Lawless by Matt Bondurant

Author:Matt Bondurant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

Chapter 16

1929

IT WAS NEAR two in the morning and Jack sat in his father’s Model A, watching Howard’s bulky form trudging up the pass with the wheelbarrow into the darkness. They were on a hidden feeder road deep in the base of Turkeycock Mountain. Jack was dressed in his father’s dark serge suit that he had taken that night, along with his father’s car. On the seat next to him he had a few maps of Franklin, Bedford, and Roanoke counties and an old cardboard suitcase with a few changes of clothes. The trunk of the car was packed full with forty gallons of Howard’s doubled and twisted crazy apple in five-gallon cans and another four cans under a blanket in the backseat. Jack eased the choke out of the Model A and the engine settled from a shuddering chug to a smooth purr. Behind him Cricket Pate ground his ramshackle Pierce-Arrow into gear, loaded with another thirty gallons of mostly popskull, sugar-liquor he made with the remnants of a chopped still he reconstructed in a moldy ditch. A blackened .38 hung in Jack’s coat pocket, borrowed from his oldest brother.

Howard disappeared into the dark woods. He didn’t say a word and Jack knew it was because the arrangement didn’t suit him; making and selling was fine but he didn’t like Jack doing the driving. Jack didn’t care as Howard blew his wages in a card game at the Blackwater station and Jack was owed. He just took it back in booze and a bit of labor. Cricket Pate knew a guy across the line in Burning Bag, an associate of John Carter’s, the man who ran the Roanoke liquor trade, who would pay five dollars a gallon for the quality crazy apple and three for the sugar-liquor. The suit, briefcase, and sample bag were intended as a last-ditch option, the faint hope he might pass himself off as a salesman on a deadline. Cricket said he’d dress likewise but his moth-eaten suit and car weren’t going to fool anyone and Jack knew it. As they hit Route 33 and headed north Jack began to feel like a damn fool and wished they hadn’t bothered with the disguises and just did it straight like other blockaders. They would move fast but they wouldn’t look much like runners, and they would be through and back before daylight and if they were lucky they may not be noticed at all.

The Model A smelled like his old man: whiskers and pipe tobacco, linty socks and licorice candy. Jack rolled the car down the drive soon after Granville went to sleep and started it on the fly. If he timed it right he would be back in Snow Creek before six with the fuel topped off and his father wouldn’t be the wiser. Howard would take a quarter share, Cricket would take fifty dollars, and the rest was Jack’s. He’d make near $250, more money than he’d ever had in his life. He wrestled the Model A around a corner, the tires whining with effort as he hammered along the hard road.

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