Wisp of a Thing: A Novel of the Tufa (Tufa Novels) by Alex Bledsoe Page A

moonshiner around Needsville, in every sense. They say she weighed seven hundred pounds, but I figure there’s a thirty percent exaggeration factor in that. She lived up at the Gwinn house, but she was too big to get out the door, so nobody ever arrested her. The local cops told the feds, ‘She’s catchable, but not fetchable.’”
    “Wow. If she was around now, she’d have her own reality show. What happened to her?”
    “When she died, they just put sides and a top on her bed and knocked down a wall to get her out. Took a dozen men and two mules to drag her the ten yards down the hill to the family plot. People all switched to white lightning for a month in her honor.”
    “Switched from what?” Rob asked.
    “Moonshine.”
    “What’s the difference?”
    “White lightning’s brewed during the day, moonshine’s brewed at night.”
    Berklee dropped her empty beer into the garbage with a loud clank. “I hear Bliss—” She said the name with disdain. “—bailed you out.”
    Rob nodded. “Ran off the monster, then stitched me up. Probably saved my life. Definitely saved my ass.”
    Berklee folded her arms. “That’s Bliss, all right. The answer to every man’s prayers.”
    Doyle kissed her on the cheek. “I keep telling you, honey, green ain’t your color.”
    “Hmph.” Berklee shrugged off the kiss and opened the fridge for another beer.
    To Rob, Doyle said, “Bliss knows a lot of different things.”
    “No kidding. All she had to do to run off that psycho bitch was this.” He made an approximation of her hand gesture.
    Berklee, just closing the refrigerator, gasped and made a motion with her left hand in response. She caught herself about halfway through, and tried to turn the movement into an innocuous tapping on the counter. But Rob caught it.
    “What was that ?”
    “What?” Berklee asked innocently.
    “What you just did.” He imitated it as accurately as he could.
    Berklee glanced at Doyle, who shrugged.
    “Oh, it was nothing, you just startled me,” she said dismissively. “It’s stuff we used to do when we were kids.”
    “Like what?” Rob pressed.
    “Just … stuff,” she said desperately, unable to come up with anything else. “Excuse me, fellas, I have to pee.” She practically shoved Doyle aside to run down the hall.
    Rob looked at Doyle. “So are you going to tell me?”
    “Son, I don’t know and I don’t want to know. Women around here are crazy on a good day. They all get these superstitions from their mommas when they’re young, and they never quite shake ’em.”
    “And you’re not superstitious?”
    “Not a bit,” he deadpanned, then knocked on the wooden table.
    When Berklee returned from the bathroom, Rob did not bring up Bliss or the hand gestures again. They sat around the kitchen and drank beer until Berklee produced the casserole from the oven.
    “So you both lived here all your lives?” Rob asked as they ate.
    They nodded. Doyle said, “I reckon it’s true, you can take the boy out of the mountains, but not the other way around.”
    “And now he’s got his own business,” Berklee said.
    “Yeah, long as you quit running off my help.”
    Berklee blushed and smiled, and Doyle laughed. Rob said, “What am I missing here?”
    “I came by to bring Doyle his lunch one day, and he was up under a car working on it,” Berklee explained. “I was feeling kinda silly, so since his legs were sticking out, I bent down and unzipped his pants on my way into his office.”
    “Where she found me sitting at my desk,” Doyle added.
    “Seems he’d hired this Barnes boy without mentioning it to me,” Berklee said, “and now the poor kid came staggering in, bleeding from where he’d smacked his head when he jumped ’cause somebody opened his fly.”
    They shared more stories as the empty beer cans piled up. Later, Doyle lit a fire in a pit in the backyard, and they sat under the stars, surrounded by the sounds of the mountain night.
    At last, after a