“Give him a taste, Malcolm.”
Sugar took a long pull and handed it back. He wiped his mouth just as the whiskey exploded in his belly. A warm, tingling sensation spread over his entire body, from the bottoms of his sore feet to the top of his bruised head, and he immediately wanted more. “Any place around here to get a jug?” he asked.
A squat, husky man wearing a frayed straw boater pointed across the road to a narrow, windowless hut tacked on the side of the store. “Jenksie over there will fix you up if’n you got the money,” he said.
“You ain’t from around here, are ye?” another asked.
“No,” Sugar replied, “I’m comin’ from Detroit.”
“Detroit? What you doin’ in Shadesville then?”
“Oh, I just stopped by to see some people, but they all gone.”
“What people?”
“The Milfords.”
“The Milfords? Why, that was ol’ Susie’s name, wasn’t it?” Several of them chuckled.
“Lord, I damn near forgot about her,” another said.
“Not me,” a light-skinned boy with greenish eyes said. “That girl could suck a—”
“That’s my sister you’re talkin’ about,” Sugar said, raising his voice and placing his hand on the razor in his pocket.
“Oh,” the boy said.
“Well,” said another.
They all looked away or down at the ground for a minute, then someone said, “Here ye go,” and handed Sugar the bottle again. He forgot about his sister and stayed with them for a while longer, but they didn’t pass their liquor around fast enough to suit him. Walking over to the little shed, he tapped on the door and a sweaty, sickly-looking man wearing nothing but a soiled pair of yellow trousers let him in. The man sat down on a wooden crate before he asked Sugar what he wanted. It was dark inside the room. There was something alive inside the crate, moving around in a tight circle, but Sugar couldn’t make out what it was. He bought a couple of pints of Old Rose and that left him with a dollar. Avoiding the volunteers, he sneaked around the corner and down the road to his homeplace and sat under a dead apple tree in the backyard. From time to time, he uncapped one of the bottles and took a sip, then screwed the cap back on tightly. He felt guilty about breaking his promise to the Lord, who had obviously saved him once again, this time from drowning back there at the bridge, but he swore that he would never get drunk again, not after this one last time. Who could blame him really? Coming all the way back here just to find his mother dead, and his brothers and sisters gone. What the hell was he going to do now?