by Taylor Brown
“‘State within a state,’” said Rory, quoting the county’s motto.
“This damn place.”
Blue ranges, jagged, dominated the horizon in three directions, walling off the county like a fortress. A magazine had dubbed it the “Moonshine Capital of the World.”
They arrived just after noon, navigating a bewildering set of red farm roads, none of them marked or named. The airstrip was bulldozed into a string of harvested tobacco fields down in the lower part of the county, where the land flattened out. The earthmovers were parked a little ways from their handiwork, a couple of three-wheeled tractors, red as fire engines with tires treaded like paddlewheels. One was mounted with a dozer blade, the other a road scraper, their seats surrounded by a motley crop of levers and pedals. They looked tired, still dirty from the work.
Liquor cars lined the airstrip, plain-Jane coupes that anyone might drive, clerks or foremen or shopkeepers. But they seemed fatter than their civil kin, meaner. Their tires were wider, their rumps higher. Large-bore pipes snaked through their undercarriages, exiting like gun barrels beneath their tails. There were armor plates in their doors, their trunks hulled out for space. All of them had their hoods already up, displaying motors built as carefully as giant hearts. Men milled around them, hands in their pockets, nodding and spitting tobacco juice in the dirt when they liked something or didn’t.
Rory pulled bumping over the field and parked at the end of the line. Eli jumped out to pop the hood. Men began to shuffle toward them, drawn to the supercharged motor like cows to a feeder. Rory stood away, letting them talk. He found himself next to the driver of the neighboring car, a towering man with a boyish face.
“Rory,” said Rory, extending his hand.
“Junior,” said the man. The name rolled from his tongue, soft and gentle. June-yuh. They shook, and Rory could feel the calloused strength of the man’s bear-size hand.
“Wait,” he said. “Is your daddy Glen Johnson, from up at Ingle Hollow?”
The man nodded. “Yes, sir.”
In the thirties, revenuers had seized more than seven thousand gallons of white liquor from the man’s home—one of the biggest busts in history.
“Junior Johnson,” said Rory. “People say you can drive a car.”
Junior shrugged. His hands were in his pockets now, his eyes scouting the hills.
“I better.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Rory saw Cooley Muldoon detach himself from his green Hudson, heading their way. He was wearing a white longjohn shirt under a red flannel with rolled sleeves, his suspenders down. A knife the size of a small sword flopped against his leg as he walked. Two or three others followed behind him, big men, his brothers or kin.
Junior watched them come.
“Looks like they got eyes on you.”
“Damn pop-skullers,” said Rory.
“So I hear.”
Cooley carried a jar high against his chest. All his power was up in his face, his smirking mouth, like a spring tree with the sap running. He looked at Rory the whole way, but turned his attention to Maybelline once he got close. He circled the car, bending to its every detail, clucking and poking. Eli became distracted, watching him.
“See something you like?”
Cooley straightened, shrugged.
“Looks like a right pig to me.”
Eli spat.
“Ain’t how it looks that matters, now is it?”
“Some old whore tell you that?”
Rory’s blood ran hot, rising against his skin. He held his breath quivering in his chest, loosing it slowly through his nose. The iron of the pistol throbbed in his calf.
Eli pointed below Cooley’s belt.
“You got some holes there in your britches,” he said. “Drop some ashes in you’ lap?”
The other men laughed. Even the kinsmen cracked grins, and a crazed look came into the Muldoon boy’s face. One eye seemed to grow higher and larger than the other, as if his face had been glued from dissimilar halves. “Fifty bucks says you two sons of bitches can’t beat me into the mountains with a half-ton of sugar.”
Rory could feel every eye turned upon him. Junior stood beside him, tall and strong as a tree, his blue eyes judgeless.
Rory spat.
“It ain’t a game, Cooley. All this. Someday you’ll learn that.”
Junior nodded, and Rory was turning from the conversation, digging his pockets for his missing cigarettes, when Cooley let out a scream, high and curdling, like a panther in the night. Rory stopped dead, as if his name had been called, then turned slowly on his heel. The world was white and cold beneath his eyes.
“Make it a yard, motherfucker.”
One hundred dollars.
Cooley hawked and spat an enormous gob into his palm, extending his hand with a grin.
* * *
They heard it first, a tiny drone that warbled in and out of earshot. They searched for it, squinting beneath the flat of their hands, grown men each wanting to see it first. There it was: just a wink in the far sky, like a daytime star, growing over the jagged spine of the Brushy Mountains. It seemed to sprout wings as it neared them, resolving to shape. A cargo plane skinned in naked aluminum, the twin radial motors humming in their cannonlike nacelles, spitting oil down the wings.
“Gooney Bird,” said somebody.
The craft circled the field once, silver-struck under the sun, so bright it hurt the eyes. The pilot, they said, was a local boy by the name of Caruthers, who had flown a Flying Fortress in the Mighty Eighth. Obviously, he was enterprising.
One-room holler stores once sold more than a million pounds of sugar per year, more annually than the entire cities of Richmond and Raleigh, until the government came in, throwing up barricades of paperwork. Now any sale over one hundred pounds had to be reported with a special form. The stillers were forced to buy their sugar from black-market profiteers, corrupt army quartermasters, sea captains sailing ten-thousand-ton loads straight out of Cuba. From ex–bomber pilots.
The lumbering transport turned upwind for final approach. It fell lazily from the sky, shimmering like something molten, only to flare its wings at the last moment, the tires blooming twin spirals of dust as they touched. Just in front of them, the tail wheel kicked out and the big plane rotated in place, streaking the world red, blasting the drivers with a stinging barrage of dust and seeds and debris. It settled, pointed back down the runway, ready for takeoff. The prop blades were still winding down as the cargo doors opened and two men stepped down on a retractable ladder. They both wore high-altitude bomber jackets and aviator sunglasses with green lenses. Everyone started toward them in a single movement, like a herd of cattle, but the shorter crewman held up a gloved palm.
“Stop.”
They did. He was scarcely taller than five feet, with a voice that seemed to come from his nose rather than his mouth. But he had a submachine gun strapped across his chest, a mean-looking piece known as a grease gun.
“Who’s this little pinch-a-turd?” asked somebody.
“Caruthers’s old tailgunner,” said somebody else.
The tailgunner raised his voice.
“We’re gonna do this orderly, one at a time.”
“How much is they?”
“Eleven a sack.”
Somebody whistled. “Steep.” Others muttered their assent.
“You don’t like it, don’t buy it.” He pointed to the first car in line. “Bring her up.”
They were hundred-pound sacks, burlap, which read: TRUCANE, PRODUCT OF CUBA. The pilot took the money, making change from a cashbox, while the tailgunner supervised the loading, one hand always on his weapon. It was little more than a metal tube, barrel, and magazine fitted with a wire stock. He looked like he might just enjoy plugging a couple of hillbillies with it.
Rory bought one thousand pounds of sugar from the envelope of cash that Eustace’s courier had delivered. Eight of the sacks fit in the trunk, with the whiskey tank removed, and they tucked the
last pair behind the front seats, covering them in a wool blanket.
Afterward, they sat on Maybelline’s hood, wishing for smokes. Their nerves were up, buzzing under their skin. Junior appeared, holding out a soft pack of cigarettes, a pair of butts sticking up just for them.
“Thank you much.”
“Careful out there,” said Junior. “I wouldn’t trust a Muldoon farther than I could throw him.” With that he walked back to his own machine.
They lit the cigarettes and inhaled, squinting at the line of bootlegging cars. The trip boys were hanging around despite their loaded trunks; no one wanted to miss the show.
Eli ashed his cigarette with a flick of the thumb.
“You ought not to done this.”
“Done what?”
“You gave that crazy son-bitch just what he wanted.”
“What’s that?”
“A crack at you. That’s all he wants.”
Cooley was leaning on his flashy green Hudson, waiting while a bigger man slung his trunk full of sugar. The boy turned and looked at them, his arms crossed, and smiled at them, as if they were friends. Rory smiled back, speaking through his teeth.
“Sometimes when you get what you want, you don’t like it so much.”
“Sure,” said Eli. “And sometimes you do.”
* * *
The cars crouched side by side, each rattling and smoking like a bomb ready to blow. Liquor cars lined the road on either side, chugging at idle, ready to run if the law showed up. Trippers sat on the hoods, warmed by their engines, their eyes bright with anticipation. They were watching the starter, a sprite-size beauty in a red gingham dress. Somebody’s sweetheart. She cocked one hand against her hip and raised a red handkerchief high overhead. Every eye followed that red scrap of cotton, waiting, waiting.
The handkerchief floated free of her hand. The Hornet leapt, torqued sideways with power, and the two machines roared in echelon past the girl, each a side, the bandanna swept tumbling in their slipstream. Great balls of dust billowed from the rear of Cooley’s coupe, like it was on fire, and Rory powered through the wake, blinded, squinting to see the gleaming blade of the bumper. First gear, second, third, topping a hundred miles per hour along the length of the airstrip, the two machines tearing a red storm of dust from the earth, and then they were braking, downshifting for the coming turn. The Cooley boy whipped the Hudson hard into the corner, kicking the tail wide, and Rory followed close, his tires breaking loose as he cocked the wheel opposite the turn, using the throttle to steer. Maybelline rolled well onto her side, sliding sideways as Rory gassed them onto the next stretch of road. Eli rode with both hands on the dashboard, bracing himself.
The car hounded down the next long straight, every surface singing with power. Rory stayed right on the Hudson’s bumper as they tore between reaped tobacco fields, waiting for the boy to make a mistake. Cooley went too fast into a turn, plowing deep into the belly of a deserted crossroads, and Rory goosed past on the inside. Eli howled in delight. Soon they were flying down a narrow road cut through a sea of unharvested corn, the stalks slashing past their windows in a liquid green rush, and then they were sliding in a squall of rubber onto the paved highway that went snaking up into the mountains.
Rory’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror. There was the silver grille of the Hudson, shaped like an enormous frown, and Cooley himself, hunched over the wheel, grinning like a fiend. Rory knew he would spin them if he could, send them into the trees or through the guardrail. He yanked the shifter into third. The tires barked, the dual exhausts racketing between the trees like a machine gun.
The turns were sweeping here, and long, and steep ridges rose to either side so that it was like running through a channel cut into the mountains. He’d never liked this road for that. It seemed like there was nowhere to go, no way to stop what was coming. Still he stepped deeper into the accelerator, the motor surging between ridge and road and sky, mindless, willing to die. Soon the Hudson was shrinking in the mirrors, its power fading, and Rory didn’t let up. He used both lanes when he could, the machine flattening itself to the road as they charged higher and higher into the hills, the mountains rising blue-toothed before them.
They were nearing the town limit of Boone—the finish line—when the road rose to meet the stone bridge of the Parkway overpass, white as a monument in the sun. They flashed through its arched hollows, a blast of sound as if through a chute, and Eli turned to look through the back window.
“Showed that son of a bitch,” he said.
Rory’s eyes flicked to the mirror a moment, the Hudson but a toy in their wake. When his gaze fell again to the road he was stunned to see a doe struck rigid on the pavement before him, ill-propped on a set of splayed and delicate limbs, her ears wide and white-tufted as little wings. She was on that alien river again, so hard beneath her hooves, and this time she could feel it vibrating, speaking through the very meat of her, seizing her heart with a terrible knowledge: she would die.
Rory swerved, flashing past her, and looked to the mirror.
“Move,” he said. “Move!”
She didn’t. The Hudson came straight on, never turning, and struck her square in the hindquarters, slamming her spinning and tumbling across the pavement in a flailing wreck of herself. Her legs thrashed at obscene angles, her neck curling under her body as she rolled. She slid crumpled onto the shoulder and lay there in a whelm of dust, still as a sack of feed.
Rory downshifted.
“The hell?” said Eli.
The Hudson flashed past them, one headlight mangled and bloody, blowing its horn in celebration or spite. Rory wheeled the Ford around in the road, heading back the way they’d come.
“Rory,” said Eli. “Rory!”
He pulled in behind the doe and left the motor running as he stepped out.
She was moving now, or trying to. Her hindquarters lay in ruin, her once-tawny hide stretched over the broken miscellany of what had made her fast and strong. A purple wreckage of crushed bone and meat. Her legs lay wrongly angled, connected only by red strings of remnant tissue. Jags of bone stabbed through the wounds, pooling blood. She smelled already, the flap of her tail tucked tightly between her legs, as if to keep her insides from spilling out. It didn’t. The white tuft had darkened with ooze. Her forelegs were moving, making walking motions though she lay on her side. Her cracked hooves scratched against the pavement.
Rory knelt beside her. One eye looked up at him. It was huge and dark, a brown almost black, round as a world. She had a long neck, slender, with white patches under her chin and around her eyes. He held up his right hand, palm out, like the stone god of the temple. He touched her on the head, gently, between her ears. The meat of his thumb lay in the furrow between her eyes. He tried to give her something in that touch. He wasn’t sure what. Whatever he had.
When he stood he had the pistol in his right hand. He shot her where he had touched her, between the eyes. He didn’t want to look but did. He didn’t want to miss.
* * *
The high country town of Boone. Narrow storefronts lined the street, tall and brick-faced, each a different color. A few cars were parked along the curb for the places open on a Sunday. The movie theater, the pool hall, the soda fountain. The places the people in the teachers’ college went.
The Hudson was parked in front of the drugstore, as agreed. Cooley Muldoon was leaning on one of the posts that held up the sloped roof of the building. Sunken windows stared out of the hand-split shingles above him. Rory made a U-turn in the street and pulled in behind the Hudson. He left the motor running and got out. The hundred-dollar bill was in his hand. What he owed. He had folded the bill into a neat square the size of a postage stamp, pressed tight under his thumb.
Cooley dropped his cigarette and ground it under his toe.
“Got showed, did you?”
The big kinsman behind him chuckled, crossing a pair of ham-size arms.
Rory lifted his free hand in front of Cooley’s f
ace and snapped his fingers. The boy opened his mouth, confused, like Rory knew he would. Rory grabbed the scruff of the boy’s neck and yanked back his head, jamming the bill into his mouth and clamping it shut under the vise of his hand. Cooley grabbed his wrist in both hands and tried to scream but couldn’t. Rory watched the boy’s throat work, pumping down the bill so as not to choke. A stifled scream tickled his palm.
The kinsman was coming at him now. A crude blackjack dangled from his hand, a heavy object stuffed into the end of a long woolen sock. A padlock, maybe, or a fistful of ball bearings. Rory shoved Cooley to the sidewalk and raised his arms to protect his head.
“Drop it!”
The big Muldoon froze, the heavy end of the blackjack sagging limply from his raised hand. It fell to the sidewalk without a bounce, as if magnetized. Behind him stood a giant of a man in uniform, a white napkin hanging from the front of his shirt: Big Carling, sheriff of the high country. He had a belly the size of a pie-safe, hard as a punching bag. A face as square and grim as a stone jug. The blue steel of a Smith & Wesson revolver dangled at his side, sized like a popgun in his overlarge hand.
The man belched through his teeth and stepped off the sidewalk, peering through the windows of the cars. He opened the door of the Ford and pulled back a corner of the blanket that covered the two sacks of sugar there. He walked up to Rory, the pistol tapping against his leg. He was the opposite of Sheriff Adderholt. Carling wore his uniform all the time, the buttons aligned just so, the belt buckle polished bright. He had been a tank commander in Europe. Some said he kept a war-surplus howitzer in his backyard, oiled and polished like a giant pet.
“You a baker, boy?”
“A baker, sir?”
“A baker, got-damnit.”
“No, sir.”
“You wear you a apron at home, tie it in a pretty bow over your bare-naked ass?”
“No, sir.”
“Two hundred pounds of sugar in your backseat, I figure you must be baking me a cake. A cake big as a got-damn house. Otherwise, I might think you was putting that sugar to nefarious ends.”