The Wettest County in the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

They’d have to keep the mash warm all night and through the next day, a tricky thing to do with simple pit fires and no device to measure temperature other than fingers. Then he’d have to borrow Danny’s truck tonight to get back down to the County Line Restaurant to help Forrest. It was part of the arrangement for the new loan: Forrest needed backup for a big sale to some men from Shootin’ Creek set to go off around midnight. It would take Howard at least an hour to get to the restaurant in the dark, so he figured he’d get the still hot, the mash boxes set, and head out and let Cundiff and Danny handle it through the night.
    Danny looked over to him and grinned. Well damn, Howard thought, Danny ain’t such a bad fella anyway. He took another slug from the jar and passed it back. Howard sneezed three times in quick succession.
    I’ll tell you what Danny-boy, Howard said. We gonna need to stop off somewheres and get a better pop o’ whiskey. That shit ain’t fit to slop hogs.
     
    J ACK RAN ALONG East Court Street, dodging the stray pedestrians who slouched off with their late-afternoon purchases. He stayed off the muddy streets, rutted with tire tracks and mule dung. Downtown Rocky Mount was lined with a few blocks of shops bordered by rooming houses and apartments, two hotels and a strip of agricultural-supply warehouses, and the streets were perpetually littered with animal refuse and farming scrap. As Jack neared the Little Hub Restaurant he slowed to a walk and pulling off his cap fluffed it and set it back on his blond head at the appropriate angle. He gave his weathered boots another look over, flicking away some street mud, smoothing his britches and coat. He had a fine sheen to him in the plate glass of the colored barbershop and he felt erect and indomitable. Jack paused in front of Slone’s Haberdashery and inspected the burgundy calfskin boots with brass eyelets in the display. He scratched the top of his foot with the sole of his other boot. My first two dollars free and clear, Jack thought. The creamy yellow insides of the boots looked smooth and he imagined they felt like soft butter. Inside the store a man in a fur-trimmed ankle-length coat stood at the counter making a purchase. Jack eyed the brand-new Dual Cowl Duesenberg Phaeton angled at the curb. The two-tone paint job gleamed deep blue-black in the afternoon light, a fine spray of red mud on the running boards and white-walls. He had never seen one in Franklin County before, only in advertisements. That car cost more than ten goddamn Fords, Jack thought, maybe more.
    When Jack reached the restaurant he found his friend Cricket Pate at the counter, drinking a cup of coffee and eating a doughnut.
    Hey Cricket, Jack said. You finished stuffin’ your gullet?
    Yeah, Cricket said. Let’s get on.
    Cricket crammed the doughnut into his mouth and the two young men set off down the street to Cricket’s ramshackle Series 80 Pierce-Arrow coupe.
    Lemee drive, Jack said.
    Jack fired down the street in the rattling heap, Cricket shaking his head and holding on to the frayed ceiling.
    C’mon, Jack, he said. Ain’t no reason to bust us up.
    Cricket Pate was an old classmate of Jack’s from the Snow Creek school, though Cricket was three years older and didn’t stay in past the third grade. A reedy kid with awkward bowed knees from childhood malnutrition—a case of the rickets that made him walk like he was straddling a fence. Cricket had been living on Smith Mountain since his mother died when he was fourteen; he never knew his father. He’d shoot squirrel and run trotlines for mud cats in the lake under the mountain, sometimes picking up slop work during harvesting season. He was married at seventeen to a red-haired strumpet from Sontag and divorced the next year. Cricket was famous around the county for his inventive on-the-spot fixes for farm equipment; it was said that with a bit of spit and twine he could get your tractor or thresher up and