on me for another eighteen years just because Katie can’t keep up with who she’s sleeping with.”
Which sounded an awful lot as if he was under a court order for ol’ Wendy Nicole.
“Not behind on your payments, are you?” I needled, wondering if that had anything to do with why he was hanging around over here instead of heading back to Charlotte.
“Sally knows I’m doing the best I can. I send her money ever chance I get. Hell, I even send Katie something when I have a little extra. Poor girl never did figure out who’s Tiffany’s daddy.”
Allen might not’ve fathered her child, but I was willing to bet even money that he’d left that Katie with a tiny black star on her left shoulder. And Sally, too. I knew Keith’s mother had one and God knows how many women before or since. I was just young enough and dumb enough to be flattered when Allen hauled me into a tattoo shop and had the guy do me.
When we walked down the street together, my right thumb was always hooked in the back pocket of his jeans just as his left hand always rested on my left shoulder. At eighteen, that tattoo had seemed so romantic, as if the heat from his hand had magically burned through to my flesh and marked me as his woman forever.
Hard to believe I’d been so stupid. What on earth made me pick such a bad-news womanizer to go to hell with?
I was still getting used to the idea that my one fling at marriage hadn’t been a marriage at all and wasn’t quite sure whether this was something that would help me or hurt me if the whole shabby mess ever came out in public. One thing was certain though: the sooner Allen Stancil got out of n’ County, the sooner I’d breathe easy again.
I decided maybe I’d give Charlotte a buzz and see if his ex-wife Sally really was as understanding about those erratic support payments as he made out. If I was lucky, maybe there’d be a nice little warrant out for his sorry hide.
8
« ^ » …
Annoyed as I was with Allen, though, I had to admit he was handy with a wrench.
While he wrestled my faulty alternator out of the engine and installed the new one, I stood at the front of the shabby cinderblock garage and talked with Mr. Jap, who’d come over from the house when he saw that Allen’s truck was back.
I noticed that someone had painted over the purple cross on his front door and I guessed that the “Holyness Prayr Room” was out of business.
“Yeah,” said Mr. Jap with a sheepish smile on his grizzled face. “Religion never does take on me, it don’t. I just can’t seem to stay right with the Lord. And anyway, them Mexicans has gone back to Florida, they did.”
The rain began again as he came in, and the old man pulled a slat-backed chair over to the open doorway so be could sit and watch it fall. There was no wind. The heavy drops came straight down, hammered the tin roof, then sheeted off the edge of the front shed like a waterfall. Inside, cigarette smoke mingled with the smell of steel tools and machine oil and gasoline fumes—masculine smells I would always associate with my father and brothers as they endlessly tinkered on cars and tractors, tobacco harvesters and bean pickers, mowers and hayrakes.
Something’s always breaking down on a farm and men are always cussing and putting it back together with duct tape and baling wire and a squirt of WD-40.
But Mr. Jap wore a contented smile as he settled deeper into the chair and watched the rain come down. Every once in a while Allen would drop a wrench or mutter and Mr. Jap would look even happier.
“Just like the old days,” he said, “when Dallas or some of your brothers would come over and work on their cars. Sometimes I couldn’t find a wrench for my own work because they was using them all, they was. Good as he was at driving, Dallas didn’t have much feel for a engine. Your brother Frank, now—”
He cocked his head at me. “Where’d Kezzie tell me Frank is these days?”
“Southern California. San Diego.”
Frank’s my next to oldest brother. He spent twenty-six years in the Navy as a machinist and retired as a master chief petty officer. He and Mae come for a long visit every other year and they talk about how nice it’d be to live closer, but she’s from California and their kids have married and started families of their own out there, so we don’t really expect them to move back.
“That Frank, he could do anything with a motor that needed doing, he could. Many a time he’d just listen to it running and hear what was wrong before he ever lifted the hood.”
He cut me a sly look. “Good at making things, too, he was. When he weren’t but twelve, he made the prettiest little copper worm you ever saw. Not a kink nowhere.”
A worm, of course, is the coil that runs from the cap of a still through a barrel of cool water and acts as a condenser. Some of those homemade copper stills are works of folk art and the worm is the hardest part to shape because copper tubing is so soft it’ll crimp and collapse when you start to bend it. A lot of operators won’t bring their coil out to the still until they’re ready to start running a batch.
And even though destruction is their job, few ATF officers are so hardhearted that they can bust up a pretty copper cooker without a niggling regret when they smash the worm.
Or so they tell me.
They do the telling with sidelong glances if they know my daddy’s reputation and I’m never sure whether they really do feel that way or if they think they’re making Brownie points with me.
“Some of both, probably,” Dwight said when I once asked him about it. A deputy sheriff hears a lot of scuttlebutt. “They’re the hounds. Mr. Kezzie was a fox. A hound won’t have much fun if there’s no fox to chase, now will it?”
