My grandfather was killed when Daddy was still a boy. The revenuers couldn’t catch his souped-up Model T, so they shot out his tires and he crashed into Possum Creek and drowned before they could get to him. Nowadays there’d be a lawsuit for wrongful death; back then it was good riddance to bad trash as far as the revenuers were concerned.
Although he hadn’t even started shaving yet, Daddy took over as head of the household and whenever times were tough, he’d amble off down to the swampy part of the creek and use his father’s recipe to cook up the mash. With the scrimping and saving of his first wife, he accumulated enough cash to bankroll a little country store at Pleasant’s Crossroads and after that he had a loyal supplier of sugar and Mason jars. By the time he married my mother, he had put a couple of layers of insulation between himself and the production end and was directing a distribution network that some people say reached from Canada to Mexico.
That network supposedly included some of the biggest names in early stock car racing, men who bought and then juiced up their first cars with the cash they got hauling moonshine out of Colleton County. Indeed, the sport got its start in North Carolina with young daredevils who outran law officers on moonlit nights and got together on weekends along deserted dirt roads or out in isolated pastures to see whose car could go fastest. Lee Petty always downplayed or flat-out denied any whiskey connection, but Junior Johnson, Curtis Turner, Little Joe Weatherly, Wendell Scott, Buddy Arlington?
When they hit a roadblock, every one of them knew how to execute a “bootleg turn”—that quick reverse and one-eighty dig-off that throws dirt in the lawman’s eyes and has you flying back down the road like it’s the devil’s racetrack. Before the law can get a good look at your license plate, you’re going, going, gone, and all he sees are tail-lights fading in his rearview mirror.
Today, the Highway Patrol calls it a three-point turn and they teach a sedate version in Driver’s Ed, but everybody out here knows who invented it.
And why.
“Did you know Daddy was a bootlegger when you married him?” I asked my mother that summer she was dying.
She nodded. “But like every woman since Eve, I thought I could change him. He didn’t need the money anymore. The store was doing well, he had land and sons to help him farm it and tobacco was booming. He swore he’d quit if I’d marry him. And he did quit.”
Mother’s smile was rueful as she reached for the old battered Zippo lighter that was always near to hand. Even though she seldom lit a cigarette anymore, she liked to hold it in her thin hands, run her fingers over the worn insignia engraved on the front, then flip open the cover and make the little flame blaze up inside the wind guard. “It’s like the way I quit smoking a dozen times or more. Quitting’s easy. Staying quit’s a different matter. Right now it’s been almost eight years for him.”
She shook her head. “Or maybe I’d better say I think it’s been eight years since he’s messed with it. He could have started up again yesterday or he could start tomorrow. Whiskey’s the only thing your daddy’s ever lied to me about. At least, it’s the only lie I ever caught him in.”
And then she did laugh, a rich warm chuckle that sounded almost like her old self.
Laughter balanced so tightly on the edge of tears that summer and her voice was tremulous as she touched my face. “Oh Deborah, honey, try to marry a man you can laugh with, okay?”
“Okay,” I promised, unable to keep my own voice from wobbling.
She smoothed my hair away from my eyes and said, “You reckon you’ve met him yet?”
“Come give ’er a try now,” said the man I’d married before my mother was two months in her grave.
I went over and got inside my car and cranked it up.
Almost immediately, Allen declared the operation a success. “Your battery’s charging good as new now, darlin’, but your oil looks a little dirty. Better let me change it for you, long as you’re here.”
He didn’t really wait for my consent, just started jacking up the front end so that he could squeeze underneath while lying flat on one of those rollerboard creepers.
If Mr. Jap hadn’t been sitting there with a hopeful look on his face, I’d have paid Allen and left. Instead, as Allen disappeared underneath the front of my car carrying an oil pan, I went back over to the open doorway and leaned against the jamb. There was really nowhere I needed to be this afternoon and Mr. Jap clearly wanted to talk. I kept thinking of Daddy with eleven living sons and Mr. Jap’s one son buried over at Sweetwater Baptist with Allen Stancil the only blood kin left to him.
Whatever Allen wanted here—money or a temporary place to hole up—I was pretty sure that when he got it, he’d be long gone and Mr. Jap would be alone again except for Merrilee and her dutiful Sunday morning check on him.
“Some folks don’t even have that much,” my internal preacher reminded me.
I stared out into the rain while Mr. Jap talked happily about his plans for the garage. As soon as Billy Wall paid him what was owed, he was going to get that hydraulic lift fixed and buy a bigger air compressor so that they could ran an air chisel and a sandblaster, start blasting the rust off some of those old cars. Why, there was a doctor over in Widdington been after him for over a year for that old Stingray.
“Offered me nine hundred dollars just as she stands, he did.”
And Allen knew a dealer out in Charlotte that’d write him out a check tomorrow for ten thousand dollars if he’d give the word and let the man haul ’em out, but he and Allen were going to do the restoring themselves and make a bundle.
Allen had turned into a car-fixing genius, to hear Mr. Jap tell it. He’d bought a badly wrecked car from some guy on the other side of Raleigh and almost overnight he’d fixed it up good enough to sell.
“And that’s just with my old tools, it was. Think what he’ll do when we get us a new acetylene torch and a paint sprayer and maybe some of them newfangled electronic testers.”
He lit another cigarette. “I know a lady over in Cotton Grove as can reupholster seats and make new head linings, she can. Real good and real cheap. Yes, ma’am! Give us another five or six years and we’ll be the place to come for restoring old cars, yes we will.”
The way he talked about stretching that corn money, he sounded like a fat man who expected to button a thirty-eight-inch waistband around a forty-two-inch beer belly. Of course, he could also be counting what he might eventually receive from Dallas’s estate.
“I guess you’ll be glad when the trial’s over and everything’s settled,” I said.
Mr. Jap’s lips tightened. “I don’t see why it has to take ’em so long. The DA says it’ll probably be June and then if she’s found guilty”—he almost spit the word she—“he says she’ll probably appeal and it could drag out for years. Well, let her, say I. In the end, she’ll burn in hell, she will, for a thousand thousand years. Ain’t no way she can appeal that!”
He leaned his head toward me and spoke confidentially of how John Claude Lee was handling things. “Dallas didn’t have no will, so Mr. Lee says I’ll get at least half of everything anyhow, but he’s sharp, he is. Got her believing that if she signs the land over to me, it’ll make the jury think she didn’t want Dallas dead for the money. Maybe let her get off with manslaughter instead of murder.”
The rain was coming down even heavier now. It thundered on the tin roof, cascaded off the eaves and flooded the rutted drive. I’d have been more concerned if I didn’t know that twenty minutes after it stopped, the rain would soak right on through this sandy soil. Creeks may flood out of their banks after hard rains, but puddles don’t stand for very long around here.