Free Good Vibrations by Tom Cunliffe Page A

wouldn’t lose her bottle and drop the bike, while feeling glad that I’d done the decent thing making sure I was the first to follow that car.

6

BANJOS,
MOONSHINERS
AND THE FEDS
    The rain started in earnest as we arrived at Haggerd’s store. With its rickety wooden sidings, sloping roof and porch propped up with rustic posts, it nestled in the West Virginian hollow like the sleeve image of a country music album. Haggerd was out back checking his oil tank, wearing blue dungarees that appeared to have grown on him. His powerful face looked out from a shock of white hair making him appear nearer fifty-five than his actual seventy years as he moved with purpose to greet us. Roz and Shannon splashed in through the door, but Earl and I hung out under the porch with him drinking bottled beer. Haggerd unloaded his grief concerning bureaucracy which, he said with Earl’s full concurrence, would bring the country down.
    â€˜Fifteen different permits I needed to erect this here oil tank,’ he grumbled, ‘and eight thousand dollars in administrative fees. Not so long ago you could have built the thing for that money and had change.’
    â€˜Surely they have to have some sort of regulations so people don’t spill the stuff all over the place,’ I observed.
    â€˜Ain’t nuthin’ to the guys who make the rules if we do spill it,’ grunted Earl. ‘They’re hundreds of miles away in the city. But these tanks today are so tight that there ain’t no more spillage. All that paper serves no purpose… ’cept to breed more of the same useless crap.’
    He lobbed his empty bottle expertly into a waste can 15 feet away and opened the fly screen into the store. Inside, the place was out of time. Shelves lined the walls, forming the alleyways typical of a small supermarket anywhere in the Western world, but these were of well-worn wood, not some easy-clean composite, and many of the products on sale were 1950s and beyond. Hardware like Grandpa used peeped out from behind buckets of nails. The basics of handed-down cooking skills were prominent, including yeast for home bread-baking. Jostling the packets for space were cans of Stockholm tar, a vital unction for traditional boats and now almost unobtainable in coastal communities anywhere. Horses use it too, though I’ve never understood why. Baseball hats and other crucial items of gentlemen’s outfitting drooped from the ceiling, while huge bags of potato chips were piled up near to the counter so that whoever was running the show could grab a snack.
    The overall effect was one of a darkness where anything on earth could be found by an informed searcher. Save for the small front windows and the door, the only light came from an unshaded bulb dangling over a sagging, round table where the weeks’ newspapers were open to be read by the customers. Coffee was available. A tattered sign announced that alcohol consumption on the premises was illegal, but the regulation group of ‘good old boys’ sat minding their own business, enjoying an ‘Old Milwaukee’ in the late-day humidity. The rain pelted down on the still-hot tin roof.
    Haggerd picked a cardboard six-pack out of the tall cold-locker and tossed it on to the table. We pulled up shaky kitchen chairs, flipped the tops off our bottles and settled on to our seats. Shannon came and sat on Earl’s lap. Roz was still over at the counter with Dolly, Haggerd’s wife, who was confiding that Shannon, the lady we had marked down as in her early twenties, was actually thirty-nine and the mother of four. Her first grandchild was almost due. Perhaps her eternal youth was something to do with being part Indian.
    I looked at Shannon sideways in the dimness. Her colouring was pure Anglo-Saxon settler, but the native blood showed in the outline of her face. I remembered the memorial to the victims of the Indian massacre back in the shade of Sharon churchyard