The Whiskey Baron (26 page)

A
unt Lou’s servant had dropped Mary Jane off in front of a cheap boardinghouse downtown with five dollars to get him through the week. Locked away, sober, he shook with memories of time past, from days of fighting out on Main Street at sixteen through years of too much whiskey and carrying on, years of death and trench warfare. So much life had to offer, and so much time took away from you. Now, on the run from God knows who all, Larthan Tull and Sheriff Chambers and the Castle County dragnet and even his closest family, Mary Jane’s heart thundered in his chest with the thought that this was all he had left, that he’d abandoned all the promises of life in his younger days. Sleep came difficult, if at all, in the boardinghouse, so after two nights he went off in search of something to drink.

He found alleys with all-night lights and raucous blues and men
chasing a dreamless sleep in the bottle of an unbonded whiskey, lost women taking advantage of the men’s nature and their loosened wallets and providing services no man’s wife would even dream of considering. Mary Jane made his way to these darker provinces with only a dollar to his name, enough to get him through a night but no longer. He would need an advance from Aunt Lou, he decided, as he sidled against a wall in an unnamed establishment lit with guttering oil lamps that shuddered throughout the room, like campfires, revealing huddled figures who kept their secret shame to themselves. No roadhouse honky-tonk, this. No place for wild times with the likes of Shorty Bagwell. No, this was some new arena, the likes of which did not exist in Castle County.

After ordering a whiskey and parting with half a dollar, he scanned the figures for signs of life. He was about to gulp his drink and move on to some merrier place when a girl materialized before him. She wore her hair back and had a powdered face, a fashion he could never understand, why a girl of no more than seventeen would want to age herself. She was more lean and supple than any woman who had shown an interest in Mary Jane in years.

“What brings you out tonight, cowboy?”

She sat across from him and nudged a booted foot up next to his leg.

“What you shaking your head for?” she asked.

“Don’t know,” he said.

“You don’t know what you’re shaking your head for, or you don’t know what brings you out tonight for?”

“Neither, I guess.”

None of the other figures in the room seemed interested in their exchange. The only one who seemed alive was the barkeep himself, propped against the bar and staring into the darkness like a sentry.

“I like a man who’s not afraid to say what he don’t know. Most people in this world, they just want to convince you of things they don’t know a thing about.”

“I’m not most people, I guess.”

She laughed and rested her chin on her hand. Her foot tapped against his in such a way that she might believe she was kicking the table leg. He held up his glass of whiskey only to see he’d finished
it. She saw it too and leaned in, put her hand on his forearm, and nodded toward the barkeep. She whispered, “That’s my father over there.”

“He the owner? And he lets you hang out here?”

“What’s he going to do about it? Send me off to somebody else’s bar to get into trouble?”

He thought of his nephew and Evelyn Tull down at the river, and he considered what future Larthan had in mind for her once she got a few years older—and what future this barkeep might have in mind for his daughter? She still had her hand on his forearm.

“Don’t you worry about him,” she said. “He lets me do what I want. He’s got enough to worry about with the law. Let me get you another drink.”

She returned with two more glasses of whiskey, both filled generously close to the brim. With the drink in hand, he was no longer interested in her. She laughed when he drained the glass without taking it once from his lips.

“You better take this second one,” she said.

“You don’t want it?” He already had his hand around it.

“You go ahead. I’ll get me another in a few minutes. Where you coming from anyway?”

He almost said the truth, but he caught himself. “I come over from Tennessee.”

“Tennessee! Whereabouts?”

“Outside Knoxville, a mountain town that ran out of jobs.”

“It’s happening all over. You found anything in Charlotte?”

“I’ve got some good prospects here.”

“Yeah?” Light glinted off her watery eyes and sent a current through him. Ancient instincts from the days of caves and primitive fire.

“Matter of fact, I had a meeting this week to set myself up in business.”

“You don’t say.”

“Should be right successful here in Charlotte.”

“You mind if I have a sip?” She took the glass from him and raised it to her lips, set it down as graceful as a movie star. He inhaled and raised the glass himself.

Later he found himself in an ill-lit alleyway wrestling a man
among a pit of swine. A gamble over a free drink, a drunken entertainment, distraction from a lonesome bar. His mind was too far gone to keep straight the how and why of his circumstances. He only wanted to pin the man down with the pigs while other men cheered them on.

“Get him, Ray,” someone yelled.

A tangled-eyed boy grinned and chuckled and waved his hand as though casting a spell on the two wrestlers. The night was cloudy so the alley was dark and disorienting. The man before him paddled his hands as though climbing up a steep mountainside, his mouth ajar, his beard scraggly like he’d hacked it himself after half a pint some long afternoon. A railroad drunk, a brawler.

“Take him down,” someone else yelled.

“Spill his guts.”

The two men circled each other amid the din, and Mary Jane struggled to focus his mind on this newfound task. Then something that felt like a heavy sack slapped the back of his head and knocked him into the bearded fellow before him. The man’s hands reached up. Mary Jane struggled to remain on his feet, but the world spun so that man and beast and building and cloud wisps patterned across his eyes. The crowd booed and cheered, and the silhouette of a man wielding a billyclub smothered out the light.

Later still Mary Jane lay in a copse of trees beyond the lights of town. He wanted to sleep but two figures kept prodding him, rifling through his pockets, rolling him over as though he were merely a lazy hound who’d settled in the wrong corner of the room.

“He ain’t even got a dollar on him,” a man said.

A woman replied, “Did you check his shirt pocket?”

“Hell yes, I checked everything.”

She cursed and said, “Don’t look at me. He must have been about to stiff us at least five.”

“A wonder y’all even stay in business.”

“Most of em come in after payday with a pocket full of money to spend. How was I to know?” Her voice lowered, softened. “Come on, sergeant. It’s early yet. We can find us a way to settle this.”

“Your daddy’s not going to like you reaching into his till.”

“Maybe I don’t need to reach into his till. He doesn’t need to know everything that goes on in his business.”

“I should hope not.”

The man let go of Mary Jane’s lapels, and Mary Jane fell to the ground with a thump.

“You ain’t even going to arrest him?”

“What good would that do for me?”

The two left him bleeding and nearly blacked out. He lacked the energy even to roll over to a more comfortable position, so he just lay on his stomach with his face against the bitter dirt. After a while rain began to patter, then pour, and water pierced the copse of trees and splashed him awake. While the rain cooled the still and humid air, it quickly turned the dirt to mud around him. A shivering, stinking mess, he rose and shuffled back toward the light of civilization.

Among the main streets again, still not sober but no longer falling-down drunk, he tried to regain his bearings. If he could find the bar district, he could find his way back to the boardinghouse. His mind fumbled for the address or for the name of its proprietor, but it was all a fog beyond the dull ache of an ensuing hangover. He wandered on, into a residential district with shotgun housing somehow even more oppressive than a mill village. Rain flowed through the gutters. Hinges squeaked. Trash cans rattled. Late-night revelers or vagabonds, perhaps, scrounging for scraps among the working poor. His body ached up and down from the night’s drama, but he felt immensely relieved to have escaped the clutches of that mendacious tavernkeeper’s woman.

The night was not finished with him yet. He rounded a corner and there, swinging his billyclub like he was practicing for the circus, was the crooked policeman, who also must have extricated himself from the woman. He caught Mary Jane’s eye from the next block over, and you could see the transformation: curiosity to recognition to shame and anger.

“You there,” he called.

But Mary Jane was already running. Still disoriented from the drink, he splashed through watery streets and into an alley, unsure of whether the cop was following, and he was not about to slow down
to find out. He hurdled a low fence and landed in a backyard where a woman was breastfeeding an infant. It took her a moment to register this intruder before she shrieked loud enough to wake a drunk three counties away.

Mary Jane clambered onward, stumbled over some trash bins, and crawled through a clothesline back into the alleyway. The woman was still yelling, and now the voices of men had joined the ruckus. Flashlights. Rain. A chorus of affronted neighbors. He shuffled, onward, to find some other neighborhood where perhaps he might catch his breath and his bearings.

“I
love you,” Quinn said.

Evelyn felt herself blush, and she rested her head on his shoulder. They lay on a bed of pinestraw beneath a canopy of trees. The late afternoon sun speckled through the leaves. This had become their spot along the river, the water rushing by and everything good in the world. These past two weeks a dream for her, life coming together in a way nothing ever had before. She pictured her life like one of her childhood jigsaw puzzles: a slow study at first, a patch here, a patch there. Eventually the whole came into focus and the last pieces were easy to fill, and came to a quick finish. That was where she was now, a few quick pieces to fill in before her puzzle was complete and she left childhood behind for whatever came next. Boys—and girls—had avoided her all her life, because of her father in part but also because the Tulls existed in this in-between state,
above the mill workers but not of Castle either. They lived on York Street, a quiet avenue of Colonial houses and shaded lawns and families that had lived in Castle since the town’s founding in the 1790s. Her father’s few years in town had nothing on those generations of history, and although he had said before that his money was good here, same as anyone else’s, she knew there were things you couldn’t buy, even in America. In many ways, Quinn was like her father in that he was a dreamer. He thought big and believed that with hard work and a little luck the world was his for the taking. When she was alone she had a sick feeling about the future, about making it on her own, away from the father who had sheltered her from the gossiping women and the backbreaking labor of the world. But when she was with Quinn, as now, an afternoon along the river, she relaxed and wanted to believe he was right.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” she said.

“Why not?”

“My father doesn’t approve. He knows we’ve been sneaking off together, and he’s said as much.”

Quinn sat up on his elbow and rested his hand on her hip. He was warm beside her and his body was dark and muscular. Taut. She laid her hand on his and closed her eyes. She was comfortable with him. They belonged together despite the odds.

“What does he say?”

“That I shouldn’t be here with you. That he knows your family, and that I should stay away.”

“What does he know about my family? My uncle keeps your father in business all by himself.”

“That’s the point. Daddy doesn’t approve of drinking.”

“That don’t make sense.”

“He says whiskey’s made for selling, not drinking.”

Quinn sat up and crossed his legs. Wind shuddered through the trees above them, and at his back the river wandered lazily southward.

“I’ve seen him take a drink.”

“But he doesn’t get drunk,” she said. “He stays in control all the time.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“It’s true,” she said, although only part of that was true. Her father stayed in control on the outside, but at home he needed her. He didn’t have anyone to take care of him. They hired help to clean the house, and when she was young they had a woman to look after her, but her father was a private man. He didn’t even want a nursemaid around his affairs, much less a real companion. Some of it was the whiskey, because, yes, he was breaking the law and selling moonshine he brewed at his factory, the details of which he had never shared outright with Evelyn, but his privacy was about more than keeping his lawlessness behind closed doors. That was no secret, not to anyone in town. What she believed he wanted kept private was a softness, which only she knew about. She’d seen him cry, something she didn’t believe anyone else had ever witnessed, not even her mother. On occasion he would drink himself into a stupor and then, alone in the dark, he wept. Although it had been several years, she could still see him hunched over the dining room table, a jar of whiskey and a glass before him. The last time, she’d come downstairs when she’d heard him rustling around, and she’d found him with his head aloll as though the muscles in his neck had snapped.

“Take a seat, honey,” he said. “Talk to your old man.”

She sat across from him, startled to see tears in his eyes. The room was dark and cold, but in the moonlight she could see his eyes were wet.

“Don’t mind me,” he said. “I’ll be all right in the morning.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t rightly know. I’ve just been thinking about our lives. About time passing. Your mother. Are you happy here?”

“Yes,” she said coolly.

“Good. That’s good. You need to be happy, because that’s all there is.”

He drank another shot of whiskey, and his shoulders began to shake. She rose and walked over to him and put a hand on his back, but he shrugged her off.