Читать книгу Selectively Lawless - Asa Dunnington - Страница 11

Chapter 3

Emmett had enjoyed his adventures up and down the West Coast—especially all the money he’d made!—but the truth was that he’d gotten a little homesick, and he was ready to get back to Oklahoma to see his family. He was still just shy of his eighteenth birthday, after all. There was as much boy left in him as there was man, probably, in spite of the way he carried himself in the world.

But the eighteen-month trip had given him all the confidence in the world, and Emmett figured he could use that confidence back on familiar ground just as easily as he could out West. In a way, he felt like he’d traveled to the end of the world, and he was now convinced, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, that after seeing all that he could see, there really was no place like home.

He passed through the same towns and dusty rail junctions that he’d seen on the way out to California, only this time, it felt different. Emmett was moving at his own pace, not depending on some stranger who’d offered him a ride or some bus schedule that didn’t agree with him.

Now he was in charge, with no one at all to answer to, and he loved every minute of it. It felt right to be in control of his own destiny. When a man realizes he is in charge of the rest of his life, he wants the rest of his life to start as soon as possible.

Emmett couldn’t wait to get back home and make his fortune.

It seemed that trip made him the man he was, more determined than ever to be the master of his own fate. He’d left school at the age of nine, worked in the fields alongside his father and brothers to put food on the table, and never shied away from hard work, but all that he’d experienced after leaving home had told him that a future without such an arduous path was not only a possibility—for him, it was a necessity.

The man whose father had taught him from the age of ten how to build fences with cedar poles and barbed wire for any rancher who’d hire them was not the sort of man who would be penned in by any artificial boundary, man made or otherwise.

When he passed back through Benson, he briefly considered stopping in at the hotel where he’d played poker to see if there was a game going on, but somehow he didn’t think it would be the same if he pulled up in a brand-new convertible. And that’s when he realized it wasn’t just the money he loved; it was winning the money. He now understood fully what Decimer had taught him.

There’s no such thing as gambling; there’s only winning.

Once he’d passed through town, Emmett pulled off the side of the road to eat a sandwich he’d packed for the trip. He leaned back against the car and ate as a small group of cows gathered around a water hole a half mile away on the other side of a barbed-wire fence much like the fences he and his father and brothers had built on occasion for ranchers all across north Texas.

It was a well-built fence, with tightly strung wire and deep, solid posts. For all he knew, the land on the other side of that fence was actually part of Big John Mackey’s ranch. Maybe built by the ranch hands he’d played poker with over a year ago, men who worked for another man and might spend their entire lives beholden to the property of another.

Emmett didn’t want that for himself. If he’d learned anything on his Wild West adventure, it was that he needed to be his own boss.

He looked out over the flat expanse of pasture that stretched as far as he could see. He wanted to own land like that someday, to make a place where he could raise a family and where his relatives could gather. But those ranchers had it backward. They spent all week busting their backs working the land so they could relax and play poker once their work was done.

Emmett wanted to play poker all week so he could relax with his cattle after the gambling was done.

Years later, the land he was admiring in the distance would be purchased by another restless young man who’d been advised to go west: a fellow by the name of Jack Speiden, who turned the Jay Six Cattle Ranch into something of a gathering point for future politicians. A young John Kennedy was sent to the ranch with his older brother, Joe, by their father when they were just nineteen and twenty-one; later on, Barry Goldwater spent time there, too.

None of that was known to Emmett at the time, of course—not then and probably not ever. But like those other men of drive and ambition, he recognized the necessity of the land beneath his feet and felt its pull on his spirit.

His own father had been tied to the land, but it was land owned by others. Land that changed from month to month depending on where work could be found. Emmett wanted more than that. He needed more than that. There was something primal about owning the land beneath your feet, almost spiritual, and Emmett was bound to have it. He would never be tethered to land he didn’t own or to a job he didn’t want.

Emmett drove right up to the cotton field where his family was working, his bright-red car gleaming in the afternoon sun. Chester was the first one to reach him, but as he ran toward his brother, time seemed to almost slow down, as he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.

Emmett had stopped off in Dallas and bought himself an expensive three-piece suit, some awfully shiny shoes, and a felt fedora that made him look like how Chester imagined the president himself would look. Emmett laughed when he saw his brother’s pace slow and his jaw drop. He was leaning against his polished red Roadster, which he’d taken care to wash once he was a few miles away for maximum effect.

Chester was walking toward him now, staring at his little brother’s smiling face.

Ches stopped several feet away from Emmett, staring at the man his brother had become seemingly overnight. The rest of the family was still a ways off, so the moment between the brothers was private, almost intimate.

Ches raised his eyebrows quizzically, silently asking his younger brother if he’d made good on the rest of his promise.

Emmett smiled broadly and took his hands out of his pockets. Each of his fists was stuffed with cash. Emmett nodded to his brother and replaced the money in his pockets, and the two of them fell into each other’s arms, laughing hysterically. By the time the rest of the family got to them, they were rolling on the ground in the dirt next to the shiny red Roadster like a couple of children after the last school bell.

Emmett insisted they all stop working for the day so that he could buy them dinner in town. His parents’ initial resistance was erased by the sight of the eighteen thousand dollars in cash he showed them, much as he’d shown Chester, by giving them a quick glimpse at the contents of the pockets of his fancy new suit.

Emmett and his family obviously had a lot of catching up to do.

The next day, Emmett went to see his friend Walter, although nobody had called him by his Christian name since he’d learned to walk. He was known as Boots from his very first steps until the day he died, because he learned to walk in, you guessed it, his father’s boots. As a toddler, he rushed to put them on the moment his father took them off.

Boots had been Emmett’s best friend in grammar school, and since Emmett had money to spend and a hankering to turn it into more, and since his old buddy Boots was always up for a little mischief, he figured Boots would make a good partner in whatever business the two of them could concoct to produce the largest return on their investment.

Being that this was the 1920s, the business that turned out to promise the richest reward for the least amount of work was moonshine.

Emmett remembered the words of Big John Mackey: “Son, this is America. You can buy anything you want if you have the money.”

Which also meant that if you had what the people wanted, they would be willing to part with that money.

Now, in spite of their mutual entrepreneurial spirit and Emmett’s large stake, the two of them realized they needed a little more expertise than they currently possessed to get started, so they approached an older friend, J. B., who they knew would be able to get certain materials they’d need to build the still.

J. B. had access to the copper tubing they’d need, as well as the know-how to actually build the still. Boots was in charge of the raw materials, like grain and sugar, and Emmett, being the man with the money, was responsible for bribing the right law-and-order types, who any successful bootlegger knew would be needed to look the other way from time to time.

Emmett found out who the local revenue agent was and introduced himself.

“What can I do for you, young man?”

“I was just wondering if you preferred coffee or tea in the morning,” Emmett said.

The man looked at him strangely. “Why do you ask me that?”

“I figure a man who drinks coffee in the morning spends more time in the outhouse at night,” Emmett said.

The man laughed. “I guess that might be so.”

“And a man who spends time in the latrine at night might miss a thing or two while he’s in there, from time to time.”

The man’s eyes narrowed. “Like what?”

“Like that sawbuck down by your feet, sir,” Emmett said, pointing at the floor by the desk, where he’d surreptitiously dropped a ten-dollar bill.

The revenue agent looked down at the bill and back up to Emmett.

“If I was a betting man,” Emmett continued, “I’d bet that fella down there’s got a big family, all ready to come visit when the time is right.”

“And what time would that be?”

“At night, after the coffee’s been drunk.”

The man stood up from his desk with a stern look on his face. After a moment, he walked over to his office door and closed it, then turned to face Emmett. “Fifty dollars a month for every hundred gallons, plus twenty-five a week whether you cook or not.”

Emmett stood up, and they shook hands.

“And two jugs a month,” the revenue agent added, “to splash in my coffee.”

Emmett nodded. This is going to be easier than I thought.

They built the still in the woods at the base of the nearby Wichita Mountains in the game preserve area, home to bison and prairie dogs and plenty of freshwater creeks feeding Bass Lake, from which they figured they could draw as much cool, clear water as they needed to make large amounts of moonshine.

Emmett also had the brilliant idea to buy votes from the local Indians, who didn’t always trust local law enforcement and so were more than willing to go to the polls and help elect the “sympathetic” sheriff of Emmett’s choosing for a dollar apiece. Some of them voted several times, as a matter of fact.

Emmett Long’s moonshine empire was in business, and business was good.

Then one day, Boots and Emmett decided to dynamite one of the feeder creeks to kill the fish and prepare the creek for use exclusively for their still.

They’d just set off the blast when a game warden suddenly appeared behind them out of a thick stand of trees across the water. “Where’s your still?” he shouted, and Emmett instinctively drew the forty-five from his hip, spun, and fired.

The warden, his hand on his holstered sidearm, dropped where he was standing. Emmett had always been an excellent shot.

It was eerily quiet for a very long moment as Emmett and Boots just stared at the man’s body, realizing the implications of Emmett’s instinctual act. The man had obviously known why they were dynamiting the creek and likely could have sent them both to prison, but it was still shocking to them both.

After a moment, without a word between them, they both trudged into the woods where the still was located. They had recently leveled the ground where the still sat, and so there were shovels at the ready for what they knew they had to do.

Still silent, Emmett and his childhood friend dug the grave of the game warden, who, on closer inspection, looked no older than they were. Neither man spoke as they dug, their shirts wet with sweat by the time they’d finished the gruesome work.

Afterward, they rode home in silence, neither one speaking of what had transpired in the woods that day until Emmett confessed the deed many years later to his nephew, Asa, in the sorrowful tones of an old man looking back over a long and sometimes tumultuous life.

“At that moment, I figured it was that or prison,” Emmett said. “I always regretted killin’ him, and I regret it to this day. But I have to take responsibility for what I done.”

Asa and Emmett sat in silence for a time, probably like the silence in which Emmett and Boots had buried the evidence of their crime.