The Year's Best SF 11 # 1993 Read online

  “Think a little plastique in the basement might help his attitude, Dennis,” the bigger one said.

  Dennis opened his briefcase and slid his hand inside, felt the Beretta, then sighed. “Bobby, I don’t know what you’re trying to do to me.”

  “I’ve got three shells in this, DeSpain. I can kill all of you.”

  “Well, tonight, I guess you could, Bobby. If that’s what you want to do. But I don’t think it would be lawful, seeing as how I’m sitting in my truck and the boys aren’t armed. You do something like that and you’ll have both law and the DeSpains against you.”

  The boys in the back made DeSpain more nervous than Bobby himself, but they had sense enough to shut up. The little one popped open another beer. Bobby did swing the gun up slightly, DeSpain noticed. He also noticed that Bobby was trembling. When the shotgun went down again, DeSpain looked around the yard and saw a car motor dangling from a hoist, a car sitting on blocks, leads from a diagnostic computer running out one window. “Cash-flow problems?” DeSpain suggested.

  “Damn you, Dennis DeSpain,” Bobby said.

  “You don’t want to kill anyone, Bobby,” DeSpain said. He eased the safety off on the Beretta. Sometimes a man would shoot you when you said such a thing just to prove you wrong. Bobby’s wife came out then and he gave her the shotgun and spoke to her too softly for DeSpain to make out.

  The little cousin whistled. Bobby’s wife looked back as if she wanted to give the gun back to her husband, but finally went into the house.

  “I hope you didn’t ask her to call the sheriff, Bobby. We’re here to work this out like businessmen.”

  “Dennis, I don’t want to make liquor.”

  “Well, you did make the liquor and you were looking for customers. I’m not asking you to make white liquor. That aged barley malt of yours would be real good to have around Smith Mountain Lake. Hey, Bobby, let me loan you something to get that car back together. No, let me give you something.” DeSpain arched his back to get at his wallet and pulled out four hundred dollars. He stuck his arm out of the cab and said, “Won’t that help?”

  “You know that it would.” Bobby wouldn’t come take it.

  Then, in the house, Bobby’s sick baby cried. Bobby closed his eyes one long moment and came up and took the money. “It takes years to age. I dumped all I made, all that was aging.”

  “Don’t worry, Bobby. We’re both young men, you especially. I’ve got someone working accelerating the aging process. I’ve thought about counterfeiting bottled-in-bond liquors, to diversify, so to speak.”

  “Can I quit when I get out from under?” Bobby asked.

  Oh, Bobby, you’ll never get out from under, DeSpain thought, but he said, “Sure, Bobby. The main thing was, I didn’t want you calling attention to the business. Amateurs often aren’t discreet enough, and if anyone gets real obvious, then the state’s going to come in serious in the county.”

  “You made it sound like I was competing with you and you were going to beat my butt if I didn’t work for you regardless.”

  “Well, yeah, I’d be less than honest if I said I welcomed competition, but the real concern was for the business as a whole. And you were hardly serious competition, just making fine liquor I happen to have a personal fondness for.”

  Bobby looked like he knew he was being lied to, but he’d settle since DeSpain fed him lies that let him keep some face. DeSpain watched him, amazed that someone could think to get into liquor-making with a face so connected to his thoughts. They both settled into an agreeable silence.

  “Aw, shit, Dennis, you not going to need us to beat him up?” the bigger nephew finally said.

  “Not tonight,” Dennis said. “Bobby here understands my concerns. I’ll take you for a treat.” He drove them up to Roanoke, where he called Maudie from a phone booth to see if the girl the bigger nephew liked was available.

  She was. Dennis got back in the truck and drove them to the little house behind the brick fence up near Hollins—very clean women, Miss Maudie had.

  “Hi, Dennis, what can I do for you?” Maudie asked as she got them beyond the door. She was a skinny woman with long thick dark-blond hair, gray in it, who wore gold bangles from wristbone to elbow on her left arm to be used as brass knuckles in a fight.

  “I’ll just listen to music. The boys want to have fun.” Patsy, the girl his nephew thought was so neat, came out with a girl DeSpain hadn’t seen before. She was a deep mountain girl, or an imitation of one, barefoot and in gingham shorts and tube top for the tourists, DeSpain thought. He grimaced at Maudie, who took his arm and led him to the parlor where a couple of high-school-looking boys sat drinking and listening to jazz piano played by a half-black, half-Chinese girl. She wore a thin blue negligee but was playing her piano so earnestly it wasn’t sexy.

  “She’s a student at Hollins,” Maudie said as she slid a iced whiskey into Dennis’s hand. “She’s from Mississippi.”

  “Aren’t they all college girls?”

  “Want to talk?”

  Dennis sipped his drink, listening to the nephews babbling about how they’d just whipped the shit out of one of his competitors and didn’t even get bloody. “No, I’m tired. Will you be needing supplies, now that I’m here?”

  “Send me in more apple brandy, if you can get some. I’m tired, too. Some of these girls are absolute cunts.”

  “I’ll let you know how the Russian deals go.”

  “That apartment house you told me to buy is doing reasonable, but it’s too much like this to be what I’d like to do.”

  “What would you like to do?”

  Maudie shrugged like whatever it was she was way too old and wise to try. “You know how it is, Dennis. We have to work out our own retirement plans.”

  The half-breed girl paused in her playing, stared at the keyboard as if pushing the keys with brain waves, then put her hands back and began playing something classical that reminded Dennis of a time he and Orris had been to the Roanoke Symphony with Orris’s college roommate. He’d felt considerably uncomfortable then, but was somewhat relieved now that he could recognize the music as classical, that a half-breed whore wasn’t impossibly different from him. Dennis asked Maudie, “Do you ever feel like you were leading a whole bunch of different lives, here, the other investments?”

  “Aren’t we all?”

  The half-breed girl stared at Dennis then, playing on as if her fingers knew the keyboard better than her eyes. She sighed and looked as if she was going to cry.

  “Does she fuck, too?” Dennis asked.

  “She’s having a bad night. Let’s see about someone else.”

  “No, I’ll come back for her.”

  “The alien tried last night.”

  “Damn. He’s on one of my bulletin boards, too. Just one of them in this area, isn’t there?”

  “Yes.”

  “If he’s making liquor here, I’m gonna collide with the bastard.”

  “Here here, or here on Earth?”

  “Franklin County, Patrick, wherever the hell he’s living now.”

  “Didn’t say. Seemed sleazy, but I don’t know how his kind’s supposed to be.”

  “And he wanted to fuck her?” The half-breed girl’s fingers jerked discords on the keyboard and her shoulders rounded. Dennis felt sorry for her; then for an instant he wondered what Orris would say if he fucked a Hollins girl, even one in a whorehouse. “Tell the boys I didn’t buy them all night,” Dennis said to Maudie. He went up to the girl and put a twenty on top of the piano, then went outside to stand by his truck until the boys finished.

  3

  Marie Sees Something Unusual

  After my spring semester exams, I took what I learned from Tech and from Dennis DeSpain and set up a mechanically cooled still. One advantage of being a black woman engineering student is that you can get your hands on such wonderful things as a twelve-volt hydro heat pump and no one suspects you’ll be making liquor with it. Run it with a transformer or solar and your electric b
ill won’t jump like it would running equipment with regular house current. State ABC officers and the local narcs cruise Appalachian power bills looking for bills that are just too big.

  The only house I could rent cheap enough was an old Giles County A-frame made of weird stiff foam-over-metal ribs, an early Tech architectural school folly. When I rented it, there was a big hole where a tree’d come down on it, so I had to patch it with new foam. Earlier owners and renters had done the same, so the house was mottled grays, browns, and creams, and lumpy inside and out along the corrugated foam ribs. Whatever, I liked it because it didn’t look like a still house.

  When I brought in the heat pump, I put it on the floor and sat in the gloom half ironic about the thrill. Me, bootlegging.

  Actually, my body missed Dennis’s body. So I was reverting to Terrella with her big skirts, her dreadlocks, and her pistol because I really wanted to call Dennis up and say, “It’s okay. I don’t really need you all the time.”

  Brain, tell the body no, I thought as I ran the heat exchanger coils into the basement water tank and then used a plumber’s bit on my drill to bring them upstairs to the bedroom.

  Reasonable enough to heat people with wood, but I’d cook my mash over precisely controlled electric heat.

  Down under the house on the other side from the water tank, the mash, in five-gallon drums, fermented buried in compost, rigged to a meter that told me the sugar was now done. I’d used a wheat malt, since I remembered a white man friend of my grandfather’s saying wheat made the best liquor he’d run. Sprout it just a little, dry it, grind it coarse, wet it down and add molasses and yeast, then some chicken shit. I left out the chicken shit, added nitrates and some urea instead. The mash was ready.

  The still was upstairs in the bedroom, where a steady run of electricity wouldn’t be suspicious. I took the heat pump and the transformer upstairs.

  About halfway upstairs, I felt utterly foolish, but so? All I’d get if I was busted would be a suspended sentence. Tech wouldn’t kick me out.

  I opened the door to my still room and began building a marine plywood box for the cooler and coil. The wires from the coil thermocouple controlled the fan motor. I sat back on my heels wondering if I should insulate the box, then decided it was better to disperse the heat, even with the cooking element being also thermostatically controlled. The jigsaw cut the vents for the cold air and the exhaust; then I soldered the box and fitted it around the worm.

  For the cooking thermostats, I’d taken old fishtank heaters and broken the override high points, then recalibrated them so I could keep the mash around 205. The cooking pot was insulated at the sides. I went downstairs for five gallons of mash.

  Rather than lift a five-gallon wooden barrel, I drained the mash into a plastic water carrier. Don’t breathe it, I’d heard all my life. It was more vomit-provoking than peyote. I needed an activated carbon filter face mask. Shit, I might have to make some money on liquor to pay for all this stuff, I thought as I lugged the mash upstairs. The mash gurgled into the pot like rotten oatmeal and I capped it quickly and began cooking.

  The first couple of tablespoons I threw away. That’s poisonous low-temperature fusels and esters. Then I began running the distillate into glass bottles, not quite having the equipment for another doubling still. I probed through my valved probe hole—temperature at the cap holding steady at 190, so I shouldn’t be getting too much water boiling off, mostly alcohol.

  Next, I’d automate, so I wouldn’t have to be on site. I kept my eye on the distillate stream, and when it slowed down slightly, I ran the rest off and threw it away. Just save the middles.

  As I waited for the cooker to cool, I fantasized rigging an automated still, computer-controlled, just like one of DeSpain’s better operators had, hogs getting the spent mash augered up to them.

  I love work with electronics and machines. I forget I’m black and a woman, which is very restful some days.

  I lifted the top and went back to town to pick up a Spraypro respirator. The clerk looked at me funny and I realized I smelled of alcohol and mash. My hair’d frizzed half a foot beyond my head. Bad as picking up a man’s odor from sex, I thought as I blushed. The clerk smiled and handed me the respirator. “Honey, I’d recommend a full-face airline respirator myself. What you got ain’t good against mash fumes,” he said and handed me an extra box of gas filter canisters.

  “Thanks,” I said. I hate being called honey. Colorwise, molasses would be more appropriate. Now, was he going to call a distributor and report me? Fool, I told myself, you didn’t show him ID.

  Back at the house, I put the liquor I’d stilled off in the refrigerator and began packing the mash up in a plastic heat-seal bag, snorting through the respirator the whole time. Then I hauled the cooking vessel into the bathroom and scrubbed it out before putting the first run through. First wine, the old people called the first run.

  I used an old iron to heat-seal the mash bag. I should have rigged a centrifuge to whirl out the remaining liquor. Next time, I thought as I lugged the bag downstairs, I’d find out how to process the spent mash in an ecologically correct way. Freeze-dry it and get some pigs to eat it.

  The alcohol, when I doubled it, tested out at 190 proof. It tasted like straight grain alcohol, which was, after all, what it was. I wondered what chemicals made scotch scotch and not vodka. DeSpain once asked me if I could counterfeit aged liquors. I swirled the liquor in its glass jar, watching the fine fine bubbles bead up. Surely it could be done. But this batch I poured in a small oak cask that I’d charred inside with a propane torch. I took the cask to the basement and put it in the compost bin.

  Leaving the house with the bagged mash in a plastic trash can to dump in someone’s field, I thought that distilling could get to be rather boring if that’s all one did. Obviously, Dennis had sense enough to hire poor boys to tend still for him.

  As I dumped the mash in a pig pasture, I considered I might sell the liquor at The Door 18, a juke joint near Fairystone Park made with a real hotel door in front. Hugous, a third cousin some removed, ran it and sold liquor and marijuana to his friends. A big, even more distant kinsman played jazz bass there on weekends. I knew of the place through trailer cousins who’d taken me there a couple of times before Mamma heard about it. Back in my dorm room, I changed into something red velveteen.

  It’s a long drive and I took a disk of some white guy reading a piece for next year’s English as I go. The guy narrating finds someone floating in a swimming pool over a woman name Daisy when I turn off 57 to the road leading to the place. Couple miles further, there’s a big dirt parking lot and two Dobermans wandering around looking for white people to bite. I sort of nod to them and push through The Door 18 and see Hugous sitting wiping glasses and smiling. The big cousin is booming out jazz chords to a hymn playing tinny from a little Taiwanese tape deck.

  “Hi, Hugous, you know Albert?”

  “Been knowing him since he was a baby.”

  “I’m his second cousin once removed. We all live on Tiggman Adams Boulevard.”

  “One them Crowley people.”

  “Yeah. You might have heard of Tirrella.”

  “Midwife. She catched my daddy.”

  I wondered how long I ought to reckon kin with Luther, but decided to get down to business, slant-wise. “You have something a woman could drink.”

  The cousin playing with the bass stopped. Hugous shrugged and said, “Woman shouldn’t, but a woman could.” He fetched a bottle from under the counter and poured me a tiny shot.

  It wasn’t just liquor. The alcohol wheeled the other chemicals into the bloodstream faster. I felt buzzy and the dust motes seemed to be stars. Deep laugh, then bass chords. I managed to say, “I bet it’s a hit.”

  Hugous nodded. We stared at each other, then I had a vision—Dennis DeSpain riding a still barrel, guiding it through the stars by the coil. Then back to The Door 18. Then a vision: a long pink car with women in it squealing. Then I saw Hugous had moved. “How lon
g does it last?” The ocean swept me away to a steel gull-winged car where an Arab-looking man sat counting money. He looked like the photo Dennis had shown me of his partner.

  “Oh, tiny time.”

  “I was going to ask you if I could sell you some liquor.” I waited for another vision, but the special effects seemed to be over.

  “No more illegal than untaxed liquor, this stuff. Quick change stuff.”

  I asked, “Can I have a sample? Maybe I can duplicate it?”

  “Sure and a half.” Hugous put some in a grapefruit juice bottle. “It been to Tech already, though. Nice, not so much effect you got to have it, mellow, not going to attract lots of attention. Some folks confuse it with having a daydream, like the drug wasn’t putting in more than they could do themselves musing.”

  The alcohol part wasn’t missing either. I felt very nice now. “Well, if you need any straight liquor, then I could help you. Where did you get this?”

  “Alien up in Franklin County. He cra-zy.” Hugous’s nephew hit a low bass chord on crazy and boinged the strings as though he and Hugous’d rehearsed hitting the emphasis. Or else the drug wasn’t completely metabolized out.

  “Stupid. Everyone can identify him.”

  “Maybe he got kin working for him,” the nephew said.

  Hugous said, not really asking, “Maybe he worse to cross than the law. Uglier than the law.”

  “Maybe it’s like if a dog could take up stilling,” I said. “Like he isn’t human.”

  “Or they don’t have no idea an alien do the unlawful like us,” Hugous’s nephew said. I was about to tell him I wasn’t an us when I caught sight of myself in my velveteen dress in the bar mirror.

  DeSpain, you turned me into this velveteen fool.

  * * *

  I was starting to move my stuff out to the A-frame when Berenice called me at the dorm. “Marie, what are you doing for the summer?”

  Stilling, I thought but didn’t say. “I rented a house off in Giles. I have to be out of the dorm by next week.”

  “I don’t want to make this sound like I was looking for a maid, but Lilly’s going in to have a hysterectomy. Marie, I don’t want to have to go to a nursing home, not even for a month.”