THE BOOZY BANSHEE OF BRANNOCK-A-BEND
Chapter 10: Shine, Shine, and More Shine!
by
Peter "Lou" D'Alessio
Copyright © 2012
“Sad... very sad.” The ghost shook his head, swallowed deeply from the eternal cup in his hand and let out one hell of yell. Calhoun never even lifted his head. Pegleg and O’Neil stood at the edge of the cave watching Beau bob up and down at the end of his anchor rope. Beau was getting up an hour before daybreak and staying out until an hour after dark, taking only short breaks to carry wood into the still for the ghost. He had given up parking his boat only feet away from the fallen tree and moved out into deeper water. He’d also given up on lures, live bait equated only with feeding the devil fish of Lake Idy, and he even drove to the shores of Galway Bay to troll the coast in search of a commercial fisherman who would sell him an old net. The latest attempt at retribution involved an overseas call to Bass Pro for a spear gun, wet suit, and diving gear. When Beau couldn’t prove to a clerk named Lynch that he wasn’t an IRA agent, they told him Bass Pro wouldn’t ship the spear gun by “overnight” delivery—or any other way—to Ireland, and even questioned just how legal it was. Beau cancelled the order, and in a rage drove to a sports shop in Galway Bay for a long bow and hunting arrows... hundreds of them.
“H’ain’t ben that many arrers in dis here part of Europe since the Battle of Hastings! Can’t cha do nuttin’ ta helps the boyo, O’Neil?”
“Pegleg, ya’all should’ve seen’em on the football field. Positively relentless.” O’Neil took another hit of Idy’s still’s second run of shine. It was good, real good. Pegleg proofed it out the old fashioned way, mixing it with a little black powder from his old pistol and lighting it. It burned hot, hot, hot. O’Neil figured it for 130 to 150 proof—a lot for whiskey, but not for moonshine. And the taste? In the dark, you’d mistake it for the best whiskey on the market at any price—until you fell over dead, passed out, or went blind. A party in every bottle, no doubt about it. And they still hadn’t added the better components. Old Man Murphy’s corn was ripening nicely, O’Neil had revitalized Idy’s garden with some wheat and barley, and it was moving on ready. The Widder Browne had been by a couple of times to do a “meet and greet,” but missed them both times as they were across the lake working on the still. She kept the “down home” food coming, too, sending “redneck care packages” with Fitzy, which kept their spirits up.
Now Pegleg was ready to be “mass pro-gressin” his moonshine in the big still, even though the plan didn’t call for it until after they’d won the contest and O’Malley’s body had been thrown overboard. O’Neil suspected that firing up the big still was the reason the captain was so concerned about his partner—there was real heavy lifting to do. At O’Neil’s insistence, Pegleg had boiled out the big tank several times and cleaned the thump tank and catch barrel. Even with Beau’s help, the captain had bitched for three days about it.
Word had gotten out from the impromptu block party the night Beau beat down the Dougals that these two Yanks weren’t here for the fish! These were Master Moonshiners, and for the first time in more than a century it looked like an O’Malley might not walk away with the festival’s prize! Christ! The town might even get a true count on the money being brought in. While the winner got a clean fifty percent, anyone who worked on the brewing, bottling, or shipping of the winning whiskey was entitled to a share. In Brannock-A-Bend, families ate off of moonshine year-round!
And that was another reason nobody liked the O’Malleys!
The problem at hand for Pegleg and O’Neil was not the moonshine, nor the making of the moonshine; it was how to get a two hundred eighty pound, all-pro lineman to come back to the project at hand! (Without getting your head smacked, that is.) Beau was a guy you wanted and needed in the trenches—and sure as hell, there was trouble coming! Father Sean offered Novenas for Beau's safe return, Fitz-Ryan would have sued the damned fish if it’d help, Sister Maria was in favor of “jus’ lettin’ d’man be!” and Pegleg was further convinced that the modern man was even “more outa his fookin’ mind” than even he suspected.
Oh, it had been a long week for Beau. There had been desperate times, and lonely too. Waiting, waiting, always waiting. There had been one or two small victories, but they hadn’t amounted to much. He had thrown them back. Mainly, there had been the agony of defeat—or more correctly, the agony of da fish. It was hard to accept, but that filthy fish had beaten him. Kicked his ass. Knocked his block off. The only thing Beau hadn’t tried was a stick of TNT. If it worked on catfish, there was no reason to think it wouldn’t work on pike! And he would have too! But, despite Pegleg’s seconding of the motion, O’Neil stopped him, reminding him of how he’d blown his bass boat out of the water and put himself in a cast for three months the last time he tried to facilitate that kind of angling. That was it! Game over.
Beau had two pieces of live bait left. He was going to release them but... well, there was a lot of work ahead of him. One last day of general fishing before rolling his sleeves up wouldn’t hurt anybody! He’d pack a lunch and spend the day in angler’s solitude.
He should have let the bait go, sat on the porch with a beer, and played solitaire.
It wasn’t the idea of the Dougals running around with sticks of dynamite in their pockets that worried the mayor. It was the possibility that one of these imbeciles might set themselves on fire with the matches. He hadn’t counted on the fact that both—BOTH—of his Neanderthals could be beaten, especially at the same time. It required him to put the Dougals in a position where they’d actually have to think. That could be more dangerous than the Dougals themselves!
It wasn’t that O’Malley needed the prize money at the moment, but there were things on the horizon that would require cash. No doubt about it, though, he was rich! Through the centuries, the O’Malley’s had cheated, embezzled, or stolen almost everything of value in the district. But if the rabble of Brannock-A-Bend ever found out that the tally of monies gotten through moonshine sales had a big fifty percent and a little fifty percent for the last few years, they might not like it. It was all done with mathematical accounting tricks he had learned from the American Democrats while fishing on their fact-finding tours in Europe. While it worked on paper, however, it might just cause a riot if the townsfolk actually took a good hard look at the real numbers. That had happened to a relative of his in the mid-1500s. In the authorized family tree and town records, it was formally listed that in 1558 Cheswick O’Malley had been elected to a high position in the church. The truth of the matter was that an angry mob had hung him from the church’s bell tower for being a cattle thief.
And then there was the matter of the Widow Browne. He was way behind schedule with her! Her dear departed grocery store owner husband, in point of fact, owned almost the entire town—and didn’t know it. Actually, his family had owned it for almost six hundred years, and the O’Malleys, always the lawyers, had sat on the Last Will and Testament of an ancient ancestor who died young. His children, their mother having mysteriously left town and disappeared forever, never knew just how well-off they were supposed to be and grew nicely into the common population. The O’Malley’s had been waiting for centuries to marry into the Browne clan and reveal the Will. They had used this deception before, and it had met with success. It didn’t make you popular, but it did make you rich.
The O’Malleys were blessed with a very thick skin. Some people are “natural-born heroes.” Nobody ever talks about the folk who are “natural-born villains.” The O’Malleys were natural-born villains and damned proud of it, perfectionists of the dark skills. In the second half of the twentieth century, the family had begun to practice villainy by manipulating all the damned laws that developed out of humanitarian concerns. Breaking an arm, cracking a few ribs, stretching on a rack, or closing the door on an Iron Maiden just wasn’t good enough anymore. After all that, you needed to prove you were within your legal rights to screw that thumb or put that hot poker in that eye. The present assault to the O’Malley dynasty might come down to that... especially if things were depending on the Dougal thought patterns.
It was so much easier in his great-great-great-great-grandfather’s day.
Ms. Kelly, his secretary (whose family was heavily in debt to the O’Malley’s from a shady land deal) brought in several books from the town hall’s cellar. She knew better than to ask why the mayor wanted to see all the town statutes from the past four centuries right up until last week’s civic committee session. She put the books on top of his desk, then crawled underneath it to perform one of her other daily duties. The mayor unzipped his fly, leaned forward, opened the oldest book of statutes, and began to read. He stopped and sat up straight.
“Ms. Kelly, as soon as yer done dere, please be so kind as to call Kylie’s Florist and have him send the Widder Browne a dozen... a dozen... wad’we send her last time?”
“Mmmunm.”
“Ah, yeh, mooms. Send a dozen roses dis time.”
Being the villain is a dirty job—but somebody has to do it!
Beauregard Calhoun and Ennis Smothers had nearly beaten each other to death on more than one occasion, but it had all been good-natured fun in a strangely perverted way. Given that they were southern rednecks and that type of behavior was expected of them, they were two of the big boys and the laws of God and man dictated that they would fight to a stand-still, and that victories, as defeats, were alternated. They’d probably spit at each other if they crossed on the street, but in truth, there was a mutual respect. Both men knew the difficulties of professional sports. Beau knew this and accepted it, and in the end would treat old Ennis as an equal and a fellow sportsman.
But that fucking, low-down, lousy rotten pike was no sportsman! There was going to be no graciousness in Beau’s defeat on the part of the fish.
Pegleg had told him that in the old days there were salmon and even a few lake trout in the pond, but he’d have to fish the deep water channel to get at them this time of year. Beau had an old saltwater pole only about five feet long that was rigged with thirty-pound test line. It was meant for deep sea fishing. He hooked it all up with the biggest non-shark-sized hook McNally had, back-rigged something akin to a sucker or a chub, stuck a four-ounce weight on the top of the leader line, then tossed the critter over the side of the boat. He didn’t drop the anchor, but decided to let a mild Irish breeze gently push the bass boat around the lake, avoiding the rocks near shore with a mild blast of the electric motor.
The bait never reached bottom.
Beau was gently feeding line out when he felt something take his hook. The line didn’t shoot out like a trout or salmon, but walked out in loping chunks... like a pike. The damned fish had followed him again! The line was heading back to shore, right into the branches of the sunken tree! The line would stop moving for a minute or two and then go again. Beau kept fighting the urge to set the hook; he knew all that would do is rip the bait out of the pike’s teeth.
Beau was in a cold panic. All his commitment to “letting it go” went the way of the dinosaur. The muscles in his arms and hands were beginning to ache as he fought to keep himself from setting the hook. They were about twenty-five yards from the tree when everything stopped dead. He had already been tied into whatever was actually on his line for about ten minutes, but now he was on a forty-minute vigil. The wind had gone dead so the boat had stopped drifting, and the line wasn’t moving any closer to the sunken tree. It was a blinking contest now, and Beau knew that whoever even so much as fluttered an eyelid would lose!
What Beau had forgotten, in his frenzied excitement, is that fish don’t have eyelids!
It was flowing like a river. Pegleg marveled at how well Idy’s still, with Beau’s modifications, could crank out shine, as well as the superiority of the moonshine leaking out of it due to O’Neil’s chemistry. Every time Pegleg emptied his cup, he’d let out a genuine rebel yell (as opposed to his “banshee” yell) and quickly reach under the piece of sink piping connected to the collection vat under the charcoal filter and refill his cup before the unseen hand could do it for him. He didn’t think it was possible, but he couldn’t remember being more drunk over the last five centuries as he was now—and when you’re trapped in a dark cave for five hundred years with infinite whiskey, there ain’t a whole lot else you can do but get drunk. He was suddenly grateful that he was dead already. The way he was guzzling this stuff down, if he wasn’t already dead, this stuff would kill him!
Through the haze, Pegleg stared at the industrial-sized still looking all new and shinny and untested. That much shine of like quality to Idy’s still, and O’Malley would be destroyed. So would half of Ireland, and they’d love him for it! He was chompin’ at the bit to light up the big fire and start pumping out shine, shine, and more shine, rivers of shine, seas of shine! So far, being a ghost hadn’t been much of a thrill. This was a real thrill! He was back to doing something he loved and it was giving him the chance to get even with the low-lives that had blown him up.
The Goddamned fish was pulling Beau around the lake faster than the electric motor could, and showing no signs of tiring. The boat had been bounced off rocks, dragged through the weeds, and spun in circles by the pike. It was very clear to Beau: it was do or die time, him or the pike!
Going into the second hour of the battle, the boat got bounced off the rocks below the moonshining cave, and the noise brought Pegleg out on the run. Beau looked up to see the ghost running along the shoreline flapping his arms like a cheerleader, screaming, “Get’im, Yank!” Actually, Beau thought Pegleg looked more like a big chicken being chased, but really had no time to debate the issue. The pike was in control and Beau was hanging on. The fish pulled an intense U-turn and the boat got caught between two big rocks. The boat pole’s drag was set hard on, but the fish from hell wouldn’t even slow down. Beau tried standing and kicking the boat off the rocks, but every time he did, the fish would tug hard on the line and nearly drag him overboard. Then he’d sink to his knees on the new Bass Pro chain-webbed net, regain his balance. and try horsing the fish in.
Pegleg’s yells were starting to be as annoying as bat shit on a cave’s floor!
Around the start of the third hour, O’Neil rowed past him. He waved, never said a word (which was wise), and met up with Pegleg on the shore. The ghost gave O’Neil a pull on the jug of the latest batch, they toasted Beau’s health, then howled loudly in harmony as the shine hit bottom. Beau, of course, responded with a hearty, “Mudda fukka, wan h’I’m finished wid dis fish, I kill ya boat!” Which, of course, caused O’Neil and Pegleg to double over in laughter.
And then it got quiet. The line went limp. The fish was coming at the boat—not fast, but slowly, almost drifting. Ever so gently the big guy took up the slack, as if to direct the pike right into the boat, but not to start another fight he knew he couldn’t win. The sudden silence gave Beau his first real chance to evaluate his immediate state of affairs. He peered over the side of the boat. He was wedged between the rocks pretty good, and those rocks went straight down, twenty, maybe thirty feet. It was an unexpected chasm. He was closer to shore, and thought the battleground much shallower.
He must have been mesmerized by staring into those depths because he never noticed the fish had stopped moving. There was a sudden and unexpected violent tug which woke him up as the fish drove straight up and came straight down as if off a diving board and it gave Calhoun his first complete look at his adversary. It was immense! At least four feet long! It hit the water with a wicked splash and Beau panicked. Instead of softening the drag to let the line pull out, he accidentally locked it up so the line couldn’t go out at all.
He held on tight, trying to figure out what was wrong. The boat pole bent. The boat popped out from the rocks he was sandwiched between. The pole bent more. The line went straight under the boat. It doubled in half, Beau refusing to release line or let go, and the fish refusing to reverse direction. Everything froze as if suspended in time, then... BANG!
Beau sat there stunned. At first he thought the line had snapped, then he realized the pole had snapped in two. His eyes followed the line into the water. He could see the first foot and a half of his pole floating in the water. As he watched, his bait, which was quite dead and chewed, popped to surface (sans the hook). Two gator-like eyes rose up behind the dead piece of bait. They stared at each other, Beau and the fish. The pike quietly took the dead bait in his teeth, turned and slowly drifted back towards the sunken tree.
Beau watched it quietly about halfway back. Then he stood up, yelled, “Hey! Asshole! Ya forgot dis!” and chucked the remaining pole and reel like a spear.
He missed, of course.
It was two full days later before he could talk to O’Neil or the drunken spirit without either of them doubling up with laughter. They had watched the whole fiasco.
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