They Don't Dance Much: A Novel (18 page)

Catfish had some wood piled up against the side of the gulch. It was stuck back in the honeysuckle vines and nobody would ever notice it, but we knew where it was. Most of it was charcoal wood that wouldn’t show any smoke and would make a hot fire, but there was some pine wood too, for kindling.

We brought the wood up to the furnace and I held the flashlight while Smut got the fire started. ‘Look how I got it fixed up in here,’ Smut said.

Inside the furnace he had piled up rocks on each side, and on top of the rock columns he had several old car springs. They were up about two feet from the bottom of the furnace and lying close together.

‘Where’d that stuff come from?’ I asked.

‘I got it yesterday from the junk pile the other side of Corinth,’ he said.

‘What’s it for?’ I said.

‘Don’t get excited,’ Smut said.

Smut finally got a little fire started in the furnace. Then he took out his knife and handed it to me. ‘Hold that a minute,’ he said, and commenced unbuttoning his raincoat.

The raincoat was the first thing he took off. After that he took off every stitch he had on, and piled his clothes in front of the furnace.

‘God, I dread this job!’ he said. ‘Gimme my knife.’

We went around the side of the beer-container and I shoved Smut up. Then he caught my arms and helped me climb up there beside him. Smut took the barrel off the opening to the beer. I reckon the hole was two feet across, but it looked small. Smut knelt down by the hole and stuck his fingers in the beer. Then he slid down into it.

I stood there and waited till I thought he must be drowned; then I saw his head at the opening. His hair was dripping. He stood up straight and spat.

‘I found him, all right,’ Smut said. ‘But it’s a hell of a close place in here. Catfish has got this thing too damned full. I can’t hardly breathe when I raise up in here.’

He tossed his knife out beside my feet, on the top of the container, and went under again. In a minute I heard him hissing, ‘Grab him!’

He had Bert Ford’s feet up to the top of the container. He had cut the rope off Bert’s chest and arms, but the rope around his feet was still there. I took hold of the rope and pulled on it as hard as I could. Smut ducked under him then and shoved up. Bert’s legs came up a little higher, but he was hard to get out. When we finally got him out on the top of the container, Smut climbed out. He took the rope and dragged Bert to the side and threw him off onto the ground. We toted him to the furnace door, and put him on the rack above the fire. We kept his face down all the time. I was glad of that.

Smut began putting his clothes on. ‘The rock had slipped just about off him,’ he said. ‘He was practically standing up in the northeast corner.’

The fire wasn’t doing very well. While Smut was putting on his clothes I got to work on it, and it wasn’t long before I had the pine kindling blazing underneath the logs of charcoal wood. It took the charcoal some time to catch up and we stood in front of the furnace and warmed. Smut’s teeth chattered and he was shivering.

‘God, I’m cold!’ he said.

‘You sure this beer’s ready to run?’ I said. ‘If it’s not, then we won’t get much liquor out of it.’

‘It’s ready,’ he said. ‘This beer’s got plenty alcohol in it. I just now swallowed enough to find out.’

‘You got anything to put it in?’

‘I brought three kegs down yesterday afternoon, and two five-gallon jugs,’ Smut said.

‘How much will the kegs hold?’

‘Ten gallons.’

‘That won’t take care of but forty gallons in all. This beer ought to run off sixty gallons if it’s run right,’ I said.

‘There’s some half-gallon fruit jars over there in the honeysuckle vines,’ Smut said. ‘Don’t worry about it. I always make arrangements.’

I thought about something else then. ‘What if some Revenuers were to come down here tonight and catch us?’ I asked him. ‘You made arrangements for that too?’

Smut looked around back of him, into the black woods. I thought I saw him shiver a little. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘shut up! You give me the creeps.’

The fire was burning pretty good by then and the flames were beginning to jump up around the rack. Smut took a piece of tin that was lying there on the ground and covered the opening to the furnace, and we went to the honeysuckle vines and rolled out the kegs.

I didn’t know until that night that Smut could really make liquor, but he must have been an old hand. We put the cap over the container and got the cooling stand rigged up. Smut looked after the fire and the beer and I looked after changing the water in the cooling stand and catching the liquor. It took us most of the night. When we finished there was about fifty gallons of it and it looked like good liquor, but neither one of us had the stomach to taste it.

After we finished hiding the liquor in a gulley that ran down into the main gulch, Smut took another look inside the furnace. He took a stick and pushed the piece of tin off the front. I didn’t look in there myself. I guess there must have been a little left on the rack, for Smut put another charcoal log on the fire. We sat there feeding the fire for another hour, or longer, then Smut looked inside again.

He got down on his hands and knees and looked all inside the furnace. He sniffed around like a terrier, then stood up.

‘He’s gone,’ he said.

‘Nothing left?’

‘He’s a part of the air now,’ Smut said. ‘We got rid of him now.’

We got some water out of the little branch that ran down through the gulch and threw it on the fire and on the pieces of steel that Bert had been on. When everything got cooled off, we took the rack out of the furnace and toted the pieces back up to the creek and threw them in it. When we finished that, we tore down the rock columns that were inside the furnace, and scattered the rocks and bricks up and down the gulch. After that we took down the still and hid the stuff in the honeysuckle vines. It was getting light when we got back to our cabin.

We slept until about ten o’clock, then went up to the road-house. As soon as we ate breakfast we went into the front. Badeye was in there, standing behind the counter and drinking a bottle of beer. Smut got the morning paper and began reading that. I took a rag and started polishing around the booths.

I looked over at Badeye and he was looking at Smut. ‘Where in the hell was you two last night?’ Badeye said to Smut.

It scared the daylights out of me when he said that. But Smut took it like he’d just been asked if he thought it might rain.

‘We went off,’ he told Badeye. He looked up from the paper. ‘What’s it to you, anyway?’

‘Oh, don’t get horsy, Milligan,’ Badeye said. ‘You ain’t paying me such high wages that I got to stay out here. I can get jobs plenty of other places.’

‘Don’t let me stand in your way!’ Smut said, and went back to reading his newspaper.

Badeye put the beer bottle under the counter and took his towel off his shoulder. ‘The reason I asked,’ he said, ‘was that I tried to rouse you all about half the night.’

Smut looked up again. ‘You did? What for?’

‘I was sick,’ Badeye said. ‘I had the indigestion and I tried to wake you all up.’

‘Hell, ain’t neither one of us a doctor,’ Smut said. ‘Whyn’t you come up to the kitchen and get some soda?’

‘That was what I was tryin to do. But the niggers had done gone then and the door was locked. I wanted to get your key to the kitchen.’

‘You ought to keep a box of soda in your cabin,’ Smut said. He took a toothpick and stuck it in the side of his mouth.

Badeye commenced rubbing his towel up and down the counter. ‘I just wondered if you all was that hard to rouse,’ he said.

‘No,’ Smut told him, ‘we had to go make a run of liquor last night. Catfish’s old man got bad off and Catfish had to go to South Carolina to see him. The beer got ready to run off yesterday and me and Jack run it off last night.’

‘How come you didn’t ast me to help you run it off?’ Badeye said. ‘I’m a good liquor-maker. I used to make liquor all the time.’

‘Well, you’d of had indigestion about the time we got started good,’ Smut told him.

‘Yeah, but you didn’t know that when you left here. My stomach wasn’t hurting when we closed up the joint,’ Badeye said.

‘Oh, hell!’ Smut said. He spat the toothpick out on the floor and stuck his head inside the newspaper.

That morning Sam and Matt and Dick made a fire in the back yard and burned rubbish. After a while Badeye went out there to advise them how to do it and left Smut and myself alone in the front.

‘That Badeye makes me nervous with all his curiosity,’ I told Smut.

‘Aw, he don’t know nothing,’ Smut said. ‘Anyway, what I told him was the truth, except that I left out one or two little details.’

‘I’ll be glad when somebody misses Bert Ford and all that’s over with,’ I said.

‘I’m resting easy now since he disappeared last night,’ Smut said.

It rained that night and all the next day and business was pretty slow, but on Wednesday it cleared up and Wilbur Bran-non drove out about sundown.

He came inside and took a drink of liquor with Smut. They drank it at the counter and offered me one, but I didn’t want it. After Wilbur finished his drink he lit a cigarette and said: ‘I thought maybe Bert’d be here tonight and we could run a few hands. Haven’t seen him, have you?’

‘No,’ Smut said, ‘haven’t seen him lately.’

Wilbur shut one eye and looked at Smut. ‘It’s been more than a week since I last saw Bert,’ he said. ‘He must be sick. I’ve got a good notion to drive out to his place and see if anything’s wrong with him. Let’s run out there,’ he said to Smut.

‘I’d like to go, Wilbur,’ Smut said, ‘but fact is I can’t hardly sit down on something stationary like one of these counter stools. It would kill me to bounce up and down over them country roads out to Bert’s. I got a boil back there.’

‘It’s a bad place to have one, all right,’ Wilbur said. ‘I think I’ll drive out by myself, then. He might be down sick and not able to get out.’ Wilbur went outside to his car then, and drove off.

That night some of the Corinth school-teachers came out again with their true loves. I guess they had a good time that other night they were out. They sat over in the booths in the dance hall and drank some beer and a little port wine. Matt and Sam were over there to wait on them, and Smut and I stayed over on our side.

I think a couple of the boys must have got to playing the slot machines and left their dates. Anyway a couple of the girls came over to the counter and began drinking beer. One of the girls was rather tall, with a good figure. She had a pretty face, but her mouth looked like she was either sore about something or had had her feelings hurt. The other girl was short and bow-legged. She had on a leather jacket and a steady smile. I don’t know whether everything pleased her, or if she was just trying to look on the bright side of things. The girls made a few passes at Smut Milligan.

Smut was trying to work out the crossword puzzle in the evening paper. He generally had a hard time with a crossword puzzle, and when he was working on one he didn’t like to be bothered.

‘Gosh, you’re a big fellow!’ the little girl said to Smut.

‘Lady, I ain’t this big really,’ Smut said. ‘I et a big supper tonight and drunk a lot of beer. I got on all my clothes too.’

‘It’s not so cold now,’ the little school-teacher said.

‘I’m expecting a cold snap any minute,’ Smut said, and went on trying to figure out the crossword puzzle.

‘I like to dance with big men,’ the tall girl said to the other one. ‘I despise to try to dance with these little runts.’

‘Oh, I’m crazy about big men,’ the little one said. ‘I bet you’re a good dancer,’ she said to Smut Milligan.

‘No,’ Smut said, ‘I don’t dance. Then I got arthritis so bad that it’d be a torture to me even if I knowed how.’

‘Don’t tease me,’ the little school-teacher said. She smiled up at Smut, but he wasn’t looking at her. ‘What’re you doing?’ she asked him.

‘Trying to work out a crossword puzzle,’ Smut said, and chewed on the end of his pencil. ‘But I’m stuck now on a seven-letter word that means the same thing as love.’

‘Why, I’d think
you’d
know all about
love,’
the little girl said.

‘I don’t, though,’ Smut said. ‘It’s a thing that don’t mean nothing to me.’

The little one pouted. ‘You oughtn’t to talk like that,’ she said.

The two boys that were with them came into the room. One of them was Harvey Wood and he still had on his boots. The other was Gyp Ward, a man that worked in the cotton mill office in Corinth.

‘Aha, you thought you’d shaken us off,’ Gyp Ward said, and wiggled his finger at the long girl. Gyp Ward was a thin fellow that had a sallow complexion. He looked a little like a gypsy.

‘Well, you all went off and left us. You went in that little room that says private, so we thought we oughtn’t to go in and bother you,’ the little school-teacher said. She stuck out her tongue at Harvey Wood. ‘I’m mad with you,’ she said.

‘We just went in there to play the slot machine a minute,’ Harvey Wood said.

‘Oh,’ the tall girl said. ‘I thought maybe it was the rest room and you all had got hung up in the plumbing.’

Smut Milligan took his pencil and the newspaper the crossword puzzle was in and went back to the kitchen, where he could have some peace and not have to listen to such conversations. But in a minute the four of them went back to the dance hall and it was all right again.

About nine o’clock Wilbur Brannon came back. He looked like he was worried about something. He walked over to the cash register. ‘Give me a pack of Chesterfields, Jack,’ he said to me.

I handed the cigarettes to him and he said: ‘You know, Jack, it’s a little strange about Bert. He’s not there.’

‘He’s not?’

‘No. I knocked on the front door and called him, but nobody came to the door. Then I went to the back porch and knocked on the doorsteps and called, but still nobody. It’s a little strange, because I went out to his garage and his car was there.’

‘That is strange,’ I said.

Smut came back in the front then and walked up to the cash register where we were standing.