Moonshine

M. Guillermo

Mom was late again. The second day in a row. So I decided to walk home this time, and told Ms. Janice Mom said I could even though she hadn’t. What she really said was the opposite: “Don’t walk on that highway under any circumstances, you hear?” But if I’d waited any longer, they’d have sent me to the principal’s office, and it’s awful in there. It smells like something old and dying, and Principal Hutchins won’t stop. She goes on and on about Jesus and the Bible, and how we have to be good little children or else get punished. I wasn’t going to sit through that again, no way. I’d rather chance it.

Mom told me she’d be working late anyway. She said it that morning, so I had plenty of time to work up the nerve. I don’t like lying to people. Not cause the Bible says so or anything, I’m just bad at it. My palms get real sweaty, and I can’t look them in the eyes or they see right through me. When I lied to Ms. Janice, I was staring at my shoes. I knew that she knew; but still, she let me go. I guess she was tired of waiting too.

Or maybe she thought I lived close in the suburbs like everyone else. Only a few of us don’t. Mom says we would if Dad had stayed, but she can’t afford it on her own. That’s the only time she talks about him: if it has to do with money, she’ll bring him up. I don’t even know what he looks like, only that he left after I was born and still sends Mom a check every month. It comes with a letter too that she throws straight into the trash. She doesn’t bother to read it. But I know it’s from him if the envelope says “John Lewis” — that last name is the same as mine.

One time I brought the mail in and saw his envelope addressed to me. I should’ve shoved it into my pocket right away, but I stood there staring like an idiot until Mom snatched it from me. “It’s nothing,” she said, as if I didn’t know already about the checks and letters. After that she was more careful: she sent our mail to her office instead of our home.

But that was my letter, wasn’t it? How many more did she take? Didn’t she say herself that stealing was a sin? When I was younger, Mom told me if I ever stole I’d go straight to Hell. I took that literally—I thought you’d burn on the spot the second you did it. I believed her up until I met Billy. He was the only other kid in my grade that didn’t live in the suburbs either. One day I went to the store with him, and he walked out with a pen and baseball cap hidden under his shirt. I waited for it to happen — for him to catch fire and burn — but it never did. “Aren’t you scared of going to Hell?” I asked him. But he just laughed and shoved the cap into my arms and kept walking.

At first, I wanted nothing to do with it. I kept the cap under my bed and watched Billy all week to see if anything changed. But he was using the pen during class without consequence, as if it was his all along. At church I remembered the priest talk about the soul as something inside of us we can’t see or know about. So I thought Billy must be burning in his soul. Or maybe he really needed the pen and God let him steal it. The priest said that too: sometimes lesser evils lead to greater goods. But trying to figure it out made my head hurt. How is it even possible to know what God wants from us? And why would he even care if we stole one lousy pencil or one stupid hat? Is that really all it took to go to Hell? Later Billy told me why he doesn’t worry about it. He said he’s got it all figured out: you just have to pray after. As long as you apologize, you’ll still get into Heaven. That made more sense to me than anything the priest ever said; so I asked God for forgiveness, and started wearing the hat too.

Mom must’ve known this all along, because the day she took my letter, I heard her doing it. I figured she tore it up like the others, and at night, went through the trash looking for the scraps. I thought maybe I could read it still. But she came out with the belt and started hitting without warning. She went until my skin turned red. After, I lay on my bedroom floor and heard her murmur through the walls: she was apologizing to God for what she’d done.

So that’s what I decided: to get home and pray and be done with it. Besides, the highway isn’t as bad as Mom says it is. There’s a big strip of grass to the right of the guardrail perfectly safe to walk on. Other people do it too. Most days there’s somebody, and when we pass, Mom points out the window and calls them crazy. I’m sure others saw me and thought the same. But what did I care? With my hat pulled low, no one could recognize me. And I was looking away from the cars anyway, to my right, where the woods followed steadily.  There was nothing to see in there, only the darkness of trees that rose up like an impenetrable wall.

Of course I’d heard the stories — how things lived deep in those woods and came out only at night. There’s one the kids at school like to tell the most, about the couple whose car broke down right where the road bends. There were no cellphones back then, so they had to wait for another car to pass. But after an hour, none came, and the man decided to go for help. He left the girl in the passenger seat and was gone a long time. Eventually she fell asleep. She woke briefly to the sound of rain falling and saw that he wasn’t back yet. She fell asleep again. The next time she woke the sun was rising, and she heard the rain still, but saw that the sky was clear. Then she saw red streaks dried on the window thick and textured off the glass. She got out the car and looked up at her boyfriend hanging from the light pole. His stomach was torn open. He dripped and dripped and dripped.

Most of the kids believed, but I knew that wasn’t the real story. Mom told me what actually happened there. Years ago, when she was my age, a couple highschoolers hit that bend hard and smashed through the guardrail. The whole car crushed up like a can, but the trees barely splintered. It was like the woods had swallowed them. Mom said their bodies were so messed up all the funerals were closed casket. The town was furious. They lit candles at church, and prayed for them, and put signs by the bend asking people to slow down. Everyone drove carefully for a while. But eventually time passed, and they forgot about the accident. They started driving normally again.

Yet when I reached the bend, I couldn’t believe Mom’s story either. Both seemed unreal in the daytime, so far away, like the parables they told us over and over at Sunday school. The kinds that show how to be and how to live as if invented for that purpose. But the light pole was just a light pole, the trees just trees. Nothing scary about them at all.

There was something else that frightened me — along the curve, the grass patch disappeared, and the woods pushed over the guardrail and forced their branches onto the highway. As I neared, I realized I’d have to walk on the road.

I climbed over quickly before panic set in. I pressed against the guardrail and felt hot metal burn through my clothes. A car went by and nearly knocked the cap off my head. It deafened my ears. But I found it better not to hear anything: I looked down at my feet and followed the white line, trying not to see either. I inched along. Until another passed even closer and screeched to a halt — I looked up at Mom’s car stopped directly in front of me. It seemed for a while the whole world was still. Then her door opened, and all Hell broke loose. Mom was screaming, but cars in the opposite direction drowned her out. She yanked me off the guardrail and the cap went flying. I could hear her then, but they weren’t words, just shouts. She ignored honking cars and threw me in the passenger seat. She walked around slow. But when she got in she was suddenly silent, as if deciding what to do with me. She drove, and in the rearview mirror, I watched my cap fade and disappear behind the bend. Then there was nothing. Cars following around the curve, that’s all.

Mom was quiet the whole ride too. But when she pulled into the driveway she hit me with her bare hand. She’d never done that before.

“What did I tell you huh? What do I always say?”

I didn’t answer. The car engine blared, but her voice rose over it: “And you know not to lie either. You made me look like an idiot, like I don’t know how to take care of you. Are you listening?” She hit me again. This time my sight blackened; I thought I would faint and grabbed onto the car seat.

“You’re a Lewis just like your father.”

“At least I’m not like you!”

There was stunned silence. I didn’t dare look at her. I heard the door open and started to sob — I knew she was getting the belt. She went into the house, and I stared after like seeing into a black hole. I felt something rise in me on the verge of explosion. Any second it would burst.

Then I saw Dad’s letter on the driver seat sitting atop the pile of mail. I took it without thinking. I got out the car and ran.

When I finally stopped the sun had already set. Back across the darkness the houses were glowing like stars; I couldn’t tell which was mine among them. I turned and walked on. A car passed and lit the road for a second, but revealed nothing, just asphalt black as the night. The driver looked at me as if I were an illusion. Then I was alone.

At the fork in the road I chose left. A dim light flickered orange in the distance and hung over a lonely house I knew belonged to the Crawleys. Billy had told me about it. He said his dad buys liquor there after school sometimes. He said the Crawleys make it in the woods and cut tunnels through the trees to hide their bottles. One day while waiting in the car, Billy found one next to the house: he saw a hole in the trees big enough to squeeze through. He wanted to go back with me and drink some.

The hole was there exactly as he’d described. I put the letter in my pocket, dropped to my knees and crawled.

Inside it was even darker. I couldn’t see a thing. But I felt branches cutting my skin and knew the tunnel was getting smaller. I could’ve been crawling for minutes or hours or days, it all felt the same. Until my hands came to the end: a thick solid brush that wouldn’t give no matter how hard I pushed. I tried for a while. Then I just sat there. I curled into a ball and rocked back and forth. A car passed far away, and I wondered if it was Mom out looking for me. I reached up to break a branch and saw a sliver of moonlight shine through the trees. I closed my eyes and could still see it. Eventually I fell asleep.

The next morning the sun broke through and dazed me. My head ached, and like a newborn, I took the world in stupidly. Then I saw my arms cut up and remembered — I took the letter out and opened it and started to read. But there must’ve been a mistake: it was filled with Godless things. It only contained obscenities. Words the adults told us never to say. Yet they were written in Dad’s handwriting like a storm, written then sent, written then sent, again and again and again.

He was saying them to Mom.

He was saying them to me.

I only read half before returning it to the envelope. I looked up and saw the tunnel entrance shrouded in a bright veil; I stared as if something would be revealed, but nothing changed. The envelope had fallen, and after a while, I noticed and picked it back up. In the blurred aftermath of the light I couldn’t read Dad’s words anymore. So I crumpled it to a ball and brought my hands down and dug. It was just as Billy said: two clear jugs bundled neatly in a burlap sack. “Moonshine,” he told me. He beamed at the word. “Hundreds of secret tunnels. Hundreds of bottles.”

But I’d tasted alcohol before. It burned going down like fire. I didn’t see why anyone’d go through all that trouble. I opened the sack and put the envelope in and buried it. I thought of the beating back home Mom had waiting for me. I could already feel the belt and shuddered. Yet still I crawled.