by Chuck Dixon
“Fern wasn’t a soldier, honey. He was a Marine.”
“What’s the difference?”
“That’s kind of hard to put into words a little girl might understand.”
Merry crunched away at her chicken sandwich, eyes on him watching the Toyota. She took a sip of soda to wash it down.
“Does it take bad words to explain the difference between a soldier and a Marine?” she said.
He took his eyes off the car to smile at her. An actual genuine open smile from her father. It was a rare sight and made her blink.
“Not bad words, Merry. Just hard words.”
“Big words? I know a lot of big words.”
“No. Not big words.”
She took another bite and tilted her head at him.
“All right. Listen up. But no more questions for today,” he said.
She swallowed and leaned forward; eyes fixed on him.
“Soldiers are trained to fight. Marines are trained to kill.”
“Isn’t it the same thing?”
"No, it's not. It's a big difference. See, when an enemy sees it's the Army coming they know it's war. When they see Marines coming, they know it's the end. Can you understand?"
“I think so.” She chewed the end of her straw. Her eyes darted to him.
Levon raised a finger, a trace of a smile on his lips.
“No more questions for today.”
She nodded assent.
But tomorrow was another day.
Gunny Leffertz said,
“Trouble never knocks. It just walks on in.”
6
Next morning, Fern found Levon regrouting tile in the house’s only bathroom.
“Gonna have to piss in the woods, old man,” Levon said.
“It’s raining, thank you kindly.”
Levon shrugged.
“You don’t need to do this, nephew.”
“My daughter’s going to be using this head. I’d like to at least bring it up to code.” Levon finished a line of grout and lifted the gun clear. He ran a wet finger between two tiles to smooth the strand.
“That why you bought all this shit at the Home Depot?” Fern leaned in the doorway with a sour look.
"I'd like to stay busy while I'm here. God knows this shack needs it."
“I got tools.”
“When you can find them.”
Fern snorted.
“Your little girl’s locked the dogs out the house. She’s mopping the kitchen floor. You’d think I lived like a pig.”
“She likes to be busy too. Let her play house. It can’t hurt anything to square away things for you.” Levon stood and inspected the floor, the new grout gleaming white. He wrapped a wad of toilet paper around the end of the tube secured in the grout gun.
“And what do I owe you for the chow?” Fern said. He watched Levon sweep curled strings of ancient grout into a dustpan.
“Consider it our first month’s board.”
“I didn’t ask you to do this.”
Levon stood and leaned back on the basin cabinet. He took a breath and let it out.
“We’re going to be here a while, Fern. It’s an imposition on a cranky old loner like you. We’d like to pay our own way. It’s only fair.”
“I don’t…” Uncle Fern said, lowering his head.
“I need to ask you something. I don’t mean to embarrass you but I have to know.”
Fern looked up, eyes ablaze.
“How you making ends meet?” Levon said.
“My veteran’s check. Last year I sold some timber off the hill. That’s all.” Fern’s eyes were narrowed, the pupils dark.
“No extra income? No thumpers hidden away somewhere?”
“A long while back maybe. It ain’t like that around here no more. Nothing’s the same as when you left.”
“Because we can’t be anywhere where there’s law might be sniffing around.”
“They have no reason to be looking here. Not for a long time. There hasn’t been a thumper working in these woods since ’98. Hell, Drew Miller went legit with his brand. Has a licensed outfit working in the old A&P market down in Haley.” Fern smirked, still struck by the wonder of it.
"Okay. I had to ask," Levon said. He pushed off the basin cabinet and stooped to pick up his new toolbox.
“It’s all right. How about chicken tonight?” Fern said. He moved to allow Levon past him.
Both men were surprised to find Merry had materialized by them, a mop in her hand.
“What’s a thumper?”
After lunch, Levon took her to see the still.
He led her down the hill behind the barn and into the woods beyond. The hounds joined them, running ahead, noses snuffling through leaves wet from a shower that morning. All but Feller who stayed in his place under the kitchen table while Uncle Fern cleared the lunch dishes from the table. The boles of the trees were still stained black from the downpour. All around them they could hear the patter of drops coming down off the high branches.
The way ahead was invisible to Merry but her father made his way along a winding deer trail as sure as someone else walking the sidewalk of a familiar street. The woods closed in around them to create a stifling quiet broken only by her tramping feet. Her father walked quieter. Despite his size, he moved with a near noiseless gait. His head did not turn but she saw his eyes were always in motion, sweeping the shadows around them for movement.
They followed a fold in the ground that dropped into a high walled cleft; a tangle of tree roots formed the walls either side. At the foot of the fold was a clearing in the trees carpeted with broad-leafed ferns. At the edge of the ferns stood a wooden shack the size of a single car garage. Its plank roof had partly collapsed over time. A rusted stove pipe leaned crookedly against a bare roof joist. A stack of split firewood was piled against one wall of the shed. It was covered in clumps of moss. A rusted lawn chair, its legs bent, crouched in the weeds.
Levon led the way around to the opening of the three-sided shelter. Merry followed, eyes on the ground to step around the litter of plastic gallon jugs and buckets lying everywhere under the ferns. The hounds milled about, snuffling in the ferns.
A fat copper tank, corroded green with age, sat in the center of the shed. Loops of metal tubing drooped down the side. There was a lingering scent of something spoiled in the air. Back in the shadowed interior a stack of cardboard cartons surrendered to rot. More plastic jugs were spilled from them.
“Uncle Fern made moonshine here?” Merry said.
“No one calls it moonshine. We called it whiskey or white or juice,” Levon said.
“Did you use to make it?”
“I helped. Cut wood. Fetched water. Made a few deliveries for Fern and my dad.”
“So it was like a family business?” Merry said. She was inside the shed squinting at a calendar from a car dealership in Birmingham. The calendar was fifteen years old.
“Better step out of there. No telling when this old shack might fall in.” He touched her arm. She stepped back into the dappled sunlight.
“Your daddy’s gone, right?”
“A lotta years now. Died right after I went into the Marines. Cancer.”
“Like my mom.”
“Different kind of cancer. But yeah.”
Merry listened to the sounds of the woods. The chirrup of birds. The knocking of a woodpecker somewhere. The hounds were quiet now, lying panting in a group, eyes on her and Levon.
“Why do you call it a thumper?” she said.
“Because when the mash reaches a boil the steam rises into the curly tube at the top of the tank. The pressure of all the heated air makes a thumping noise. Like a drum.”
“The mash is what you make the moon—whiskey out of?”
“Yeah. A mix of almost anything that’ll rot. Apple peels. Potatoes. Sorghum. Even cattle feed. Your uncle knows a man in the next county used dandelions.”
“That’s what I smell? Rotten fruit and stuff?”
“It clings to the wood. Smells worse when it’s cooking. Worst of all is a batch my dad made out of watermelon rinds. Smelled like sweet pickles. I went to school with my clothes stinking. My mom couldn’t wash it out.”
Merry knew a little about her grandmother. She knew she died in a bus accident years before. Her father told her his mom was on the way to a church event in the next state when a semi crossed the highway median.
“What’s it taste like? Does it taste like apples? Or pickles?” she said.
“Always tasted the same to me. Plain awful. Burned like gasoline.”
“Then why does anyone drink it?”
“To get drunk, I guess.”
“Why do they want to be drunk?”
“Right there, little girl, is a question for the ages.”
Levon took her by the hand to turn her from the shed. They started back the way they came. The hounds roused themselves to trot after.
It was spitting rain again when they reached the crest of the hill. Levon pulled Merry against him under the shelter of his farm coat. They walked on at an awkward pace. She trying to match his stride with long steps, he taking halting steps to throw off her pace and making her giggle. As they came in sight of the smoke curling from the chimney, Merry felt her father’s hand tighten its grip on her shoulder.
A pickup truck with big knobby tires was pulling up on the gravel before the house.
On the doors of the crew cab was the county emblem for the sheriff’s department. The truck came to a stop and a man in a police uniform got out.
It was the same man Merry saw talking to her daddy at the Winn-Dixie the day before.
7
“Hey, Goose,” Dale said and stepped from the truck at Levon’s approach.
“Go on inside, honey,” Levon said.
Merry ducked from under the tent of her father’s coat and ran through the pelting rain for the porch. Uncle Fern stepped from the screen door, his eyes on the men in his yard. Feller brushed past to stand at the edge of the porch, glowering through the railings.
“Can we talk where it’s dry?” Dale said.
“This way,” Levon said and walked to the carport. Dale followed.
They stood either side of the tarp-covered car. The rain rang off the sheet steel roof above them. Dale took off his Smokey hat and laid it atop the hood.
“This the old Mustang?” Dale said. He lifted a corner of a tarp revealing a primer coated fender. The wheels were off. The car rested atop jack stands and concrete blocks.
“Yeah.”
“Man, she was fast. Shit on turns though. Fishtailed like a son-bitch unless she had a load of white in the trunk.”
Levon said nothing.
“Your uncle’s a sentimental one, keeping this here for you all this time. Not like you. Staying away all this time.”
“What’s your deal, Dale?”
“Only didn’t want to leave things like they were at the Dixie. Me knowing you were back. Me being with the county now.”
“You telling me how it’s going to be?”
“I come here friendly.” Dale parted his shiny nylon uniform jacket to show he wore no gun belt.
“Still have your badge,” Levon said.
Dale sighed. He fished in a jacket pocket and came up with a pack of cigarettes. He poked one out and got it started with a lighter fished from another pocket.
“There’s all kinds of shit about you in alerts and shit. And your little girl. BOLOs and APBs and Homeland Security. I’d even believe some of it if you’d changed your name to Abdul or Mohammed or some shit.”
“I got in some trouble. I’m working my way out of it.”
“And you came home because you’re safe here. Safe so long as no law knows you’re here.”
Levon said nothing.
“Well, you know about that as well as I do, Goose. There’s what’s the law and then there’s what’s right. And in this county that’s all up to how a man sees the world.”
“And how do you see it, Dale?”
Dale took a long drag on the Pall Mall. He filled his lungs before blowing a blue stream out toward the sheet of water rolling off the roof.
“We’ve known each other forever. Been in every kind of trouble together. I left right after you. Joined the Army. Broke my hip and my leg falling off a truck near Tikrit. Came back here and took the police tests. Was even married for five minutes to a girl from Haley.”
“You’re getting to a point here?” Levon said.
“I know you. I know the man you are. And I’m saying you got no worries from my end. Far as I’m concerned you’re long dead or long gone or both and I ain’t seen you.”
“And the rest of the deputies?”
“They don’t know you. They never leave the county roads. Never come back up these switchbacks. You maintain the legal speed limit and you’ll never meet up with one unless it’s at Fay’s.” The donut shop in Colby.
“How hard are they looking for me?”
“Nobody in the county’s looking for you anywhere.”
“The Feds.”
“They eased up about a month back. But they were hot and heavy for you for a while. They got you on all their shit lists and I see your name and picture now and then along with all the other swinging dicks they can’t catch.”
Levon leaned both hands on the hood of the Mustang and studied Dale’s face.
“So, we straight on this, Goose?” Dale said. He let the last lungful of smoke from his mouth and crushed the butt out on the tarp.
“As long as you don’t call me that around my little girl,” Levon said.
Merry stood on the porch and watched her father and the man in the uniform come around the front of the car and shake hands. The sheriff's deputy clapped a hand to her father's shoulder. They stood a bit, talking easily in front of the car. The deputy was gesturing with his hands as he spoke. Her father was nodding as he sat hip-shot on a fender of the covered car. Merry wasn't sure, because of the driving rain between them, but she thought she might have seen her father smile.
“Are they friends?” she said.
“They’re brothers,” Uncle Fern said before turning to reenter the house.
The ridgeback trotted after, leaving Merry to stare in wonder at the two men talking in the rain.
8
“They’re shutting us down Friday. The case is still officially open but only on paper. Cade goes on the back burner,” Bill Marquez said.
“What about you?” Nancy Valdez said.
They decided to take a walk after a Chinese dinner in Georgetown. Arm in arm they strolled along storefronts with the tourists.
“Minneapolis. Playing catch up on some Syrian refugees settled there. Background checks.”
“At least you’ll be there in summer.”
“Yeah.” He shrugged.
“And in the field. They did that for you anyway. Got you out of the office,” she said.
“I had the option to stay in Washington. Well, Quantico.”
“But you don’t want to.”
“I considered it.”
“Why would you? You don’t want to be an instructor. You’re too young.”
He gave her arm a squeeze and she turned to him. Bill wore a silly apologetic smile.
“Oh no,” she said. “Don’t put that on me.”
“I’m going to miss this. I like being around you. You like it too.”
“After two weeks of breathing canned air in a classroom and fighting Beltway traffic you’d hate me.”
“Not possible,” he said. Bill released her arm and turned her on the sidewalk to face him. He drew her with him under the green awning of a book store. The yellow light from inside highlighted her green eyes. They were beautiful despite the cast of suspicion in them.
"Please don't tell me you're about to get serious," she said, a mild scolding tone in her voice.
“All I’m saying is, Treasury is still going to want this guy. He still has a high dollar value on him,”
he said.
“Well, with the Bureau going cold on him we’ll probably be amping up on our end. With you clowns out of the way we can grind away at getting closer.”
“Any hits recently?”
“A bill from the Maine score showed up in Franklin, Tennessee. Another in Jonesboro, Arkansas. We need another half dozen for a pattern to start triangulating. I still think Cade’s a million miles away.”
“And I still think you’re wrong. But you have the best shot of tracking him down and bringing the Bureau back into this.”
“You’re saying?”
“Get a twenty on this asshole and we get to spend some more time together,” Bill said.
“That might just be the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me,” Nancy said. She was shaking her head at him but smiling all the same.
9
Merry woke to sounds from downstairs. A high keening whine and the voices of first her uncle and then her father. They were shouting over the howling of a dog. The light through her windows was gray when she opened her eyes.
She ran barefoot down the stairs. Her father was kneeling on the linoleum in the kitchen, stroking the flanks of one of the hounds. The dog was whimpering and yelping, his ribs bellowing with rapid breaths. Uncle Fern was on the phone speaking to someone. The ridgeback lay under the kitchen table bearing witness.
“What happened to Tex?” she said. Her voice caught when she saw the smears of blood on the tiles leading to the dog door.
“He ran into a porcupine,” Levon said. He had the hound’s collar tight in his fist while he ran gentle fingers along the dog’s side to comfort the suffering animal.
Merry could see the silvery spines sticking from the hound’s snout and throat. They were thicker than whiskers and quivered with each breath Tex took.
“Can’t we pull them out?” she said.
“Not without hurting him more, honey. They’re barbed. He needs a vet to take them out. Uncle Fern’s on the phone with one.”
She reached out a hand to touch the hound’s shoulder.
“Better not, Merry. He’s in a lot of pain. He might snap at you and not mean it.”