the Moonshine War (1969)

Elmore Leonard

*

It Was Prohibition, And Big, Hell-Raising Son Martin Had Himself
something special: $125,000 worth of Kentucky's finest home-made whisky.

No one was going to steal it. Because when it came to shooting, fighting, and outsmarting the Big Boys, Son Martin wasn't just good. He was bad..
. D
angerous..
. A
nd deadly.

Chapter
One.

The war began the first Saturday in June 1931, when Mr. Baylor sent a boy up to Son Martin's place to tell him they were coming to raid his still.

The boy was sixteen and had lived in the mountains all his life, but at first he wasn't sure he wanted to go up there alone. He asked Mr. Baylor how he was supposed to get there, and Mr. Baylor said they'd lend him an official Sheriff's Department Ford car. He told Mr. Baylor he had only seen this man Son Martin about twice before, since the man hardly ever showed himself; maybe he'd go up there and tell the wrong person. Mr. Baylor, who was seventy-three years old and sheriff of the county, said to the boy, well, if you go up there and knock on his door and the man answers it is a white man that's Son Martin. If it's a nigger opens it, that's Aaron, his hired man. Mr. Baylor said, now if you can tell a white man from a nigger you're all set, aren't you?

The boy said, yes, sir, he'd do it; but he asked Mr. Baylor, if they were going to raid the man's still, why was the man being told about it? And Mr. Baylor said, don't worry about that, just tell him.

The boy's name was Lowell Holbrook, Jr. Evenings he wore a white jacket over his big bony shoulders and worked at the Hotel Cumberland as a bellboy, taking the grips and sample cases from the Louisville salesmen and lugging them upstairs. The few times he had seen Son Martin had been in the hotel: the man standing at the desk with his hat on the counter, leaning against it and talking to Mrs. Lyons, the manager. Son Martin was a good friend of Mrs. Lyons; everybody knew that. Some boys said they were more than good friends, that they were going to bed together, but Lowell couldn't picture Mrs. Lyons doing that.

Afternoons Lowell fooled around somewhere, maybe over at the Feed & Seed store, or hung around the courthouse if he wanted to make any extra money. The county people were always sending papers to somebody to have signed and wanting something picked up. They knew Lowell was fast and reliable because he worked at the hotel, and he had run errands for Mr. Baylor a lot of times before. Once he had driven all the way over to Corbin to pick up an important document. He had also been up by Broke-Leg Creek plenty of times and knew the road to Son Martin's place. But he had never been near the house. Some boys had told him, Son catches you on his land he'll blow your head off before asking your name. Lowell didn't think about it backing out of the parking space by the courthouse or driving through town.

The Saturday afternoon traffic kept him busy: the mud-washed cars and old trucks and mule wagons creeping along, the people gawking at the store windows and waving to friends. Nobody had enough money to spend more than a dollar; but, like most Saturdays lately, it was Cow Day and a person could buy a raffle ticket from any of the local merchants and maybe win himself a cow.

Lowell was hoping some of his buddies would see him driving the Sheriff's Department Ford car. Once out of town though, following the blacktop east for seven miles before turning off on a secondary road that climbed up into the scrub, Lowell began thinking about arriving at Son Martin's place and getting out of the car. There wasn't anything to be nervous about; Mr. Baylor wouldn't have sent him if there was. But he kept licking his lips anyway and wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. He said in his mind, Mr. Martin, I'm supposed to tell you they're coming up here to raid your whiskey still this evening. Jesus, then what does he say?

All the way up through the hollow the road was narrow and muddy and deep-rutted from the spring rains. It was hard enough staying in the tracks. Then the two foxhounds came bounding and barking out of the thicket, running next to the car and in front of it, so close sometimes Lowell couldn't see them. All he'd have to do was run over one of Son Martin's hounds. Then which did he tell first, about the whiskey raid or the hound? If th
e h
ounds would shut up he could hear himself think and study on how to drive this road without going off in the brush.

But the hounds chased Lowell for a mile and a half up through the hollow and didn't break loose until he had reached the clearing and there was the house: a two-story, gray-weathered affair set against the right-hand slope and leveled with stilts so that the porch, on the side of the house as Lowell approached, was as high as a man's head. Beyond the house across the open yard, were the barn and outbuildings and Son Martin's pickup truck over by a shed. Lowell didn't see anything that looked like a whiskey still; there was smoke rising above the house, but that would be from the cookstove. Beyond the cleared land and pasture, the hills were dark with scrub oak and laurel and climbed in hollows and ridges up to the clear afternoon sky. Lowell could just make out the roof of another house way up in the trees. High above were jaggedylooking sandstone outcrops and several open places that looked like dry creek beds, wide rivers of mud, where the terrible flash floods of '27 had washed away crops and timber. Some of the trees had been hauled out and milled for lumber; but there were still plenty of uprooted hunks lying dead at the edge of the pasture.

Reaching the crest of the road, the hounds streaking ahead of him across the yard, Lowell was going so slow the engine started to lug and he had to shift into second quick. He misse
d t
he gear as his foot slipped off the clutch pedal, and the car made an awful metal-grinding noise. Coasting into the yard, punching the shifter looking for second gear, and sounding like a kid just learning to drive, Lowell saw the man on the porch waiting for him, standing with his hands in his back pockets.

The man didn't come down off the porch; he waited for Lowell to get out of the car. Lowell slammed the door behind him. It didn't catch tight, damn-it, but he kept going anyway, around the front of the car to within about ten feet of the porch steps. That was close enough.

"I'm supposed to tell you they're coming to raid your still this evening."

Son Martin didn't take his hands from his back pockets or say anything for a minute. He was wearing a brown shirt that looked like an army shirt. In the daylight he looked younger than the times Lowell had seen him in the hotel; but he knew the man wasn't young at all and must be about thirty-five. It was his hair and his face that made him seem young: full head of hair cut short and clean-looking bony face darkened by the sun. He looked like a soldier, that was it; he still looked like one.

Son Martin turned a little as he said, "You hear?"

Lowell noticed the handle of the Smith & Wesson sticking out of Son's back pocket. Past him, Lowell could make out somebody standing inside the screen door. "I guess it our turn," the man inside answered. The hired man, Aaron.

Son Martin was looking at Lowell again. "Who sent you?"

"Mr. Baylor did." Lowell snapped the answer back.

"In his office, that's where you talked to him?" "Yes, sir."

Behind the screen Aaron said, "Ask him was anybody else there."

"Wasn't anybody," the boy said. "Just me and Mr. Baylor."

"You work at the hotel," Son Martin said.

The fact that it was a statement and not a question gave Lowell a funny feeling. The man had seen him before and knew who he was. He said, "Yes, sir, I'm on evenings."

"I believe you're Lyall?--"

"No, sir. Name Lowell Holbrook, Jr." "Lila your sister?"

"Yes, sir, she is. She waits table in the dining room." He had never seen Son Martin in the dining room; he had only seen him those few times in the lobby talking to Mrs. Lyons; but the man surely knew things about the hotel.

"Holbrook." Son Martin was placing the name. "Your family used to farm over toward Caldwell."

"Yes, sir, till the floods washed us out." Lowell waited with Son Martin looking at him, then couldn't wait any more. "A year ago me and my sister come over here to live with kin and we was able to get these jobs."

Son Martin kept looking at him until finally he said, "You're here. You might as well stay to supper."

It took him by surprise and gave him the funny feeling again, though now it was funny another way. Here he was talking to Son and being invited to have supper with him. What was so scary or different about Son Martin? Lowell told him he'd had a fair-sized dinner and sure wished he could stay and eat, but he had to get to work.

Driving away he kept glancing at the rearview mirror, at Son Martin on the porch watching him. He didn't wave, just watched. There was no sign of the hounds, which was good. Going down the road through the thicket he remembered he should have asked Son how come Mr. Baylor was warning him about the raid. It didn't make sense, unless Son was paying off the sheriff. But that didn't make sense either. If it was the case Mr. Baylor would tell Son himself, he wouldn't have somebody else do it. People did crazy things where whiskey was concerned. It being against the law to drink wasn't going to stop anybody. They'd fight and shoot each other and go to prison and die for it, so there was no sense in wondering about Mr. Baylor and Son Martin.

It was a relief to see the opening in the scrub growth and the road below him. Lowell kept his foot on the brake feeling the car sliding in the mud, the rear-wheels banging from side to side in the ruts. He said, "Hold her, Bessie," and slapped the steering wheel around making his turn, and right then he had to cut hard to swerve to miss going head on into a car parked in the road. Not a car, a line of cars, four, five of them parked there wit
h t
he men standing strungout alongside and all of them now staring at him as he went by. Lowell kept going. He looked at the rearview mirror and saw the men and cars getting smaller as he pulled away from them; they were still watching him and some of them were out in the road now. He'd recognized a few of them, people from around here; but couldn't place their names.

He surely wished somebody would tell him what the hell was going on in this world.

Mr. Baylor never could adjust the goddamn field glasses right, so he let his deputy, E
. J
. Royce, work them. They were on a ridge above the Martin place where they could look down two hundred yards or so through the trees to the cleared land and the outbuildings and the weathered house and the wisp of smoke rising out of the chimney pipe.

"What're they doing now?" Mr. Baylor asked E
. J
. Royce. The old man squinted into the distance through steel-framed spectacles: a seventy-three-year-old turkey buzzard face beneath a farmer's straw hat; tight mouth barely moving and a hunk of plug stuck in his sunken cheek.

"The nigger just come out carrying something." E
. J
. Royce spoke with the field glasses pressed to his face. "A pan. There, he just throwed the dishwater out'n the yard. Now he's gone back inside."

"Son come out?"

"No, sir, he's still in the house."

"I want quiet over there," Mr. Baylor said. "If you people can't keep still, bite on your lip or go home."

Somebody must have said something funny, the men laughing and shaking their heads, then hushing up looking solemn as Mr. Baylor spoke to them: the group waiting a few yards back, in the trees. Mr. Baylor usually deputized these same men, selected from his circle of friends. But on a raid, watching a place or moving in on it, he always called them "you people."

One of them, standing up, said to Mr. Baylor, "He can't hear nothing from where he's at
Mr. Baylor's steel-rimmed glare turned on the man. "How do you know he can't?" "Hit's too far," the man said.

"You want to swear on a goddamn Bible he can't hear you? You going to tell me what he can hear and what he can't, living out here and knowing every sound?" Mr. Baylor was talking louder than the man had talked.

E
. J
. Royce listened, the field glasses to his eyes, waiting for Mr. Baylor to finish. One time, watching like this, he had said, "Mr. Baylor, the man knows we're coming. What difference is it if we make noise?" And Mr. Baylor's glasses glinted and flashed and his mouth went tight. "Because you don't make any noise on a raid," Mr. Baylor hissed. "That's why." He had been either a sheriff or some kind of county official for over thirty years, sinc
e b
efore the year 1900, so he knew what he was talking about.