Sewerville Read online

  SEWERVILLE

  A Southern Gangster Novel

  by

  Aaron Saylor

  Copyright ©2012 Aaron Saylor

  For

  Leslie

  Mom

  Dad

  Nan

  John

  Mike

  Sis

  Sue

  Pat

  Karen

  Brinton

  David

  Anthony

  Daylan

  Kevin

  Chris

  Daxon

  Cory

  Matt

  Greg

  Steven G

  and you.

  Table of Contents

  PART ONE: FAMILY BUSINESS

  PART TWO: THE GONERS

  PART THREE: DUMB BOY

  PART FOUR: THE ORCHID FESTIVAL

  PART FIVE: HELL TO PAY

  PART SIX: VENGEANCE

  Play it low, in the background:

  “The Funeral” – Band of Horses

  “Enough Rope” – Chris Knight

  “Go Down” – AC/DC

  “Shanty Town” – Matt King

  “Before the Blues” – Colin Linden

  “Springsteen” – Eric Church

  “Killed Myself When I was Young” – AA Bondy

  “Depersonal” – Joplin Rice

  “Easier” – Joe Purdy

  “Methamphetamine” – Son Volt

  “Lucky Now” – Ryan Adams

  “Endless Ways”– Ryan Bingham

  “Oxycontin Blues” – Steve Earle

  “Wicked Gil” – Band of Horses

  “Blossom” – Ryan Adams

  “The Graveyard Near the House” – The Airborne Toxic Event

  “The Unrepentant” – Steve Earle

  “The Mountain” – Matt King

  “The Mountain” – Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band

  “Send a Boat” – Chris Knight

  Once, he thought, I would have seen the stars. Years ago. But now it’s only the dust; no one has seen a star in years, at least not from Earth.

  –Philip K. Dick

  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

  PART ONE: FAMILY BUSINESS

  VULTURE

  Boone Sumner sat in his pickup truck, gnawing the same thumb nail that he always gnawed when his nerves went a–jitter. He didn’t want to go into the Slone house, that great sprawling structure which loomed before him. Through the tall front windows, he could see his wife, Karen, seated at the dining room table, all the way at the back of the house. She counted through loose stacks of cash and wrote numbers down in old–fashioned ledgers, while her father watched with that cold look which Boone knew too well.

  I hate you both, Boone thought. It wasn’t the first time that day the notion had occurred to him.

  He had to go in.

  He didn’t want to go in.

  He had to go in.

  Not yet, though.

  So, he waited. For what, he couldn’t say. He sat there, watching his wife and her father through the windows as they counted their money, and he waited.

  Walt Slone – Boone’s father–in–law – lived in this airy home of six thousand square feet, three times the size of any other house in Seward County. The structure loomed over the valley from astride a well–manicured hill, behind a phalanx of immaculate Bradford pear trees which grew to such splendor that passers–by could see only the very tops of the house’s first–floor windows.

  The house of Walt Slone existed as a great modern masterpiece of brick and glass, an imposing facade the earthy color of bread crust, split by windows that gleamed like sheets of diamond. At night, the illumination from the house’s tall windows could be seen from Main Street. Around Christmas time, the red and blue Christmas tree lights in the living room were visible from the county courthouse lawn in the center of town.

  Some outside observers – snotty academic types from Lexington, or Louisville, or Ohio, or Virginia – would say the enormous house was an insult to the community, a monster in keeping with the monstrous man who lived within. They’d say it was a vulgar display of wealth. They’d call it a crown of gold on the head of a rotting corpse, built high above a valley filled with boarded–up businesses and sad mobile homes that were rotting on their foundations. They would say that Walt Slone’s house loomed above Sewardville the way a vulture loomed above a dying rabbit, waiting to feed as the rabbit made its last desperate kick. But people who would say this came from other places. Tennessee, California, the New York Times. They didn’t come from Sewardville, didn’t understand places like this.

  Boone kicked open his truck door, got out, breathed in the chilly night air. It’s awful damn cold for October, he thought. If the weather kept up like this, in a couple of weeks his black leather jacket, white thermal underwear shirt, and blue jeans might not be enough. They were enough now, though.

  He rubbed his face, felt the bristly beard that was the color of wet sand. He thought about Halloween. He always thought about Halloween on nights like this, when the wind had just the right amount of razor bite and the air was thick with the smell of dying leaves.

  He still didn’t want to go in the house.

  He knew that he had to go in the house.

  Karen and Walt went about their business, and he watched them. They were far back, at the other end of the house, seated at the kitchen table with several green accounting ledgers stacked in front of them. Only one small orange bulb glowed soft over their heads, yet still Boone could see them in there, Walt Slone and Karen Sumner, the father and the daughter.

  He didn’t want to go in. He had to go in. He couldn’t go in. Sure, he’d driven up here to the house. Sure, he needed to talk to Karen, or at least at one point he thought he needed to talk to Karen. But maybe now he didn’t. Now, as he watched her in the kitchen, writing in the ledgers while her father counted through stacks of hundreds and fifties and twenties, Boone recalled only painful times and suddenly he didn’t feel such a strong need to see his wife, after all. Tearful arguments, slammed doors, wasted moments.

  He leaned against the truck, and he waited, and he waited, and he waited. Finally, he had procrastinated enough, and so he headed for the front door.

  “Goddammit,” he spat into the October night, pulling his coat collar up around his neck. As he walked, he looked skyward and saw that all the stars were covered by clouds.

  A breeze blew cold and crisp across the front porch of the sprawling brick house, much colder than any other October wind that Boone could remember. The weather forecast called only for rain that night, though, and he could remember snow in a few Octobers past so it couldn’t possibly be the coldest ever. But it was getting there.

  He cupped one hand against the door’s inlaid glass, peered into the house, and saw Karen and Walt still in the kitchen, still counting money, still writing in the green ledgers.

  Tap–tap–tap

  went Boone’s fingers on the window. Neither his wife nor father–in–law looked up. He tapped harder on the door

  rapp–ppap–pap

  but got no better response and so he banged

  BAM–BA–BAM–BAM

  and kept banging, until his wife looked up from the kitchen table and saw him.

  Half a minute later, Karen opened the door just enough to stick her head out.

  “You’re home early,” she said.

  “This ain’t home,” he answered.

  She just looked at him. Her caramel hair fluttered soft in the bitter wind. She didn’t hide the utter antipathy she felt about his visit.

  He asked, “Are you about finished?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “There’s a lot to be counted.”

  Boone nodded, slow
ly. “When do you think you’ll be finished?”

  Boone’s question bounced off his wife’s hollow expression like a raindrop off concrete. “Did you make all your rounds?” she answered. A question with a question, that was her style.

  “My rounds?”

  “Yeah, your rounds. You know. Did you take care of everything you were supposed to take care of?”

  He shrugged. “Sure I did. I always do, don’t I?”

  “Did you collect from the bootleggers?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “The bookies?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The cash register down at the Bears Den?”

  “Mmm–hmm.”

  “Did you meet that truck from Florida? We had a lot of merchandise on that truck.”

  “I got it. The merchandise is already delivered. Don’t worry about it.”

  She squinted, trying not to forget anything. They will respect what you inspect, that was what her Daddy always told her. After a long reflection, she said, “What about the quarter machines? Did you clean them all out?” Her voice dripped with acid and disgust.

  “The quarter machines?”

  “You gotta get those, too, Boone. You know that. How long have you been doing this?”

  Boone Sumner hated a lot of things in the world, but very few of them did he hate more than the goddamn quarter machines. Walt Slone had them tucked away in a back corner of every store in the county. To Boone, those machines represented the absolute zero of the human race, sucking lives away one silvery coin at a time. He’d seen plenty of people cash welfare checks and feed the money into dollar–changers, just to get some loose change to fritter away in those infernal machines. All day every day, the sorriest of the sorry–sack degenerates plugged three or four hundred dollars worth of quarters in there and if they really hit big they might get twenty bucks back. Not that they really cared about the math.

  He called them quarter machines, but other folks called them “bulldozers.” They consisted of a glass case that held two shelves, with one higher than the other and a flat metal bar on the top tier that swept back and forth like the grater on one of the state DOT’s big Komatsus. People dropped their quarters in the slot and tried to hit the ‘dozer bar just perfectly enough to push their quarter into the other quarters already on the level. Hopefully this created a chain reaction that would then push at least one quarter onto the bottom level, where it could push a few more coins into the catch basin for retrieval by the lucky winner.

  It was a stupid game. People put a lot of quarters into it, though. And Boone collected those quarters. Every day, he collected those quarters and took them back to Walt Slone. That little bit of money from the quarter machines meant about as much to Walt Slone as a thimble of liquor meant to a raging alcoholic, but still Boone collected from them every goddamn day.

  Before Karen could ask again, Boone said, “Yes, honey. I cleaned them all out.”

  “All of them?” Karen said. “Are you sure?” His wife had a way of asking questions that made Boone think she never believed him about anything.

  “Every last one. I’m sure,” he said. “I have thousands of quarters in my truck. Literally, thousands. If you want to look for yourself, go the fuck out there and have right at it. I swear to you, the fucking quarter machines are empty.”

  “Your attitude is not the best.”

  “Are you and Samantha coming home tonight?”

  His wife only shrugged, and looked at her feet. “We’re still workin’,” she said. “There’s a lot to do. A lot of money to count, a lot of numbers to check. That’s how we like it, right?”

  Boone looked at her, but did not answer the question.

  Karen said, “Just go on home and I’ll be there when we’re finished.”

  Boone looked at her.

  The space widened between them.

  “You know, the numbers, we have to get the numbers finished,” she continued, just to fill the space. “We always have to get the numbers. It’s probably going to be a while.”

  “That’s okay, I’ll just wait in the house,” he said. He stepped forward, towards the door. But his wife opened the door no further.

  “Are you sure you got all the quarter machines?” she asked.

  So this was this. Of course he got all of the quarter machines. How could he not get all the quarter machines? Of course he got all of the quarter machines. The goddamn quarter machines.

  “Go home, Boone,” she said quietly.

  “What about Samantha?”

  “She’s upstairs, asleep.”

  “Can I see her? Can I see my daughter, at least?”

  Karen’s eyes drooped. She didn’t really want to answer him.

  For three solid, sober minutes, a canyon of silence widened between them. The cold wind kicked across the front porch again, raking their faces like sandpaper.

  “I’d better go,” said Karen, at last. “Daddy wants to finish the numbers.” She glanced up at Boone again, but said nothing else, as she backed away from the door while closing it at the same time.

  Through the glass in the door, Boone watched his wife walk into darkness, her small frame silhouetted against the gentle orange light that glowed from the kitchen beyond. When she reached the table, she sat down, opened the top ledger, and began punching numbers in a calculator while her father waited for the figures with an unmoving expression.

  Boone watched a little while longer. He thought about knocking on the door again, even raised his hand to do it. But he didn’t. Instead, he just headed back to his truck, and got out of there.

  BUSINESS

  After Boone left, they sat at the kitchen table, Walt Slone and Karen Sumner, the father and the daughter. A twenty–inch flat screen television hung from beneath the cherrywood cabinets, silently broadcasting the news from WTVL, the NBC station in Lexington, which was fifty miles away but still about as local as television got for Sewardville.

  The ledgers were open in front of them, stacked six high on the table’s flat oak surface.

  Walt knew they were old–fashioned. Sure, they were archaic, dusty remnants of business, long usurped in the technological age, but he liked them precisely for that reason. He found comfort in the little notebooks with red binding and green cloth covers; they were solid, dependable, always there when he needed them. The ledgers did not require broadband connectivity, or flash drives, or terabyte hard drives so they could function – they required only sharp pencils and basic mathematical abilities. He provided certain pencils, but he trusted Karen with the mathematics.

  While his daughter wrote, Walt stayed quiet. He leaned back in his chair with his meaty, weathered hands folded on his lap. The silent television caught his attention for a moment, but not long.

  Across the table Karen punched numbers into the calculator, scribbled figures on lined paper.

  The clock marched towards midnight. Walt preferred that they checked the books just before bed. It helped wind him down. So every night, after his various business establishments closed, the people who watched those businesses – unmotivated teenage boys and girls, high school dropouts, people in the margins of life – counted the cash, and totaled all the receipts. Shortly after the receipts were totaled, the bag men arrived. These men had large heads and wide shoulders, and wore bruised leather jackets and work boots. Some came in pickup trucks, some in old sports cars, some in off–duty police cruisers. The margin people met them at the store entrances; the receipts and the cash got collected. All of the money and all of the receipts came back here to the house, where the cash was counted, the ledgers filled, the figures reconciled.

  Before he retired for the night, Walt Slone knew the numbers. Usually they made him happy. Usually.

  “How’d we do today?” he asked.

  “Not good,” she said without hesitation. “The numbers are down.”

  He nodded. “Let’s start with the girls.”

  “Mmmm–hmmm,” Karen said. “The girls seem to b
e hittin’ it pretty hard. No pun intended. Best night they’ve had in six months. Almost fifteen thousand between the seven of them. Danielle brought in three thousand on her own.”

  He took a breath, exhaled, tapped his fingers on the table. He felt unsure which one was Danielle. That redhead from Prestonsburg? Or maybe the blonde who used to work at the Dairy Queen? He barely knew the difference anyway. The girls came and went, a smear of forgotten faces and hazy flesh. Some of them made a living in his spare rooms, but none of them made a career, and he found that an acceptable arrangement.

  Karen turned over another page in the ledger, punched more numbers into the calculator, scribbled some additional figures on the lined paper.

  He noticed for the umpteenth time that she had her mother’s fine cheeks.

  “What about the bookies?” he asked.

  Karen said, “There’s just no way around it. They keep coming up short. Barely two grand tonight. They haven’t cracked ten thousand for a whole week since the Super Bowl.”

  “You think they’re takin’ from the till?” Walt asked.

  “Probably. Don’t you?”

  He nodded, slow, sure. Of course the bookies were taking from the till. He made them keep ledgers, too, but was not such a fool as to believe they actually entered all of their transactions in those ledgers. Mostly he let it go, but over time the side bets added up. Something would have to be done to bring them back in line.

  Walt said, “Call the sheriff in the morning, tell him to check it out.” He thought some more. “How much you think they really owe?”

  “If I had to guess, I’d say maybe a couple hundred a day for what, nine or ten months now?”

  He winced, and repeated. “Call the sheriff in the morning.”

  She shrugged, wrote down a reminder for herself on a yellow post–it, stuck the post–it to the front of the ledger.

  The business talk continued from there, like they were checking off items on a grocery list. In a sense, that was exactly what they were doing.