Twig Benders:

THE BOOTLEGGER Sometimes people do evil and you just have to learn to live around them. “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” Romans 12:21, NIV an would shoot a dog just because he don’t like him ain’t got no feeling for people neither.” That’s what Aint Lena said after Banty shot our dog. The dog wasn’t exactly “our” dog, but a stray that started snoozing in a shed behind the old farmhouse we rented. He wasn’t much of a dog, just a funny looking spotted thing that may have been part beagle. He hunted chickens instead of rabbits and didn’t wait for a full moon to howl. But Dog was our pet. Tommy and I fed him enough table scraps to hide his ribs a little, and when we could get close enough to scratch his head, he would wag his tail and lick our feet, and we liked him. One day Mr. Locum, the retired farmer/storekeeper who owned the shed and the house, and lived in the two best rooms, remarked to Banty that the dog was a lot of trouble and bothered his chickens. So Banty went home and got his .22 and did him some target practice on Dog. Mr. Locum said he cussed him out for it, and he made him clean up the mess and bury the body before we got home from school. But Banty was just coming down the long driveway when the school bus stopped, and my brother and I knew what he’d done with that little rifle. We jumped off the school bus and screamed, “Murderer!” at him, but he just snorted and marched on down the road with the gun over his shoulder like a real soldier who’d done something to be proud of. “I hope you slip in the gravel and that dadburn thing blows your dumb head off!” I screamed at him, forgetting that dadburn was only spoken by people who didn’t know any better. But he didn’t pay any attention to the two little kids crying at him, just went on home to celebrate what a good shot he was. It was the kind of celebrating he always did that ruined him, years before. Banty didn’t farm, didn’t fish, and didn’t work at the shirt factory or carburetor plant either. Occasionally he would hire out to help somebody pick cotton or hoe corn or build a barn, but mostly he never had a regular job that people would pay him for. He looked like he didn’t have any money at all. He wore his ragged old jeans until his mama nagged him into buying some new ones, and he was too cheap to buy his own cigarettes if there was somebody around he could bum them off of. But when he bought a car, he gave the man as many wrinkled $100 bills as it took to drive the car home. Banty didn’t like to drive the same car too long and usually had two at the same time, one to drive and one in a shop somewhere getting fixed up the way he liked it. He bought and sold a lot of cars; he was always banging them up in the middle of the night and maybe getting stitches in his forehead or wearing a cast on one part of his body or another for a while. Then the high school boys would buy his old wrecks really cheap and either fix them or take out the hot motors for their better looking jalopies. At least a dozen boys would roar out of the school driveway every day in a car—or part of one—that had been fixed up for Banty. What Banty bought all those cars for was a mystery to nobody but the local law. Banty was a bootlegger. A ravine with several cold springs ran along the back of Banty’s daddy’s farm, and it got raided a few times, but Banty was never out of business for long. He just moved things around and welded what could be patched and started again, sometimes over at a friend’s place in the county right across the river, which was even harder to get to. One time my brother and I found one of his old stills. It has been hacked to pieces, but we could tell where it had been dug in and there were a lot of rotting branches and some poles where he had put up some camouflage. We knew what to look for after that, but were never able to find another one. And we were afraid to poke around those woods too much. A man who would shoot a little dog just because he doesn’t like him doesn’t have much feeling for people either. Bootlegging was kind of a puzzle to me. I knew Banty made whiskey—white lightnin’—and that it was the reason the sheriff’s deputies carried axes in their car. Once in a while, there’d be a high-speed chase in the middle of the night and you could hear sirens and tires spinning out on gravel. But mostly those took place over in Coffman County, where the trees were thicker and the roads into the foothills were easier to get lost on. We just heard tales about that, but Banty was supposed to know Coffman County the way a man would learn the lines on his own face just by shaving every morning.