Moonshine

by Justin Benton

  Pa said nothing. He knew what a raw deal it was. I didn’t dare ask about the money. Salvatore clomped down the stairs, pushing his way right between me and Pa.

  “See you soon,” he said as he climbed into his automobile.

  Pa and I stood rooted in the dirt and watched him speed off.

  “Two hundred gallons can’t be done, Pa.”

  “I told you to go to Yunsen’s after school,” he said quietly.

  I’d expected him to blow up on me when Salvatore left.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, head down. “I just wanted to help.”

  “My fault too, I reckon. I shouldn’t have expected you to do anything right.”

  That stung more than any yelling could have.

  “I’m gonna help, Pa. You’ll see. But two hundred gallons—”

  “We’ll just work and that’ll be the end of it,” Pa said.

  He was talking about our future like we were dead and buried already.

  “I’ll work as much as I can.”

  He just shrugged and headed off down the drive.

  “Where you going?”

  I had a thought he was just going to walk off and never come back.

  Over his shoulder he said, “Gotta trade for some sugar.”

  “Can I go with you?”

  He stopped and turned back, finally looking at me.

  “Does it matter if I say yes or no?”

  We trudged into town in silence and I didn’t say a word as he made a deal with Mr. Willis in the back room of the general store. The big burlap sacks of sugar would arrive tomorrow. We’d start working as soon as they did, then likely never stop.

  We started back, but near Elm Street I realized the last place I wanted to go right then was home, and I imagined Pa felt the same.

  “Pa, you never took me to the place you and Ma lived at. I’d like to see it.”

  He turned and squinted at me, confused. “You want to go now?”

  I nodded.

  “It ain’t far from here. Turn left past the McMillan place,” he said, then kept heading toward our place.

  “Ain’t you coming?” I called.

  Ten yards away, he turned and shook his head.

  “Last thing I need now is more bad memories. You go on.”

  “Maybe it’d do you good. Remind you of your life before me.”

  He stared at me for a long moment then threw up his hands in a blast-it-all kind of way.

  “Well you don’t have to be so danged dramatic about it,” he said as we walked toward the McMillan place.

  I was relieved to be going somewhere no criminals or lawmen could find us, even if only for a short while.

  AS THE CROW FLIES, THE FARM could not have been more than half a mile from Rebecca’s house, and I’d probably passed by there a hundred times without thinking twice. It was a simple white house, one level and sturdy, and not in terrible shape, but clearly abandoned. The windows had been boarded up with scrap wood to keep vagrants out, and the white paint was peeling off into little curls that dropped and hung in the surrounding crabgrass. Clover overran the front yard and knotweed shoots poked up through the slats in the porch floorboards. The whole place was in terrible need of some fixing up, and I could feel Pa’s disappointment.

  “Looks nice, Pa.”

  “Used to look a lot nicer.”

  We walked first toward the fields, where little dust devils swirled around the withered cornstalks. It looked like nothing had been planted for years. Crows and field mice had picked out everything they could eat seasons ago.

  “How big is it, Pa?”

  “Hundred and ninety-four acres,” he said, looking out over his old fields. A proudness came into his voice, something I hadn’t heard since the attack. He sounded almost alive again.

  “How come there’s nobody here?” I asked.

  “Money troubles, I reckon. Seems to be a lot of that going around. I’d bet you the bank owns it now, or the government.”

  Pa stubbed the toe of his boot under a clod of dirt, then kicked harder.

  “Look at that,” he said.

  I squatted down to have a look. Beneath a fine layer of dust were rich black crumbles. I rubbed the dirt in my hand. It was moist and stained my fingertips.

  “There’s an underground spring. Keeps the dirt wet and the pond full,” Pa said.

  We crossed through the weeds toward the east side of the house. I spied a busted window with a board missing and peeked in. It was the kitchen—empty save for about two inches of dust on the floor. I tried to picture my ma walking around in there, cooking up corn bread or something, but all I could imagine was a faceless woman doing all that.

  Together we headed down a slight hill behind the house, and not more than fifty yards away I caught the shine of sun on water. It was an oval-shaped pond, a whole lot bigger than I’d imagined. The water looked as clear as what we pumped out of the well at home. As I walked down to the edge, a shadowy shape beneath the surface darted away.

  “A fish! I saw a fish!”

  “Bass and bluegills,” Pa said quietly.

  “And you never come here to fish?” I asked. I’d never known Pa to pass up a good fishing hole.

  “Never could bring myself to come back out here,” he said, staring out at the water. “I reckon you could if you wanted. Just don’t let nobody see you.”

  I thought on it for a second, but decided it wouldn’t be much fun without Pa. The place had a feeling to it like it was more for a family, not just one person.

  We walked a quarter of the pond’s edge and sat on a limbless log. The wind was blowing ripples toward us and I could see a mallard flying circles on the horizon, probably scared to land because of us. I had a crabapple I’d found near school and carved out a thick piece with my pocketknife for Pa. He chomped on it and stretched out his legs and settled into the log. He didn’t want to go home either, I reckoned.

  He said, “I tell you I wouldn’t mind having this place again. I could have that corn shooting out of the ground like we’d struck oil.”

  That spark was back in his voice and I seized on it.

  “Maybe you could get it, Pa. Ain’t nobody living here now.”

  Pa blew out a breath and shook his head.

  “We don’t have any money, Cub. You know that.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You surprised me by wanting to come here,” he said.

  Who wouldn’t want to come here, I thought. It was even better than I’d imagined. Near town, near Rebecca’s, a normal house. Not just a place to sleep when we weren’t working the still out back.

  “Sounded like a good place,” I said.

  “It was once. Me and your ma had a good life here.”

  “Before shining.”

  “Before your ma got sick,” he said sharply. “And before the government tried to take you away from me. I did what I had to do.” He crunched his apple chunk loudly to make his point.

  I wiped the knife blade across the knee of my overalls and flicked it shut. He had done what he had to do back then on account of me. All these years I’d been thinking I was doing him a favor helping with the business, when the whole danged operation was actually something he had been forced to throw together to take care of me. Then when he had finally found a way to do it without risking jail, I had butted in and almost gotten him killed.

  I looked over and he was stock-still staring into the water, eyes wet from the wind. There was nothing I wanted more than to make things up to him.

  We were silent passing through town on the way home, and I saw folks eyeing Pa’s bandages under the cuff of his coat. Maybe they’d heard stories. Maybe Shane’s preacher pa had been telling them.

  As soon as we were home I walked right back out the door to see if I could find dinner. We hadn’t sold a drop of shine in over a week and had no food at the house.

  With about an hour of sunlight left, I headed west with Pa’s Winchester over my shoulder and four shotgun shells
in the chest pocket of my overalls. I had on what I’d started thinking of as me and Pa’s lucky red flannel shirt. I just hoped it wouldn’t bunch up and hurt my aim if I had to shoulder the gun fast.

  A noisy pair of meadowlarks squawked at me from a fallen limb, but I walked on. I’d learned long ago not to waste a shot on anything that wouldn’t make a decent meal. Or as Pa would say, “Don’t shoot unless you’re going to eat it or it’s going to eat you.”

  I’d seen a few black bears before, but usually higher up in the hills. Still, they’d be getting ready to hibernate now and looking to fatten up on any meal they could find. And we’d had so many unexpected visitors lately a bear wouldn’t have even surprised me then.

  At the back end of the cornfield I walked up slowly on the gravesite. I didn’t sit, just stood there with the gun in front of me, barrel to the sky.

  “I thought I was doing something smart for once, but he got burned. I should have just listened to Pa, but…Well you know what I did.”

  I shifted from foot to foot, unsure of what else to say. When the words came they were a surprise, like they’d come out of some part of me I didn’t know was there.

  “For so long it was just me and him. But now I know some other folks and I’ve been seeing there are other ways of doing things. Ways that don’t land you in jail or an orphanage or burned up. He thinks working for Salvatore is our only option now. I don’t. But I don’t know what else to do.”

  I bowed slightly, then walked north. The nights were coming sooner now, with the sun dropping behind the western cornfields early and no more lightning bugs around. I reached a patch of sumac where I knew rabbits holed up, and I stomped through, brushing my pant leg against each bush in hopes of spooking something out.

  A fluttering caught my eye and I spun ready to shoot, but it was just a magpie flailing about on a cedar branch. He looked injured, maybe winged by buckshot, but then I saw he didn’t have his tail feathers yet and figured he was still a baby. Sure enough there was a nest of barnyard grass wedged in the cedar’s crook and a big mama bird standing guard.

  She kept slapping at the baby with her big black-and-white wings, and I was thinking she was pretty abusive before I realized she was trying to get him to fly down to eat some of the black beetles below. They were teeming out of a hole in a rotten log, and beetle was a fine meal for a magpie, but the baby had his little bird mind set against it. The mother finally smacked him off the limb and he flew down as graceful as any eagle, then crash-landed beak-first into the dirt. He collected himself and started feeding, and it reminded me I didn’t have food yet myself, so I walked on.

  Zigzagging from shrub to shrub, I fell into deep thinking. Pa had said it himself—without shining we’d starve. And now with Salvatore around, if we didn’t shine we’d be dead too, but gangster style.

  But what about Mr. Salvatore? I didn’t know. Not yet. There were so many questions and I was sick of Pa’s answers. Was there somebody else I could talk to?

  There was a rustle in the brush next to me and a streak of gray jolted me out of my thoughts. A giant hare was bounding away, its massive hind legs coming up behind its ears as it dashed off. I dropped to a knee and threw the gun up to my shoulder. Aiming a yard ahead of the hare, I squeezed the trigger. The mass of fur flipped once, then stopped.

  “Whoo!” I ran over and grabbed the hare by its giant back feet. One shot, killed instantly. And it was big. I held it up by its back legs, and the hare’s front paws nearly dragged on the ground. It was three times the size of a cottontail.

  I had our supper, food for tomorrow, and maybe even enough to share with Rebecca. I’d gotten something big in one shot. Maybe that was the key to everything.

  THE NEXT DAY AT LUNCH, Rebecca and I sat under the school’s one maple tree, sharing our food and making a stick corral for a pair of ladybugs we’d found. The night before I’d cooked the rabbit in butter and pepper and saved a big piece in wax paper. I had a bite of Rebecca’s ham sandwich as well, to make it more like a trade.

  “You think maybe I could go to your house today?” I asked.

  “Nope. Yesterday you were invited and said no. I was even going to show you the secret basement. Folks used to hide there during President Lincoln’s war.”

  “It was an emergency. But can I? I was hoping I could talk to your grandpa.”

  She brought the rabbit leg down from her mouth and wiped the butter off her chin with the back of her hand. “What for?”

  “I’m trying to help my pa. And your grandpa knows a lot, and maybe he could help me.”

  She kept staring at me, her eyes squinting so tight they almost closed. “Grandpa used to do crazy stuff, but not anymore.”

  “I just want to talk to him.”

  She kept on staring at me and I figured it was hopeless. She raised her finger and pointed it at me, then cocked her head to the side in warning.

  “You’re lucky this rabbit is so good. You can talk to him.”

  After school that afternoon, Mr. Yunsen and I sat at the dining room table in Rebecca’s house, me with a piece of paper and the nub of a pencil in front of me, Mr. Yunsen with his hands crossed casually before him.

  “I had understood we were meeting yesterday, Cub.”

  I nodded apologetically and said, “Things changed.”

  That could sum up my year.

  “Why isn’t your father here?”

  “Um, this meeting was my idea.”

  Mr. Yunsen nodded.

  When I was hunting yesterday, I would’ve had to have shot three rabbits to get the same amount of meat I got off that hare. It would have taken longer to find them all and I’d have used two more shotgun shells. Instead, I’d just needed one shot for big results. That’s how I was going to tackle our problem.

  “Sir, me and my pa are in a bad scrape. But I was thinking maybe we could make one more big sale and then leave moonshining for good.”

  Mr. Yunsen sighed and began rolling up the cuffs on his shirt, revealing a web of purplish veins running up his chalk-white arms. You could almost see right through his skin.

  “Cub, the incident with this Salvatore fellow is absolutely horrific, there’s no question. And your eagerness to help your father is noble. But I don’t think this ‘one more big sale’ will help your situation or your relations with Salvatore at all. Quite the opposite.”

  This was true. A sale that did not go to Salvatore would be the death of us. If Salvatore was still around.

  “I’m not looking at him as the problem. I’m looking at moonshining as the problem.”

  Mr. Yunsen drummed his fingers on the table and studied me.

  “Interesting. And your decision to disregard this mobster is certainly daring. Foolhardy it would seem, but your approach is refreshing.”

  “I’m working on a plan for Mr. Salvatore.”

  Mr. Yunsen cocked a white eyebrow at me, waiting for me to explain.

  “I haven’t got the specifics nailed down just yet…”

  His eyebrow dropped, and I sensed that his hopes for me and my pa came crashing down then too.

  “It’s just that I think me and my pa could get out of moonshining for good if we just had the money to get started on something new. I’m real good with numbers. If I knew the prices and whatnot, then I could count everything we’ve got stored and see if we have a chance.”

  “Prices? Well, I don’t suppose there’s any harm in sharing what I know. Provided that you are upfront with your father about our discussion.”

  We talked for almost two hours. Rebecca had obviously inherited her talking skills from her grandpa. And that old man knew all there was to know about moonshining, rum-running, bootlegging, plumb near everything that had to do with selling illegal liquor. And he’d heard more rumors about Mr. Salvatore and his crew—they were spreading like termites throughout the state.

  Police had been bribed, terrorized, and corrupted, and no one had been able to escape their control. Every drop of alcohol was being s
hipped up North and local prices were through the roof. On my paper I scribbled prices, town names, amounts of shine, everything I could.

  I thanked Mr. Yunsen after the meeting, then thanked Rebecca, who appeared at the bottom of the giant wooden staircase and eyed me suspiciously. I headed home with half the numbers I needed. The other half I got counting our stocks in the tree.

  The night’s dew had already coated the grass by the time I reached the house, and as soon as the back door creaked open, Pa pounced on me.

  “Where have you been?” he yelled, jumping out of his chair.

  I took a step back.

  “I was at Rebecca’s,” I said. “I didn’t know I was going until today.”

  “Don’t you do that without telling me! I nearly had a fit sitting here wondering where you were. I thought you’d gotten into it with somebody.”

  I stared back at him.

  “I didn’t.”

  I started to head past him, but he stepped right in front of me. Leaning down in my face, he said, “Don’t you go anywhere without telling me. School and come home, that’s it for you.”

  I had gone to school, then I’d started working on how to save us. He’d been sitting at the house all day.

  “Why should I listen to you?”

  Pa’s eyes blazed in the lamplight and I saw him swallow hard, like he’d just choked down something venomous instead of spitting it out at me. His legs were trembling, rattling the floorboards. Any peace we’d found between us at the farm yesterday was gone like smoke in the wind. I turned my back on him and went to my room to wait out the hours until supper.

  We didn’t speak all evening and that silence, added to my desire to tell Pa my plan, was putting me into a frenzy. I walked circles in my room, stepping over pieces of the broken drawer and wishing I hadn’t gotten him riled up. Pa barked at me to come eat, and as I sat at the table listening to him angrily chomp his navy beans, I asked, “Can I come with you to work tonight?”

  Pa stopped chewing and stared at me like I’d asked to burn the house down, then swallowed in a big dry gulp. “Oh you’re coming all right. I’m not going to be the only one breaking my back working out there. Now if we’d gotten the original price I could hire a hand. But somebody told him no, so now we’re glorified servants.”