The Suicide Motor Club by Christopher Buehlman

cracked up near Pigeon Lane, and he packed his load right, big drums of it, none of this mason jar shit—that’s how you tell an operator from a shit-nose, but you had to put it in the big cans, right? Yeah, Clem had him a bunch of blankets all between them cans to cushion ’em and he’d soaked them blankets in horse piss to mask the corn smell in case the revenuers come makin’ him pop his trunk, figurin’ nobody’d want to go putting their hands in horse piss. But I don’t guess the devil minded too much, because he got him a load of shine and a skinny white boy on Pigeon Lane that night. Wasn’t nobody even chasin’ Clem, he was just showin’ off for his brother, rumbling down the road bigger than hell, clippin’ them curves, but his wheel hooked and wouldn’t come back and he rolled, cracked them cans. That was goodshine, too, not hoss eyes, but damn near, hunnert and twenty proof or more, but something sparked and he went up like the Fourth of July, blowed all the leaves off them trees, made a black char mark they say won’t never grow back. I didn’t see it. I was in the jailhouse that night, first time I went. Mitch Lily came and got me out, did it because I was makin’ him too much money, and the sheriff was scared of Mitch. Hell, everyone was. Mitch said, “Hey, kid, did you hear about Clem?” “No,” I said, “is he dead?” and he said, “Yeah, how’d you know?” “Just the way you said it,” I said, “ain’t nobody alive when somebody says ‘did you hear about so-and-so,’” and he said, “Yeah, well he might have been in jail or beat up, or maybe he got the syph, and I’d’a said the same thing,” and I said, “Yeah, but it’s the way you said it. I just knew.” And he punched me in the nose real hard for bein’ smart, and that was a good lesson. You can be smart all you want, until you go makin’ somebody else feel dumb. Especially somebody stronger than you. And Mitch was stronger than everybody. Except Hitler. Hitler shot his ass out of the sky over Romania somewhere, Ploesti, that was the name of the place, bunch of oil fields, and here I still am, though Hitler fucked me up pretty good there too for a while. I loved Mitch. But I fucked his woman. And she didn’t tell him ’cause he’d’a killed us both. Women today, they’ll cheat on a fella and then tell him about it to show him she’s stronger, but it wasn’t like that in those days, not in the mountains. You cheat on a hard-ass operator like Mitch Lily, and you’d better sew that mouth up with iron wire or you’d get found ass-up in a well and everyone’d know why and nobody’d say boo. She was fine, too, freckles on her like cinnamon dust, red hair curly and thick and it smelled like clean laundry on the line and pine sap and river gravel all at once. Yeah, I miss those days some. But all I gotta do is get a whiff of blood, anybody’s blood, and all those days of sunlight on girls’ hair and sunlight on chicory flowers and the hot wind blowin’ in your face and shine money and sheriffs swearing a blue streak ’cause I cut their tires, all of it just blows away. If Mitch Lily was still alive and walked in some bar, I’d drink with him and talk aboutold times for as long as I could stand it, and then, when that hot brick of hunger started cookin’ my guts, I’d ask him what he’s drivin’ now, and he’d say, “Aw, nothing like in them days,” and I’d say, “Show me anyway, Mitch Lily,” and out we’d go to the parking lot and I’d bend him down between two cars and first he’d think I was playin’ a joke and I’d laugh, too, and then he’d try to stand up and say, “Quit horsin’,” and say, “I ain’t,” real cold and he’d smell death in my