Read Nightwoods Page 7


  He lacked a gun, but that didn’t stop the bully in him from needing an airing. He walked over to a short slim man with a sweaty Pabst in his left hand and a big .45 like a brick in his right. The little man leaned against its weight. Bud said the first thing that popped into his head.

  —Hey Lit, some of these old boys say your feet’s so small you buy shoes in children’s sizes at the store that sells Florsheims.

  Lit smiled, raised his eyebrows, and sipped his beer. He moved up real close into Bud’s air. Inches apart. The top of his head level with Bud’s collarbones.

  —Which ones say that?

  Bud took one involuntary step back. He said, Nobody.

  —Nobody said it? You just took a flying fuck of a guess at my name and where I buy my shoes?

  —Somebody might of said something. I don’t recollect all the specifics. It was supposed to be funny.

  —Funny? It’s the same shoes for less money. You ought to feel funny paying full price.

  Bud looked down at little Lit, his angle against the weight of his big pistol. Drawing himself together, remembering his higher degree of suavity among the hillbillies, Bud said, Slim, you need a twenty-two. It would fit your hand better. One of those purse guns.

  Lit closed the back step Bud had taken. He reached his .45 out, and Bud took it from him and turned it from one face to the other and studied it, like a message might be written in the diamonds of its grips.

  Lit switched his beer to his shooting hand and pitched the half-full can toward the clay bank. It rolled, spewing, just a score of feet.

  Lit said, Can you hit that?

  —In my damn sleep.

  —Well then, if it’s that easy, can you empty the clip into it?

  —Step back and watch me.

  Bud squared up and started shooting, pulling the trigger as fast as he could jerk it out.

  The first round hit the can fine and knocked it spinning up against the bank. Then with every shot, the .45 began rising on him, like it wanted to haul back and strike him in the forehead. He fought to hold it down, and he lost. By the time the clip emptied, the barrel pointed about where the moon would be come midnight.

  Lit said, Yeah, that’s how I figured.

  —Shit. Let me see you do it.

  Lit took back his empty pistol and packed it in its holster and snapped the flap over it.

  —I tell you what, Lit said. When you can do it, I’ll do it.

  Lit walked away. Immediately, several shooters came over to Bud with fresh beers. One of them said, Natural mistake. He was off duty and out of uniform.

  —Off duty from what? Bud said. Pumping gas?

  Laughing and delighted, they talked over one another, telling the new man the famous story about Deputy Lit and the burglars. How when Lit was first hired, many people around town thought him a figure of amusement due to his size. But that ended one night when three men set out to rob the dime store in the dark hours after midnight. The burglars carried guns for some fool reason. Lit surprised them in the alley as they came out the back door with their loot. Nineteen dollars, mostly in ones, from the cash drawer. And a brown paper sack of stuff they had scooped in leaving. A fat roll of a thousand Daisy BBs, a hawkbill knife with a fake bone handle, a red-and-white paper cylinder of Royal Crown pomade, and a pink rabbit’s-foot key chain. So, altogether, make it twenty-three dollars and change. It shouldn’t have amounted to much trouble at all. A fine would have taken care of it if the magistrate was in a good mood. Except when Lit turned his light on them and told them that they were under arrest, one of the burglars misjudged and pulled his pistol. Lit was afoot and off duty, making one last check of town on his way home. He had his flashlight and nothing else. Nevertheless, the flashlight was longer than Lit’s lower arm from elbow to fingertips, heavy with D batteries stacked down its black metal sleeve. When Lit was done, all three men ended up in the hospital, and the one that pulled the pistol nearly died. He never thought right from that mistaken moment forward. Even now, you could see him most days sitting on the bench outside the pool hall, a slow simple fellow with a deep pink dent in his forehead, smiling at everybody, a friend to mankind. Afterward, a rumor passed around that Lit had been a Ranger in the big war, which meant he could kill you barehanded ten different ways without breaking a sweat.

  —Shit, Bud said at the end of the story. Shit, shit, shit.

  One of the tale tellers, struggling to keep his mouth straight, said to Bud, You know what I think?

  —What?

  —Lit must have taken a shine to you.

  So, Bud reckoned, a bad move for starters, calling attention to himself with the law. But don’t look back. You make your mistakes, and then fuck it. You don’t dwell, you move forward.

  And sure enough, as night settled in and the marksmen quit shooting their guns and drank more beer and ran their mouths, they taught Bud something welcome. They bitched about how difficult and expensive it was to get beer and bonded liquor, this being a dry county with nothing but vast national forests and several layers of other dry counties at every quarter of the compass. You either had to drive hours to reach the outer world or else pay the one bootlegger a horrendous markup. It took Bud about three seconds to recognize a ripe situation. And then a day to find the Roadhouse and learn that it served drinks, the local law looking the other way. And only one more day to learn the bootlegger’s name and pay him a friendly visit.

  OLD JONES WAS A BALDY ELDER who had cut his teeth on moonshining back at the edge of the previous century. He wore pressed bib overalls and a starched white shirt and a black suit coat. Farmer below, businessman above. He sat rocking on his porch, looking at the view across the valley. Said he was thinking about cutting open a watermelon if Bud cared to have a slice.

  They ate the melon spraddle-legged, letting the juice drop between their feet and disappear into the porous porch boards. Jones got pretty talky about his early days of moonshining, the copper kettle and copper coil. Eluding revenuers for decades and never serving a day of time. Even now, cooking off about fifty gallons every fall when the evenings grew crisp and he and his white-headed buddies wanted to get away from the wives and camp out in the high mountains for a couple of weeks, running their coon dogs and recollecting lies from their youth. Oh, the happy late nights holding fresh bottles of corn liquor up to firelight and complimenting one another on the fineness of the bead. Now the money was in bootlegging. Hauling bonded stuff. No art, just commerce.

  When Bud grew weary of listening to folklore and turned to business, he bore down pretty hard. Times have changed, was his main theme. Less bullshit, more profit. The new world had gotten dangerous, and Bud embodied the new. In the end, he nudged the bootlegger into retirement with a combination of fairly specific threats and promises involving a slightly vague percentage of an expanded liquor empire run by Bud on sharper modern lines. Long story short, the former bootlegger could sit in his porch rocker and do nothing but collect a monthly check.

  —Good God, Jones said. Don’t you know this is a cash business?

  Bud left with a little brown leather shirt-pocket address book. Inside, a long list of standing orders reaching forward into infinity from everybody in town interested in getting their liquor without committing themselves to a day’s drive. Two fifths of Smirnoff every two weeks. One of Johnnie Walker Red and two of Bacardi monthly. Half gallon of Popov weekly. Page after page. Each order with a name and a number, if you considered 7 and 14-G to be phone numbers, which Bud didn’t. So, what a happy surprise when actual liquor customers answered his calls.

  By the end of his second week in town, Bud had made four long runs in the pickup and found himself amazed at how fast you make friends when you’re the bootlegger. Amazing, as well, to be gainfully self-employed so soon after arriving in town wondering how far he could stretch a pocket of greasy bills from his gas station stickups if he lived frugal, which was never likely to happen. Yet, in a matter of days, he had income.

  Jones’s little b
rown book made the new vocation possible, so Bud stopped by one afternoon and peeled off a few twenties as a first fraudulent percentage for the old boy, who was an entertaining little shit when you compared him to the run of regular people. Sat on the porch with him, drinking a tumbler of his shine mixed fifty-fifty with lemonade, and Jones told every bit of local gossip he knew. Always an appealing trait, but especially now, when anything about a couple of new kids would be so interesting.

  When Bud finally got ready to leave, already down the porch steps on the way to the truck, the old man said, You ever wonder why there hasn’t been but one bootlegger in this end of the county?

  Bud said, Nope.

  Old Jones said, Twenty years ago, if you’d come to my house saying the things you did last time, you’d have found yourself at the bottom of the lake by midnight.

  STEADY MONEY GOT BUD to wanting a Mercury, equipped with every hot nonstock item a car can have in regard to carbs and cams and transmissions and hubcaps. A Hurst shifter with an eight ball. Kind of car that could twist the speedometer off the end without breathing hard.

  But then he took a woman he’d met at the Roadhouse to the drive-in one night, Thunder Road, which proved so instructive that Bud fended off her groping at his trousers to attend to the lesson. Robert Mitchum had a shit-hot car, and the movie showed exactly where that got him. Dead was where. Glorious, but nevertheless dead. Fact of nature, hot cars draw trouble. So, better than getting away from the law in white-knuckle races over twisted mountain roads was never having to run because you looked plain as dirt and they paid you no heed.

  Next day, Bud settled for getting the truck’s radio and gas gauge fixed. He bought a brown canvas tarp to cover his load and a dozen bales of hay to strew for camouflage in the bed. As for cash investment in his new business, that was it.

  He wanted to feel the glow of his accomplishment, but he made the mistake of projecting his thoughts into the future. He ran the numbers in his head, and found that hauling liquor paid considerably better than lubing boxcar couplings, but even if he worked until he was as old as the former bootlegger, he’d never make back what Lily took from him. And he’d always live like he had the muzzle of a gun to his head, those two idiot kids with their grubby fingers on the trigger.

  CHAPTER 8

  —IMAGINE, LUCE SAID. What if a locomotive pulling flat-cars loaded down with fresh-cut logs came chugging through right now. You’d smell dirty coal smoke and cinders. And then, when the cars passed, new-cut oak and poplar and maple, all crisp and clean. The ground shaking and the rails clacking against the big wheels and the sleepers shifting under the weight.

  The children paid no attention to Luce but stood with their heads bent, studying a fanned branch of hemlock needles. They began backing slowly away, as if the branch were dangerous, a bear or snake.

  —Luce said, What is it?

  Dolores and Frank turned and continued walking down the sunken bed of an abandoned narrow-gauge logging railway from early in the century, which even now made a good trail for the daily jaunts through woods and fields they needed as bad as a high-strung pair of spotted bird dogs. It drained their energy into the ground like electricity and settled them.

  Luce kept hoping that if she talked enough about the relict places she had discovered in her days of freedom, language would rub off on the children. And they seemed to like the walking, and would follow creeks and streams for great distances, slogging through them as if they were trails. Wet to the knees, mossy underwater stones shifting beneath their feet, they bobbled along and for balance waved their arms like lunatics. And if they weren’t doing that, they had to be herded down the curves of trail to keep them from making one of their straight-line marches, regardless of terrain impediments, like they were being pulled by a string down some passage nobody could detect except maybe dousers with their wise twitching sticks crossing and parting to find underground watercourses and other transmissions of unknown powers.

  This day, Luce’s next history stop was a magic place in the river where a Cherokee fish weir still showed its downstream V during times of low water, and where Luce believed she would always catch a fish. Which she demonstrated by cutting a springy pole from a beech and using a string and hook from her pocket and rock bait she’d taken from a secret place in a creek a ways back that old Stubblefield had shown her one day on a walk together, acting like he was giving her the combination to a safe full of money, saying only three people knew the spot and two of them were dead. The result, a rainbow trout she pulled out of the water and showed the children, to no particular impression, despite its brilliant agonizing in the sunlight. She worked the hook from its lip and let it go back into the history it arose from.

  Later, after struggling up to a gap hardly anybody crossed anymore, she showed them a rock cairn where she said people used to mark the end of their climb by adding a stone. It stood knee-high and spilled in a circle six feet across. Luce told the children that if they dug into the pile to the earliest stone, it might well reach back as deep into time as the hairy cavemen who dressed in furs and had enormous feet.

  Farther on, along a stretch of trail Luce had walked at least a dozen times, she noticed something new to her. A stout old oak partly screened by younger trees, the first four feet of its trunk hollow and the crown nearly dead. What Luce first thought was a low limb, much thicker than her torso, ran parallel to the ground and then made an unnatural upward right angle. At the L, a knob of scar.

  Luce went to the tree and raised her arm and cupped her hand on the knob. She realized the odd limb was really the deformed trunk and knew this was a trail tree. One day two or three hundred years back, in a different world, somebody bent down a sapling and torqued it in the middle and sliced it partway through at the angle and tied it to a stake in the ground with withes or ligaments to make it grow that way forever. When the cut healed, the scar kept growing, like an old man’s nose, and it was where the nose pointed that mattered. Go this way, was the message nobody had received for a long time.

  —Where does it aim? Luce asked the children. Maybe to a sweet spring, or a rock overhang sheltering a good camp where we might find an ancient fire ring, scribbles of lost languages, or drawings of animals on the rock. Maybe a cave of treasure hidden from Spaniards in the days of conquistadores marauding for gold.

  The children stood within themselves, without apparent interest. Luce said she was ready to follow the tree’s suggestion, if neither of them had a better one of their own. She threw her right arm forward, her forefinger matching the way the tree pointed.

  The children took the lead and walked straight through general hardwoods and clumps of laurels, galax and its dank body smells. Luce came behind, keeping her eyes open, though nothing presented itself worth deforming a tree to indicate. Following the line, they crossed a creek and climbed to a shelf of land, a dry place with hickory and locust and a few pine trees. Open woods.

  Then down into a wet cove. Dense old-growth hemlocks. The limbs of the big trees lapped over one another, shutting out the light. All Luce could smell were the astringent needles and wet rot. Dolores and Frank kept marching forward under the trees. The light was filtered and green, and their footsteps fell silent in the dead needles that lay a million years deep. Dodging giant fallen trunks, nurse logs sprouting moss and ferns and new hemlock saplings from their own brown decay. The children kept to the line. They went downslope until the contour of the land leveled into a clearing. But not really a clearing, a blank space in the world. They stopped short at the edge of a drop.

  As long as she could remember, back to the freedom of childhood, Luce had believed that if you walk in the deep woods long enough, you’ll inevitably come to places of mystery or spirit or ritual. But she hadn’t ever found a place like this, and she hadn’t expected to feel so scared when she did. It was a perfect round hole down through the earth. A deep cylinder of still air encompassed by dark rock. Not a lot farther across than you could throw a softball. Far down inside,
black liquid lay still as the face of a mirror. The hole was set about with hemlocks, their trunks dark and massive. The children went right to the lip and looked down, and Luce felt scared and reached for them, expecting them to flinch, but they didn’t. They let her hold their clammy little hands with crud in the creases.

  She walked them all the way around the pit’s lip, looking for a slightly sunken track through a corridor of younger trees. If the place had once been a quarry, wouldn’t there be signs of an old road or rail bed for hauling out the shattered rock? Spalls and shards scattered on the ground. But Luce found no sign of disturbed ground and no obvious break in the circle of tree trunks, so stout that many of them must have begun life back before the flood of white people into the landscape. The rock inside the hole was free of half-round drill marks or raw grey jags sharp as knapped flint from blasting. Nothing but serene smooth stone with lichen and a few ferns growing in nooks and crannies.

  Luce let go of Dolores’s hand and picked up a rock the size of a grapefruit and lobbed it out into space, and then grabbed back the hand. The rock arced and fell and fell and fell and then broke the surface of the black liquid with no splash, like there was forty-weight down there. She guessed her rock would keep falling slowly through the thick liquid in total darkness nearly forever. People shoveling wells or outhouse holes or graves, when they got past knee-deep, joked about digging to China. But however deep the black hole went, Luce figured China wasn’t near weird enough to be where it came out.

  Luce realized she hadn’t said a word for some time, so she tried to devise commentary. Something about young warriors coming here alone to spend the night and test their courage. Or maybe ceremonies with big bonfires and drums and dancing. That’s what the tree aimed people toward. What she didn’t say was that the message of the tree was surely Don’t go this way. And the sign that meant don’t had been lost to time.