by Ninie Hammon
Ben blew by the compliment. “I missed summer practice this year and it’s hard to play good ball if you haven’t run a play in 10 months. I’m sure not up to speed with the rest of you guys.”
“God help the defense when you do get up to speed!”
A short, chunky, blond boy hollered at Jake. “You driving?”
“Yeah, I’m driving,” he called back, then turned to Ben. “We’re going out for a burger. Wanna come?”
“Sure.” Ben grinned. “I’ll get my jacket and be right back.”
When Ben came around the corner, Jake actually looked at the jacket for the first time. It was a red-and-white letter jacket with three letters on it.
“You were playing with the varsity as a freshman, weren’t you?”
Ben nodded.
“We’re gonna have to get you a new jacket, bud.” Jake beamed. “One in black and gold.”
• • • • •
His belly full, a hot cup of black coffee resting beside a half-eaten piece of extra-gooey Derby pie on the table before him, Seth sat back and tried not to stare at the red-headed woman seated across from him. He hadn’t said much. For all his charm and charisma, he was at his core a quiet man, a listener, an observer.
And his housekeeper, Mrs. Hannibal, had kept the conversational ball bouncing just fine without him. The stout, buxom woman had begun peppering Sarabeth with questions about her travels as soon as she found out the newspaper editor actually had a passport. He watched expressions play across Sarabeth’s face as she described the time she’d attempted to order a sausage biscuit at a McDonalds in London.
“A biscuit in England is a cookie? Well, I never!” Mrs. Hannibal squealed.
Seth studied Sarabeth without appearing to, a maneuver he managed to pull off by not looking directly at her. It had been a roll of the dice, of course, homey meal, table right in the kitchen, not every woman would have responded to that, but Sarabeth fit right in.
As she was speaking, a glass of water unexpectedly slipped out of Sarabeth’s hand, tumbled to the floor and exploded like a hand grenade on the stone tiles.
“I’m so sorry! I—”
“Now, don’t you never mind a thing!” Mrs. Hannibal clucked.
Sarabeth quickly scooted her chair back as the big woman dropped a dishtowel and a couple of napkins on the puddle of water at her feet.
“Let me help.” Sarabeth reached for her own napkin, but her hand was trembling. She balled it quickly into a fist around the napkin, but Seth saw. And he saw something else, too. Her other hand was steady.
“Why don’t we get out from under foot,” Seth suggested. He stood, stepped to the back door and pushed open the screen for Sarabeth. “Is the squeak of a screen door the same in British English as in American English?”
“I never saw any screen doors in England.” She got up and stepped around the puddle of water. “Or screens on the windows either. Guess they just like bugs.”
He followed her out onto the porch that wrapped all the way around the old house.
“Wait just a second,” he said, then turned, walked quickly to the front corner of the house, looked around it and came back smiling. “Come here, I want to show you something.”
He didn’t realize that he’d said the same words, or that there was the same hushed quality in his voice earlier that afternoon in the barrel warehouse.
The tree frogs in the pin oak trees had taken up their eech-eech, eech-eech to add to the symphony of crickets and the deeper rubbuph, rubbuph of the pond frogs as Seth and Sarabeth stepped out onto the part of the porch that swept across the whole front side of the house.
An enormous full moon had just cleared the horizon and was sitting like a scoop of orange sherbet atop the knob on the other side of the valley from Double Springs. It spilled bright liquid gold down to shimmer on the night-blackened river and honey-glaze the mist hanging in the hollows and drifting up off creeks in the distance. Fireflies by the thousand glittered green-gold in the meadow below the house, sparkling the night with a mystical, other-world magic. The distillery, with lights twinkling in buildings here and there looked like a fairytale kingdom. Somewhere in the woods a solitary nightingale sang its lonely song.
Sarabeth walked to the porch railing and looked out over the valley. Seth came and stood beside her, drinking in the night.
“Oh, Seth!” Her voice was an awed whisper. “Have you ever in your life seen anything more beautiful?”
It was out of his mouth before he could catch it. “The moonlight in that red hair of yours … it’s close.” In for a penny, in for a pound. “And in case you were wondering, yes, I’m hitting on you.”
Her response surprised him. She said nothing for such a long time, he began to feel awkward. He started to—
“Don’t.” Only the one word.
“Don’t …?”
“Hit on me. Just don’t.”
“If it’s about the story, you know, what you’re writing … ” He was sorry the moment the words passed his lips. Why in the world had he brought up that? He saw her stiffen.
She turned and looked full into his face. “I guess I found out everything I can, right? Everything you’re willing to tell me.”
He sighed. Heard the psychic slamming of all the doors that had opened between them. “I’ve told you everything you need to know,” he said.
Chapter 11
Jimmy Dan Puckett and Donnie Scruggs were dead set on it and they’d agreed when they started this that the three of them were in it together. Lester Burkett thought it was a bad idea, though. A colossally bad idea. Oh, they’d voted and he’d lost and there it was. But he still thought it was a bad idea.
Donnie was checking out the building while Lester—his friends called him Doodlebug—and Jimmy Dan waited in the woods with the money in a canvas gym bag, $35,000, divided equally into used twenties, fifties and hundred-dollar bills. Perfect for spending. Of course, they weren’t going to spend it, not right now anyway. That’s why they were out here in the woods with it; that’s what they’d agreed to.
Now wasn’t the time to run the whole thing back up the flagpole. Wasn’t nobody going to salute a new plan now. Still, the fat man couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
“It ain’t too late to chuck this idea and do somethin’ different, you know,” Doodlebug whispered. He and Jimmy Dan were in the shadows behind a big oak tree with a stand of brush in front of them. Doodlebug didn’t know why he was whispering, who it was he thought could hear them, but the magnitude of the occasion seemed to call for it.
The building Donnie was investigating was about 50 yards away, a dilapidated shed that might be close to 100 years old. It had last been used to store fertilizer, weed killer and insecticide. You could still smell the chemicals that had been spilled over the years on the dirt floor. But clearly it hadn’t been used for anything in a long time. The briars, brush and brambles had grown up around it so high it was almost invisible.
A lot of buildings as old or older than this one dotted Callison and neighboring counties, their wood a shiny silver from the graying of the elements, some of them leaning badly, their roofs riddled with holes. This one was better than most, about 12 feet by 15 feet with a pitched roof and a slanted-ceiling loft. It probably had been built as a tool shed. Maybe there’d been a house nearby, though there was not even the stubble of a foundation left anymore. There were big cracks between the timbers of the walls, but it was in good shape, good enough for what they needed. The door even fastened, and you could have put a padlock on it, too, but doing that was like announcing, “Hey, there’s something so important in here it had to be locked up.” That was just inviting somebody to snoop, least that’s what Jimmy Dan said.
Doodlebug wiped his runny nose on his beefy arm encased in a tight sweatshirt and pulled the hood up to cover his ears. It had turned cold Halloween Night. All the little kids had worn coats over their costumes when they’d come knocking on his door and he’d handed out pieces of candy to put
in their sacks.
Jimmy Dan didn’t seem to notice the icy breeze. He wasn’t paying any attention to Doodlebug, either. Not surprising. He and Donnie’d been on the same side as soon as they’d come up with the idea, sitting in the tiny living room of Donnie’s cracker box house near the Callison County Fairgrounds.
Doodlebug was short, but Jimmy Dan was even shorter, a little guy with no butt—none whatsoever—which meant he had to reach down about every six seconds and pull up his pants or they’d slide off his backside into the dirt. He reminded Doodlebug of a Jack Russell terrier, sort of prancing around, always angling for a fight. That night, Jimmy Dan had been sitting on the floor lovingly counting the bills lying in a pile in front of him. He set them in neat stacks in a cardboard box on the floor beside the coffee table as he counted them, and jotted down totals on a notepad he kept in his front shirt pocket.
“So, we just go out there and spend it like there’s no tomorrow and you don’t think Bubba’s gonna catch on?” Jimmy Dan had said. He may be as mean as a snake, but when you look in them eyes, you can tell he’s smart, too.”
Doodlebug was sitting on the sofa, sunk down in the cushion where the springs were broken, patiently rolling a joint from the contents of a sandwich bag. He’d gotten interested in dope in high school when somebody told him smoking it would make food taste better. He’d probably put on 50 pounds smoking weed and cutting classes until he finally quit school altogether and went to work for his uncle as a mechanic at the Burkett Brothers Garage.
Donnie returned from the kitchen with beers all around. He was blond and really did look a little like Don Johnson on Miami Vice, except his broad shoulders weren’t shoulder pads. He worked on the crozier machine at the cooperage. The self-professed ladies’ man of the group, Donnie had a sex drive you couldn’t rein in with a choke chain. If you believed half the tales he told about his exploits with women, he must have been the daddy of half the illegitimate children in Callison County.
“You guys still arguing about what we’re going to do with the money?” he asked. “Shoot, I thought you’d have it all figured out by now.” He handed a beer to Jimmy Dan, who set it down on the coffee table next to the box and kept counting bills. Doodlebug set his beer beside J.D.’s while he continued rolling the joint. Donnie turned his up and drank half the bottle in one long gulp.
“If you ask me, I think Bubba Jamison’s all hat and no cattle,” Doodlebug said, then carefully licked the edge of the filmy paper, stuck it down and twisted the ends. “Just ’cause he’s so big and scary lookin’ he’s got everybody buffaloed. I don’t believe all those stories I’ve heard. I bet Bubba made ’em up.”
He put one end of the joint into his mouth and lit the other with a butane lighter, sending the cloying, sweet scent of marijuana into the room. He inhaled deeply, held his breath and passed the joint on to Donnie.
“You been smokin’ more’n dope if you don’t think that man’d strangle his own grandmother for the gold in her teeth,” Jimmy Dan said. When Donnie tried to pass him the joint, he shook his head and kept counting bills. “If he ever figures out what we’ve done, he’ll cut us up and feed us to his dogs.”
“He didn’t figure out about them seedlings, did he?” Doodlebug challenged. “You was so scared you about wet yourself when you got busted in the spring, afraid Bubba was gonna put it together that we stole them plants out of his seedling bed. Well, he didn’t catch on to that and he ain’t gonna figure out the rest of it neither.”
The three men had worked for Bubba off and on for years, knew his whole operation, and two years ago, they’d come up with what Donnie’d called a “long-range plan” to make themselves some serious money. True, the starting-their-own-organization piece had gone up in smoke when the police burned their whole first crop. But the rest—well, proof of its success was laying right there in stacks in the box.
For two summers, each of them had stolen small amounts of dope from every one of Bubba’s barns they worked in, not enough so’s anybody’d notice. They were smart, careful, didn’t get greedy, just kept stashing it away a little at a time. They’d been sharp enough to sell the stockpile the same way—a little here, a little there—to different buyers who’d never heard of Bubba Jamison, and made sure to get paid in used tens and twenties so it couldn’t be traced when they spent it.
Only now, J.D.’d got his jockey shorts in a wad about not spending it at all!
“You really don’t think Bubba’d notice if we suddenly showed up in Brewster with all kinda money? If we started buying fancy clothes?” He turned and looked at Donnie. “Or motorcycles?” He shifted his gaze to Doodlebug. Both men knew Doodlebug had his eye on one of those Harley Davidson choppers sitting in the window of the dealership in Bardstown. “You don’t think he’s gonna start wondering where we come up with that kind of money? He knows what he pays us and it ain’t that much. We don’t lay low for awhile, we’re gonna disappear just like that wife of his done. And Roger Furman—ain’t nobody seen or heard from him since he went out looking for dope on Blackburn Ridge.”
Doodlebug was still holding his breath after his toke on the joint. When he sighed it out, he breathed words out with the smoke. “His wife run off with some other man, you know she did. Can you imagine being married to that gorilla? And Furman’s gonna turn up any day now with some story about falling off the wagon and waking up in Syracuse.”
Jimmy Dan had completed the money count. In the box were 35 stacks of bills with 25 bills in each stack. When Doodlebug passed him the joint, he took it, drew a big lung full of smoke and held it as long as he could. As soon as he released it, he started in on Doodlebug again.
Donnie finished off his beer and announced with a loud burp that he had to go pee. He walked back into the room a few minutes later, put both fingers into his mouth and blew. The loud whistle produced instant silence.
“That’s enough!” he said. “We can argue about this all night. I say we vote. How many thinks we ought to divide up the money—J.D., what’s the total?”
“Exactly $35,250.”
“Ok, that we split the $35,250 three ways and do whatever we want with it?”
Doodlebug raised his hand high in the air, looked hopefully at the other two, then dropped it in his lap in resignation.
“And how many thinks we sit on it until next summer, say June first, long enough that Bubba will figure we musta made money doing something else during the winter, long enough so he don’t connect the dots?”
Jimmy Dan and Donnie raised their hands.
Disgusted, Doodlebug got to his feet and lumbered toward the bathroom. As he stepped around Donnie, he bumped the coffee table and knocked the two full cans of beer into the box with the money.
That had ended all discussion. From that point on, they’d been frantically drying it off, running around cussing and stumbling into each other, spreading it all over the house quick so the bills wouldn’t stick together. The next morning when the money was dry, they’d gathered it all up and put it in the canvas gym bag.
Once they’d decided they weren’t going to spend it, they had to find someplace to hide it. Donnie was only renting and he had two or three on-again, off-again live-in girlfriends who sniffed around him like coon dogs all the time to make sure he wasn’t cheating on them. Jimmy Dan had been sleeping on the couch at his brother’s since he got out of jail. Doodlebug was the only one who had his own place, but it was a trailer and didn’t offer an obvious spot to stash that much cash.
Then, Donnie’d remembered the old tool shed he’d come upon once when he was tracking a wounded doe. It had sounded good, so they had come out to take a look.
Jimmy Dan turned his attention away from Donnie’s inspection of the building and looked at Doodlebug. “Naw, it ain’t too late for us to decide to do somethin’ different, but unless you got some sort of plan we ain’t heard about yet, then we’re stickin’.”
Doodlebug said nothing. He had no better plan; he just didn’t like this one.
Donnie waved the two of them out of the woods. They were careful to move the Kudzu vine that had wrapped around the shed door so they could put it back when they left. Inside, the shack was dark and cold and smelled like bug spray. Though it had no windows, shafts of sunlight spilled in all around through cracks in the walls. But not a speck of light shown through the ceiling. No leaks; the roof was sound.
“I was thinking we ought to put the money in that half loft up there, scoot it back in the corner and, you know, maybe cover it up with … ” Donnie looked around. An ancient burlap bag hung on a nail on the wall. “Put this old bag on top of it. It’s not like we got to worry about hidin’ it. Don’t nobody ever come here, you can see that.”
He stopped and thought for a moment. “And we can’t come nosing around here neither, checking on it all the time. We do that and somebody’s gonna notice. I say we put the money here and agree to leave it be until June first.”
Doodlebug didn’t like that one bit, and this time Jimmy Dan was on his side. The three men instantly started yelling at each other.
Finally, Donnie made a point the others couldn’t argue.
“If we buried the money in a hole, would you dig it back up every few weeks just to make sure it was still there?” No response. “Well, if you don’t think putting it here is just as safe as burying it, then maybe that’s what we ought to do, just go dig us a hole—”
“We ain’t gonna bury it!” Jimmy Dan said. There was a wild look in his eye. “We already been all through that.”
Neither of the other men was surprised by Jimmy Dan’s reaction. The little man had been so dead set that the money wasn’t going into a hole in the ground that he’d threatened to take his share and spend it right then if that’s what the others planned to do. He never would say why he was so against it, but Doodlebug figured it had something to do with Jimmy Dan’s old man. His daddy beat those kids something fierce, and done other things, worse things Jimmy Dan wouldn’t talk about. Doodlebug had seen his back; J.D. had scars from Christmas to Easter. So whenever the little man got weird—about the dark or graves or being in tight places—Doodlebug always suspected that was why.