“Down,” I said, pushing him back some.
He settled, and I turned on the radio.
“If you look to the stars in three weeks, you’ll see something those of us in the South haven’t seen in a while. The Northern Lights. Yes, that solar storm they predicted should hit the last week of the month and grow more colorful later on in the week. By that Friday it’ll be done, so make sure you pick a good cloudless night and grab you a seat! This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. Looks like we got a caller…”
“You believe that happy crappy?” I asked Raider.
He didn’t answer me, he’d fallen asleep. Being a dog must be a rough life. I still had to rinse and bleach these barrels to sanitize them, put them in the sun behind the barn, order propane… I pulled into the driveway, noticing that Grandpa’s truck was back. I parked next to him and let Raider out. He barked and started chasing chickens, but came back to me once I called him off. I was heading into the foyer. Usually, the TV or the radio was on. Grandma had tinnitus and liked background noise, not the ringing in her ears.
“Hello?” I called.
“In here,” Grandma called from the living room quietly.
Raider beat me in there by a long shot and was sitting on the couch next to her when I got there. Grandpa was nowhere to be seen, and I figured he was in the barn. The thing that concerned me was that Grandma’s cheeks were wet, like she’d been crying.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her, worried she’d fallen and hurt herself.
“He didn’t want to go,” Grandma said softly.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her again.
“They said it looks big, but they want to do exploratory… surgery,” she swallowed hard.
“Cancer?” I asked her quietly.
“Yes,” she said, “at least, that’s what they’re figuring. They’ll know after they cut the tumors out.”
“Tumors?”
“We were gone all day because the regular doc took some pictures and then sent us up to the hospital where we did that cat scan thing.”
“They got you in fast,” I said, absentmindedly.
She nodded.
“So when do we do the surgery?” I asked her.
“We don’t have enough to cover the co-pay on something like that.”
I think that was the moment I decided to roll the dice, though that might have been a lie. I’d been thinking about it long before she’d said that, but thinking and making the decision were two separate things.
“Let me worry about it, Grandma,” I told her. “I have to unload the truck and then make one more stop up to Home Depot.”
“I… What are you…?”
“I need another propane Turkey Fryer or two,” I told her.
I could run three at once. I just needed to split the propane line in the barn for three outlets and run the lines from the fryers to it. I could run two stills and be heating water for mash on the third. We could do this.
“Give me a week or so, maybe two,” I told her. “Go ahead and call the hospital and tell them.”
5
I was sore, I’d worked for almost twenty-four hours straight, filling every barrel we had with mash and getting the airlocks on. I’d also run one of the stills the entire time, realizing with trial and error that I couldn’t keep an eye on all three kegs, at least not until I had more practice and worked out my workflow. Boiling water for mashing the grains and watching two stills and making the cuts was too much, but I could do two at a time for now.
“What are you cooking up?” Grandpa asked, walking into the stall, sitting down.
“Bunch of shine,” I told him.
“I see that you been working your fool head off. When you gonna sleep?” he asked.
“Tonight,” I told him, “or as soon as this run is done.”
“You know, your grandma’s worried about you.”
“Me?” I asked him, surprised.
“Said you came out here and went to work. I was so shocked at the news I got, I took me one of her nerve pills and slept right through supper and woke up this morning, so yeah… she said you were out here for almost all that time.”
“Yeah. I’ve got twelve barrels more going, got two to distill out.”
“You’ve picked up more stuff,” he said, noting how I’d rearranged his still room without asking.
“Yes, sir. Plumbed in more gas lines for another couple of burners, added another barrel of water in case the first one gets too hot.”
“You got you some kinda deal?” he asked me pointedly.
“Lester found somebody. The folks we made the twenty gallons for. They loved your Uncle Jessie’s Sour Mash recipe. If I rotate the barrels and can do two barrels a day, keep rotating them, I should have enough to—”
“That’s pert near ten to twelve gallons of whiskey a day,” he said, his eyebrows shooting up.
“Yeah, figure each barrel is going to take four runs on the still to empty, so if I run two stills, that’s about ten hours a day,” I told him.
“You don’t think the propane company is going to get mighty curious?” he asked.
“Not at first. We could have had a slow leak. They filled it up an hour ago by the way.” I told him, avoiding the fact I was now flat broke.
“What are you doing, boy?”
“Making sure you get your surgery.”
“You gonna be all careful, like?” he asked softly, not looking me in the eye.
“As much as I can be. They want me to deliver directly. I’ll pay Lester his fee myself.”
“How much are they asking and how often?”
It was something we’d both talked at length about over the years, finding a consistent buyer. Somebody who would take in such a quantity that we could make easy, consistent money, without making twenty different stops on delivery days.
“Forty gallons, every week or other.”
“So you run the stills here four or five days a week, both of them. You figure out the propane usage and how long it’ll last?”
“Well, I’ve meant to talk to you about something,” I told him. “We’ve got that small propane tank at the house. It wouldn’t look all that unusual if we ordered one of those big pigs for the barn. They’d think we were running a heater out here, maybe a water heater. Heck, we could get ourselves a few pigs so we could fatten them up on spent corn and grains that we’re about to have a ton of.”
“I’m worried about a deal so big,” Grandpa Bud admitted.
“I am too, but if we only did this for a month…”
“Running ten to twelve gallons four or five days a week wouldn’t cut off our old customers either. We can’t do that, or they’re likely to get pissy, and nobody wants pissy customers, especially when their liquor runs out.”
“That’s what I was thinking. It’ll be hard at first, but if I keep that going and keep the mash going…”
“We’re gonna need more yeast.”
“I got a plan for that, please trust me, Grandpa.”
“I… ok. What can I do to help?”
“Now that I’m done cooking mash, can you give me a hand finding the insulation for these two kegs and some to wrap the condensers?”
“We didn’t use that kind of stuff in my time, we just—”
“I know, Grandpa, but if I can take this from ten hours a day to eight hours a day, or make it more efficient, we don’t have to do it this way forever.”
“You go find the insulation, it’s up on the shelf near the tractor. I’ll watch this. Smells like you’re running hearts.”
“Yup, just started running,” I said, pointing to the pile of new canning jars and lids I’d picked up at Home Depot.
“You get you that insulation out, and we’ll put it on when these kegs cool down. In the meantime, get you some sleep. I can watch liquor cook for an hour or five, I ain’t dead yet.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, loving to hear the fire in his voice.
He’d sounded so scared before. I kn
ew the idea of running and selling this much shine scared me, but he wasn’t scared of that so much as now knowing he had something growing inside him. It was out of control and running amok. I didn’t know much about medicine, but a benign tumor or tumors didn’t usually make you lose weight, did it? I didn’t think so, and I had been worried for a long time. It had just kind of snuck up on us, until one day I was looking at a picture of him and Grandma and realized he’d gone from stocky to thin. He was bordering on not being thin anymore, almost into gaunt territory.
He was still healthy though, as healthy as he could be. I nodded to Grandpa and headed to the other side of the barn. I found the insulated water heater blankets. I cut one in half, not realizing that the other side would be needed to run two kegs. Running one of them worked so much better than his old copper unit. I headed back into the stall, putting them on the floor between our respective chairs, and took a seat.
“Kick your feet up, boy, give your eyes a rest.”
“Sure,” I told him, my feet going up on the old bucket we kept around for that.
It felt good - the heat, the smell of fermentation… I needed to call Lester. I pulled my phone out before I could drift off and dialed his number.
“Hey, kiddo,” he said. “What you doing calling this old fool for?”
I was puzzled for a second, and with a start realized I’d called him on my personal phone, not a burner. I kicked myself.
“I just wanted to let you know, Grandpa’s doctor's appointment…”
“Oh, kid… I…”
“Yeah,” I told him, “so I’ll be in touch with you in a little bit. We might have to do a spaghetti dinner or something.”
“Let me know how I can help.”
“Thanks, Les,” I told him.
“Anytime Wes,” he said with a half-hearted laugh.
I hung up and walked to my truck and fished under the seat and pulled out this week’s burner phone. I put the battery in and walked back into the barn while it was booting and sat down.
“Spaghetti dinner?” Grandpa asked. “Boy, I’m not a charity case.”
“No, I forgot and called him from my phone, I had to say something.”
“You two are even more paranoid than I am,” Grandpa grumped.
The phone booted and, from memory, I texted the burner Les had for that week.
You know who has cancer. I’m leery of the big deal, but I’m in if it’s what we’re talking about.
Cancer? Sorry. Will let the buyer know. When do you want the address of drop off?
Now is good, I can do research before first delivery. I need contact details too.
Lance Warcastle at The Barred Rooster next town over.
I almost threw my phone.
Raider just looked at me, his head cocked to the side.
6
I wasn’t going to have quite forty gallons this week unless I broke into my personal reserves I’d been storing on oak. I had eight gallons of rum that had been sitting in an old, used Jack Daniel’s barrel that had been rinsed out and then refilled. If Lance would take that, then he could buy himself enough time for his mash to ferment out.
Lance! Damn, in school he’d been the bane of my existence. If there was one person I remembered from school who’d been horrible to me, he’d was the first name that popped into my head. That, and he was dating Jessica. Dammit. Still, I wouldn’t let an old grudge kill this deal. Hell, I’d gladly forget and forgive if it ensured my grandpa would do all right. It wasn’t the end of the week, but I wanted to head into the Barred Rooster before things got busy. Grandpa was minding things back at the homestead, like he’d been doing longer than I’d been alive.
The gravel crunched as I pulled into the parking lot, and I picked a spot off to the side of the door and backed the truck in. Rule one of moonshining was never talk about moonshining. I was about to break it. Rule two of moonshining was, always have an exit plan. I planned to come right out of the front door there and get into my truck and head straight out the exit. If that was blocked for whatever reason, there was another exit on an adjoining road. Failing that, the grass was cut between the exits and the curb wasn’t big. I doubted anybody was going to block my exit, but it was something to think about when you’re always watching out for the law.
“You stay here, boy,” I told Raider, cranking my window half down before closing the door.
I opened the door to the bar and stepped in. A waitress was turning stools over from the tabletops, getting ready for the day.
“We’re just opening, hon, but you can sit at the bar if you don’t want to wait on a table.”
“Thanks,” I told her and gave her a small smile.
Rule number three, don’t act unusual. A pretty lady talks to you, you’re supposed to smile. Even when you’re pissed, nervous, or paranoid.
I walked over to the bar and sat down, noting the bartender was on a stool near the door, his back to me, talking into the handset of a phone mounted on the wall. I wasn’t in a hurry and saw I was the only one inside, other than a couple of employees. The bartender hung up the phone and turned, seeing me. Oops. That wasn’t the bartender.
“Can I get you something to eat or drink?” Lance asked, walking over.
“Sure,” I said softly, “How about some white dog? One shot.”
“Coming right up,” he said, then paused, recognition coming over his features.
“Hey… you’re…” he snapped his fingers a couple times, my name on the tip of his tongue. “Flagg… Westley Flagg?”
“Good memory. Lance Warcastle?” I asked.
“You got it,” he said, without teasing or rancor in his voice.
“What kind of shine do you have on hand?” I asked him.
He didn’t know it was me. Lord, he didn’t know it was me. His face would have betrayed that as he pulled a bottle off the shelf behind him.
“I’ve got corn whiskey, vodkas, and some rum.”
“Rum?” I asked him.
“Sure, people like to drink it,” he said with a grin.
I saw what he was doing now. He was pouring the shine in with his other liquor. He probably still had some of the original liquor in it, but had watered it down with shine or…
“I’ve also got a new label of shine we’ve been selling the customers,” he said, pulling out a mason jar that had a label on it.
“Huh,” I said, taking the jar and looking it over.
It looked legit, but I’d never heard of the distillery. Ahhhh, this guy was bold, and it worried me. If he was so bold, his distributors might get wise to what he was doing and turn him into the law. Still… I’d got the figures back for the surgery. I needed to find six thousand dollars for Grandpa’s surgery, and if I hustled and did this deal for two weeks, we could get the ball rolling. I’d put half down and half the day of surgery. I’d made Grandma call and ask to set things up, and she had.
“So I have a question for you,” I said, putting the jar on the bar and leaning in close.
Lance looked confused, then leaned in himself.
“Would you take eight gallons of aged oak rum and thirty-two gallons of shine, instead of the regular forty gallons of shine this week?”
Lance almost jumped back in surprise.
“Well, shit,” he said after a moment, laughing.
“Howdy,” I said lamely.
“You?” he asked.
“Me,” I agreed.
“Let’s talk back in the kitchen, the girls are going to get this place ready to go and…”
“Loose lips?” I asked.
“Exactly.”
He made a come here motion, and I got off the stool while he shelved the jar and walked around and behind the bar, following him through the double doors back to the kitchen. It was gleaming, stainless steel over top of what looked like sealed terracotta tile. The walls were coated with easy to wash FRP board, a plastic looking paneling that was easy to wipe off, and fire resistant. The textured surface of it contrasted with t
he stainless work surfaces everywhere.
“Wow, I thought this place was just a honky tonk,” I said, looking at the vast area.
“It is for right now. We’ve got room in this kitchen to really make this place a great dining area in the day and a lively dance hall and drinking establishment later on,” he said, pulling out two stools and motioning for me to take one before he sat on the other.
“I think you could do it, that is, if you could get the holy rollers to leave you be.”
“I was actually hoping to have that open at the same time. We’ve got short order cooks, but I’m looking for somebody who can cook the fancy stuff.”
“Sometimes people like their food a little country,” I told him truthfully.
He laughed and started tapping on the stainless counter we were sitting next to.
“That’s true, which is why I have the business name and address and the DBA of a fictitious distillery. What I don’t have, is the ability to produce the liquor. I’m guessing that’s where you come in?”
“Yes, I’m the guy our mutual friend got in contact with.”
“The Sunoco, I never would have thought…” he said grinning, “I can’t be running all over town picking things up in random spots. I’ve got all the problems of somebody who owns a bar but doesn’t know how to run it well yet. I think my manager is skimming, the ladies aren’t reporting their tips the way they should, and I think the bartenders’ pours are a little too long. Which means I have to keep an eye on things and I’m going to have a hard time splitting up the shine, doing the running, and everything else.”
“Which is why you wanted me to deliver directly.”
“Exactly. Hell, if you could split things up into smaller batches for me, I could pay you a premium.”
More than he already was?
“I don’t know. I have some worries,” I told him.
“What’s that?”
“You mixing your shine with your regular booze to get more bang for your buck?”
“Sure, why?” he asked.
“You’ll want to quit doing that, and hurry. The feds come in, they have a tool that can tell you what kind of alcohol is in what. They find corn whiskey in the vodka, for example, they’re going to know right away. On top of that, your distributor finds out you’re watering down their product, and they have test strips for that… they’ll turn you in themselves.”
Blackout: Still Surviving Page 4