Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [29]
OLD JONES WAS A BALDY ELDER who had cut his teeth on moonshining back at the edge of the previous century. He wore pressed bib overalls and a starched white shirt and a black suit coat. Farmer below, businessman above. He sat rocking on his porch, looking at the view across the valley. Said he was thinking about cutting open a watermelon if Bud cared to have a slice.
They ate the melon spraddle-legged, letting the juice drop between their feet and disappear into the porous porch boards. Jones got pretty talky about his early days of moonshining, the copper kettle and copper coil. Eluding revenuers for decades and never serving a day of time. Even now, cooking off about fifty gallons every fall when the evenings grew crisp and he and his white-headed buddies wanted to get away from the wives and camp out in the high mountains for a couple of weeks, running their coon dogs and recollecting lies from their youth. Oh, the happy late nights holding fresh bottles of corn liquor up to firelight and complimenting one another on the fineness of the bead. Now the money was in bootlegging. Hauling bonded stuff. No art, just commerce.
When Bud grew weary of listening to folklore and turned to business, he bore down pretty hard. Times have changed, was his main theme. Less bullshit, more profit. The new world had gotten dangerous, and Bud embodied the new. In the end, he nudged the bootlegger into retirement with a combination of fairly specific threats and promises involving a slightly vague percentage of an expanded liquor empire run by Bud on sharper modern lines. Long story short, the former bootlegger could sit in his porch rocker and do nothing but collect a monthly check.
—Good God, Jones said. Don’t you know this is a cash business?
Bud left with a little brown leather shirt-pocket address book. Inside, a long list of standing orders reaching forward into infinity from everybody in town interested in getting their liquor without committing themselves to a day’s drive. Two fifths of Smirnoff every two weeks. One of Johnnie Walker Red and two of Bacardi monthly. Half gallon of Popov weekly. Page after page. Each order with a name and a number, if you considered 7 and 14-G to be phone numbers, which Bud didn’t. So, what a happy surprise when actual liquor customers answered his calls.
By the end of his second week in town, Bud had made four long runs in the pickup and found himself amazed at how fast you make friends when you’re the bootlegger. Amazing, as well, to be gainfully self-employed so soon after arriving in town wondering how far he could stretch a pocket of greasy bills from his gas station stickups if he lived frugal, which was never likely to happen. Yet, in a matter of days, he had income.
Jones’s little brown book made the new vocation possible, so Bud stopped by one afternoon and peeled off a few twenties as a first fraudulent percentage for the old boy, who was an entertaining little shit when you compared him to the run of regular people. Sat on the porch with him, drinking a tumbler of his shine mixed fifty-fifty with lemonade, and Jones told every bit of local gossip he knew. Always an appealing trait, but especially now, when anything about a couple of new kids would be so interesting.
When Bud finally got ready to leave, already down the porch steps on the way to the truck, the old man said, You ever wonder why there hasn’t been but one bootlegger in this end of the county?
Bud said, Nope.
Old Jones said, Twenty years ago, if you’d come to