The Darling Dahlias and the Unlucky Clover Read online

  The front steps were guarded by a pair of coonhounds too lazy to do more than lift their heads when Buddy pulled up in front. A stripped-down 1932 black Ford that belonged to Bodeen’s younger brother Beau was parked just ahead of him on the street. A fast car, it could easily outrun the old Model T four-door sedan that Buddy had inherited from Roy Burns.

  That is, it could until Buddy had bolted on a high-compression cylinder head and installed a high-speed camshaft and a bigger carburetor. On the door, he had painted a six-pointed star around the words “Cypress County Sheriff,” and added a red light and an ear-splitting siren, rigged to run off the battery. He’d also anchored a sturdy strip of hog wire across the back of the front seat, so if he had to haul a prisoner, the guy couldn’t grab him from behind and get him in a choke-hold. Although he was still itching for an opportunity to prove its merits, he was confident that his souped-up Model T could now outrun almost anything on the road.

  Dispiritedly, the coon hounds left the steps and flopped down under a cottonwood tree at the edge of the yard, displacing a red rooster and a couple of squawking hens. As Buddy rapped on the screen door, he could hear a soothing male voice announcing that it was time to tune in to “Oxydol’s own Ma Perkins.” The announcer was abruptly throttled when somebody switched off the radio.

  Bodeen’s mother answered Buddy’s knock. Her gray hair was wound on top of her head and fuzzy tendrils frizzed around her face. She wore a green-checked cotton dress and a flour sack apron that still bore the washed-out brand name, Sunbonnet Sue Flour. She glanced at the badge on Buddy’s shirt pocket. Her tone was resigned. “Which one you lookin’ for this time?”

  “Bodeen, ma’am,” Buddy said, taking off his hat respectfully.

  The Pyles had three sons: young Beau, a rakishly good-looking troublemaker; Bodeen; and the older boy, Rankin, who’d joined a gang over around Atlanta and was said to keep busy robbing banks. Old man Pyle had just been released from Wetumpka (also known as “The Walls”) where he had served a five-year sentence for knifing a man in a fight in a speakeasy in Monroeville.

  Of the lot, Bodeen showed the most self-discipline and industry, although the industry he was involved in was generally considered illegal. His still had already been shut down once by that pesky revenue agent, Chester P. Kinnard. But that had been a temporary setback, and it wasn’t long before he had relocated from the south end of Briar Swamp to the north. Following Roy Burns’ lead, Buddy had so far considered Bodeen’s bootlegging as none of his business. That is, it was none of his business until Bodeen got up to something else illegal, like thieving or murder, in which case, he’d have to do something about it.

  “Well, Bodeen ain’t here,” Mrs. Pyle said in a resentful tone.

  Buddy wondered whether she ever got tired of defending her kin or worrying about what they were up to. “Happen to know where I can find him?”

  Somewhere in the house, a male voice shouted, “Ma, you made my sandwich yet? I’m hungry.”

  Mrs. Pyle shook her head. Over her shoulder, she yelled, “You fix it, Beau. I’m busy.”

  “Bodeen’s out at the swamp, I reckon,” Buddy hazarded.

  Mrs. Pyle regarded him darkly. After a moment, she replied, “I ain’t sayin’. You can find him your own self.”

  Buddy sighed. “You know, you’d save me a goldurned long drive if you’d just tell me he’s not out at the swamp. I could be in a better mood when I get there.”

  She gave him a narrow-eyed look. “Ain’t sayin’ he ain’t,” she said at last.

  “Thank you, ma’am.” Buddy put his hat back on. “What I needed to know.”

  The male voice came again, plaintively. “Ma, there ain’t no cheese!”

  Unless Darling folk had important business in Briar Swamp—hunting, fishing, or hiding out—they mostly stayed away. Briar Creek flowed deep and dark there, and the swamp itself was embraced by a series of wide oxbow bends of the Alabama River, which snaked slowly along on its muddy way to Mobile Bay and the blue Gulf beyond.

  The swamp’s bottomland was thick with trees and underbrush and even thicker with mosquitoes and snakes—cottonmouth, copperhead, coral snake, diamondback rattlesnake. The few houses along the river weren’t houses at all but houseboats, tin-roofed and shanty-like and liable to be swept from their moorings when the river flooded, which it did often. The CCC boys at Camp Briarwood had been cutting trees and digging ditches along the eastern margins of the swamp, attempting to drain the land and claim it for agriculture. In Buddy’s view, that was a waste of time—make-work, really—an opinion shared by many Darling people. They liked Briar Swamp the way it had been in their long memory, deep and dark and free, a nearly impenetrable refuge for those who needed a place to hide out. Like General Bedford Forrest’s Confederate boys, on the run after the Battle of Selma, near the end of the war.

  When he was a kid, Buddy had spent a fair amount of time in the swamp, playing hooky from school, mostly, but also getting to know the place, which had a strange, almost hypnotic hold on his imagination. Long narrow fingers of shallow bayous reached into the swamp on the river side, their shores bordered with bald cypress, their waters home to some pretty fine gators and longnose gar lazing among the lily pads and water willow. Where the land rose up a few feet, the trees were mostly tupelo and gum, mixed with southern red oak, sweet gum, yellow poplar, and beech. And the waters and shorelines and trees were home to an astonishing variety of birds: dabblers like the Canada geese, mallards, gadwalls, and blue-winged teal; waders like the herons, bitterns, egrets, ibises, and wood storks; raptors like the osprey, kites, eagles, hawks, and owls.

  Buddy knew where a wooden skiff was tied to a swamp cottonwood and had occasionally borrowed it to fish the bayous for largemouth or spotted bass, catfish, crappie, pickerel, and sunfish. Sometimes he’d pole to a place where the water shallowed over a clean gravel bottom and hunt for freshwater mussels—southern fatmucket, yellow sandshell, Alabama orb—or for crawdads and frogs, to be cooked over a campfire while the sky darkened down to night and the ivory moon lifted above the trees.

  Buddy hadn’t been down to the swamp since he’d been elected sheriff, but he still knew his way around. What was more to his present purpose, he knew the way to Bodeen’s relocated moonshine camp, although he hadn’t been there for a while, either. He had a choice. He could drive in past the prison farm on the Jericho Road, then take the dirt two-track that curled and twisted through the trees for several miles. Or (and this would be quieter and give no notice of his coming) he could pole up Snipes Bayou, if the skiff was still moored to that swamp cottonwood.

  It was, although he had to disturb a great blue heron and a small flock of hooded mergansers and buffleheads fishing in the dark, still waters nearby. He had to bail the skiff out, too, using a rusty coffee can he found in the gunwale. But by midafternoon, he had poled his way up the narrow bayou to the point where he could smell the smoke from Bodeen’s moonshine camp and hear the dull thud of an ax.

  He pushed the skiff onto the bank below a tangle of tree roots and got out. He had left his holster and gun locked in the car—he’d never been very keen on firepower, feeling that having a revolver on his hip increased the likelihood of rash behavior on both sides of the law. When he walked up to Bodeen’s camp in a large cleared space in the middle of a dense wood, he made it easy for anybody he met to see that his hands were empty and he was unarmed.

  The center of the clearing was taken up with three large boilers set up on stacks of bricks. Off to one side was a storage shack, with a row of wooden barrels and smaller kegs along one wall and a shanty bunkhouse nearby, with an iron pot of something—squirrel stew, maybe, or fatback and beans—perched over a campfire.

  At a quick glance, Buddy counted three men in the clearing. An old man, gray-bearded and gaunt, was stacking empty cans—the square five-gallon metal cans bootleggers used to haul their moonshine, instead of the glass jugs that were easily broken. A young boy in ragged overalls, shirtless, was spl
itting short lengths of firewood with a heavy ax as long as he was tall. Seeing Buddy, the boy stopped in mid-swing.

  “Look sharp, Bodeen,” he said loudly. “We got us some comp’ny.”

  Bodeen Pyle was bent over, shoving firewood under a four-hundred-gallon blackpot boiler. He straightened up quick as a nervous cat and turned around, a stick of firewood in his hand. When he saw Buddy, he relaxed and dropped the firewood. He nodded at the boy and old man, and they went on with their work.

  “A little out of your usual territory, ain’t you, Sheriff?” Bodeen said.

  Buddy always wondered if Bodeen had a different daddy than his older and younger brothers, for while Randall and Beau were dark-haired, sultry, and slouchy, he was red-haired, blue-eyed, and freckled, with the straightforward, no-nonsense manner of a born businessman. He was wearing a dirty denim work shirt and jeans, and he had a red bandana tied around his head to keep the sweat out of his eyes. Bodeen had never been one to shirk hard work.

  “Maybe so,” Buddy allowed affably. “Still in my county, though.” It was true. The entire swamp was in Cypress County, for whatever that was worth. If you asked the county commissioners, the swamp was more a liability than an asset. It didn’t produce anything but some timber and a lot of mosquitoes.

  “You got time to talk?” he added, as if this were a casual meeting in front of the courthouse or at the diner. “Don’t mean to take you away from your work.”

  “Hang on a minute,” Bodeen said, and reached for a wooden paddle fashioned out of a piece of beech. He climbed up on top of the boiler and took off a lid. “Fire’s about to take hold. Have to give this here batch a good stir.”

  If you were making corn liquor or peach or plum or apple brandy for your family or your neighbors (and plenty of Darling folk did), you probably used what was called a “turnip pot”—a copper boiler about the size of a half-barrel, small enough that a man could carry it on his shoulder. All you needed was your turnip pot, forty or fifty pounds of fruit and twice that much sugar, plus a source of clear spring water. Once you had all that, you were cookin’. One or two runs and you’d have enough for the whole year.

  But if you were in the business of making moonshine for money, you’d have a blackpot still—or several of them—that held up to eight hundred gallons of fermented mash apiece. Cobbled together from boards and sheets of metal, the blackpot boiler was set up above a fire pit on stacks of brick and filled with the makings of mash: cornmeal, usually, or a varying mix of corn, rye, and barley meal; sugar, yeast, and water. The quantities were daunting. For each big blackpot, you’d need a hundred pounds of grain meal, eight hundred pounds of sugar, some yeast, and enough water to top it off. You might also want to pour a couple of eighty-pound sacks of wheat bran on top of the mash to hold in the heat of fermentation. Getting the supplies without getting caught required some skilled advance planning.

  Once it was all in the blackpot, the mash was left to ferment, with an occasional stir. Then a fire was lit under it and the mash was boiled, releasing the alcohol in the form of steam. The steam was run through a coil of copper pipe (the worm) in a vat or box of cold water, cooling it into a liquid. At its most potent, what came out of the worm was 150 proof—75 percent alcohol, with a knife-edged, explosive jolt. White lightning. White dog. Tiger spit. Hooch.

  After the blackpot had been run once, more sugar could be added to the mash and the process begun again. Shiners could get as many as six or seven runs of tolerable liquor out of one pot of mash, although they might have to settle for less potency in the later runs. Buddy had heard it said that blackpot moonshine didn’t have the fine taste of liquor produced in smaller quantities. But it was cheaper to make and most drinkers didn’t care what it tasted like, as long as it had plenty of firepower. Corn whiskey was never aged, the way bourbon whiskey was, up in Kentucky and Tennessee. It was simply siphoned off into metal cans, packed into a fast car, and run down to Mobile or up to Montgomery.

  Buddy sat down with his back to a nearby sweet gum tree, keeping an eye on the boy and the old man. Bodeen, whistling “Dixie,” finished stirring, climbed down from the pot, and hunkered Indian-style beside him. He stopped whistling and reached into his shirt pocket for a crumpled pack of Camels and a matchbook.

  “Heard you busted Pootie McKay,” he said.

  Buddy shrugged. “Just doin’ my job.”

  “You ain’t busted none of my haulers.”

  Buddy thought about that. “Haven’t crossed my path yet, I reckon.”

  The boy had gone back to his splitting, and the silence was broken by the solid thunk of his ax. Bodeen swatted a mosquito on his neck.

  “Tell the truth, I’ve been expecting you, Sheriff,” he said. “I’ve been wondering why you ain’t showed up out here sooner—to pick up where old Sheriff Burns left off. Pick up his cut, I mean.”

  Buddy was puzzled. “His … cut?”

  “Sure.” Bodeen rubbed his thumb and first finger together. “Moolah. Gravy.” He pursed his lips. “I paid him ten dollars a week plus five dollars a load protection fee. Reckon that’ll work for you?”

  Protection fee? And then Buddy understood—and wondered why in the hell he’d been so oblivious for so long. No wonder Roy Burns had been live-and-let-live about Bodeen’s moonshine—and probably Mickey LeDoux’s, too, before Mickey got busted. And maybe the small local shiners, as well. The sheriff had his hands in their pockets. Folks had been paying him to turn a blind eye.

  For a moment, Buddy was surprised. And then he wasn’t. He was just mad at himself for not cottoning to the racket sooner. Burns’ nice house, his wife’s cook and housekeeper, their vacation cottage, that big motor boat on Oyster Bay—all the signs had been there. He just hadn’t been smart enough to put the picture together.

  But being dumb in the past was no excuse for not being smart now.

  “Give me a minute to think on this,” he said.

  Bodeen bent a match against the matchbook striker, lit it with a jab of his thumb, and held it to the tip of his cigarette. He narrowed his pale blue eyes, and when he spoke, his voice was colder.

  “You figure on askin’ for more?” He paused, frowning. “Bear in mind that I got other obligations, Sheriff. If I pay you more, word’ll get out, and I’ll have to come up with more for them. Then I’ll have to add that to the price of the shine.” He shook his head. “Drives up the cost for ever’body.”

  Buddy wanted to ask what those other obligations were, but now didn’t seem like the right time. He turned this new and surprising situation over in his mind, trying to sort through all the ramifications. But it wasn’t easy. Bootleg operations were one thing, an ongoing bribery racket was another. And there could be more he didn’t know about.

  Finally, hesitantly, he said, “I reckon what you gave Roy will be okay for me. I don’t want to upset the applecart.” He frowned. “For now, anyway. We can talk about it again later, after I’ve had a chance to see how things are going.”

  “Swell,” Bodeen said. He reached for his wallet. “How about if we start right now?” He took out five tens and handed them over. “This is for the last two weeks plus the six loads that’ve gone out in that time. Which somehow didn’t cross your path.” With a grin, he added a twenty. “And this is for good faith, because we’re pals. We got a deal, Sheriff?”

  Buddy folded the bills into his shirt pocket and buttoned it shut. This thing was too damned complicated for him to dope out on the spot. He felt like he had just stumbled into a nest of angry rattlers, and every single one of them was buzzing around his feet. The arrangement between Roy Burns and Bodeen Pyle might have been a small-time, short-term private transaction, one man to the other—or it might be something bigger.

  Bigger than what? Buddy couldn’t even begin to guess. And starting from where he was right now—a position of total and complete ignorance—it might take weeks to figure out.

  And in the meantime, he knew one thing. He was between a rock and a hard place. It didn’t
feel good, and he didn’t see any way out. But there was something that had to be said, right here and now, before Bodeen got any other ideas.

  “Yeah, we’ve got a deal, Pyle. I’ll overlook what goes on out here—for the moment, anyway. But that doesn’t mean you get a free pass in town. Long as you do right, stay out of sight, and don’t give me any heartburn, we’re pals. Give me or my deputy a bad time, and the deal’s off.” He gave the other man what he hoped was a steely glance. “You got that?”

  Bodeen didn’t look pleased, but he nodded. “Yeah. I got that. Anything else?”

  “I need to know where you were last night.”

  “Last night?” Bodeen seemed surprised. “I was over at Pete’s Pool Parlor, playing pool. Most of the night, anyway.” He flicked the ash from his cigarette. “How come you’re askin’?”

  “Who else was there?”

  “Well, Pete, o’course. That little tattooed guy who works at the prison farm. Bragg, his name is. The warden’s fair-haired boy.” Bodeen blew out a stream of smoke. “A couple of officers from the CCC camp. Archie Mann—he’s a regular. A few others, in and out. Pete could tell you, I reckon. There was a poker game in the back.”

  The warden’s fair-haired boy? “How long were you there?”

  Bodeen hesitated. “Went in around eight, I guess. Stayed until just before eleven.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I went over to the Exchange. My girl, Lila Jean, gets off work at eleven. I walked her home and we sat on her front porch swing.”

  Buddy refrained from inquiring what they were doing there. “How long?”

  Bodeen gave him a crooked grin. “Until Miz Crisp—Lila Jean’s mama—came out and ran me off. Half-past midnight, I guess, maybe a little later. Shame, too. Lila Jean and me was just gettin’ warmed up.” More cautious now, he slid a glance at Buddy. “How come you’re askin’?” he said again, more emphatically.