The Whiskey Baron (23 page)

The brothers had to contain their laughter as they watched. They only expected him to unwrap the sandwich, smell it, investigate, and gag. But instead and to Willie’s surprise he chomped down like he hadn’t eaten since lunch yesterday. Which he might not have, given his family situation. They’d drifted to town after the Depression was in full swing, already poor and no buffer to keep them from getting poorer. Peach Skin’s father was out of work, hadn’t even come looking for a job, so who knew how the family subsisted.

Peach Skin consumed half the sandwich without even looking at it and not even chewing that Willie could see. Willie watched on in horror, and remorse returned to his soul, heavy and laden with a guilt no preacher would ever be able to assuage.

Peach Skin finally must have spied a piece of the tail because he quit chewing in a hurry. He opened the last of the bread, saw the bare and ringed tail, wormlike in its curls and nakedness, and spat out a mouthful of the bloody, unchewed food.

He moaned and twitched, stood up and screamed something awful: “Rat tail, rat tail!”

Turning, he stumbled away from his lunch, that rusty lunchbox, and ran into the mill. Men at their looms watched him, some of the younger men muttering, “They Lord,” the older men not even turning from the machines, so used were they to the antics of children in the mill.

Peach Skin rounded a corner and tripped over his own feet and fell onto one of the idle machines. Men scrambled up and a melee ensued, napkins swirling and men cursing and Peach Skin screaming up to high heaven about the rat in his sandwich. The Hopewell brothers laughed and laughed and soon, when other men figured out what had gone down, the entire crew laughed at the poor dusty kid from Kentucky.

When he recovered from his spill, Peach Skin reared up and assaulted Willie. The two boys clambered around the weave room, among the dust and spit. The men shut down their looms, and the machines ground to a halt. Men yelled. The boys grunted. After rough hands pried the boys apart, an eerie silence filled the room.

Mr. Lowry, the mill boss, stood in the corner and waved for them to follow him to his office. He shut the three boys—Willie, Quinn, Peach Skin—in there. Through the window, Willie watched his father and Mr. Lowry talk. Joe frowned and glared in at the brothers with a look likely meant to instill fear. Mr. Lowry was wide and tall and wore a white button-down shirt so that, standing beside him, Joe appeared tiny, grimy, and meek. Back at the house, Willie knew, his father’s authority would return, but for now he pitied the man and felt a deep shame for feeling that pity. He looked away.

Quinn hunched over and stared at the floor in boredom. Peach Skin’s eyes flicked back and forth between the two brothers, and then he said to them, in a calm voice, “You boys know you’re going to pay for this.”

Quinn spat on the floor by Peach Skin’s feet.

“I’ll put a hex on your entire family,” Peach Skin said. “You’ll see. You’ll be begging for a rat sandwich before I’m through with you.”

“Yeah, yeah. I’ve heard that before,” Quinn said.

Peach Skin pointed at him and said, “You think I don’t know all about you?”

“What do you know?”

“About Evelyn Tull? You think everybody here doesn’t already know about you and her? Doesn’t even matter if I put a hex on you. You’re already cursed.”

M
ary Jane roamed through Charlotte under cover of night. He’d been on the run more than a week now, tired and grimy from the long road and wrong turns. Water puddled in the wet streets of the east end, the Tudor houses in Myers Park, clear brick towering over well-kept lawns and curving streets. Light gutter trash and gas lamps. The quiet shuttle of streetcars. Not his district, but his destination. Tony suburb home of the mill owners, bankers, and utility leaders the rest of the city worked for.

At number 7 he stopped and examined the house, the downstairs windows still lit up though it was nearing midnight. All the neighbors had work in a few hours, office jobs, but Mary Jane knew this resident’s business, and she didn’t set foot in an office. His boots crushed blades of fescue, and then he stomped his feet dry on the porch, clacked the brass knocker three times, waited.

A moment later a kid answered the door—twenty-three,
twenty-four maybe, a snarl and a thin mustache. Older than Ernest had been, probably arrested and sent to the army, made it out and realized he wasn’t cut out for real work anymore, got involved in the liquor trade. The kid stared at him until he said, “I’m here to see Aunt Lou.”

“Who are you?”

“Tell her Mary Jane Hopewell is here. She’ll know my name.”

The kid eyed him another moment before closing the door. When he returned he didn’t immediately invite Mary Jane in, instead asked, “What is it you want?”

“To talk to Aunt Lou.”

“About what?”

“Larthan Tull.”

The kid opened wide the door and bade him enter. The hall was dim, but even in the low light Mary Jane could see the well-polished brass fixtures, the shellacked floor. A light glowed beyond a door at the end of the hall, and he hung his coat on the rack and followed the kid to the back of the house. Inside the kitchen, Aunt Lou sat at the table, her hands cupping a mug of hot tea. She was small and trim and looked nothing like what he’d been expecting. She resembled his mother, God rest her soul. One would expect her to be a wealthy widow living off the pension of her dead husband. You certainly wouldn’t peg her as the local moonshine tycoon.

“Didn’t think I’d ever meet you face to face, Mr. Hopewell. I’m getting old enough now, I’m not sure how long I’ll be in business. Been a long time since I’ve needed to meet any farmers out your way, it being the drive that it is. What brings you out here?”

He knew he looked a sight, wearing the same set of clothes for nine days straight, sleeping in ditches and mountain hollows, riding in smoky trucks. His shoes were worn thin, his skin was covered in soot, and he hadn’t eaten in three days. Sallow and sunken and cut up from brambles, his village-soft back sore from sleeping on too many hard places after too many years in a comfortable bed. “You haven’t heard from Larthan Tull’s boys in the Studebaker this week,” he said.

“That’s right. I suppose you’re going to tell me why, seeing as that wasn’t a question.”

“Larthan’s barkeep shot them a week and a half ago in front of his bar. Tried to shoot me too, but he missed.”

“I see.”

“He’s probably after me now, and I want him taken care of.”

“Who? Mr. Tull or the barkeep?”

“Both, but I’d settle for Larthan.”

“You’d settle, huh?” She took a sip of tea, and her eyes never wavered.

“You know he runs the show,” he said.

“Indeed, and I understood the issue to be your selling shine to me. Seems there’s a mix-up in Mr. Tull’s ranks, but I’m not sure it helps either one of us to run with that confusion. Do you?”

“I’ve got a better business proposition for you, provided you can take care of him.”

“Explain to me what you mean, ‘take care of him.”’ She paused, and this time it was his eyes that never wavered. She went on, “And what makes you think I can do that, even if I wanted to?”

“I don’t want him dead. I just want him to leave me alone. I came into a lot of money recently—it didn’t belong to Larthan, but he felt otherwise and now he’s after me. He’d slit my throat in the night or do like his barkeep done to my friends, tear off my jaw with a shotgun and not think a thing of it. Probably sleep like a baby afterward.”

“I’m not interested in the condition of Mr. Tull’s soul,” she said. “I can’t say I particularly blame you for how you feel, but I still can’t figure out why you’re here. Way I see it, you’ve done nothing but disrupt my business with my best supplier. And Mr. Tull is my best supplier.” She nodded her head as she spoke to make sure he understood her. “So right now—and you’ll excuse my directness—I don’t see anything in it for me whether he kills you or not.”

“That’s what I want to talk about. That money I’ve come into, it came from whiskey I’ve been brewing.”

“Yes, yes, I get it. You’ve got good whiskey and want me to sell it.”

“Larthan bought my corn for nothing, turned it around for profit. I cut out the middleman, sold a few jars of my own. A better product, sold for less, still gave me more than what Larthan was paying. I couldn’t make it on as large a scale as him, but it’s quality shine. I was thinking we could do business.”

“What are you offering me today that Tull can’t already provide?”

“I’ve got capital.”

“Mr. Hopewell. Surely you know we live in a free society here. Free enterprise, free exchange. The same principles apply to whiskey as they do to Coca-Cola. Since the government doesn’t want it sold, we don’t have to pay taxes on it. That’s the only difference. I’m merely a vendor here, your local general store, if you will. If you want to enter this business, that’s up to you, so long as you realize you’re trying to enter a competitive, unregulated market with Larthan Tull. Competitive means I’m going to keep selling his whiskey unless someone offers me that kind of quantity at a lower price. Unregulated means he can do whatever he wants to keep his business running smoothly. He can kill your family. He can kill your wife. He can kill you. You understand?”

“A monopoly is the death of free enterprise.”

She finished her tea, studied him a long while, so long that his knees quivered and sweat misted on his skin. He saw now why she was so good at her job. Then she grinned and said, “I can talk to him this week, but understand I’m not about to lose my best supplier.”

“That’s all I’m asking.”

“Come back on Friday then. I’ll think it over and see what I can do for you.”

T
ull’s day was thus: He rose early and drove into the factory north of town. The rough industrial neighborhood, where his former employee Lucas Mackey used to live. Although Lucas was long dead, his family still lived up here, what was left of them. Shotgun shacks and a mess of kids scurrying about in the street like fleas.

Inside the steaming factory, they still produced soda, less than in the peak years before Prohibition, but enough to put on the pretense of legitimate business. In the back boiler they brewed whiskey: mixtures of mash in barrels, a row of submarine stills in which the liquid boiled, shot up through pipes to condensers, and dripped out in gallon cans for delivery. He still remembered the turnip stills of his youth, men in the backwoods under cover of moonlight, the scent of pines, the call of a whippoorwill.

Today was the first Tull had been in the boiler room in a few days. First the business in Charlotte, his meeting with Aunt Lou, and
then his time running the books at the Hillside, and then his dealings with the lawmen. With all that was going on, these weeks had been a time to lay low. Nevertheless, business continued to operate. As the chief executive of his tiny empire, Tull had responsibilities in every area of the operation.

Depot Murphy had been with him for years now. When the barkeep had first shuffled into town, his lazy eye had made him look dumb, which had not instilled confidence in Tull about the man’s wherewithal. But Tull knew the type of man he was—broken down from a long history of defeat in the Appalachian coal mines, drifting southward in search of an honest job, desperate in the way Tull liked his employees to be. Tull set him up to man the stills, and after Lucas Mackey passed, Depot became Tull’s right-hand man, a good worker who knew how to keep his mouth closed and wasn’t averse to using his muscle to strongarm someone behaving out of line at the Hillside. Kept the operation well oiled and took on more work than he needed to—the factory, the Hillside. Now Tull had one more job for the man.

Depot was sitting on a stool stirring mash when Tull walked in.

“Hidy” Tull said. “Everything good?”

Depot grunted.

Operations were easy now, and required little more than checking water levels and temperatures. Alcohol boiled cooler than water, so it was a matter of keeping the burners in that magic range to separate the two liquids. The bubbling mash smelled like a hog’s gut, and although the room was well-ventilated Tull wouldn’t want to spend his days here. But he figured it wasn’t any worse than a coal mine.

“Who you got running the Hillside this evening?”

“I left the kid in charge.”

“Which kid?”

“Tommy Cope.”

“The boy that’s always running the pool table?”

“He’s a good worker.”

“I see,” Tull said. “I got a call from Aunt Lou the other day.”

“Oh?”

“She needs another load tomorrow, and I can’t make it. You think your old coupe could handle a trip to Charlotte?”

“Be glad to,” Depot said.

“In fact, tomorrow I’ve got another task that needs to be done up in Charlotte. The price for it’s negotiable.”

“Is it?”

“It is. You might find it worth your while for more reasons than one. Let’s talk tomorrow.”

Depot nodded, and his eyes drooped so that his face appeared like that of the dead.

This was as long as Tull could stand to be in the boiler room. He quickly moved from there to the office, where stacks of papers lay for him to weed through. The day-to-day grind of owning a business, legitimate or not. His business had slipped beyond his control lately, so he needed to close himself off and think through his next move. He’d received a phone call from one of Aunt Lou’s henchmen yesterday, who confirmed that Mary Jane had indeed made it to Charlotte, and had made some kind of futile offer for her with the five thousand dollars he’d scrimped from his bootlegging. The henchman had practically gloated that Mary Jane had sat there and tried to explain to her about competition and the benefits of selling a smaller-yet-high-end batch of his brew alongside Tull’s mass-produced swill.

Well. Mary Jane was as good as dead tomorrow, but Tull could feel the foundations of his empire shaking, not because of some peon drunk who occasionally ran whiskey. But the scope of the situation, all the whiskey he made and the breadth of his operation, all the angles and crevices where danger lurked, all that pressed against him some days, to where he needed to sit and think. Mary Jane, Ernest, Lee. They were just the first, and he’d contained them almost without a hitch. Then there were the feds, but he paid them off with cash or information. There was Sheriff Chambers, a good man, and a good man was ordinarily hardest to deal with unless you wanted to kill him, but the sheriff wasn’t interested in anything more than his retirement. Eventually, though, someone would come along who wasn’t interested in retirement or money and who wasn’t a bumbling fool.