Chapter Twenty-one - Dealing and Wheeling
The silence chipped away, one little piece at a time. The thumping shoes of heavy feet overhead, the ticking of lighter ones. Muffled voices and then there came a sigh from Luke, as if he wasn't looking forward to getting let out of here. Or he was chewing over all the things that he had a habit of worrying about. Then louder voices, including Jesse informing J.D. Hogg that there was no reason he needed to come down even one step, cowing the commissioner away from the basement of his own offices like only the Duke patriarch could. After that came was a click and a clack, then the last of the silence broke away and acquiesced to Daisy's squeal of joy as she made it to the bottom of the steps before any of the older, heavier men behind her.
"Bo," she hollered and ran to him first, even if it meant she had to go right past Luke without even acknowledging his presence. Half a hug through cold steel, and maybe he could understand it. His male cousin was slower about getting to the front of his cell, where he could be touched. Then there was the part where his whole family had halfway expected Bo to die in a fiery crash into a pile of cars right about now, and there was also the fact that he'd left home. Just about run away with the carnival like a little boy dreaming of joining the circus, and maybe she thought she'd lost him forever. Whereas Luke was stalwart and steady and no one figured on him going anywhere.
Or maybe it was more than that. Squint-eyed look passing from his female cousin to the male as she let go of Bo to take a step closer to that first cell. Luke nodded in answer, stuck an arm through the bars as a sacrificial body part and let her smack it. Hard enough to echo even over the rest of the noise down here, and Luke muttered a small ow in response. Which might have been just to make her feel good about how strong she was or how he'd learned not to make her angry or whatever, except it wasn't. Not when Luke winced to match the grunt of pain.
"Don't you never do that again," she admonished, leaving it up to any listeners to figure out what she meant, but Luke seemed to know anyway. Nodded at her and swore he had no plans to do anything at all. Could have been talking about getting himself arrested or sending her off to another city on a wild goose chase or using all the hot water in the shower. Bo didn't know and he never would find out, either, now that the basement was all crowded with men.
"All right," Jesse roared, gruff and scary as he could make himself. For all that the man halfway resembled Santa Claus, he could growl like a bear when he was of a mind to. "Get them out of there."
Jingling keys and Enos stepped forward from where he'd been behind Andy Roach. Two lawmen and one riled uncle didn't exactly seem like a welcoming committee to him, but Bo was happy enough when the deputy stuck the keys into the lock on his cell door and turned them. Waited for the door to swing open and then the second wave of Daisy's hugs arrived like a freight train crashing into his chest.
"Wait," came from Luke over there where Enos was getting ready to turn him loose, too. "What's this deal you made?" with a wide finger pointing back and forth between Jesse and Andy Roach, accusing them of all manner of secrecy and scheming behind his back.
"We'll talk about that later, Luke," Jesse rebuked, then held out a hand to beckon Bo out of Daisy's arms and into the old man's own. "Enos, you just let him out for now," got said over Bo's shoulder as they hugged.
"No," Luke sassed back. Of course he did, he always had. Never did know when to leave well enough alone and accept a gracious offer when it came along. "Enos, don't."
Nervous, lip-licking deputy, eyes twice the size they ought to have been, fingers twitching in the air as he tried to decide what to do with those keys in his hand and Bo didn't blame him one bit. In between Luke and Jesse was no place to be, not when they were bucking against each other for dominance. In fact, Bo stepped out of Jesse's hug and off to the side, because he didn't want to get caught up in this little showdown, either.
"Not until I know what kind of deal got made for my freedom."
"Luke," Jesse tried, but it was pointless. Whatever privacy the old man might have wanted to preserve had to be given up to the mulish ways of his older nephew. Besides, when it came down to it, Bo figured the only ones in this space who didn't already know what clever little pact had been made were him and Luke. A sigh; the oldster must have figured out that Luke had all the leverage here. Any Duke boy that wanted to stay in a jail cell pretty much had the permission of the law to do it. "Andy there agreed to lesser charges. You still got to go before the judge, but with the charges down from transporting illegal intoxicants to simple possession, you ought to get probation with no prison time."
"And," Luke asked, meaty hand up in the air to stay Enos, who had started to jingle the keys and move toward the cell door again. "What does Andy get in return?"
Leave it to Luke to count the teeth of horses that hadn't had any inclination toward biting him until he made it so easy.
"I get," the revenuer answered, fingers stroking across the few strands of hair stretched across the top of his head like they could hide the shine of bare skin underneath them if only they'd been arranged right. (Bo was tall enough to tell the man that there just wasn't enough hair left up there to bother with and he might just as well shave it all down to the nub.) "Peace of mind. And maybe I'll even be able to assign an agent to this region and have them stay for more than a couple of months at a time."
"Because?" Luke prompted. Head tipped slightly sideways, mildly curious and that was all. No need to worry about old Luke, he could stay in his cell until the sky fell or old men who thought they could hold back grew tired and got around to admitting things.
"Luke," Jesse snapped against little-boy, foot-stomping pig-headedness of the fool in the cell. "We ain't going to run 'shine no more is what he gets. We sign, he signs, and the charges get small enough that you ain't got to do no prison time. Now get out here."
Only idiots and men with thick hides would dare to disobey that tone of voice, but Luke thought about it. It was there in how his eyebrows came down, his lips mashed into a frown.
"Nope, no deal," he declared. "Enos, you just put them keys right back on your belt."
"You just listen to me, boy." It would be hard to whip Luke through the bars. There'd have to be some feat of strength and cooperation from Luke, or maybe it would take getting Enos to let the old man in the cell too, so there'd be no obstacles.
"Uncle Jesse." Luke didn't whine, would swear he had never whined a day in his life. But he did complain plenty with just the tone of his voice, and he was doing some mighty complaining right now. "You can't take that deal. If I got to do time, I'll do time. Moonshining has been the family heritage since—I don't even know when. We ain't got no other craft."
"Well, don't you think I know all that?" their Uncle charged. Walked right up as close as he could get to Luke with the bars in between. "But that don't matter to me none if you ain't home with us. You fool, you did all this so Bo wouldn't up and leave us. Do you really reckon it's okay for you to get your dang-fool self sent off to prison?" Silence, standoff. Two sets of blue eyes clashing, duking it out for dominance and eventually Luke's gave in. Dropped down to look at his feet or the concrete below them.
"No, sir," went to show how serious Luke was about it. His cousin almost never called Jesse sir anymore. "I just ain't got no idea how we're going to make a living, is all."
"Well, farming," Jesse said with a shrug that pointed out how obvious the choice was. "We been doing half that job all our lives. Now we just got to do the other half." Which would mean harvesting and selling raw crops, and growing more than just corn. Wouldn't be easy, but he reckoned they could handle it if they all put their minds to it. "Now Enos, you get him out of there, or I'll tan your hide. Go on," Jesse encouraged, stepping back to make room for the deputy to get to the lock. Still, old Enos was too nervous to move, eyes flicking back and forth between Jesse and Luke. Ugly place to be, unfortunate choice to have to make, but Luke helped him. Waved a defeated hand through the air—do what he says—and dropped his head down again. Looked tired, looked old, maybe. Older anyway, not the same obstinate jackass that did chores at double time just to prove how big and tough he was.
Clank and rattle, the cage opened. Enos hid behind the door like the wild animal he was letting out might bite, but it didn't turn out that way. "Come here, boy," was Jesse's command that brooked no sassing and might have meant a whipping. Except it didn't, today it meant a hug and knowing his cousin Bo figured the whipping would have been more welcome, but Luke accepted what was offered, mumbled apologies that Uncle Jesse hushed before they could be explained.
"Ijit," interrupted what might have been a quiet family moment, Jesse welcoming home his two prodigal children. Gave them the excuse to separate to stand back and listen to the staircase echo under the weight of yet more people coming down here to squeeze into this tight space. Ducking out of the way, because Rosco P. Coltrane meant it, he was serious this time.
Shadows first, then bodies. Carl from the Carnival in the lead, limping the same as he always had, just a little more pronounced and the dirt on the knees of his pants spoke of some sort of struggle that he'd come out on the losing end of.
"Carl?" he blurted.
"Just move," Rosco was saying as he emerged from behind. "Just you move and don't you go threatening me neither." Glowering look back over his shoulder from Carl, but that was about all he could manage, what with how his hands were cuffed behind him. "You get in there now," Rosco menaced, steering Diane's right-hand man toward the open door of the cell Luke had just come out of. Enos swung it that much wider with a squeak of surprise at how quickly it was getting used again.
"What are you doing here?" Bo asked the man who was about to get locked up, his voice going high with surprise. Sounded like a kid in his own ears and he hated it. Hated the notion of sounding young and naïve in front of this man who had tried to warn him that life with Diane Benson wasn't as rosy as it looked at first blush.
"None of your business, kid," got grumbled back at him, then echoed by Rosco.
"It was," came the nasally voice from the bottom of the steps, Investigator Zimbra finally making his way into the crowded confines of the basement. The walls were sweating with the vapor of nine people clumped in close quarters. "Your cousin Daisy's information that led me back to the carnival." Zimbra's once tidy suit had matching dirt spots to Carl's jeans; looked like the two of them might have come to some sort of physical violence before the arrest could happen. "She told me that when she went to look at Bob Dexter's wrecked car from last week, she found the fuel line cut in a straight slice."
"That's right," Daisy agreed, her face glowing. If Zimbra had been a little younger and had more hair, she might have begun flirting with him, right then and there. As it was, her smile alone made him flush a healthy shade of pink. "It looked like it had been cut on purpose."
"It had been," Zimbra agreed, as Rosco locked Carl into the cell with a solid clang. Remembered to take the handcuffs off all by himself this time, unlike this morning when Bo had just about had to take them off of himself. Then again, he'd just about put them on himself, so it all evened out in the end. "And it was your information, young man, that made me not suspect Miss Benson. Seemed like she wouldn't know what a fuel line was to cut it. So I asked her who might have done it and—" She'd given up Carl, just like that. Hard to say whether that made anything better or worse. Couldn't even make up his mind whether what Diane had done constituted treason or a good deed or was just wisdom. Cutting Carl loose like the bad seed he was, and if she ever wanted a successful carnival, he didn't suppose she ought to keep harboring a bitter man who had just about gotten other men killed by cutting their fuel lines just because they got too close to his old girlfriend or his once-prized driving skills.
"Come on," Jesse was saying before he got around to making sense of the swirling thoughts in his brain. "Let's give these folks some privacy." Right, as if Carl, the law of Hazzard and Mr. Zimbra really needed to be alone together. "Besides," his uncle added, using one hand to grip around his upper arm while the other shoved at Daisy (and Luke was left to come all on his own, but he always did better if you didn't tug on him anyway), "you boys need to get to work."
"Work?" he asked as the four of them shuffled around to figure out getting up the stairs single file. "What work?"
"Well," Jesse answered, a smirk that Bo couldn't see because the oldster was behind him now, but it was perfectly clear in the tone of his voice. "I reckon someone needs to get on plowing that south forty. We got to get new crops planted back there before the fall rains come."
They were, more or less, back where they started. Not in the fields, not today. Yesterday they'd done some plowing sown in a small crop of winter wheat, but there was only so much you could put in this late in the year. It wouldn't be easy, and they'd be eating plenty of beans and chicken, wearing last year's jeans and cutting back on nights out carousing, but they were just going to have to make the last of their liquor money stretch out until next harvesting season. A full year with no income.
Unless another loophole could be found or offered to them. Andy Roach seemed pretty happy with the deal he'd already made, and Jesse was as good as his word, so it seemed unlikely that there'd be any more moonshining in the Duke line. It wasn't what he'd hoped to accomplish, not by a long shot. But you couldn't go looking back with regrets, you had to go looking forward with hope. At least that was what Jesse told him.
"It wasn't supposed to work out this way," he'd sworn to the man who'd raised him as they sat, once again, over coffee cups in the dark of night. Despite threats that he and Bo would have to get straight to plowing the south forty when they got home from their little adventure in the jail, it hadn't worked that way. They'd been sent off to bed as soon as they'd finished the barn chores. Sure, it had only been late afternoon and they could have done some good in the hours before dark, but Jesse had been adamant, and Daisy had been on his side of it. All four Dukes had been up all night and needed some sleep right then and there. And they'd gotten it, at least for a few hours. But while the two youngest of the family slept on, he and Jesse had risen during the darkest hours, and due to some tacit agreement, had met in the kitchen over heaven in the form of coffee.
"I ain't sure how else you figured getting yourself caught moonshining would go, Luke," came the rebuke. Still not half as angry with him as he wanted it to be. Not that a whipping would get them their craft back or make it any better that they'd have no income for the foreseeable future, but it might just have made it a little easier to live with himself.
The way it was meant to go ended with him in prison. For five years at most, he figured, what with it being his first offense and all. With good behavior he might have been out in half the time, but that wasn't important. He would have done ten years if that was what it took to keep Bo alive and away from the carnival. "You was supposed to leave me to the Feds," he explained. "And Bo wasn't supposed to get himself arrested, neither."
A tsk tidily explained what foolish thinking that had been. "Bo goes everywhere you go, except when he don't," was perfectly logical, from the old man's point of view.
"Yeah, well, he wasn't supposed to want to be anywhere near me. He was just supposed to go looking for you out of loyalty to the family."
"Luke," had sounded just like the beginning of a series of words that he wasn't going to want to hear. "He ain't never wanted to be too far from you. He just wanted you to accept him no matter what."
"I do that," he'd defended himself. After all, he'd put up with temper tantrums and foolish stunts all his life. "I just didn't like the way Diane was using him, was all."
"You just got lucky that she really was using him. Admit it, boy, you didn't know for sure that she was." It was one of those rhetorical statements, he felt. Something that didn't require an answer because Jesse had already made up his mind on the subject and didn't see the reason for anyone to go contradicting him with facts now. "Luke, one of these days he's going to fall in love for real, and you're going to have to decide whether you want him in your life or out of it. You keep on finding flaws with every girl he wants to get close to, and eventually he's going to choose one of them over you. You got to make room in your heart for both him and whoever he falls for and means it, or you're going to lose him for real someday." Silence dragging on into eternity after that one. "And I wasn't never going to leave you in jail or let you get sent to prison, neither. You did a good thing, maybe the best thing you could do, making sure he didn't make that jump. I'd give up moonshining a hundred times just to have you both home, safe and alive. And," he'd added with a wink, "not fighting no more."
More silence after that, broken only by sips of long-gone-cold coffee out of the chipped lips of old mugs.
"You're a fool, boy, but I love you," had been Jesse's final words on the matter.
Which hadn't eased the burden on his mind one bit. Daisy had helped him a little bit with that, burning his food and starching articles of his clothing that scratched up against sensitive skin. She'd been direct, too, hollering at him about how he never should have done any such dang-fool thing and more than that, he shouldn't have kept her in the dark about it. "I would have helped you," she'd stormed, but he wasn't quite sure how she saw herself assisting him in his quest to get busted for running moonshine. Still, he accepted her angry little lectures and her warped sense of punishment, because it made sense to him. Someone ought to be trying to teach him a lesson after what he'd gone and done.
But somehow or other, the days were mostly progressing as they always had. Whatever ceremony Jesse had enacted as he'd dismantled the still in the woods had been kept private, and their court date wasn't for a couple of weeks yet. The fields could be left to themselves for now, so he and Bo were back out here at the edge of the property under watercolor gray skies, finishing that fence that they'd been working on a week ago. Whistling at first, but it gave way to huffing and puffing when the work got heavy, then catching their breath as Bo drew a gloved hand across his forehead. The thick leather didn't do much more than smear the sweat around, which gave them an excuse to stand still a little longer while Luke mopped his own brow with his newly-shucked shirt before offering it to Bo to do the same. Daisy would complain about the sweat and dirt ground into the cloth there, and then she'd starch another pair of his shorts. At least, he figured, some things would stay the same in their suddenly changing world.
Somewhere after he'd pointed to the rails that still needed to be pounded into place and mumbled something about getting to work, there'd come a rumble from the north. Might have been welcome were it thunder, giving them an excuse to take a break and bringing some cool rain to the soupy-hot air. But it didn't roll and crack, it just got steadily louder until it came around the bend in the form of a white RV.
They paused, both Dukes, to watch. Seemed a good enough excuse to prop his left elbow on Bo's shoulder, wondering all over again if he'd ever get used to having to reach up to do it. Their eyes traced the movement of the vehicle lumbering over dirt like a slow-moving elephant, kicking up dust behind. It was a book, one he might wish they'd never checked out, much less read, closing. He wasn't sorry to see that little orange star that adorned the back door getting smaller in the distance. Was about to nudge the two of them back to work, when Bo turned from where he'd been watching and buried his head in Luke's shoulder.
He never had been any good at handling tears, but he knew what it was like to lose someone, and he knew that the days without Bo in them had been an endless kind of miserable. He knew he hadn't helped then, hadn't given his cousin any good reason to want to be around him. He reckoned there were some things that he'd never been good at, but that was no excuse for not trying.
And it wasn't difficult, really, Bo had already done most of the work for him. Didn't take much to put his free arm around his cousin, to hug him like Lavinia would have. To rub at the back of that sweaty neck until Bo got himself calmed down like his mother might have, had she lived.
Knew enough to keep his mouth shut about how much better off his cousin was now that Diane was driving the rig right out of town, figured out how to laugh when Bo announced that if he ever wanted to finish the dang fence, he'd better turn him loose. Decided right then and there to let it go, to never again mention the fact that there'd been warm wetness on his bare shoulder, and set instead to digging and singing an old Eagles song until Bo joined in, harmonizing about life in the fast lane.