Down With the Shine (5 page)

“And she was my sister.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Are you?” Smith says, and I finally detect a slight softening in his tone.

“Yes! Of course.”

“Then why did she have your crappy old suitcase, Lennie? And a fake ID with your name, but her picture on it? What do you know about that?”

I’d had no idea about the fake ID, but I can’t say I’m surprised.
Oh, Dyl, what did you do?

“Well?” Smith presses, and I’m about to spill everything I know, when a gigantic arm circles Smith’s chest, picks him up, and carries him away as if he weighs nothing more than a rag doll. The white letters on the back of his T-shirt read Security. I start to chase after them when a second bouncer grabs me. I struggle as he drags me in the opposite direction as Smith.

“Smith!” I yell, uselessly kicking my legs against the mountain that has me in his grasp.

I can’t help but wonder if I’m going to end up like Dyl.

The thing is, I’m not Dylan. Dyl wanted lots of things. So many things. She was a black hole of wanting. But—with the exception of tonight—all I’ve ever asked for is survival. During that last fight when I accused her of having a death wish, she called me the living dead. Said that I didn’t know how to truly live. Maybe this whole night was to prove something to her.

In the end, though, I am proving something to myself. Survival is sometimes more than enough.

Since I cannot overpower this guy, I decide to use my words instead. “My uncles,” I gasp. “My uncles are the Hinkton brothers.”

He hesitates and I feel laughter through his chest.
“Maybe you’ll taste like moonshine.”

I go cold. We are directly in front of the bar and he is reaching for the door, no doubt ready to carry me in and offer me as a virgin sacrifice. Squeezing my eyes closed, I blurt out the only words that might save me. “I’m Leonard Cash’s daughter. He’ll kill anyone who touches me.”

And just like that, I’m released. For the first time in my life that name is not a curse. For the first time I am happy to have it.

My legs wobble beneath me and I sink to the ground. I need to get up. I need to get away from here. I take three, four, five steadying breaths and then, using the wall behind me, I get my feet beneath me once more.

A tiny man stands before me. The overall impression he makes is that of a small, harmless woodland creature—like a chipmunk or a squirrel. A large part of that is due to his hair, which flows from the top of his head and down around his shoulders. As if this wasn’t enough, his beard seems to cover most of his face too, giving the impression of a veil that allows only his eyes and his nose to peek out. His clothes seem like they were picked to match his hair—both in color and texture. Several layers of pilly brown sweaters make him appear almost cuddly, while the frayed cords covering his legs have wear marks at the knees.

“I’m a friend of your father’s,” he says, as if this explains everything. “Well, perhaps more of a business partner. An associate of sorts. Or an employee.” He flashes a gummy smile at me. “It’s a shifting role, to be honest.”

“Um, okay,” I say.

“Sorry about the boys. They get a little overzealous sometimes.”

“It’s okay,” I say, then step sideways to go around him. He moves with me, blocking my path. I slide in the other direction, but he follows me again. I try a last-ditch quick dodge to the right and still cannot shake him. Frustrated with the ugly twists and turns this evening has taken, I finally lose it. “What the hell? Get outta my way, dude!”

My outburst is enough to shake him. He stumbles backward as if my words are a physical blast, and I take the opportunity to slip around him. Except he snatches at my elbow, with a surprisingly strong grip. “Lennie, please. If your father were here, he’d roll out the red carpet and gilded cage. And if he knew that in his absence you’d been treated with anything but the best, well, he’d kill me.” The man titters nervously. “I’m joking. Probably. I hope. Right?”

His voice trembles. I don’t want to feel sorry for him, but I do. “Look, it’s okay. He’s never gonna know about any of this. I just, I gotta go,” I give a little tug, removing
myself from his grasp. “I have to find my friend.”

“Oh, don’t worry about him. He’s been taken care of.”

I freeze. “Like cement boots sending him to the bottom of Lake Erie taken care of?”

“Heavens, no.” He chuckles nervously. “He’s been sent home. Unless . . . did you want him taken care of in that way?”

“No!”

“Oh, well, good, good. That keeps things simple.” He clears his throat and then does this little weird half-bow thing. “As for you, young lady, I have a driver who can take you and the rest of your friends home. I’m pretty sure it’s past your bedtime. No need to pay or tip. The driver will be taken care of. . . . Oh, dear, maybe I shouldn’t use that phrase anymore.”

“Yeah, it’s a little confusing.” The man remains by my side as I slide around the cars with the goal of returning to my far corner of the parking lot. He refuses to be shaken loose, so with the hope of getting rid of him, I stick out my hand. “So, um, thanks, I guess.”

“Rabbit. The name’s Rabbit,” he says. “If you do run into your father one day, I’d prefer if you didn’t mention that we met. Also, you should probably avoid running into your father.”

“Sure,” I easily agree, knowing the chance of seeing my
father is pretty much zero. “I’ll do my best to avoid him.”

“Wonderful. Wonderful.” Rabbit grabs my hand and shakes it enthusiastically. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Miss Cash. A real pleasure. If you ever need anything taken care of, er, that is, if I can ever be of assistance, you can ask for me at the bar anytime.”

Right on cue, a minivan with a taxi logo on its side door pulls up in front of me.

The driver collects the other ex-partiers still lined up on the curb. A few of them mumble thank you to me when they climb inside. As we pull out of the parking lot, I look for W2’s truck, but don’t see any sign of it. A last ember of anger flares and for a moment I regret not asking Rabbit to have that sleazeball taken care of.

It is four a.m. by the time I get home, and I nearly cry with relief when the door opens easily under my hand. With heavy feet I climb the stairs to my room and collapse onto my bed. I expect sleep to come quickly, but even as the approaching dawn begins to eat away at the night’s darkness, my brain won’t stop replaying the evening’s events.

I keep coming back to the moment when it was all going right, when I got to have just that little taste of what it felt like to be winning. I’d had this crazy hope that maybe the tide was finally turning. That maybe for the first time in
my life, things were gonna go my way.

It was a short-lived fantasy, but I can’t stop myself from trying to hold on to it as I fall into sleep. Hoping that maybe, in my dreams, I can believe in it once more.

I
wake to the sound of someone doing their best Big Bad Wolf impersonation on our front door.

BAM
.
BAM
.
BAM
.

Some people say bad things happen in threes.

Those people must be luckier than me. In my life, bad things don’t feel the need to limit themselves this way. Which is how I know trouble has a distinctive knock. And this is trouble times three.

My suspicions are confirmed a moment later, when the banging becomes interspersed with someone yelling my name.

“Cash! Cash! CAAASSSHHHH. My dad’s gonna sue you for every sorry thing you own!” It’s impossible not to recognize W2’s distinctive holler. He’s one of those people who doesn’t have an inside voice.

Bleary-eyed, I find my alarm clock. It is seven a.m. We
are a night-owl family and nobody is ever up before ten at the earliest.

The uncs will not be pleased.

Hoping the pills still have them sleeping peacefully, I hop out of bed, throw on some clothes, and shove my cell into my back pocket. I have to take several deep breaths while my head swims and I resist the urge to hurl.

“LENNIE!”

That is Uncle Jet’s bellow. The “you’re in deep shit” one.

Oh, good, the sleeping pills have worn off. Perfect timing. Once again my luck is the worst ever.

Stomach churning, I gingerly slink downstairs while trying to think of a cover story for damage control, but when I spot the tableau in the middle of the living room my entire mind goes blank.

W2 stands with his arms crossed over his chest, flanked by my oversized uncles. He looks pitiful and small. I would laugh except for the looks on my uncles’ faces. They are not red-faced and furious as I expected them to be. No, what I see is much worse.

They look scared.

No one says anything for a long moment.

“What did you do to me?” W2 whines, breaking the silence.

Uncle Dune slaps a hand against the back of W2’s
skull, accompanied by a soft, “Shaddup.”

W2 is an idiot, so instead of shadduping, he clutches the back of his head as if mortally wounded and wheels on Uncle Dune. “Do you know who I am?” he demands.

There’s a hole in the garage wall the size of Uncle Rod from one of Uncle Dune’s punches. For all their power, though, Uncle Dune’s fists fly incredibly slowly, which at this moment is very lucky for W2 as Uncle Jet quickly steps in and grabs hold of the fist headed toward W2’s stupid face.

“Not now,” Uncle Jet tells Dune. Then he looks at me. “This boy says you were at a party last night.”

I know better than to try and lie, but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna volunteer information. I simply nod in response.

“And you brought moonshine with you?” Uncle Jet continues.

Damn, how did W2 manage to blab so much so quickly? I nod again.

“And you gave this boy some of that shine? Personally drinking and toasting with him?”

“Yeah, we did the toast.” I sigh and roll my eyes like a petulant asshole, trying to convince everyone
I’m
the wounded party here.

“What did I tell you?” W2 exclaims, pushing past
Uncle Jet. I wince, waiting for blood to flow, but for some reason Uncle Jet not only allows W2 to interrupt his interrogation but lets him get in his space too. “She said, ‘Make a wish.’”

Now it’s my uncles’ turn to wince.

“And I said, ‘I want brass balls so when some pissy girl tries to knee me in the nuts you’ll just hear a loud old
gooonnggggg
.’” W2 makes the gong noise all dramatic, his mouth open in a wide
O
and his whole body vibrating like it’s been rung. “And then she said, ‘Wish granted.’”

“That is not what I said!” I explode.

W2 shrugs. “Right, right. You told me stainless steel would be better, it’s dishwasher safe and lasts forever. And I was like, ‘Yeah balls of steel. I like that.’ Then you said some alla-kazoo wish bullshit and we both drank that nasty booze you brought to the party.”

Uncle Dune growls low in his throat, but W2 doesn’t seem to notice.

“And I thought, ‘Well this swill is sure as shit gonna make my head pound tomorrow.’ But instead when I woke up this morning to take a piss, you know what was aching?” W2 grabs his junk. “My balls! My freaking balls were killing me, and when I scratched them they made this weird clinking noise.” Of course, he demonstrates. “So I jerked down my shorts, took a peek, and guess what I saw?”

I say nothing. This is a joke. I mean, of course, it’s a joke. It has to be a joke.

W2 hooks his thumbs inside his track pants and jerks them down. “This is what I saw!” Both hands gesture to his crotch, in case anyone was confused about where exactly to look.

I throw my hands up to cover my eyes.

“You scared to see what you did?” W2 yells. I can hear him coming closer. “Look, bitch. Look, you little cu—”

W2 is cut off by the thud of flesh and bone colliding, immediately followed by the louder crash of a body plowing through drywall.

I peek between my fingers to find the solid wall of Uncle Dune’s back between me and everything else. Leaning slightly to the left to see around him, I immediately spot the new dent in the wall and W2’s slumped form beneath it. Uncle Jet and Uncle Rod are leaning over him on either side. At first I think they’re checking his vitals to make sure Dune didn’t kill him, but then I realize their attention is focused between W2’s legs.

Uncle Rod gives a long whistle. “She’s done it now,” he says in a low voice as he bends to pick up W2.

I suppose after last night, the sight of W2’s bare white buttocks slung over Uncle Rod’s shoulder on their way out the door should give me some satisfaction, but all I feel is
dread. And it grows when Uncle Jet says, “Put him in the basement.”

I open my mouth to protest, but realize the alternative is to put him outside, where he’ll run to his daddy as soon as he regains consciousness. And then we’ll really be in trouble.

“Need me to open the door?” I call after Uncle Rod.

“You’re staying right here,” Uncle Jet says in a tone that leaves no room for argument.

Not wanting another interrogation, I decide to argue anyway. “That guy is a slimeball. I mean, obviously. You saw for yourselves. Look, yes, I went to a party last night. I took some moonshine. I only wanted to have some fun. It’s my senior year and . . .” I choke back the words I was going to say. That after this year my life feels like a dead end. That I have nothing to look forward to except having a life exactly like theirs.

“It’s my senior year,” I repeat lamely. “And W2’s just pissed that nothing happened between us last night, so he came here to get me in trouble. Whatever he did to himself down there is some stupid prank he thinks we’re all dumb enough to fall for.”

Uncle Jet stares at me long and hard, looking a little perplexed. “That was no prank.” His brows furrow even further than before. “Lennie, you do know what your
uncles and I do for a living, right?”

I laugh more out of nervousness than anything else. “You sell moonshine and it’s illegal. And I know it was bad to take it to the party.”

Uncle Jet looks angry now, but thankfully his stare isn’t directed at me. He’s pointing a finger at Uncle Dune. “I thought you talked to her. What was it . . . three or four years ago? You drew the short straw and then a few days later said you and Lennie had a good talk.”

“I was gonna!” Uncle Dune roars. “But then you had to stick your nose in and tell her first!”

“I sure as shit didn’t!” Uncle Jet shoots back. “Who told ya I did?”

“Well, Lennie . . .” Uncle Dune’s voice trails off and once again the focus is on me. Worse, Uncle Dune is looking at me with a look reminiscent of Bambi after his mother got shot. “Lennie . . . you lied to me?”

I gulp. “A little lie. I thought you were trying to give me the sex talk.”

I can still clearly remember five years ago, looking up to see Uncle Dune standing in my bedroom doorway. He’d cleared his throat before announcing, “Lennie, you’re old enough now. It’s time you were told how things really work.”

I assumed that
things
was a euphemism for penises.
And I really did not want to discuss the ins and outs (excuse the pun) of such things with my uncle Dune of all people. In a panic, the lie popped out. “Oh, Uncle Jet already told me all about it.”

“He did?” Uncle Dune’s face got all crinkly and confused then.

“Yeah, we were watching
Road House
together and you know how that movie always makes him real emotional and he just sorta told me. Everything. All the details. More than I needed to know really. So there’s nothing more for you to tell me. It’s been covered like a plate of extra-cheesy nachos.”

“Oh,” Uncle Dune said. Then came the dreaded follow-up question. “And do you think that’s something you’ll want to do sometime soon?”

“No! God, no! I’m way too young for that. In fact, I think I’m one of those late bloomers who end up waiting till I’m thirty or forty to do it for the first time.”

Uncle Dune finally cracked a smile at that. “Okay, I get it. You’re freaked out. I was the same way at your age. It seemed impossible that it all worked that way. I promise, it all comes together how it’s meant to. But look, when you’re ready, I’d like you to grant a wish for me.”

Assuming Dune meant that he wanted me to practice safe sex or something like that, I’d quickly agreed just to
get him out of my room. “Sure, sure. You’ll be the first to know when I’m ready.”
As if.

“Damn it, Lennie!” Uncle Jet explodes now. “That wasn’t sex ed! He was explaining how the shine works. He was preparing you for the day when you’d start granting wishes and take over for us so we could retire. Are you telling me that every time since then, when I’ve told you about carrying on an important legacy, you thought I was talking about plain old bootlegging?”

Oh boy, I hope that’s a hypothetical question, ’cause to be honest, Uncle Jet likes to monologue sometimes. Especially when he’s had a few. And I usually tune him out.

“Did you?” Uncle Jet demands. Shit. Not hypothetical then.

“Ummm . . .” I stall.

“Let me make this clear. Are you listening real good right now?”

I nod.

“We. Grant. Wishes. ‘Make a wish’ isn’t a way of saying, ‘Down the hatch.’ It’s our way of saying, ‘What do you wish for?’ That’s it. Right there. We grant wishes. Do you think you maybe got that now?”

I blink at him several times. But nothing he said makes any sense no matter how many times I flap my eyelids. At last an idea slowly takes shape in my head. “Did you put
W2 up to this? Is this your way of teaching me a lesson about sneaking out with shine?”

“Teaching you a
lesson
?” Uncle Jet’s face grows redder with every word. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him this angry before. He takes two steps toward me, and I can’t help it—I flinch. He freezes. “I’m not gonna hit ya, Lennie. But I am gonna throw you out.” He points toward the door. “Get out. Get out and don’t come back.”

I should run, but I can’t because Uncle Jet’s suddenly on his knees, clutching his chest. “My heart.” He grinds the words out between his teeth.

I put a hand on his back. “It’s okay, it’s only a panic attack. Remember what the doctor said? Your heart is fine.”

“Strong as a horse,” Uncle Dune booms behind me.

“Put your head between your knees,” I remind him. “You don’t want to faint like the last time.”

Uncle Jet staggers toward the stairs and lowers himself so that he’s sitting with his head hanging between his knees. “I didn’t faint. I’ve never fainted in my life.” He mutters.

I go into the kitchen, pour a few fingers of shine into a glass, and bring it back to Uncle Jet, setting it between his feet. I know he sees it, but it takes a long moment for his hand to find the glass. “Thanks.” He practically whispers
the word, but I hear it just the same.

“You’re welcome,” I say at precisely the same volume.

This is usually the point where I would escape back up to my bedroom, but since I was only moments ago sort of kicked out I’m not sure if I even have a bedroom anymore.

Luckily, Uncle Rod returns, throwing the door open so that it bangs against the wall. “Holy shee-it.” He gives a long exaggerated whistle. “That kid’s got stainless steel nicer than what we got in the silverware drawer wrapped around his boys. Lennie, that is some—” He stops suddenly as the scene by the staircase penetrates his brain. “What did I miss?”

“Nothing,” Uncle Jet and Uncle Dune say at the same time.

I force a weak smile and shrug when Uncle Rod’s raised eyebrows swing in my direction.

“Okay, then,” he says. “Well, I locked the man of steel in the crawl space. He’s about as sharp as a bowling ball—”

“Or his own balls,” Uncle Jet, still in the prone position, cannot resisting inserting. All three of my uncles giggle over that one. Uncle Jet even recovers enough to pull his head out from between his knees.

“Ain’t that the truth,” Uncle Rod finally says. “He won’t be happy when he wakes up. And when I came up the stairs I found this one, hovering at the back door.” He
jerks his thumb behind him and I look past Uncle Rod to see Smith standing in the doorway. His face looks like someone mistook it for a piñata and refused to stop hitting it until some candy fell out.

There is nothing good about the feeling in my chest. Part of me wants to walk over and press a finger into the angriest blackest bruise just to watch him wince. The other part wants to hand him a bag of frozen peas and stroke his forehead.

Ignoring both impulses, I cross my arms over my traitorous heart.

“Aw, shit,” Uncle Jet says, slowly rising to his feet. “You got brass balls too?”

“Stainless steel,”
Uncle Rod interjects.

Uncle Jet waves a hand Uncle Rod’s way, silencing him. Then we all stare at Smith and he stares back at us with his one eye that isn’t swollen shut.

“I woke up this morning,” he says, but then stops and starts again. “Something woke me up this morning. My hand.” He holds up his right hand. Unlike his face, it seems to be in good shape. Looks like whoever beat him up didn’t give him much chance to return the favor. “I tried to ignore it, but the feeling wouldn’t go away.”