Michaela Thompson - Florida Panhandle 01 - Hurricane Season (3 page)

“I sure don’t know, Mother Trulock,” he said, his voice muffled. He removed the matchbook and continued, “I think maybe Bo was just upset. He flies off the handle easy.”

Lily had just sold Bo Calhoun a new cast net. She had also persuaded him to buy a mold for making lead weights for the net. The mold was uneven, but he had taken it for only fifty cents off. Therefore, she was inclined to be sympathetic. “It’s a bad thing to have your livelihood taken away,” she said. “Not that I hold with drinking any kind of liquor.”

“I should
hope
not,” came Wanda’s voice from the kitchen.

“Did you ever taste moonshine, Aubrey?” asked Lily.

Aubrey looked at the tablecloth. “Naw,” he said.

“It ain’t that special,” said Woody. “But I tell you, since the liquor taxes went up last year they are purely selling a bunch of it. With that ten-fifty tax on a gallon of legal whiskey, the government thought they were going to get a whole mess of money. Instead, they just put the moonshiners in high cotton. The government is making less off liquor now that it did before taxes went up, because everybody’s buying moonshine instead.” He belched. “It don’t make my job any easier,” he added as a pious afterthought.

“The government is working as well as it usually does,” said Lily. “Who do you like for president?”

“Ike,” said Woody promptly.

“No need to make up your mind right yet,” said Lily. “There’s still plenty of time till Election Day.

“Pie and politics don’t mix,” said Wanda. “Sit up straight, Junior. It’s time for dessert.”

On the evening of Labor Day, Joshua Burns was crossing the bay from the mainland to St. Elmo Island. He sat in the back of the open boat, his hand on the tiller of the outboard motor, while a sluggish breeze ballooned his sweat-stained shirt and lifted the dark hair from his forehead.

Josh knew he could be picked out from shore, silhouetted in the reflection the setting sun cast on the water, but he felt reasonably sure nobody was interested. The grocery store at the landing was closed, and that was the only inhabited location for a couple of miles down the coast except for the summer cottages, which either were closed for the winter or housed outsiders who wouldn’t wonder.

As the boat drew closer to the island, he could see the ruined hotel, the Elmo House, outlined against the dunes. He veered away from it. The north end of St. Elmo was not his destination. Not much of the island, he had gathered in his short acquaintance with it, had ever been inhabited. The few miles of white sand beach at the north end had drawn visitors, and it was near the beach that St. Elmo’s inhabitants still lived, in a cluster of concrete-block bungalows. Most of the island was untouched, with its thick pine woods and tangled undergrowth, its perimeters lined with sawgrass to the water’s edge.

Josh guided his boat toward this less hospitable part of St. Elmo. Now, he easily recognized the features of the island’s coastline that were his signposts. Opening the throttle wide, he swung around the southern tip of the island. Seeing the wide-open Gulf gave him the lightheaded feeling he always got at that moment.

His eyes swept the darkening shore, searching for the ragged, outsize clump of yucca that marked the entrance to the channel. The channel had been one of his tests. “Reckon you can maneuver a boat through there without knocking the bottom off it?” Murphy had asked.

Josh had looked and said, “I reckon so,” and had taken the vibrating tiller when Murphy wordlessly handed it over. The temptation had been to show off, but that wasn’t Josh’s style. He carefully took the boat through the almost unnoticeable break in the vegetation and up the narrow channel under the pine boughs.

Now that Josh thought of it, the episode hadn’t really been a test. By the time he and Murphy had gotten that far, they both knew he was going to go to work. The tricky part had been earlier, when he was pumping gas at the fuel station on the canal where Murphy came to gas up his cabin cruiser.

“I ain’t seen you here before,” Murphy had said, drinking an R.C. while Josh hooked up the hose.

“No sir,” Josh had said.

“You from this part of the world?”

Josh shook his head. “Close to Columbus.”

“Georgia boy, eh? What you doing down here?”

“Looking for something to make me some money—a job, I guess,”

Murphy finished his drink and put it in the weathered wooden crate leaning against the boathouse. “You know anything about boats?”

“Some. Pretty good bit.”

That was all the conversation the first time. But Murphy had returned, and each visit Josh had been conscious of the man’s watching him with his small eyes, slapping the side of the gut his shirt would barely button over. His conversations with Josh always got around to two matters: the fact that Josh didn’t know many people in St. Elmo, and Josh’s need for money.

“Got a girl, have you?” Murphy asked once, his lips sinking deeper in the flesh of his cheeks.

“Sort of.”

“Lives up there in Columbus?”

“Yessir.”

“What’s the matter with her, let a fine young man like you run off down here?”

“Her mama don’t like poor boys.”

“Ain’t that the way,” said Murphy, sounding satisfied.

It was on Murphy’s next visit that he told Josh he might have a job for him. “I don’t know what you’re making, jockeying these here pumps, but I imagine I can do better. Are you interested?”

“Sure I am,” said Josh.

They arranged to meet that evening at Sal’s Roadhouse, and while Johnnie Ray sobbed “The Little White Cloud That Cried” on the jukebox, Murphy quizzed him. Why wasn’t he fighting in Korea? Why did he come to St. Elmo to look for work? What kind of jobs had he done before?

Josh answered stolidly. He’d tried to sign up but had a heart murmur. He’d come to St. Elmo because he’d gotten a ride this far. He grew up on a farm, and had done a lot of jobs, but was best at mechanical things—working on boats, cars, and such.

Murphy ran a thick forefinger down the side of his beer bottle and said, “What’s your feeling about corn liquor, son?”

Josh shrugged, “One time when I was fifteen, my brother and I drank up some my daddy had, and he gave us a whipping for it.”

Murphy grunted. “Making it’s against the law, you know.”

“So is fishing without a license, but that ain’t stopped me from pulling in many a bream without paying no two dollars.”

Murphy nodded, and the next day Josh quit his job and went to work for Murphy.

The grass was still burnished by the setting sun, but once into the woods it was dimmer. He put-putted around the turns, waving once to a blond man wearing overalls who was leaning against a tree, a shotgun cradled in his arms. As Josh rounded a bend, he noticed a sourish smell that mingled with the scent of the water and the pines.

A dock made of raw, unweathered lumber jutted into the water, hung with old tires to keep tied-up boats from scraping against it. Josh drifted in, picked up a string of fish from the bottom of the boat, jumped from the bow to the dock, and tied up. Murphy emerged from the underbrush and said, “Where you been, boy? We needed you an hour ago.”

Josh held up the fish. “They started biting. Thought you might like some for supper.”

Murphy nodded and led the way along a rudimentary path to a clearing. Here, the last rays of the sun revealed barrels, vats, copper tubing, kerosene cans. The smell hung in the unmoving air. A shed stood on one side of the clearing, and outside it a bristly-haired young man was lighting a lantern. He adjusted the wick and hung it from a nail outside the door, over a small makeshift shelf that held a camp stove. Josh held up his string of fish again. “Suppertime,” he said. “Time to get the grits on.” A few minutes later, the blond sentry Josh had passed on the way in arrived.

After their meal, the smell of fried fish and hush puppies lingering, it was dark enough to begin the night’s work. Josh slipped on his headlamp, a light like a miner’s that was meant to be used for frogging, blinding frogs at night so you could stick them with a gig. It had the advantage of leaving the hands free to pass wooden cases and load them into the boat.

When one boat was loaded and sitting low in the water, Josh and Murphy took the other down the channel. Josh’s headlight picked out the curves of the bank, occasionally flashing in the eyes of a possum or a raccoon. Once in the ocean, they could feel that the wind had picked up slightly, and it sent a sultry breath across the bow. Five minutes’ ride took them to the inlet, hidden to the casual passerby, where Murphy’s cabin cruiser was anchored. Murphy got aboard, started the engine, and followed Josh back to the mouth of the channel where the other two men were waiting with the loaded boat. Josh left Murphy and the blond sentry to transfer cartons while he and the bristly-haired man returned for another load. It took them an hour, rotating, to get the cruiser loaded.

“That’s all she wrote,” said Josh, wiping his forehead on his sleeve.

Murphy checked his watch. “The truck’ll be there in an hour. I’ll see you boys tomorrow. We run again the day after.”

“Tomorrow’s payday, right?” asked Josh.

“That’s right,” said Murphy shortly.

Josh swung over the side of Murphy’s boat and landed in his own. The men rode back to the dock in silence, as the sound of Murphy’s motor died in the distance.

When they disembarked, however, Josh said, “Close bastard, ain’t he?”

“Don’t you worry about it,” said the blond man.

“Promises all kind of things, but you don’t see the color of his money very often.”

“That’s true for sure,” said the bristly-haired man.

The blond man turned swiftly on the bristly one. “What are you worried about, Larry?”

“Nothing, Amos,” said Larry hastily.

Josh said, “It would be teetotally too bad if this turned out to be for nothing. Murphy talks a lot, and he drives a big old boat, but have we got to wait till he sells that liquor before we see any money? That could be another week or more.”

“I told you don’t worry about it,” said Amos.

“You didn’t tell me why not,” said Josh.

The three reached the clearing. In the feeble lantern light, Amos entered the shed and emerged with a fruit jar of clear liquid. He unscrewed the top, sipped, and held it out to Josh. Josh sipped and felt the sensation, familiar now, that the front of his skull had been blown away. Lord, I hate this stuff, he thought.

“There’s plenty money behind this here operation,” Amos said while Larry drank.

“Yeah? Whose?” said Josh.

“Murphy don’t say. But you’ll get paid tomorrow. Wait and see.”

Josh took another swallow from the jar, handed it on, and opened the door of the shed. The air inside was hot and still. He could just make out the three cots in the dimness. “Reckon I’ll have to do that, being there’s nothing else I can do,” he said, yawning.

“You ain’t planning to go to sleep now, are you?” said Amos. “You’re on sentry duty till two.” Without a word, Josh picked up the shotgun from where it was propped next to the door and strode off through the woods. He was tired and dizzy. A mosquito buzzed in his ear. He wished, and not for the first time, that he’d never left Georgia.

Pearl Washington walked through the backyard, past the azalea bushes, and climbed the back steps of Congressman Snapper Landis’s house. It was eight o’clock in the morning when she let herself in the door, early enough to feel some of night’s fugitive coolness.

Snapper’s house was on the edge of town, on land not long since reclaimed from dunes. The place had been fairly recently built, with—rumor had it—generous help from Snapper’s friends and constituents who were contractors, plumbers, and roofers. Its raw pink brick belied their efforts to re-create the Old South. The white columns on the front porch were too skinny, and the white rocking chairs on the veranda looked stickily new and had obviously never been sat in.

Where Pearl lived, in one of a huddle of shacks called Bacon’s Settlement, built on sandy earth near the canal, the days started early. Babies fretted, a draggle-tailed rooster crowed as if he had something to be proud of, and feet hit the plank floors inside the close, tin-roofed cabins that never cooled off in summer and were never warm in winter.

Once inside the Landis house, Pearl took off her shoes and put on the house slippers she kept in the broom closet under the hook where she hung her apron. She was a large woman and on her feet most of the day. The Landis household was still. That was good. If Snapper wanted his coffee before Pearl arrived, he got mad if she wasn’t there to make it for him. Sometimes she found him in the kitchen, in undershirt and trousers, hair awry. “God dog it, Pearl,” he would say when she came in, “look at the mess I’ve made because I wanted me some coffee.”

After thirteen years as a widower, Snapper could fix himself a cup of coffee, Pearl knew. Hands on hips, she would survey the scene—spilled coffee grounds, pieces of the percolator spread over the counter top—knowing it had been done for her benefit. “It’s a mess all right,” she would say, and Snapper, secure in moral victory, would let her get on with cleaning it up.

Today, Pearl had the coffee perked and the grits made, and still the only sound was a mockingbird in the mimosa tree outside the kitchen window. She poured coffee into a china cup with pink roses around the rim and, balancing it carefully on its saucer, climbed the stairs.

Snapper’s bedroom door was open, and Pearl peeked in. A pair of antlers with a shirt hanging from one prong and a rack of shotguns decorated the walls. The bed was empty and unmade. He had been gone a lot lately. Maybe it was something to do with the election. But it wasn’t for him she’d climbed the stairs. She moved down the hall to another door, this one closed, tapped lightly, and opened it.

Diana was asleep, the pink-sprigged bedspread bunched around her knees.

Her naked body, the small round breasts with deep pink nipples, the black pubic hair, contrasted with the frilly pink-and-white organdy little-girlishness of the room. The innocent decor was also at odds with the ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts. The clothes she had worn yesterday were heaped in a corner in a way that meant they had been kicked there. Despite the oscillating fan, the air in the room was sour.