The Boys Who Woke Up Early by A.D. Hopkins

Author:A.D. Hopkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction
Publisher: Imbrifex Books
Published: 2019-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

“Dismissed,” said Judge Miller calmly.

“Dismissed?” Ben’s voice thundered across the courtroom as he leaped to his feet.

Judge Miller pounded his gavel on the bench.

“Officer, if I see another such outburst I will hold you in contempt of court.”

He went on, “I believe firmly in the separation of powers. It is your job, Officer, to find sufficient evidence to bring offenders to trial. It is the job of the commonwealth’s attorney to decide whether you have done so. Mr. Conway has decided you have insufficient evidence in this matter, and has moved for dismissal on that basis. I have no choice but to honor his request.”

Bobby Lee Lawson had kept his seat, but I could see his face growing red and dark as a baked ham. All his courage at the boathouse had gone for nothing. Rich Conway had decided not to allow Ben a victory. That dismissal was the result. Of course, there really was plenty of evidence. But Conway was an elected official and answered to nobody but the people, and the only way the people could speak was by voting against him in an election more than three years away.

The boathouse already had a new door and it reopened that very night. But that wasn’t the end of it. The next Friday, at 4 a.m., a tractor drove up the dirt road to the boathouse. It was an ordinary Ford farm tractor, with a plow attached. And in a short while, before anybody bestirred himself to find out why a farm tractor was being heard at such an hour, it had turned the first fifty yards of the boathouse road into a muddy field you could have planted in root crops. The only road-legal vehicle you could have driven across it was a Jeep with snow tires. A couple of mill workers were still at the boathouse when this happened, and since they weren’t driving Jeeps, they had some explaining to do when they arrived home without their cars.

It wasn’t an official road, so the county wouldn’t fix it. The guy running the boathouse had to pay somebody to grade it level and pack it, but he’d lost his weekend business, and the grading had surely cost him money. Everybody remembered that Ben had grown up on a farm and was a good hand with a tractor. But if you asked him about it he would give no direct answer. He’d just laugh and let you draw your own conclusions.

That was the sort of thing you could do only once though, so Jack and I set to plotting. And a couple of weeks later we heard reports of boathouse customers being kicked out of their beds by angry young wives demanding to know why that damned bumper sticker was on the family car. The stickers were hand-lettered, and they said, “BOATHOUSE BROTHEL: Bad liquor & fine women.”

But that was also something you could do only once. We had cut into business at the boathouse, but Ben couldn’t close it.

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