—and they was kept penned up in a game preserve till they busted out, like anybody smart knowed they would.
Some of them boars still roam these mountains. Just a few years back, somebody kilt a seven-hundred-pounder that come from that bad idea. Hungry hunters keep the numbers down, but Lester’s got his self a special problem.
“A hog can eat up a quarter acre of corn in one night,” Lester complains. “That’s a helluva lotta profit gone that won’t come back. We need to kill us some hogs.”
“We’ll trap em for you.”
“How you do that?”
“Got a plan. You get ready for bacon,” I say and go fetch Roy.
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Me and Roy drive before dark to the cornfield where the hogs been eating Lester’s corn. I set posts, and Roy nails a spiral wire fence in place. In the heart of that spiral we put a pile of sweet corn hooked to a trip wire. When we come back the next morning, two big hogs pace in the pen and the sweet corn is gone.
Lester pulls up in his pickup. “They don’t look happy.”
Roy says, “Ain’t looking for happy hogs, just dead ones.”
He cocks the rifle and puts the barrel through the fence. The first shot kills one hog, but the other gets riled and breaks the fence down. The hog snorts and aims his thick tusks straight for Roy’s privates. The hog musk stinks something terrible. Me and Lester run to the truck and I jump in back, but Roy gets cut off and runs into the cornfield. He has his rifle, but he don’t have time to turn and take a shot.
Lester starts the truck and yells, “Lord! Hang on, Billy!”
Poor Lester Jolly got no choice but to drive straight into his orderly cornfield on the heels of a wild hog and a moonshiner. I hold tight to the roof, and we zigzag the hell all over his cornfield followin the sound of wild grunts and breaking stalks.
“Left… Too far… Back to the right… They on your left—”
“Shut up, Billy. You ain’t helping!” Lester shouts, mowing down green walls of his prize corn.
Just then, I bang on the truck roof and shout, “Stop! Stop! STOP!”
The truck fishtails and comes to rest within inches of Roy and the hog. The boar has Roy’s hunting knife sunk to the hilt in one eye and the rifle stock broke in half cross its head. Roy kicks at the hog with little steam left. Lester pulls his pistol outta the glove box and does the rest, then looks back at the crazy trail his truck made across his field of prime corn and says, “Well, hot damn, I guess I got me a crop circle. Wonder what this looks like from the air?”
That starts us to laughing, and the laughing turns to girlie giggles. When Roy stands and dusts his self off, one of his boots is gone. We try to lift the hog into the truck bed but can’t do it, so we tie him to the bumper and drag him. Me and Roy sit on the tailgate, dangle our legs, and look for Roy’s boot while the pig plows through the dirt.
The lot of us strings them boars up by their hind legs and guts em. Then Roy and me drive off with the smell of blood drying on our clothes, wore out. We got our corn supplier, and that’s good. Roy drives with one arm out the window. His square hand grips the steering wheel, his flat belly caved in. The Possum sings “She Thinks I Still Care” on the radio, and Roy whistles off-key. He looks cool even with one boot on.
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Roy Tupkin had him lots of women. One he paid for outta curiosity, but the rest he got for free. He’s the kinda sweaty danger women love. All of em he treats better than Sadie, and that galls the shit outta me. Still, I sit on horny widows’ porches and on back roads where the moss lays thick on the north side of white oaks.
And I wait for him.
Now and again, Roy says, “Don’t you get the itch, Billy?” tucking in his shirttail, hitching up his pants, sweeping back his thick hair, and putting on his hat. “Gotta get your hands on a woman’s skin? Dip your wick? No? Times I think you a fag, man.”
Roy tries to get under my skin. I don’t let him. I got me a poker face.
One time I say, “I’m saving myself,” and Roy laughed.
I been with a few women, but I don’t dream about em.
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Then comes the night Roy meets Darlene.
She’s the new girl at the Midnight Club back in the woods at the end of Danner’s Cove. It’s a plain place with bare floor, loud music, and cheap likker. The regular girls got dull eyes, dull minds, dull skin bleached out under the glare of lights on the rough stage. Then Darlene appears with skin white as flour, hair as black as raven’s feathers, and a attitude wound tight. She don’t fool me for a second.
But Roy’s smitten. I never seen him act like this. He runs his tongue over his parched lips, dazed. You’d think she was his first. The girl’s pretty enough. Fresher than most, cause she’s new to the trade and seventeen. I can tell right off Darlene’s different from other girls who come to the Midnight Club and stay too long. Behind her dark eyes, she’s restless. Itchy. Selfish.