The Wettest County in the World (4 page)

Later as the evening grew dark and colder Howard fried up some bacon, sticking it under the still, and the men ate it with their fingers right out of the skillet.

Why should I care? Howard thought. I ought to just let Forrest handle his own damn business. He blinked at the fire and thought about just what all he owed his brother.

Cundiff was stirring the still and sealing the cap, tapping it down and crisscrossing the chains over the top to hold it down under the intense pressure. The thumper keg, connected by a length of copper pipe between the still and the condenser coil and filled with a slop of steaming mash, began to knock woodenly, a steady beat as the pressure built. Danny was sleeping, curled up near the side of the still, hands under his head, the hot bricks warming his skinny body, his pale ankles naked above his boots. There was a tinkle, a metallic music, a pattering of light, and for a moment Howard thought he was hearing music like bells ringing but then he breathed again and slouched lower on the log, the soles of his feet hot from the fire. The tall trees swam in conflicting arcs of light above him and he closed his eyes again.

Howard awoke to find himself sitting on the ground leaning against the log before the furnace, Cundiff kneeling by the condenser, watching the singling coming out of the cooling barrel and into the pail, the first run working its slow, singular way in a tiny puff of steam, the foreshot bubbling with small knots of material, a hot stream of liquor and sediment. Cundiff’s face a flickering, cracked carapace like a beetle’s wing. Howard’s legs were splayed out before him like deadwood. He began to feel the mountain breathe with him; each time he expanded his chest the mountain swelled, bringing him hundreds of feet into the air, beyond the trees, into the darkness of the sky lit with stars that he dimly knew could not be there. Exhalation brought him back through the canopy to the ground, the fire shimmering crimson and gold through his eyelashes, then darkness.

Howard’s body snapped like a greenstick, his feet flipped under him, hands on the ground. The thumper keg was rapping hard, echoing down the mountainside, and a jet of steam raced out of a hair-thin seam in the cap, making a high whistle.

Forrest. The County Line.

Howard crabbed over and rolled the unconscious Danny, dumping out his pockets in the dirt. Pocket watch open in the firelight: nearly midnight. He fumbled in the flickering dark, the ground cold and sticky with wet leaves and spiderwebs. Keys; Danny’s truck parked down the mountain along the road.

Turning down the steep trail, Howard stumbled, kicking empty molasses cans. Glancing back he saw Cundiff in a circle of wavering light, patching the cap with a cup of clay, dabbing at the steam with his fingers, elbows held high, his hands jointed and fluttering. It wasn’t midnight quite yet—he could make it. Howard let his weight pull him down the mountain, his upper body rolling forward, legs keeping up with the generated momentum, floundering in the leaves and brambles, hooking his shirt, tumbling down sections of shale, stumps barking his shins, cursing and swinging his forearms into branches, mashing down small trees with his boots. The slight ribbon of the creek at the bottom shone like a gray vein; that was the valley and the road and he had to get to that and then he would find the truck.

Howard’s boots crunched the hard-packed dirt and gravel of the road. In either direction he saw nothing, just a faint chalk trace of road, no trees, no mountain, just low darkness closing in, no stars or moon and he knew he would have to run down the side of the road in each direction until he collided with the vehicle; there was no other way to do it. Howard began to run, one arm stretched out to feel the contact. He felt a cold dampness on his face, and the dark world turned and was suddenly dotted with light, like a plague of white fireflies, and he stumbled in fear, the flies thickening, incandescent, filling the dark. The air turned white; it was snowing. Howard lowered his outstretched hand and pumped both arms, feeling his gathering speed, running hard through the snow.

M
IDNIGHT AND THE MEN
who sat in the County Line Restaurant had nowhere else to go. A group sat playing cards, piles of dusty nickels and dimes between their elbows. A few men sat at the bar, haggard and dog-eyed, cigarettes burning down to the knuckle, a loosely held mason jar with an inch of clear fluid at the bottom. A radio on the counter played a music broadcast from Wheeling, West Virginia: the Carter Family singing “Don’t Forget This Song.” A man in hobnail boots and a stained overcoat rapped his fingers on the bar to the beat. The windows rimed with hoarfrost and shadow, stained clumps of sawdust on the floor.

In the kitchen Forrest Bondurant stood holding his hat in his hand, looking out the window into the back lot as it filled with snow. He wore a heavy shirt tucked into dungarees and his hair was greased and parted on the side. He stamped his boots on the floor a few times. He was a tall man like his brothers, with great bony knuckles and jutting ears, a thinner version of Howard. Forrest was annoyed because his boots were wet, his socks soggy and cold. He had just been in the storage room out back rearranging stock and in the back lot he stepped through a puddle of black ice, going ankle-deep in dark water. The dishwasher, a black man named Jefferson Deshazo, turned to watch Forrest stamp his feet, then looked back at the brown soapy mess in front of him, a cigarette streaming off his lip.

Two of the men drinking in the front room were waiting to purchase eighty gallons to take northwest across to Shootin’ Creek in Floyd County. His brother Howard was late, and if he wasn’t on the road already he wouldn’t make it in time. He would have to ask his counterman Hal to back him up with the shotgun. Forrest thought of the stock in storage, more than two hundred gallons. A few convoys had come through that week and Forrest had over six hundred dollars locked in a cashbox hidden in the kitchen under an old stove. He fingered a small gnarled lump of wood in his pocket. Too much goddamn money on hand, he thought. A fool thing to do.

The weather was due to break open; all day the sky had been gathering and folding along the ridges, and Forrest had a good twenty miles to travel through the mountains to get home. The County Line Restaurant stood astride the Franklin County and Henry County line, just down off the western spur of Thornton Mountain, where routes 19 and 21 met and turned into the hard road that led on to Martinsville, west to Patrick County and Floyd, and on south into North Carolina. A simple place with a wooden counter and stools in front of a grill, a few tables, curtainless windows looking out onto a muddy lot. Most people in that part of the state knew that it was a place where a man could sit and get breakfast, a sandwich, a piece of ham, biscuits, and a drink or two of decent mountain liquor. On a regular night for a half dollar the counterman Hal Childress would set you up with a quart of corn whiskey or brandy, good stuff, not the heavily sugared rotgut they sold to the convoys taking it up north. A single snort would cost you a dime. You could sit close to the box stove and listen to the radio for the whole afternoon as long as you didn’t make any trouble. Evenings men would play a few hands of cards at the tables and Forrest held regular weekly games that ran late into the night in the closed restaurant. If you wanted a larger order of liquor Forrest Bondurant could handle that too; the real business at the County Line was late at night or early morning when small convoys of cars and trucks pulled into the lot and men swung crates of liquor, in half-gallon fruit jars and five-gallon aluminum cans, some heading south, others east to Richmond or west into Tennessee, some men with muddy boots and sleepy, sunburnt faces, mountain men bringing their still whiskey down out of the hills, and other men in long coats and crisp hats who spoke in clipped phrases, picking up booze and headed for points north, Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia.

Or men came into the County Line Restaurant to watch Maggie, the woman behind the counter who fried eggs and bacon and made biscuits and sandwiches. Maggie was a tall, angular woman around thirty years old with long features and wide shoulders. She carried herself with a strange bearing, a wariness, aloof, as smooth in her movements as a housecat, and there wasn’t much anything like her for miles around. She had long auburn hair that during work hours she often kept in a high bun, and Maggie wore new dresses and frocks, dresses with lace and machine-made patterns and exotic fabrics, all the latest fashions ordered from catalogs and delivered to Rocky Mount. Men sat at the counter and watched over their jars of apple brandy, her shoulder blades twitching under her fancy dresses as she worked the grill and when she turned they inspected her long neck, downy with dark hair, resisting the urge to finger the glistening fabric that slid like liquid over her hips. Maggie didn’t seem to mind and men would sit and stare brazenly at her, a line of men’s heads following her down the counter as she stooped for some butter or across to the cooler for a hunk of cold meat. When it was quiet Maggie would lean on the sink and smoke a cigarette, blowing plumes of smoke from her nose. Maggie always looked a bit over the shoulders of men as they gazed at her, like she was looking a long way off.

Forrest put two fingers in his mouth and whistled low and Hal stepped through the swinging door into the kitchen, wiping his hands on an apron. Hal was a slight man, hair combed carefully over his bulbous scalp, who uttered perhaps a dozen words a week.

Shut ’er down, Forrest said.

Hal nodded and returned to the front room.

As Forrest began to put on his coat to return to the storage shed he heard a shout from the front. He stood with one arm stretched out in his coat sleeve and listened. The pop of shattering glass; he could tell someone had thrown a jar into a wall. A clatter of wood and the heavy sound of struggling bodies; a man yelped in pain. Jefferson took his hands out of the soapy water and began to dry them on a rag.

A man was stretching a bloody hand across the bar trying to get hold of Maggie’s waist, her back against the grill, hands behind her back. His hat was on the floor. Another man in dirty coveralls stood next to him; their stools lay on the ground. It was the two Shootin’ Creek men who came to make the buy. The men at the card table were all standing now as well, still holding their cards. On the radio Jimmie Rodgers sang

Hal stood at the end of the counter, holding the wooden club they kept under the bar in his hand, watching the two men. His hair hung in limp hanks by his ear and he was breathing heavily.

That’s it! Forrest shouted. Everybody out!

The man leaning over the bar twisted around. His face was streaming with sweat. He tried to grin, his mouth shaky and wet-lipped.

I done paid for another and she won’t give it, he said. Then the bitch done cut me!

He held up his bloody hand, a deep slice running across his knuckles, the skin peeling back.

Forrest looked at Maggie and she shook her head slightly. He looked back at the two men.

You didn’t, Forrest said.

We gonna buy near a hunner’ gallon, the man said. Now you ain’t gonna throw in some extra?

You ain’t buying a damn thing, Forrest said. Get out.

Hal bent down behind the counter and picked up a long-barreled Colt cavalry pistol, flecked with blood, and held it out to Forrest.

He pulled it on her when she wouldn’t give him one, Hal murmured. She brought the knife around and caught him.

Forrest looked at the two men blankly.

Did you pull a gun on this woman? he said.

The man pounded the bar with his fist and seized another jar.

Throw that damn jar and you’re gonna get yourself seriously hurt, Forrest said.

The cardplayers were putting on their hats and coats, sweeping change on the table into their palms, stuffing half-empty quart bottles into their pockets, and tumbling out into the night, the door slamming. Forrest glanced at Maggie who stared over the heads of the men, her right hand still behind her back gripping the carving knife she used for slicing cold ham, the blade smeared crimson.

The man hocked a wad of mucus onto the bar and then heaved the jar just to the right of Maggie, into the large mirror. When the mirror exploded, raining glass into her hair, Forrest felt the flaring up inside. He could tell these men hadn’t come to buy anything. Too much cash on hand, it was a foolish thing, as was coming out here to confront what he knew was trouble without the shotgun or his pistol. It was lucky these men only seemed to have the one gun and this pinned them as desperate fools. Howard’s very presence would have made this whole thing a lot easier. They must have been waiting to see if he was going to show up; late enough now and they would take their chance. Didn’t matter, Forrest thought. If it was punishment they sought then they would get it.

All right, the man said, and he squared up to Forrest and the man in the dirty coveralls stepped up behind him. This second man was medium height but thicker than most. He had a flaming goiter under his jaw that swelled out like a turkey’s comb, and his face was set in a grim line. That ol’ boy ain’t drunk, Forrest thought to himself. That’s the one to watch for. It was in the sizing up of a man, when you could tell how it would go—that foreknowledge was what made Forrest’s ears crack and his knuckles go white. Forrest saw in his head the anger in a triangle of fire floating in a field of night sky. He focused on it and put a dark box around it, making it smaller until a cold blankness ran over him like water and he wanted to fling himself onto the back of the world with both fists crashing down. When he looked at these two men they were like animals standing on their hind legs.

Forrest stepped away from the bar to give himself some space. Hal stood behind him holding the cavalry pistol but Forrest knew they would charge and the old man wouldn’t fire. The four of them stood there for a moment and then the sweaty-faced man came at Forrest with both fists, howling, and Forrest sidestepped him and pushed him into a table and the man crashed to the ground. Jefferson rushed out of the kitchen in his apron and sat on the man’s kicking legs and Hal put the pistol to the man’s temple and told him to lie still.

When Forrest turned around the man in the coveralls was driving at his face and Forrest twisted and caught the blow on the ear, moving with the momentum, covering up with his elbows, and then the man was on him. The man got both arms around Forrest’s midsection and was trying to pick him up, grunting, his lips curled and his mouth open, his breath foul and hot and Forrest felt himself come off his feet and then he knew that this was real trouble. The man lifted him and staggered into the bar and when his grip loosened for a moment Forrest got a hand free and brought the heel of his hand up sharply under the man’s chin, into the soft pouch of the goiter. The man’s teeth clacked hard and he let go of Forrest and stumbled back, his eyes wild. A fleshy sliver of tongue dribbled over his bottom lip followed by a sheet of blood that ran down his chin and neck. He caught the piece of tongue in his palm and groaned. In a fluid motion Forrest slipped on the iron knuckles he had in his pocket, jerked him around by his collar and caught him with a crunching overhand right between the eyes, laying his forehead wide open to the bone and dropping him to the floor.

They dragged him out by his ankles and threw him into the ditch beside the road and when he hit the muddy snow he moaned and clutched at his bloody head. Then Forrest and Jefferson threw the sweaty-faced man out into the parking lot and he rolled about cursing and crying as Forrest kicked him with his heavy boots for a while. He waited for the man to turn or move his arms to get a kick in at his ribs or head, walking around his body and winding into him with a few steps for momentum, his boots slipping in the snow. It was a cold night, clouds building from the east range of mountains and the pines across the hard road standing tall in the darkness. When Forrest’s boot found a soft part the man grunted and wheezed. Forrest felt tired and irritated by the whole thing, though he was not surprised. The word was out about the money and desperate men would always show up to take a chance. Forrest rubbed his split earlobe with his fingers as he aimed a short hard kick to the man’s kidneys. Goddammit, Howard, he thought, why bother even say you’re gonna do something?

Maggie was sweeping up the glass from the mirror and the jars when Forrest came back in. The radio was still playing and there wasn’t another sound for miles. Forrest felt a bit ashamed suddenly and he thought of saying something or apologizing but instead turned away and went into the back with Hal and Jefferson to finish up in the kitchen. She’s no child, Forrest thought, and she’d seen worse it was certain.

In the kitchen Jefferson was washing his hands in the sink again and Hal was smoking as he paced the floor, mumbling to himself, still keyed up. Forrest took out his money clip and peeled off two fives and stepping in front of Hal he placed one in the old man’s trembling hand. Hal nodded, and Forrest clapped him on the back. Jefferson dried his hands and folded the other five neatly and placed it in his shirt pocket.