Loder: Bootlegger page 6
The Bootlegger
a short story
by
Michael Wescott Loder
Hemlock Lodge Publisher
Kutztown, Pennsylvania
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2012, Michael Wescott Loder
This eStory is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eStory may not be sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please download an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this story and did not download it, or it was not downloaded for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and download your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Print books by the same author:
The Golden Horn (PublishAmerica, 2007)
The Nikon Camera in America, 1946-1953 (McFarlane Pubs, 2008) Non-fiction.
ebooks by the same author (available through Smashwords)
Beetle: A Biography of a Virtual Girl.Smashwords Edition.
Beetle II: Restoration and Retribution. Smashwords Edition.
The Bootlegger by Michael Wescott Loder
Thirty years ago …
Ben still remembered the first time he followed the tracks of his father’s truck out to the Ganado Wash. He had waited inside until all the truck’s dust had settled—and waited some more. Then he closed the comic book he had pretended to be reading and eased out the east-facing door of his family’s house. The sun was August hot, its light slipping in and out among the puffy cumulus clouds building to the west above Roundtop, the local promontory that dominated the view to the west . Ben moved when the sun hid, waited when the sun shone again. Knowing, even then, that this journey would not take long, he moved slowly, stepping only on gravel and hardpan.
His father claimed to be a silversmith, but Ben had never seen him touch the anvil with its light patina of rust, nor light the propane torch to melt or shape the few pieces of silver wire and plate that gathered dust in drawers behind the grey workbench. Until that summer before his ninth birthday, Ben had never thought much about what it was that his father did that had paid for the new bedroom on the back of their twenty-foot-square, asphalt-shingled home. He had never questioned why it was that his mother had a new propane stove and refrigerator. He had never wondered why their TV was color with a 26 inch screen and a satellite dish to support it—when most families had only little black-and-white units that barely picked up the sole Gallop station. He had never tried to put these things together until two days ago.
Money came from somewhere, and not from family. When his parents’ new double bed had come off of the Sears truck that Thursday, Ben knew he had to follow his father’s pickup that next Saturday.
Like pencil drawings of striking lightning, the tires had left sharp, zigging tread marks running parallel to each other—out of the driveway and along the north side road for half a mile. There they cut left through a truck-wide opening in the thicket of russian olive that hid the wash from view. Ben pressed his lips together, pushing his fear back below. He passed through the opening and dropped down onto the dry stream bed.
The wash was its own world, full of tall cottonwood trees with their twisted trunks and spinning leaves. Wide spills of pink and tan gravel—dotted with broken glass and rusted cans—spread around trees’ roots and fanned out in patterns like sand dumped out and flattened by an unseen god. It was all dry now, as it almost always was. In the winter, traces of dark water would trickle down its middle; once or twice each summer, sudden“male” rains to the east poured water on the bare ground like the rain in movies—thick and heavy. Then the wash would become a rushing river for a day or two before returning to what it was now. Ben could smell the mushy, blue-grey leaves of the olive shrubs. He wrinkled his nose and listened to insects buzzing and heard the distant tink-tink-tink of the neck bell that Hosteen Taylor’s guide goat always wore. He traced the tire tracks as they wove upstream through the cottonwood groves and he followed. When he heard a jay protest, he stopped and gathered his small body behind the largest cottonwood he could see.
The truck stood on level ground, half lost in the shade of overhanging olives. Its turquoise blue paint had faded and the fenders showed dings. But the tires were brand new, and Ben knew the truck could hit a hundred-miles-per-hour easily. Today the cargo in its open bed was hidden under a blue, roped-down tarp. Ben’s father was nowhere in sight.
Ben waited. The jay fell silent. The grasshoppers and locusts increased their buzzing chatter. Then a man stepped out onto the wash less than ten feet from the truck. Ben sucked in his breath but did not move. The man was Navajo—Diné—like his father, like himself—thin, with delicate hands and a narrow, soft face. He wore a black cowboy hat, snap-fastened cowboy shirt, levi’s and black riding boots. Ben did not know him. The stranger stared at the truck, then moved away to stand in the sunlight. Ben’s father appeared from the other side, a shadow leaving shadows.
Ben could hear the soft “Ya’at’ééh” greetings as their right hands touched. Softer words followed, all in Navajo. Then Ben’s father was opening the driver’s door and getting out a brown paper bag. He lowered the tailgate, loosened a corner of the tarp, reached under and removed two bottles which he put in the bag and handed to the stranger. Even at a hundred feet away, Ben could hear the clink-clink of glass touching glass. The stranger handed Ben’s father several bills. Again, they shook hands in the soft Navajo way. The stranger, clutching the bag against his chest, turned and vanished into the olives, leaving the way he had come. Ben felt a sickness in his belly spread upward and outward. For he had just discovered that knowing could destroy harmony and happiness as easily as not knowing, and he was miserable.
The shadows had grown longer and Ben’s nose was twitching from the sweat rolling off its tip before the next two men came, one tall and thin like the first, the other short and round. Despite the heat, both wore jackets inside which bottles disappeared. Ben knew the short one. He was Albert Donald and he sat on the Chapter Council. He was of Ben’s mother’s clan, a relative by name, if not in fact. As he left the truck, he took out his bottle, unscrewed the lid and took two long, deep swallows before he, too, disappeared back toward the homes and the trading post.
His father no longer was waiting in the shadows. The customers were coming too quickly. Instead, he just stood by the back of his chidí, smoking and nodding to the men and women as they wove their way toward the battered truck.
Later, heading home, Ben wished he could plead to someone or something for the peace he had felt before the Sears truck had arrived. Instead, he found himself counting the bottles along the roadside, their flattened sides hugging the earth, their black labels marked with triple X’s. Every one seemed to be pointing back toward where he had been, mute witnesses testifying to the truth of what he now knew: about his own father, and about where the money came from that put the food on his family’s table.
#30#
The author: Michael Wescott Loder, born in Pennsylvania, has hiked, climbed and caved his way across the United States, been an Air Force officer, photographer, National Parks naturalist--and an academic librarian for more than 30 years. "Wes" has worked in eight different states, but is now retired and lives next to the family farm in a passive-solar, off-grid house he designed himself. There he gardens, writes, plays the Highland Bagpipe and watches his grandchildren grow.
Wes wrote his first children’s story when he was seventeen, and over the last quarter century has completed 20 other stories. He published his first YA novel, The Golden Horn, in 2007 and, non-fiction, The Nikon Camera in America, 1946-1953 in 2008. Beetle: A Biography of a Virtual Girl was his first venture into ebooks.
From 1978 until 1980, Wes and his family lived in Ganado, Arizona, a small town in the heart of the Navajo Indian Reservation, today the Navajo Nation. There is served as a librarian for the College of Ganado, a small two-year college that had grown out of the old Ganado Mission School. The college is long since gone, but the town remains with its hospital, trading posts, Hubbell National Historic Site and K through 12 public schools.
Several years ago, Wes received a review copy of a YA novel set on the Navajo Reservation. The Cultural elements were dubious and the description of Navajo weaving methods and traditions so absurd that he wondered what Navajo world the author had associated with. “I could write something more accurate than that,” Wes argued. This story was the result. Someday, more may follow.
Wes’ blog: http://wesloder.blogspot.com/