Everyone glanced over and nodded when I came in, but clearly I’d interrupted a climactic moment.
I stepped around to see what was so interesting. Another celebrity trial? Basketball previews? Highlights from the final car race of the season?
On the television, two impossibly gorgeous (and obviously naked) daytime actors were writhing together beneath tangled pink satin sheets. Talk about climactic moments— they were going at it so hot and heavy with hands and mouths and little animal noises that it’s a wonder the screen didn’t fog up.
So this was why I always got the answering machine if I called these men at lunchtime. Soap opera?
Jimmy tore his eyes from The Young and the Restless and started to put down his plate.
“Sorry,” I said, “but I’m afraid something’s wrong with that battery you put in last month.”
“You finish eating, Jimmy,” said a voice behind me. “I’ll check it out for her.”
I turned and there was Allen Stancil.
“Hey, thanks,” said Jimmy, sinking back into his chair, his attention already focused on the TV again. “Battery tester’s over there on that Mercury.”
Reluctantly, I followed Allen back outside. The sky had lightened momentarily, but more thunderheads were roiling up in the west.
I popped the hood and started the engine and Allen did his thing with the battery tester. After a few minutes, he hollered for me to shut it off and he began pulling on various belts.
‘Try it again.”
Again, I started the engine, gave it more gas when he told me to mash down, turned my lights off and on, then switched off as he eventually closed the hood and came around to my side of the car.
“Nothing wrong with your battery or your belts, far as I can tell,” he said, “but it’s not charging right. Looks to me like your alternator’s going to the bad. You don’t get a new one pretty soon, it’s gonna leave you on the side of the road somewhere.”
Back inside, the soap opera had ended and the guys were clearing away. James stowed the television and its board under the desk while Woodrow and the others pushed the cinder blocks and stool out of the middle of the floor.
Allen told Jimmy his diagnosis and Jimmy shook his head and gestured to all the cars ahead of me.
“I’m sorry, Deb’rah. You know I’d do it in a minute if I could, but I’d have to send James to town for the part and the way we’re so backed up—there’s no way in the world we’n get to it before Monday or Tuesday. And even then…”
His voice trailed off into uncertainty.
“I don’t mean to be butting in,” said Allen, butting in. “But she sure needs to get it changed and I’m not doing much right now.”
“Would you?” Relief brightened Jimmy’s face. He really does hate to make me wait. “That’d be great. Y’all do know each other, don’t you, Deb’rah? Dallas’s cousin? Staying over yonder with Mr. Jap? He knows as much about cars as me.”
Allen smiled broadly beneath his mustache. “More.”
“Naw, now, I didn’ say that!” Jimmy laughed. “But he’ll do you right.”
Which was how I found myself riding over to Cotton Grove with Allen to buy a new alternator.
We left my car parked in front of the garage at Mr. Jap’s place and drove to the auto parts store in Allen’s old Chevy pickup. I had to slide in under the steering wheel since the door on the passenger side was held shut with a C-clamp.
“Keep forgetting to get that damn latch fixed,” Allen said with a trace of embarrassment.
Didn’t bother me. With him driving, I could look him over good rather than the other way around.
He’d held up rather well, all things considered. His brown hair was still thick and bushy, his belly was flat, and he didn’t seem to have any teeth missing.
“When’d you grow the mustache?” I asked, as we crossed Possum Creek and headed north toward town.
“You don’t like it, darlin’, I’ll shave it off tomorrow morning.” His voice was warm and insinuating, but there was no way I was going to step in that creek twice.
“I don’t give a damn whether it stays or goes, Allen. I was just making polite conversation.”
“Well, I’n talk polite, too. How come you never got married again?”
“Once was enough, thank you.”
“What about that game warden? Y’all serious?”
“Oh, I always take game wardens serious,” I said. “What about you? How many times you been married since me?”
“Might’ve put my mark on one or two.” With one of those Ain’t-I-a-pistol? smiles, he flashed me the black star tattooed in the palm of his left hand. “You were the last one with a preacher, though.”
“Except it was a magistrate,” I reminded him sharply. “Any kids?”
“They proved one on me, but that’s all.”
I knew that Allen had been married before I met him and I seemed to recall mention of a son. “You mean Kevin—was that his name?”
“Keith. Naw, he’s grown now. Lives up in Richmond. I’m still paying for a girl that—”
He broke off so abruptly that my curiosity was piqued.
“A daughter? How old is she?”
He hesitated. “Seventeen. I got just one more year to pay on her. Wendy Nicole.”
“Seventeen?”
I’m not all that good at mental math, but it doesn’t take an Einstein to realize that his daughter couldn’t have been in this world very long at the time we’d run off to Martinsville together. I said as much and added, “Back then, didn’t you say you’d been divorced four or five years?”
“That was from Keith’s mama. Sally come after her.”
Rain had begun falling again and the wind was whipping wet leaves across the pavement. The pickup might be old, one door might be a different color and the other hanging on by a C-clamp, but the wipers swept the windshield cleanly and the engine purred like a happy kitten. Those two boded well for my new alternator.
“So how long had you been divorced from this Sally?”
Another hesitation. “Well, now, darlin’, I don’t want you to get all fussed over something that’s long done and finished with.”
“I’m not your ‘darlin’,‘ Allen. How long done and finished was it?”
“Actually, we only got it finalized about four years ago when Katie came up pregnant.”
I sat bolt upright. “Wait just a damn minute here! You saying you were still married to this Sally when you married me?” My hand slammed down hard on the dashboard. “You committed bigamy?”
“See? I knew you were going to get upset.”
“Upset?”
“Well, what was I supposed to do? You were the one so hot to get married that—”
This time it was my fist hit the dash and he gave me an apprehensive look.
“You ain’t got a knife in that handbag, have you?”
“If I did, I’d cut your lying tongue right out of your head,” I snarled. “My daddy paid you five thousand dollars not to contest the annulment and to keep your mouth shut about it and it wasn’t even a legal marriage?”
“You ain’t gonna tell him, are you?” Allen asked as he pulled in at the auto parts place. “I’d sure hate for you to get him mad at me all over again.”
I was so outraged that I jerked at the door handle a couple of times before I remembered that it was broken. Meekly, Allen got out on his side and held the door for me, but he made sure he stayed well out of my swinging range as I stomped into the store ahead of him.
“How ’bout I don’t charge you nothing for fixing your car?” he called after me.
The trouble with small-pond life is that it’s awfully hard to go anywhere without bumping into a relative. When I stalked into the store, my nephew Reese was there at the counter talking to the clerk about the merits of different floor mats.
“With winter coming on, I got to do something to keep the mud off my carpet,” he said with an inquiring look at Allen.
&n
bsp; I swallowed my anger and introduced the two of them after Allen had told the clerk what we wanted. While the clerk went off to find an alternator that would fit my engine, they talked carpet cleaners and the care and feeding of vinyl interiors.
By the time the clerk came back and I’d handed over my credit card, Allen had convinced Reese he was the one to help him install his new stereo speakers in the door panels.
“You might want to see how he fixes his own doors before you turn him loose on yours,” I said nastily.
Allen just smiled. “Everybody knows the shoemaker’s children always go barefoot.”
When we were in the truck again and heading back to Mr. Jap’s, Allen looked over at me warily and said, “You ain’t gonna stay mad at me, are you, darlin’?”
I knew my outraged feelings didn’t really concern him. He was only worried what Daddy or some of the boys might do if I told them. Well, he could just keep on worrying.
“So who’s Katie?” I asked.
“Nobody special. Just a gal I stayed with for a coupla weeks one time when Sally threw me out.”
“And she had your child?”
“Won’t mine. I tell you what’s the truth—between paying for Keith and paying for Wendy Nicole, I quit taking my pecker out of my britches without putting on his raincoat. No way that baby was mine. She took me to court, but I got a blood test and it proved that little girl was somebody else’s.”
“Lucky you,” I said, remembering the relief of Portland Brewer’s client when the blood test let him off the hook.
“Won’t luck, darlin’. It was science. You know how much I’d’ve had to pay if they’d proved it on me?”
“Depends on what you’re making. In your case, probably a hundred dollars a week?”
“I keep forgetting you’re a judge. You know all about laying child support on a man, don’t you? Busting his balls?”
Takes two to make a baby.”
“So how come it’s always one that has to pay?”
“Sometimes it’s the mother,” I said.
He snorted disdainfully. “Not very often, I bet”
“No,” I agreed. “Most times it’s the father that takes off.”
“Hey, I paid for Keith. And I’m paying for Wendy Nicole, too. But damn if I was gonna let ’em lay a court order on me for another eighteen years just because Katie can’t keep up with who she’s sleeping with.”
Which sounded an awful lot as if he was under a court order for ol’ Wendy Nicole.
“Not behind on your payments, are you?” I needled, wondering if that had anything to do with why he was hanging around over here instead of heading back to Charlotte.
“Sally knows I’m doing the best I can. I send her money ever chance I get. Hell, I even send Katie something when I have a little extra. Poor girl never did figure out who’s Tiffany’s daddy.”
Allen might not’ve fathered her child, but I was willing to bet even money that he’d left that Katie with a tiny black star on her left shoulder. And Sally, too. I knew Keith’s mother had one and God knows how many women before or since. I was just young enough and dumb enough to be flattered when Allen hauled me into a tattoo shop and had the guy do me.
When we walked down the street together, my right thumb was always hooked in the back pocket of his jeans just as his left hand always rested on my left shoulder. At eighteen, that tattoo had seemed so romantic, as if the heat from his hand had magically burned through to my flesh and marked me as his woman forever.
Hard to believe I’d been so stupid. What on earth made me pick such a bad-news womanizer to go to hell with?
I was still getting used to the idea that my one fling at marriage hadn’t been a marriage at all and wasn’t quite sure whether this was something that would help me or hurt me if the whole shabby mess ever came out in public. One thing was certain though: the sooner Allen Stancil got out of n’ County, the sooner I’d breathe easy again.
I decided maybe I’d give Charlotte a buzz and see if his ex-wife Sally really was as understanding about those erratic support payments as he made out. If I was lucky, maybe there’d be a nice little warrant out for his sorry hide.
8
« ^ » … the very first year the purchaser made 11 hogsheads of brandy of the peaches and apples in his garden and some cyder…“Scotus Americanus,” 1773
Annoyed as I was with Allen, though, I had to admit he was handy with a wrench.
While he wrestled my faulty alternator out of the engine and installed the new one, I stood at the front of the shabby cinderblock garage and talked with Mr. Jap, who’d come over from the house when he saw that Allen’s truck was back.
I noticed that someone had painted over the purple cross on his front door and I guessed that the “Holyness Prayr Room” was out of business.
“Yeah,” said Mr. Jap with a sheepish smile on his grizzled face. “Religion never does take on me, it don’t. I just can’t seem to stay right with the Lord. And anyway, them Mexicans has gone back to Florida, they did.”
The rain began again as he came in, and the old man pulled a slat-backed chair over to the open doorway so be could sit and watch it fall. There was no wind. The heavy drops came straight down, hammered the tin roof, then sheeted off the edge of the front shed like a waterfall. Inside, cigarette smoke mingled with the smell of steel tools and machine oil and gasoline fumes—masculine smells I would always associate with my father and brothers as they endlessly tinkered on cars and tractors, tobacco harvesters and bean pickers, mowers and hayrakes.
Something’s always breaking down on a farm and men are always cussing and putting it back together with duct tape and baling wire and a squirt of WD-40.
But Mr. Jap wore a contented smile as he settled deeper into the chair and watched the rain come down. Every once in a while Allen would drop a wrench or mutter and Mr. Jap would look even happier.
“Just like the old days,” he said, “when Dallas or some of your brothers would come over and work on their cars. Sometimes I couldn’t find a wrench for my own work because they was using them all, they was. Good as he was at driving, Dallas didn’t have much feel for a engine. Your brother Frank, now—”
He cocked his head at me. “Where’d Kezzie tell me Frank is these days?”
“Southern California. San Diego.”
Frank’s my next to oldest brother. He spent twenty-six years in the Navy as a machinist and retired as a master chief petty officer. He and Mae come for a long visit every other year and they talk about how nice it’d be to live closer, but she’s from California and their kids have married and started families of their own out there, so we don’t really expect them to move back.
“That Frank, he could do anything with a motor that needed doing, he could. Many a time he’d just listen to it running and hear what was wrong before he ever lifted the hood.”
He cut me a sly look. “Good at making things, too, he was. When he weren’t but twelve, he made the prettiest little copper worm you ever saw. Not a kink nowhere.”
A worm, of course, is the coil that runs from the cap of a still through a barrel of cool water and acts as a condenser. Some of those homemade copper stills are works of folk art and the worm is the hardest part to shape because copper tubing is so soft it’ll crimp and collapse when you start to bend it. A lot of operators won’t bring their coil out to the still until they’re ready to start running a batch.
And even though destruction is their job, few ATF officers are so hardhearted that they can bust up a pretty copper cooker without a niggling regret when they smash the worm.
Or so they tell me.
They do the telling with sidelong glances if they know my daddy’s reputation and I’m never sure whether they really do feel that way or if they think they’re making Brownie points with me.
“Some of both, probably,” Dwight said when I once asked him about it. A deputy sheriff hears a lot of scuttlebutt. “They’re the hounds. Mr. Kezzie was a fox. A hound won’t have
much fun if there’s no fox to chase, now will it?”
Trouble is, I’m not comfortable asking Daddy about those days and he never volunteers. I know the older boys talk about it amongst themselves once in a while, but it’s almost like they’re the Masons and Adam and Zach and I have never quite learned the secret handshake. Most of what I’ve heard about making illegal whiskey comes from ATF officers, SBI agents and occasional old-timers like Mr. Jap.
“So how’d Frank make the worm?” I asked Mr. Jap.
The old man laid his finger alongside his nose. “Don’t know as I ought to be telling a judge, no I don’t.”
I smiled. “The statute of limitations ran out on Frank a long time ago.”
“Well, I’ll tell you then,” he said happily. “He set right over there on that workbench with a piece of copper tubing and we saw him studying and studying on it, me and old Max Pleasant, Leo Pleasant’s daddy, we did. Max says, ‘What you making, young fellow?’ and Frank told him.”
“He did?” That surprised me. Whenever I do get my brothers to reminisce a little about those early years, they always say that they knew to be closemouthed about whiskey making. Mr. Jap would have been safe since he’d operated a still on contract to my daddy, but Max Pleasant?
“Oh, yeah. You think because Leo’s so set against that new ABC store they’re building out here in the country that nobody in his family ever messed with making it? Leo’s daddy took Kezzie’s money same as a lot of us, yes he did. And so did Leo’s mammy when Max got caught and sent away for two years. No need for Leo to act so prissy pants. Whiskey paid the taxes on his farm many a year back in the thirties and forties, yes it did.”
A deep cough rattled Mr. Jap’s thin chest as he lit a cigarette and took a long drag.
“Anyway, Max asked young Frank if he needed some help. ‘No, sir,’ says Frank, all polite. ‘I reckon I can figure it out myself.’ And danged if he didn’t. Oh, he messed up a couple of inches when he tried to bend it around a big iron pipe after he got it soft with my blowtorch. But he just set there and studied some more and finally we seen the light bulb go off in his little head. He went out yonder to the edge of the field, he did, and got him some sand, wet it down good and rammed it in the tubing till it was packed solid. Then he hit it with the blowtorch again and that tubing near ’bout wrapped around the pipe all by itself with not a dimple in it. After that, he flushed the sand out and it was perfect. I used it for eight years, I did, before the liquor agents found it”
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