The Whiskey Baron (19 page)

All through the day Mary Jane traversed this countryside. At midday he settled in the arms of a sycamore, the smooth bark cool and the wide leaves shelter from the blistering sun. A cluster of other trees nearby, their branches twining overhead to keep him in the shade. He rested his eyes, and in the afternoon haze he dreamt of the blind man from the mountain, marching up Main Street ringing his bell and calling for the end of the world: “The Lord will smite down those who aren’t saved. Follow me to the river, brethren, and wash your sins in holy water.”

In his dream sinners came out of their proud houses with snakes’ tongues and fire in their eyes, the living dead following the piper still tolling his bell through the streets of Castle. Sutures across their cheeks and foreheads, bare skin spliced to bare skin. Night fell on the town. The sun blackened and the moon filled with blood and a cloud of fire swept through the alleys like water from a burst dam. Mary Jane found himself alone in a jail cell awaiting his creator. Depending on God’s demeanor, he would have words. He would have words.

He woke and moved on through a piney wood, roughly north, stopping once to pick blackberries. In the late afternoon the woods opened to reveal, in the distance, score marks where the crests of the Blue Ridge met the sky. A washed out and grown over dirt road led from the clearing into more pines and sloped down into a valley. A rusty tow trailer lay in a glade of sedge and red clay, grown over with dead brown vines beside rows of rocky tilled earth, sprinkled with sticks and broomstraw. Across the glade a boulder jutted out of the ground, and beside it he found a nice resting place, a circle of loaming soil and pinestraw. He rested against the boulder and sat in the soft earth, pulled a peach out of his bag and ate. Juice dribbled down his chin. His hands grew sticky from the soft sweet flesh.

Later he built a fire. Embers sizzled into the evening as a storm rolled in, and in his dream a figure emerged in the forest, a husk of a man whose firehot eyes could only be those of the devil.

I know who you are
, Mary Jane said.

The man sat beside him, helped himself to a plate of cold beans, and chewed thoughtfully before asking Mary Jane about his family. His voice grated like a train skidding to a halt on a trestle:
You come from good people, Mary Jane. Why did you leave them?

I couldn’t help it
, Mary Jane said.
Trouble came to us, and I had to move on
.

Trouble came because you called for it. You left Ernest and Lee dead in the street to save yourself, and you left Abigail to follow through with your selfish plans. Men weren’t made in God’s image to gallivant around like you’re doing now
.

I’m going to Charlotte to make things right
.

Just like that?

Just like that
.

And you believe it will all work out? Mary Jane, you’re a hustler. That’s who you are. You’ve left behind a trail of suffering, and before you is a long, narrow road. Godspeed, if you think you can walk it, but making things right now won’t account for the sin you’ve already caused
.

Mary Jane felt hollow inside, like he’d been bruised right down to the soul. Christ given for his sins, hung from a cross, suffered, died and buried. That knowledge was a heavy burden for a man to carry, for all of us come up short. How many have to reckon with their sins? To atone? To ask for mercy? He said,
Jesus will forgive me
.

Jesus? What do you know about Jesus?

He died for my sins
.

He took lashings two thousand years ago, so that’s two thousand years of souls he might have saved. I’m here to tell you there’ll come a time when the Lord’ll grow weary of forgiveness. His creation has done some damage and wiped the good name of His son through the mud. All in the name of Jesus. Ha!

So God’s promise doesn’t apply because I was born too late?

Have you ever tried to explain Noah’s Flood to a child?
the man replied.
In the good book God has done some wicked things
.

So has man
.

And so has man. Such is human nature. We were made to fall, but what is God’s nature? Father, son, and ghost? God wasn’t made to fall, nor to forgive. He simply is
.

So why does sin matter?
Mary Jane asked.

Rather than answer, the man left him there and the night wore on. Rain came and went and the fire hissed until it was cold. Nothing moved in the darkness around him.

The next day he walked along a damp road without eating and stopped when he heard the squeak and hiss of a tractor-trailer pulling into the lot of a filling station. He followed the sound to a cleared-away patch of dried yellow grasses, clover, and concrete. An old country store set up in the middle of nowhere, no signs to indicate where he was or how far was the nearest town.

Inside, he stood in line to buy a bottle of Coca-Cola. The afternoon heat burned the dust in the air. In the back of the dry room, a woman held a miniature dachshund in her arms, and three old men with raspy voices stood around her, discussing its blackness, one man preferring brown dachshunds, the other two admiring this one. The cash register clanked as the clerk tendered the sale.

Mary Jane set his bottle on the counter and asked, “How far is Charlotte?”

“I’d say it’s about forty miles, straight shot to your left up the highway. You on foot?”

“I was, lest I can get a ride.”

“It’d take you two days to walk it.”

“I’m going to set here and drink this Co-Cola and see if I can get a ride.”

The clerk rang up the drink. “You set here and you don’t have to pay for the bottle.” Mary Jane paid with a dollar, and when the clerk handed him his change, he said, “Shouldn’t take too long fore a trucker coming in will stop.”

“Appreciate it,” Mary Jane said.

“God bless.”

In the back of the room, the crowd around the dog had quieted. Mary Jane felt their eyes as he stepped into the hot outdoors. The sun seared against the dust and the pavement, and he sipped the drink until the bottle was empty, and then he lay it in the shade by the building. The sugary syrup stuck to his teeth, and he wished for a real drink. Some days were worse than others, but he’d always liked to drink, ever since his days as a soldier in the war. His father had never approved, said it would lead him into the kind of trouble he was in now, and Mary Jane couldn’t figure how his father had made such a prophecy so many years ago. His brother had drunk plenty
back then too, but their father’d seemed to peg Mary Jane as the one who wouldn’t be able to quit, who would ride it head on to the devil and come out ruined. Well. Here he was, on his way to Charlotte to face that devil. Making a deal with Aunt Lou would earn him enemies, especially Larthan Tull. That was assuming he could make a deal with her, and of that he was less sure now that he was several days on the road. Why he hadn’t just killed Larthan Tull before he left town he couldn’t say, but when he returned from Charlotte, that business would be his first order. And then any man who dared step in his path.

A car rumbled to a halt, and an attendant hoofed over to greet it. Mary Jane listened to children bickering in the back seat, didn’t smile or wave, only continued to sit still until the family drove off. The broiling day made him faint, but he remained in the shade until he heard the hiss of another truck pulling in.

The driver was a sandy-haired kid not much older than Mary Jane’s nephews. His shirt and pants hug from his lanky body like a boy dressed in his father’s clothes, but when Mary Jane came over and asked where he was heading, his face wised up and hardened.

“I’d be obliged if you could get me a little closer to Charlotte.”

“I’m not going all the way into town. Where you need to be?”

“Myers Park, eventually.”

The driver froze with his tongue behind his lip.

“Anything to help keep me from being on the road till next Sunday.”

The driver hesitated as though torn between common sense on one hand, the bandits on the road who would slit your throat and take everything you had, and on the other hand—not compassion, exactly, and not exactly respect for his elders, but the uncertainty of youth in the face of a grown man who knows what he’s about. Mary Jane recognized that look as the same one he’d gotten from Ernest and Lee as he’d described his godforsaken plan to enter the liquor market. He took advantage of the kid’s hesitance and climbed into the cab. “Much obliged,” he said.

After he’d paid for the gas, the kid climbed into the driver’s seat without looking at Mary Jane and started the engine. The truck jerked onto the highway as the kid mangled the gears. He got up
to speed and seemed unconcerned by the curves and narrowness of the road. Their windows were down, so the wind and the engine created a deafening roar. Mary Jane nonetheless felt obligated to make conversation.

“Where you coming from?” he said.

The kid glanced over at him.

“I said where you coming from?”

“Georgia.”

“I had an uncle in Georgia. Whereabouts?”

“South Georgia.”

“Mm. My uncle was in Macon. I don’t rightly know where that is.”

The kid made no reply. The steering wheel wobbled loosely in his hands. Mary Jane studied him as he sped onward. He looked about Ernest and Lee’s age, had that same scrawny look, a dust of freckles on his soft skin. Amazing how everyone not your age looked the same. Although the kid was trying to look tough over there like a working man, Mary Jane could see he was just another lost soul trying to make it in this world. The kid could easily have been one of Mary Jane’s Hillside prodigies. Apparently, he’d never had a wild uncle like Mary Jane, or else he would have relaxed a little and maybe even shot the breeze.

Mary Jane closed his eyes and tried not to picture the truck missing one of these hilly curves and rolling right into an abyss. The warmth of the air blowing onto his face and the soft padded seat made him drowsy. Before long he was remembering his last night with Ernest and Lee, bonded by conspiracy, drunk off Larthan Tull’s rotgut, playing cards in a booth.

Depot was sweeping the tavern, and when he passed near their booth, he said, “I hear you boys have some liquor brewing out at the widow’s place.”

“We might have a sup. Why, you want some for the bar?”

Depot shook his head. On the next pass with the broom, he said to them, “Tull know you’ve got a side business going?”

“Likely he does.”

Depot nodded and swept on. A moment later he called, “Why don’t you boys step out with me?”

“Hell, Depot, we’re in a game here.”

“Come on.”

Mary Jane saw the shotgun before the boys did, and he knew what was coming the same as if he’d read the story in the newspaper: Three murdered outside the Hillside Inn. Ernest and Lee looked up and saw the score as well when Depot cocked his head toward the door and said, “I can’t have you hurting my boss’s business.”

Ernest laid the cards on the table and eyed Depot as he walked away, Lee following, then Mary Jane. The night was sweltering, and Mary Jane, in what he felt would surely be his last moments alive, didn’t pray or take in the beauty to savor the evening air. Instead, as he marched off the porch, he noticed a slimy slug that clung to the railing. As they walked up the hill to the road he thought that was one nasty creature. Where’d he come from? What was he doing up there? Those would have been his last thoughts, that banal musing on an ugly, insignificant creature.

The barkeep didn’t say anything more to them. Once the four of them were standing in the road, Depot pumped the shotgun, aimed, and shot Lee in the chest. Lee’s body spun as he fell to the roadside. Depot pumped again and fired at Ernest. The shot sprayed into Ernest’s jaw and looked to take off half his face. Stray pellets bit into Mary Jane’s shoulder, knocking him back.

He hunkered over and, without thinking, dove down the hillside and tumbled into the ravine. A third shot kicked up dirt at the hill’s edge, and Mary Jane rose in the bottom and scrambled through briars and brush, not looking back.

The driver slammed the brakes and jolted Mary Jane from his day-mare. The kid wheeled the truck to the side of the highway, kicked up dust as the rig eased to a halt.

“You said Charlotte?” he asked.

Mary Jane caught his bearings, saw a crossroads, meadowed hills, cattle, and a barn in the distance. Nothing resembling the great city.

“I’m heading north from here, but that road will take you the rest of the way in, maybe five or six miles to the city limits.”

Mary Jane rubbed his eyes, pinched his nose. He thought about
asking if the kid would take him on a detour, but the kid kept his eyes straight ahead, as though he were holding his breath until this stinking sinner got out of his cab. He’d done his Christian duty and learned his lesson. What lesson was that? Mary Jane wondered. Don’t pick up a stranger or he’ll fall asleep on you?

“Obliged,” he muttered as he got out of the cab. The kid maneuvered the truck back on the highway and grinded the gears as he tried to floor it and speed toward wherever he was going, leaving only dust in his wake.

Mary Jane looked about him again and began to walk down the road the way the kid suggested. Meadows gave way to tobacco fields, their leaves yellowgreen under the blistering sun. He passed one shack after another, the men lazing in the shade not even upturning their hats to investigate this lone traveler. He passed a dead mule that seemed to have been hit by a car. The mule stank and flies gorged on its open sores. After a time he came to a mill village, the familiar puff of steam from the factory, the dusty streets, the cluster of houses a mirror image of the Bell.

No one was in the streets, but he could feel eyes watching him from the houses as he walked through. If this was anything like the Bell, strangers came in often but they didn’t remain strangers for long. They either adapted to the community or left in a hurry. Likely the community knew before the stranger did whether they’d get along. He approached the mill and flagged over a man in the yard.