Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [30]
STEADY MONEY GOT BUD to wanting a Mercury, equipped with every hot nonstock item a car can have in regard to carbs and cams and transmissions and hubcaps. A Hurst shifter with an eight ball. Kind of car that could twist the speedometer off the end without breathing hard.
But then he took a woman he’d met at the Roadhouse to the drive-in one night, Thunder Road, which proved so instructive that Bud fended off her groping at his trousers to attend to the lesson. Robert Mitchum had a shit-hot car, and the movie showed exactly where that got him. Dead was where. Glorious, but nevertheless dead. Fact of nature, hot cars draw trouble. So, better than getting away from the law in white-knuckle races over twisted mountain roads was never having to run because you looked plain as dirt and they paid you no heed.
Next day, Bud settled for getting the truck’s radio and gas gauge fixed. He bought a brown canvas tarp to cover his load and a dozen bales of hay to strew for camouflage in the bed. As for cash investment in his new business, that was it.
He wanted to feel the glow of his accomplishment, but he made the mistake of projecting his thoughts into the future. He ran the numbers in his head, and found that hauling liquor paid considerably better than lubing boxcar couplings, but even if he worked until he was as old as the former bootlegger, he’d never make back what Lily took from him. And he’d always live like he had the muzzle of a gun to his head, those two idiot kids with their grubby fingers on the trigger.
CHAPTER 8
—IMAGINE, LUCE SAID. What if a locomotive pulling flat-cars loaded down with fresh-cut logs came chugging through right now. You’d smell dirty coal smoke and cinders. And then, when the cars passed, new-cut oak and poplar and maple, all crisp and clean. The ground shaking and the rails clacking against the big wheels and the sleepers shifting under the weight.
The children paid no attention to Luce but stood with their heads bent, studying a fanned branch of hemlock needles. They began backing slowly away, as if the branch were dangerous, a bear or snake.
—Luce said, What is it?
Dolores and Frank turned and continued walking down the sunken bed of an abandoned narrow-gauge logging railway from early in the century, which even now made a good trail for the daily jaunts through woods and fields they needed as bad as a high-strung pair of spotted bird dogs. It drained their energy into the ground like electricity and settled them.
Luce kept hoping that if she talked enough about the relict places she had discovered in her days of freedom, language would rub off on the children. And they seemed to like the walking, and would follow creeks and streams for great distances, slogging through them as if they were trails. Wet to the knees, mossy underwater stones shifting beneath their feet, they bobbled along and for balance waved their arms like lunatics. And if they weren’t doing that, they had to be herded down the curves of trail to keep them from making one of their straight-line marches, regardless of terrain impediments, like they were being pulled by a string down some passage nobody could detect except maybe dousers with their wise twitching sticks crossing and parting to find underground watercourses and other transmissions of unknown powers.
This day, Luce’s next history stop was a magic place in the river where a Cherokee fish weir still showed its downstream V during times of low water, and where Luce believed she would always catch a fish. Which she demonstrated by cutting a springy pole from a beech and using a string and hook from her pocket and rock bait she’d taken from a secret place in a creek a ways back that old Stubblefield had shown her one day on a walk together, acting like he was giving her the combination to a safe full of money, saying only three people knew the spot and two of them were dead. The result, a rainbow trout she pulled out of the water and showed the