The Moonshine War

by Elmore Leonard

  Son rolled away from her, off the bed. He felt funny walking out of the room without a stitch of clothes on. He sucked in his stomach and moved carefully, feeling Kay watching him. Son waited in the front room, listening, before he walked over to the front window. He didn't see anyone on the porch or in the yard but, as he waited, listening, he heard a car engine start, beyond the stand of cedars. A moment later the sound faded to nothing down the road. Son walked back to the bedroom.

  Kay was sitting up in bed, holding the sheet in front of her. "Was it him?"

  "I didn't see anybody."

  "What if he was looking in the window?" Son stepped into his pants. "He might have learned a new trick or two."

  Chapter Four.

  Before Son was all the way through Marlett, heading out the highway in his pickup truck, he knew Frank Long was following him--a black Ford coupe hanging back there, keeping its distance. If it wasn't Frank Long he didn't know who it was, so he'd take for granted it was Frank and maybe play with him a little bit--get him tensed up maybe and wondering what the hell was going on, get off alone and see how he handled himself.

  Son left the highway at the county road pointing to Broke-Leg Creek, held back to see the Ford coupe make the turn after him, then was sure he was going to be followed wherever he went. That was fine with Son. He drove past the road that led up through the hollow to his place, went about two miles past it and turned off on a road that skirted the edge of an old worn-out pasture and led back into the woods, narrowing in the dimness and looking more like a trail than . A road. His dad had used this road sometimes to haul in his corn and sugar, but it had not been used much in the past few years. Weeds grew tall down the spine of the road and brush closed in on both sides to scrape against the body of the pickup truck. Maybe Frank would be irritated, getting his car all scratched up. That, too, was fine with Son. He hoped to get Frank Long irritated.

  Finally the road climbed up through dogwood and yellow pine and came out into the sunlight on the ridge that looked down over the Martin property: the pasture and the barn and sheds and the gray-weathered house, little squares way, way down below. Son's pickup bumped along in low gear, passing the place where Mr. Baylor had waited with his deputies the evening before, following the ridge trail through trees and clearings, until Son decided this was about far enough back and away from everything. He got out of the pickup and stood squinting in the sunlight, waiting only a couple of minutes before the Ford coupe came bumping along and pulled up next to him.

  Frank Long's elbow stuck out the window. He said, "Well, here we are."

  Son nodded. "Here we are." He watched Frank open the door and come stiffly out of the car and then press his hands against the small of his back and arch his body as he looked out over the land.

  "It's a nice view," Long said. "But it don't compare to that cozy little setup you got back of town. That I'd say was about it for a Sunday afternoon--truck hid in a shed, jar of moonshine in the kitchen. Where was you, Son? I peered in, I didn't see nobody stirring anywhere. You all must have been down in the cellar putting up preserves." Frank Long grinned. "You helping that nice lady with her canning?"

  Son grinned with him. "You aren't any little sneak, are you? You're a big tall skinny sneak. Grown man peeks in windows--what else you like to watch, Frank?"

  "Being a little sneaky is part of my job, so I know what boys like you are up to."

  "I'll tell you, Frank, anything you want to know."

  "Anything?"

  "Maybe just about anything."

  "How's she, any good?" Long waited when Son didn't answer. "Well, is she? How many times you put it to her?"

  Son kept watching him. Thinking, two steps, two and a half, fake with the right and come in with the left wide, hard against that bony nose and mouth, right where the hatbrim shadow cuts him. But Son knew he would have to keep going and finish it because if he didn't, the .45 would come out of the shoulder sling and he didn't know for sure what Frank had in mind, so Son held on. He didn't smile, he didn't go stone-faced either. He just looked at Frank, telling him he had better ask real questions if he wanted answers.

  "All I wondered," Long said, "was if she's the local whore or Son Martin's special stuff. All right, now I know, we can get to other things."

  "Like whiskey," Son said.

  Long nodded. "Like whiskey."

  "Come on." Son walked out of the clearing into the trees and scrub, Frank Long catching up to stay close behind him.

  Frank wasn't worried; he had lived in the mountains most of his life. He knew the dank smell of the forest and the feeling of silence in the tree dimness--silence, though there were sounds all around them, high up in the trees and in the dense laurel thicket. The sound of their own steps in the leaves, the sharp brittle sound of twigs snapping. He could follow Son anywhere and he could keep up and keep his sense of direction in the thicket and if Son figured to lose him in here, Son had something to learn. Hell, he'd traveled these paths. They were just barely trails leading into where they hid the stills. A man could tramp these woods till he dropped of old age, but if he didn't know what to look for he'd have to be dumb lucky to find anything. Water, that was what to look for: cool stream water a stiller had to have in order to run whiskey. In this hollow it would be Broke-Leg Creek and if Son was going to show him anything he'd have to take him to the creek.

  Son showed him a rock house up in the limestone where his dad had once operated a still: more of an open ledge than a cave, with water seeping in and staining the rock a copper color. He showed Frank Long the aqueduct system his dad had made: split logs hollowed into troughs and laid end to end a quarter of a mile from the spring to the outdoor still. That was another one his dad had used. The third one was in the house Son had built the year he got married, and that still was operating today.

  "Where's the house?" Long was following Son through the laurel, speaking to the back of the man's tan shirt.

  As they came out of the thicket, Son pointed and said, "Down there in the trees. You see the roof and the smoke. I guess Aaron's got the fire going."

  "Where you and your bride lived, huh?" "For a year, before I went in the Army." "Was she from around here? Somebody you knew awhile?"

  "From Corbin. I knew her a few years. Then we seemed to get married all of a sudden." "I know how that is," Frank grinned. "Elizabeth never had any children, which I guess is a good thing."

  He could picture her; he could see the dark-haired girl with freckles, a strong and healthy-looking girl, who had never been sick in her life until the influenza came to Marlett and spread up into the hollows. Son did not see her in the casket. He got home from Camp Taylor the morning of the funeral and went directly to the funeral home where everyone was standing around waiting for him, and the undertaker was wishing they would hurry and get done with expressing their sorrow, because he needed this parlor for somebody else. So they buried Elizabeth Hartley Martin, 1898-1919, in the churchyard. Son got on the train to Camp Taylor and was back in Marlett seven days later for his mother's funeral and burial in the cemetery, next to his wife.

  Son could picture her, the twenty-year-old girl he had married, but he seldom thought of her as his wife; he could see her smile and her nice even white teeth with the freckles across her nose, a pretty girl he had taken to dances and out riding in a buggy. He didn't think of her as his wife and it gave him a start sometimes when he remembered he had once been married. He would probably marry again. It seemed natural, though it wasn't a simple thing to do now--with Frank Long standing with his hands in his pocket squinting down the slope at the little house where Son Martin worked his still. Son watched. He said, "You want to look at the still?"

  Frank Long turned, looking past Son, up the slope and to the dark ridges beyond. "Well, as you know, I'm more interested in old whiskey than new stuff. I'm interested to know where an old man would hide a hundred and fifty barrels." His gaze roamed over the slope studying the thickets and trees and the outcroppings of sandst
one.

  "Where'd the old man dig his coal at?" "All over here," Son answered.

  "I see where there might be some shafts. He worked all alone?"

  "Usually. Sometimes Aaron helped him when he wasn't working the farm."

  Long nodded. "The old man dug coal, Aaron farmed, and the both of them made whiskey. What I want to know, was the old man digging for coal or digging hiding places?"

  Son was working a cigarette out of the packet in his shirt pocket. "There's only one way to find that out, isn't there? Go look in all the holes you come across, peer in and poke around and see what you find."

  "That would take me some time, wouldn't it?"

  "I don't know. Twenty years."

  "Less I had some help."

  "You think they can spare the men? I understand you Prohibition people are awful busy."

  "I was thinking," Long said, "of getting people around here to help me, like the Black-wells and the Worthmans. I mentioned to Mr. Baylor this morning it might be the way to do it."

  Son drew on his cigarette. "What'd Mr. Baylor say to that?"

  "He said he'd like to be there when I ask them"

  "I would too."

  "Then I told Mr. Baylor I wasn't going to ask them. I was going to tell them."

  "I see. Just order them."

  "That's right. I say to them, 'You go out and find me Son Martin's hundred and fifty barrels. Find it or get him to tell where it's at, I don't care which. Because if you don't I'm going to start busting your stills one at a time, and I'm going to put all you boys out of business.' "

  "Now you're telling me."

  "Yes, now I'm telling you. Mr. Baylor said they need their stills to make a living and without the stills their families would go hungry and said something about the kids getting rickets and scurvy. You believe that?"

  Son nodded. "They rely on their stills, that's the truth, with the good farmland washed into the creeks and river. I don't know anything about what would happen to the kids."

  "But without money to buy food it would seem those folks would go hungry," Long said.

  "It would seem so," Son agreed.

  "So, what are you going to do about it?" Son looked at him, drawing on his cigarette. "I don't see as it's my problem."

  "You don't care what happens to them?" "I think the Blackwell boys and the others are big enough to take care of themselves." "After I put them out of business?"

  "If you can do it. You haven't showed anybody how big you are yet."

  "How about when they see their stills in little pieces?" Long was working in gradually, keeping his gaze on Son now. "They see their equipment shot full of holes and all busted to hell and they see the smoke still curling up from your cooker. What do they think then? The Prohibition man hits them where they live, but he don't lay a goddamn finger on his friend Son Martin. How do you think that will set with them?"

  "I think you got to bust a still first," Son answered. "And I think you got to have more than that army automatic hid under your coat."

  "But let's say I can do it."

  "Frank, we'll be here. Show us something." "I just want you to realize what's going to happen."

  "If I don't tell you where the whiskey is."

  "That's right. It's in your hands," Long said. "I promise you, if you don't do the right thing your neighbors are going to come down on you like a herd of bulls."

  "Frank, you should have stayed in the Army where you got somebody to think for you. You start using your own head it's likely to get blown off."

  "You keep thinking I'm alone."

  "All I see is you."

  "And all I got to do is call Frankfort and you'll see more Prohibition agents than you can count. I'm offering the easy way, Son, because we soldiered together and were buddies. But if you want me to be mean about it then boy you got trouble."

  "Because we were buddies," Son said. "I appreciate that. Listen, because we were buddies I'll do you a favor, Frank, I'll give you an ax and let you go down there and chop up my still and pour out any whiskey you find. You write a report and say you found only one still in Broke-Leg County and you busted hell out of it and your boss says, Frank, you did a dandy job, now we'll send you some place else. Then you go there, wherever they send you, forget all about any hundred and fifty barrels a drunk soldier told you about. Figure it was drunk talk and go about your business and maybe you'll live to enjoy old age."

  Frank Long grinned, shaking his head. "It is surely good to be talking to an old buddy again. Yes, I'm certainly glad I came here. Son, I'm not going to bust your still. I told you why. But I wouldn't mind taking a look at it--see where the best moonshine in the county comes from."

  "Down there in the house." Son nodded toward the roof showing in the trees below. "How do I get to it?"

  "Path over there, through the bushes." "Show me."

  Son had dropped his cigarette stub. He paused now to fish another out of his pocket and light it. "Go ahead, I'm right behind you."

  Long moved through the brush and stopped at the edge of a dry wash that came down from the slope above and dropped down steeply a good hundred feet to Son Martin's, where the bank of the wash had been lined and built up with stones, diverting the course of the gully away from the house. Frank Long looked down the open trough. It looked dry or crusted over; you couldn't tell about it this time of the year. He looked over his shoulder at Son coming up behind him.

  "Is this all right?"

  "That's the quick way, Frank. You can take it or go on over aways and find a switchback trail the ladies use to go down."

  "I asked you if it's all right."

  "Well, it looks all right to me."

  Long would have to agree to that, but he didn't know when it had rained last and he didn't know if the wash was dry or only covered with a thin dry crust. He stepped down off the bank, took another step and one more before his foot went through the crust. Long hopped as his foot sank into the mud, but with the next step his shoe disappeared and as he struggled to pull his foot out and keep his balance he went down, breaking through the thin dusty crust. He tried to get up and slipped again and rolled over to get his arms out and his hands in front of him, but he was going down the gully head first now, plowing open the thin crust, clawing at the mud, and taking chunks of it with him. Long had no chance against the month of spring rain that had seeped into the red dirt and turned the gully into a mud chute. He gave up, letting himself slide and roll until he came to a stop a hundred feet below, where the bank turned and was reinforced with stones.

  He sat there a minute before pulling himself up, his clothes and one side of his face painted with the red muck. Long was still wearing his hat. He took it off, looked at it, put it on again, and stared up the wash, way up to where Son Martin stood waiting.

  "A man has to be careful around here, Frank. Watch his step and know what he's doing. He'll find he can't rely on anybody's word." Son didn't raise his voice; his words carried clearly to Long, who unbuttoned his coat and drew the big .45 automatic, looking at it and then at Son as he held the gun in front of him.

  "You want to get rough," Long said, "I can end this game right now."

  "Maybe," Son said, "but not without getting the back of your head messed up. Put it away, Frank."

  Long hesitated. Son wasn't going to trick him from a hundred feet away. He looked over his shoulder, hesitated, then slid the automatic back into its holster. Aaron covered him from the porch of the house, holding a 12-gauge aimed right at his head.

  By Monday noon the story around Marlett was that Son had thrown Frank Long down the mud wash after Long pulled a gun on him. Aaron told it correctly at the Sweet Jesus Savior prayer meeting Sunday night; but it was natural for the story to take on weight in Son's favor. Son causing him to fall wasn't enough; Long deserved to be pushed. Lowell Holbrook told how Frank Long had given him the muddy suit of clothes and instructed him to throw it away--there was so much wet mud stuck to it, the suit would have to dry out for a week and
then be beaten with a stick for another week. Lowell Holbrook said the suit was in a trash barrel back of the hotel if anybody wanted to see it. A few of Lowell's friends went to take a look.

  By the time Frank Long appeared on the street that Monday, he was being referred to as The Hog Man, a nasty creature that liked to wallow around in wet clay mud. No one was sure who had made up the name though later Bud Blackwell claimed he said it first. Maybe he did. It was Bud Blackwell who said it to Frank Long's face.

  Bud and his brother Raymond, and Virgil Worthman were standing at the corner down from the hotel entrance, probably waiting for Long, when he came out and walked right up to them.

  Long took them by surprise. He spoke first, asking if Mr. Baylor had talked to them.

  "About what?" Virgil Worthman said.

  "If you have to ask then he didn't," Long said, "so I'll tell you myself."

  "I don't know," Bud Blackwell said, "if we should be seen talking to you. They say you tell a person by the people he hangs out with."

  "You won't have to talk," Long said. "Just get the wax out of your ears and listen."

  Bud Blackwell glanced at his brother. He said, "Hey, you know who this is? Somebody must have hosed him off, because this here is The Hog Man."

  Frank Long hit him in the mouth. Bud might not have gone down, but the curb tripped him and he fell hard in the street. He got up wiping his hands on his thighs; his right hand slid around to his back pocket and came out with a bone-handle clasp knife that he put to his mouth to pull the blade out with his teeth.

  "Open it," Long said, "and I'll shoot you dead for assaulting a federal officer. You can come at me, boy, but if you use the blade or these others horn in, then out comes Sweetheart." Long patted the hard bulk of the automatic beneath his coat.

  One thing about Bud Blackwell, whether it was to be knives or guns or a fist fight, he didn't stand around talking about it. He threw the knife underhand to his brother Raymond and went for Frank Long, who was waiting with his big bony fists and his reach advantage. He jabbed Bud hard in the mouth with his left and slammed the right into Bud's cheekbone; he took a couple of Bud's wild swings on his shoulder and forearm and waded in again with the jabs and hammered Bud's bloody mouth with the right and held up from throwing it again as Bud went down on the sidewalk and this time didn't get up.