The Bourbon Thief, Page 33

  worshipped. The blood of the gods couldn’t mingle with the blood of the commoners. Gods aren’t easy to come by. They had to marry their own so they could stay gods.”

  “We aren’t gods. We’re just people.”

  “So were they. But they were gods, too. We can be, if you want,” Levi said. “At least to ourselves. What is a god but someone who is worshipped? I’ll worship you and you’ll worship me and we’ll be gods together.”

  “Will you forgive my sins?” she asked.

  “There are no sins,” Levi said. “Gods don’t sin. They act. What they do is right not because it’s right, but because they did it.”

  “What do gods do?” she asked. “I’ve never been a god before.”

  “Anything they want.”

  Tamara felt Levi’s hand on her face.

  “They smite people,” he said. “They part seas and send down lightning and thunder. They impart justice and mercy and vengeance...”

  Tamara opened her eyes. She saw the bourbon on the floor like blood leaking from a corpse.

  “Maybe I am a god.” She looked at Levi.

  “What are you doing?” he asked. “What is this about?”

  “It’s about our father,” she said. “He thought he was a god, too. But he wasn’t. He was a devil.”

  Levi was smart. She did love that about him. That she could say one thing and he could, with one step, transverse a dozen deductions and get straight to the end where the truth lived.

  “What did he do to you?” Levi asked, narrowing his eyes at her.

  “The night of the flood... Momma didn’t beat me. That was a lie. She slapped me, but she didn’t beat me. But the bruises I told you about were true. Granddaddy gave them to me.”

  “He beat you?”

  “No,” she said and shook her head. “He wanted a son, a real Maddox son.”

  “Tamara—”

  “He wanted one with me. He wanted a son he could pass off as legitimate. A Maddox son. My son. His son.”

  “A white son.”

  “Royal blood,” she said. “Gods and mortals don’t mix.”

  Levi rubbed his face. His blue eyes were rimmed in red.

  “Fuck...”

  “He dragged me to the bed. My bed. My stupid pink bed. But before he could do it, the river came in the room to save me. The house was flooding. I had a second, and I took it.” Levi lifted his head and she looked him in the eyes. “I killed him.”

  Levi said nothing. Tamara smiled.

  “I smote him,” she said and giggled drunkenly.

  Can gods kill other gods?

  “I was so sure Momma had sold me to him like Jacob Maddox’s wife had sold Veritas down the river that I stopped talking to her. And she thought I’d killed Granddaddy because we’d fought over you and my inheritance. He’d been threatening to leave everything to you unless she and I did what he wanted. She fired you because she knew you were his son and she’d seen us kissing. She wanted to keep us apart. But I don’t blame her for hating you or me or anybody. Granddaddy made her earn her keep, too.”

  “You never told me this,” Levi said. “Why?”

  “Because I was afraid you wouldn’t believe me. And if you didn’t believe me, I couldn’t love you, and I wanted to love you. I needed to love you.”

  Levi looked up to the ceiling. She wondered if he was praying. Did gods pray to other gods?

  “They sold a girl to start Red Thread. Raped her and sold her and bought a still. You can’t sell people,” Tamara said.

  “No. No, you can’t.”

  “This distillery was everything to him,” Tamara said. “Red Thread was everything. If he ever had a soul, he sold it for this place. He knew I was his daughter. He knew it all the time. That didn’t matter. Only this mattered...” She pointed at the barrels, the thousands of barrels that might as well have been filled with liquid gold. “He tried to take you away from me. All that I had. So I’m taking all he had away from him. I took his life first. And now I’m taking his soul.”

  It took all she had left to get up off the floor. Her hand left a bloodred print on the wall behind her as she fought her way to her feet. A wave of dizziness hit her as she bent to pick up the ax.

  “Sit down, Tamara,” Levi ordered. He did that sometimes, gave her orders. And she loved it. He was her teacher and her lord. It pleased her to obey him, but only after she put up her fight so he would have to fight back and subdue her.

  “I can’t. I have to finish this.”

  “Rotten, sit your ass down on the floor right now.”

  Her body obeyed even as her spirit rebelled. Gently he took the ax from her hands.

  Levi walked a few feet, dragging the ax behind him. He stopped. He turned.

  Then he slammed the ax into the nearest barrel so hard the staves exploded.

  Then Levi smashed the next barrel open like he’d been born for the job. And maybe he had. Just the way she’d been born to bring down Red Thread for Veritas. Finally. At last.

  Down the line he walked, smashing barrels as he went. One. Two. Twelve. Bourbon was everywhere, all over the floor. A flood of it sweet and ripe with scents of sugar and apples and licorice, spiked and potent enough to make throats burn and eyes water. Thousands of dollars of bourbon. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of bourbon. Five-year aged bourbon. Ten-year aged bourbon. Twenty-year aged bourbon. The stuff that sold for a hundred pounds a bottle to English dukes.

  It was an orgy of bourbon and destruction. Alcohol erupted from the holes in the casks, broke like ocean waves onto the ground. Wood shattered. Barrels ruptured. And Tamara sat on the floor and laughed and laughed.

  Finally Levi came for her and carried her down the stairs to the main floor. There he did the most damage and it delighted her to see it. Sweat soaked his T-shirt and she could see the muscles rising and straining underneath the wet fabric. Did gods sweat? She could believe it. It made him look more powerful. He was strength and beauty incarnate, and she desired him. Her lover, her brother, her husband, her god. When this was all over, they would go somewhere and take a long hot bath together. He would make love to her after they were clean or maybe before. He always made love to her. They would talk about the baby, what to name it if it was a boy or a girl. They were gods now and gods must make other gods. They wouldn’t have a family. They would have a pantheon.

  Tonight Levi became a god of destruction. There must be a god for that, mustn’t there? Destruction and vengeance and justice. And yet it was a mercy that he did this for her. She couldn’t finish what she’d started. Only he could finish it for her. He worked in a fury. Hate had walled them both up in this prison. Levi would cut their way out.

  Even when Levi was out of her sight, she could hear the ax at work. Metal splitting wood. Cracking. Levi’s grunts of effort. He’d spent half the summer in the cooperage learning how to make the barrels. Who else was better suited to break them? Levi had made himself into a machine, lean and sleek and molded for this purpose. He brought the ax high in the air and let the weight of it crash into the barrels. They didn’t stand a chance against him. A pool of a thousand drunken nights that would never happen surrounded her. Fights would go unfought. Angry words unsaid. Confessions would remain unconfessed with a little less liquid courage in the world. Children would not be conceived who otherwise might have been. They lay on the floor at Tamara’s feet—the fights, the confessions, the children—all of them. They flowed past her like a river, trickled through the cracks between the floorboards and disappeared.

  When the barrels had been broken, enough of them anyway to do the job, Levi came back to her. The ax was in one hand. With his other hand he reached for her.

  “Come on,” he said, waving his hand at her, beckoning her to take it.

  “Why did you come back to me?” she asked him.

  Levi shrugged. “I didn’t know who I was before you. I don’t know who I would be after.” Levi had a beautiful voice, resonant as an oboe. Was this the first time she not
iced that? “But while I was with you, I knew myself.”

  “We’ll stay together?” she asked.

  “We will.”

  “Can we bear that?”

  “Can we bear being apart?”

  No. No, they couldn’t. Who could they love after loving each other? Who could they touch if not each other? They had ruined each other for anyone else. The curse was on them and in them and they must stay together lest they spread the curse to others.

  “Will we have to go away and hide?” she asked.

  “We can go anywhere we want to go.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “Then we go home.”

  “How did you find me here?”

  “I went to Arden to look for you. Your mother told me you’d left, that you thought I’d died. I was on my way out of here when I saw your car in the parking lot. Your mother said to me... She said she was sorry. I think she is.”

  “She is. So am I.”

  “We should leave,” Levi said. “This smell is something awful.”

  “It’ll get worse,” she said.

  “Then let’s get it over with.”

  She took his hand this time and let him hoist her to her feet. With his arm around her he brought her out of the warehouse. The door was open now and bourbon leaked all the way out to the sidewalk.

  “What did you say this was?” Levi asked. “One hundred fifty proof?”

  “About that. Maybe more.”

  Tamara pulled the book of matches out of her pocket.

  “I wish he was still alive,” Levi said. “Just so I could rip out his heart.”

  “This was his heart,” she said.

  Her hands shook so hard she couldn’t light the match. Levi took the book from her and lit it for her. Then he put the match back between her fingers. He nodded. It was time.

  Tamara flicked the match into the warehouse door.

  Do gods start fires?

  The gods invented fire.

  34

  Tamara dropped the match into the bourbon, and in less time than it takes to blink, Red Thread had ignited.

  Flames skimmed the surface of the alcohol, racing and chasing their way into the warehouse. Levi kicked the door shut and locked it as fast as he could. He grabbed her hand and ran with her fifty yards into the trees that ringed the property. At first not much seemed to be happening. But only at first...

  Then smoke sneaked out from under and over and around the door. The windows clouded up white and turned red.

  They heard a crack, a clamor. Things falling. In minutes the fire had made it to the top floor and burned its way through the roof.

  She heard sounds like bombs going off. The barrels were detonating. Around them the night air turned warm. Then it turned hot.

  Levi coughed and so did she. Her eyes burned, her lungs. They pulled back farther away from the warehouse. Tamara wanted to be sick but couldn’t. She had nothing in her to vomit up.

  From within the warehouse came new sounds. Crashing. Breaking. Beams catching fire and falling. Floors giving out. A beautiful sound and a terrible smell. They had to pull back even more. The scent of bourbon was everywhere, stinging their eyes, singeing their nostrils. They covered their mouths and their noses with their shirts.

  “Let’s go,” Levi yelled over the sound of the fire and the wind.

  “Not yet,” she called back. She had to see one more thing. She waited. It wouldn’t take long surely. She waited longer. And yes, there it was. The fire caught the wooden breezeway between the first and second warehouse. It would all go down now. The entire operation. The offices. The bottling plant. The still. From the parking lot to the river, all of it would burn.

  Tamara giggled at the sight of what she’d done. Would they even suspect her? A little thing like her? And what would it matter? She owned the warehouse, the company. She could burn it to the ground if she wanted. She could do whatever she wanted. Her laughter grew hysterical. But it wasn’t laughter anymore. She was crying. Her stomach hurt. She hadn’t eaten in too long. She was dehydrated. She’d overtaxed herself in the warehouse. She’d inhaled too many fumes and they’d gone to her head and made her sick. This time she’d say it. She was sick. Her mother would be proud of her for admitting it.

  A cramp struck her like a fist in her lower back, nearly felling her. She clung to Levi. Sweat beaded on her forehead. She was hot, so hot, burning hot, scalding hot.

  “Tamara?” Levi looked her up and down.

  “Can you put me in the river?” She had to cool down and the river was right there. Right there... She would boil to death if he didn’t put her in the water. She thought that was what she said, but she couldn’t make out her own words.

  “Jesus, Tamara, you’re bleeding.” Levi’s hands were all over, holding her up, searching her face.

  The heat was between her legs now. A line of red coming out of her and staining her legs. Levi’s eyes were black with panic and fear. That wasn’t good. How much was she bleeding?

  Did gods bleed?

  She was off her feet and in his arms. They were running away, the fire far behind them. She could see the smoke rising into the sky, creating night clouds that blocked out the stars. She’d done that, hidden the sky away. Only a god could do that.

  Drink up, she called to her angels. And the angels came and drank. But they were greedy beasts and came after her, too. Their wings closed in around her. They always said the Maddoxes had bourbon in their blood.

  That night the angels drank their fill.

  35

  Paris

  Before tonight, the only thing in the world more important to Cooper McQueen than a good bourbon was a beautiful woman. He had the woman. He had the bourbon. What he wanted more than anything now was the truth.

  “So what happened?” McQueen asked, meeting Paris’s eyes for the first time in an hour.

  “The newspapers described it as a ‘river of fire,’” Paris said. She sat like a lady, like a duchess. Back straight, ankles crossed, hands in her lap. She turned her head and looked into the empty fireplace. “Flaming whiskey poured out like lava. There’s nothing quite like a whiskey fire. It doesn’t just burn. It consumes everything. And the smell...” She paused and laughed. “Well, they say the firemen couldn’t get near the warehouse for the sweet sickening scent of it. All they could do was form a perimeter around it to contain the fire. Even six hundred feet away they could feel the heat of it. A hundred and fifty firemen from four or five counties couldn’t handle the immolation. They say even their helmets melted from the heat. The warehouse collapsed and the burning rubble ignited the next building over. And the next. Domino effect. The operation was old. The buildings were mostly wood. Tamara’s grandfather’s obsession with tradition doomed his legacy. They should have torn down those old wooden buildings decades earlier and replaced them with brick and steel. Nothing doing. On the entire property there was only one fire hydrant. There was nothing anyone could do. They let it burn itself out. By morning there was nothing left.”

  McQueen cleared his throat. Something in it didn’t want to let him speak.

  “And Tamara?” he asked. “What about her?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I want to know what happened to her.”

  “Do you really?” Paris asked. She seemed suspicious and amused, as if she didn’t believe he had it in him to care about the girl who’d brought down Red Thread. “No one was charged with arson, if you were wondering. Any evidence of arson—which it had been, of course—the fire destroyed it all. Can’t take fingerprints off a pile of ash. To this day people talk about the fire and what might have started it. Some people thought it was Tamara’s mother doing it out of revenge against her daughter for stealing the company from her. Or a disgruntled employee. Or lightning. That does happen. Lightning from the heavens. Bolt from the blue. You know what they finally classified the fire as?”

  “What?”

  “An act of God.”

 
“You won’t tell me about Tamara?”

  “I’ve told you enough about Tamara. You don’t get any more of her.”