CHAPTER 1
1989
Big Whiskey
For as long as Tom Grady could remember, he had always been hungry. He sat in Smith’s Feed & Farm Supply, his hulking self hunched over a gallon of bacon & beans cold out of the can. Sauce drizzled down his chin. His gut sang with every syrupy spoon. He shoveled and shoveled more into his mouth until he hit bottom tin, dropped the can at his feet and stifled his belch with a fist. Little Matthew, his 8 year-old baby brother, stood worshipful in front of him, held out his half-uneaten Neapolitan ice cream sandwich as offering, in the event it be required as well.
Tom had just hefted the front end of a 5000 pound Fleetwood Cadillac, and held it for three minutes. He’d felt the weight of it shoving down on his forearms as they ripped themselves and rebuilt brand new in that very moment. His eye had twitched and shuddered. A bead had run down his jaw and neck.
Tom’s muscles ached from the labor he’d just performed, and they needed the fuel. Their mama, Mary-Alice, swore he’d nearly eaten them flat broke from a toddler. She’d feed him until he about popped and an hour later he’d be asking for more. Bologna sandwiches by the packful. Pots of beanie wienies didn’t last the hour. Peanut butter by the jar. Growing older hadn’t changed the frequency of his meals, only what he craved to eat.
It was Alicia Grantham who blew out a tire on Highway 590, just a half a mile away and on route herself to Smith’s for an ice tea and biscuit. Rance McCinnis, who ran the flower shop up past Tyler’s Welding and Steel Work, had been the first to pull over and offer a hand and made a botched job of setting the jack and managed get it crushed underneath (it being one of those piss-poor factory jobs that come along with the vehicle). He had at least managed to get the lugs took off before the fiasco, so when Tom came strolling down the road, tailgrabbed by his four-foot sidekick and minstrel, he only had to lift the front end and hold it just long enough for Rance to slide the spare on and one or two lugs.
People had heard his name since he was a boy. Tossing unbusted quarry rocks off a flatbed as a toddler. Bent steel rebar at ten and half. At seventeen, he stood already above 6’6, and muscles tore out of his skin. People around never knew quite what to make of him, though he smiled often and rare was the time he wasn’t around to help out with some chore or other. Mary-Alice loaned him out to neighbors frequently in his childhood to help with the farming. He’d had to go down into the swamp bottoms below Sissy Gordy’s place and pull her fool steer out of the mud. Tied it off under its crossribs. Hadn’t a horse handy to be able to get down into the bottom. Tom threw it over shoulder and hauled it out in a hurry. Mudd slurping and gurgling to refill the hole left behind. Come butchering time, they gave Mary-Alice the shanks and twenty pounds of its chuck.
As long he was kept well filled with cornbread and buttermilk he ran like a steam engine. Now this business with the Cadillac. It was already spreading through the hollers and bottoms like a bout of chest crud. The real announcement of himself had come his freshman year. Fatass Bucky Jackson had thudded his way right up to Tom his first day in the cafeteria. He’d brought an old Dairy Fresh gallon ice cream bucket filled to its brim with his mama’s zipper peas and sausage. If he got lucky, it would hold him till afternoon break when he could eat the pound of peanut brittle he had stowed in his booksack. But Bucky hadn’t cared for the 14 year-old that stood half a head taller than most seniors. Muscled-up with them little abdominals that made all the girls giggly. He didn’t care for little freshman squirts as a general rule, and had made it his special mission both his prior senior years to vex and confound the buggers into shitting their britches and crying home to their mamas. So, Bucky hocked him the frothiest loogy he could muster and fatted his way right up to the kid and slobbered it right down into Tom’s bucket of lunch. Not a beat and Tom fistfired the heaviest cannonshot he had into the fat tub’s gullet. Flew up straight up in the air. Ten feet across the room. Big Bucky Jackson’s fat face slapped the back wall with a thonk and sent him to bed. Half dollar matching bloodspots on the wall and his left temporal. Right eye winked ever since.
All that and add to it him being the first-born son of none other than Hank Grady was enough to solidify his reputation in the eyes of Culloden County folks twice over.
Hank Grady, the boy’s father, had never understood any of it. Some occasionally jested it was due to that nuclear testing they’d done up at Jasperville got in the water and turned Tom into some sort of mutant. Old Hank was known to have been around that part of the county the time of the blast and it was widely wondered whether the younger boy, Matt, would turn out odd in some way, too.
“I was all the way up in Coalwater when they shot that thing off. That was right when I took Sheriff Brody for a ride into the ditch,” Hank would say. Hank, on the off chance he was around and not on the road, had lately been tooting his own horn more than normal on account of talk was more often of his boy rather than himself these days. Just some rough-riding old moonshiner tales didn’t get the job done anymore when there was a boy around who could likely box a bulldozer.
“Big Whiskey!” Charlie Ford would call out every time he saw Tom. “When you gone take them boys to a state championship?”
“I’ll try hard this year,” Tom would say.
“Y’ought to turn to bulldogging, son,” another would say. “Them fellers make good prize money.”
“I might,” Tom would say.
Of course, little Matt soaked it all in more than anyone seemed to notice. He was a one boy walking cult of Thomas Waylon Grady. As far as he was concerned the world began, middled and ended with his big brother. There was certainly no foe real or imaginable Tom couldn’t best in a straight fight and before lunchtime at that. Little Matt already had some drawings he’d worked up to prove the fact. He’d placed them in a file under his bed for safe keeping.
Not a day later, Hank had both boys in the pickup coming back from the Collierville General Medical from having had some kind of check-up and was burning hot up Highway 11 having not the slightest idea there was a highway patrol flashing far off behind him. Tom could tell from the grit on his grin that Hank was in no mood for chatter and did well to keep quiet. He did take note of the new golf community going up near the intersection. Tom was no big fan of golf, but he could see it might appeal to some.
Little Matt had noticed the lights, however, and had logged it in his notebook already. In fact, Hank had pulled down the drive to the house he’d finally bought off the Pickfords and parked the pickup before the highway patrol even figured out where he’d gone. He’d run the engine so hot, he was worried he’d finally blown the old crate 350 motor it come with and had Tom spraying it down with the garden hose when the patrolman came sliding up the drive and jumped out with his stick in his hand.
The patrolman screamed at Tom to drop down on the ground and not to move. Tom looked at the officer and all around him to see what he thought was going on. He had no idea a patrol car was after them, and Tom wondered did Hank not have some contraband or other lying about from McCory or somebody he was supposed to make a run with this afternoon. Hank was bad about contraband. He’d actually helped Charlie McCory smuggle a yak up to somebody out near Lathan just last month. Why anybody’d need a yak that bad was a mystery to Tom.
The Patrolman stood sneering and spitting and sweating and holding that baton out like a rifle barrel and barking yet more for Tom to drop. Tom was aiming his eye for Hank who seemed nowhere to be found and so was unsure what to do. As a general rule, Gradys never bowed down to po-licemen for any reason he’d been taught to imagine. Little Matt was steady recording the incident for posterity, eyes set hard to Tom in the event the patrolman decided to fire his pistol and Matt could witness firsthand the bullets bouncing off. Such was Matt’s theory on the outcome of such an affair.
“Put your stick down, you son of a bitch,” Hank yelled, finally coming from out of the house with his face half shaved. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing?”
??
?Sir, you step back now, I made this boy doing 110 up the highway. That’s a 55 zone, son. Do understand there’s laws in this country?” the cop barked.
“Shut up, you goddamn fool” Hank yelled and stepped off the porch. The patrolman tickled his pistol and cocked his eye at Hank. “There ain’t no law in play here ‘cept me and my family standing here living peaceful and a shitbird like you screaming evil at us. Now, I can’t see but that we’re just a gang of fellers out here having ourselves a truck wash.”
“Wash, my ass, you burned your engine up running from me.”
“Something you’ve not a prayer to prove. And without that, I reckon you best head on down the road. This is private property. You got that, son?” Hank hollered back at him.
The patrolman scowled and looked back and forth at the two not even sure which one he wanted to arrest. Not that he could arrest either in any case.
“I’ll be waiting for you,” the officer finally said, not wanting to seem beaten. “I’ll get you.”
“I hope so, you fool. In fact,” Hank said. “I’ll tell you what. See that big red truck right there?” Hank said, pointing at his red Kenworth big rig. “I’ll be barreling out of here headed out 590 West in just a few minutes now. In fact, I’ll be blaring out ninety to nothing headed out to Lathan to pick up a load. I hope you’re out there waiting on me. I pray right now in the name of my daddy’s Jesus that you come a-haul-assing after me. I’m going to be screaming that hoss down the road, and I just wonder what will happen to a goddamn piss-ant little shit of a lawman like you when you come alongside of that rig when it gets up to speed. I pray to God I see what that’s like. Now, remember you promised me, son. You made a promise. You better well be waiting on me.”
Hank spat on the ground in front of the cop and then walked back in the house. The cop stared in disbelief, first at Hank’s departure and then at Tom’s blank look. Tom, not sure what in the world to do now, turned back to the trooper and reiterated.
“Sir, I guess, you ought to go now. I think my daddy’s mad.”
The trooper cussed under his breath and got back in his car and took off spitting dirt up the drive. Tom went on with his hosing and Matt took in the whole business with a spot of concern on his face. Matt had very few experiences with his father and was not sure now but Hank might even have some sort of powers that were yet unaccounted for. He would have to make note to explore this new avenue. If such a thing was to run in the family, there was hope yet he’d have a power of his own.
When Hank finally exploded from the house fully dressed and geared for the road, Tom laid the news on him that the motor had blown.