Moonshine
1 The Hooch and the Fortune
Hillary, her feet hanging over the edge of the cliff watched the black waters of the river below as the sky slowly changed to a mix of orange, yellow and pink. The sun seemed determined to drive the dark of the early morning back to where night hid from the day. The striking red color of the ferns along the cliff to her left and the layers of greyish blue along the mountain ridges out to the far horizon mesmerized her. She was taking a break from her morning hike that she had added to her regular visits to the stills that she owned and had hired still operators to operate.
She had spent the last few years acquiring and partnering with still operators across most of the state.
She enjoyed many an early morning hike as she was doing at the moment. Just as often it was an evening trip where she watched the sunset. It was a business that she had never dreamt that she would be running. She now considered herself the “Hooch Shine Mama.”
She credited her grandmother and her own partying life to having gotten her into her current business.
Her grandmother had always talked about her “Appalachian culture.” The culture was actually rooted in their Scottish roots, which went back to the sixteen hundreds Scotland. She was fascinated by her family history. It was one rooted in maintain their personal independence.
She was in her final year at junior college when her grandmother died and left her two million dollars. She was surprised by the amount and that her grandmother who had live a long life had been able to accumulate so much money.
The money represented a branch in the road that took her life in an entirely new direction. The inheritance made her question what she wanted to do. She had applied to several colleges but knew she had no real desire to pursue that path. She was an outdoor mountain girl.
The question of what she wanted to do drove her to the edge of sanity. She needed to find something other than working in an office.
Then one night at a friend’s party she was introduced to a young man, Crayton Taylor. It was not a romantic attraction. She was mesmerized when he got a little drunk and told her about what he did to make a living.
He handed her an open quart jar filled with a clear liquid that had a faint tangy, pungent, malty, smell with a hint of alfalfa. She wondered whether it was tequila. Before tasting it, she asked what it was.
He proudly said that it was the hooch that was the icing on the money he made. He pushed the bottle toward her mouth and told her to take a sip.
She took a small sip and realized that he was talking about moonshine.
The smooth way it warmed her throat as it went down, followed by the warming of her stomach made her want another sip. She took another small sip and complemented him on how good it tasted and how smooth it was.
He smiled and said that it was a family recipe that each generation had worked on improving. He claimed he was the fourth generation of moonshiners and that his hooch had taken the taste up a notch.
He took another sip and handed the jar back to her.
She remembered laughing and joking as they passed the moonshine back and forth.
The next morning, he woke up in her bed and asked her how he had gotten there.
She smiled, told him that the two of them had finished the quart of his moonshine and she that she had barely been able to help him to her apartment. She asked him if he wanted to go out for breakfast.
He said that he would love to, but he needed to go up the mountain and get his still into action and then he needed to get to his day job.
She asked if after breakfast she could go along and be of help.
He nodded and said that if she could stay at the still, she could make sure that the temperature on the still did not go too high. He suggested that she bring a cooler with lunch and some drinks.
He drove his pickup to a where a small single lane road left the highway. He drove for about a mile and parked well into the brush. He then walked over to a narrow path that made its way through the brush. The trail looked more like a deer trail than a hiking trail. He carried her red metal cased cooler as if it were a feather and led the way up.
She was challenged by the slope up the mountain as she followed behind his almost jogging pace. He kept looking behind to make sure she was keeping up. He explained that he was late and needed to make it back to work in about forty-five minutes.
They were probably half way up to the top of the mountainside when he turned off the trail and led the way through a thick stand of trees.
Suddenly ahead of them was a rather large depression surrounded by rock and in the middle was a forest green elongated building that was about a highway lane wide. As they got closer, she could see through its horizontal boards and see three bright polished copper tanks.
She breathed in and seemed to both smell and taste the sweet, spicy, and fruity aroma as she walked in the door.
He led her in and proudly pointed to the three polished round copper structures that to her looked like large thermos bottles. The middle thermos was the largest.
The first one was next in size and the final thermos, whose output went to a fifty-gallon drum, was the smallest.
He explained that the still was a fifty-gallon, ten foot high still and that the thump keg and worm box made the entire structure fourteen feet long.
He pointed to a pipe that was bringing in water to cool the distillate at the last stage. He said that the water from the spring at the outer edge of the depression was one of the secrets of the great taste of the hooch.
He handed her a small glass and asked her to taste it.
She was surprised that it had a unique flavor that most waters lacked. She wondered what chemical was dissolved in it.
He said that this was the day that he was kicking off the actual distillations cycle that would extend out for about three weeks and during that time would, if everything were kept in control, produce fifty gallons of pure hooch.
He looked at her and asked whether she could stay and monitor the temperatures and make sure the gas burner stayed on and that the cooling water pump would stay on.
Hillary had nothing planned and said she would.
He pointed to the cot that was against one wall and said that she could take a nap if she needed one.
He added that there was a great view of the valley when the trail reached the top of the ridge, and she might enjoy the hike there.
He smiled and added that the black berries along the way were all getting ripe and might make the hike even more enjoyable. He told her to also look for the few gooseberry bushes along the way. They were golden in color and pure joy in taste.
He said he had to go and disappeared.
She watched the still operate for about an hour and realized that it seemed to be doing whatever it was supposed to. Everything was stable and there was nothing for her to do.
She decided that the hike up the trail was a good idea. She was constantly stopping to pick blackberries. The dark blackberries had a tart bordering on sweet and tangy flavor, while unripe berries were on the sour or bitter side. She only found one bush of goose berries, but they were truly pure joy to taste.
She got to the top and sat down on a boulder set a few feet back from the edge of a cliff that ended below in the jumble of jagged pieces of what had once been the face of the cliff.
She decided to call Crayton and ask a few questions about running the still.
She asked the cost of the materials that he put into the still.
He said that he normally spent about five hundred dollars for the grain that he put in.
She asked how much he sold a quart for.
He responded that for a quart he was currently getting fifteen dollars.
She did the math in her head and figured that each batch was worth three thousand dollars, so the margin was twenty-five hundred dollars.
That would be thirty-six thousand dollars a year.
She asked him how long the production season ran.
He let her know that he had extended it from the beginning of May to the end of October and he managed to get seven batches done during that time.
He added that he was working on shortening the time to make each batch to two weeks by preparing the mash ferment in a separate container. He said that approach would double his production.
She shook her head when she realized that he was currently making only eighteen thousand dollars for his efforts, and he was risking getting arrested, facing up to five years in prison and being fined ten thousand dollars.
She went back to the still and found a pencil and paper and spent the rest of the day figuring out how many stills were needed to make the risk an attractive choice.
The page she had scribbled on was totally covered when she decided that she would needed to control sixty stills to make it a worthwhile venture. When she factored in his doubling of his current production it dropped down to a more reasonable thirty stills. That was still a big number.
She wondered whether there were that many stills in existence and if not if there were that many locations available to put them.
She looked at the still in front of her and realized that there was enough space in the current building to put in two more stills.
That would reduce the locations from thirty down to ten or fifteen separate locations.
She could envision operating that many.
She then wondered how difficult it would be to get the amount of materials for three stills up and put in place. She also wondered if she could find the operators for all the stills.
She figured her best bet was to recruit existing moonshiners and see what kind of deal she could arrange with them. If the sites used by the moonshiners was big enough, she could triple their operations.
She figured they would be making three times as more money would attract most of them.
She knew that she was taking a branch in the road that she had never dreamt of. It was a branch that had a high risk, but it also had a high reward. It was certainly not a traditional line of work. She laughed and thought that she would label it as a career in mountain side hiking, hooch making and fun.
Not much later she proposed expanding Crayton’s operation. He said he liked the idea. He would be able to quit his current line cooking job and spend his entire time running three stills.
He asked how they would split the money they made. She suggested that for the first year after the additional two stills were on line, he get one hundred percent of what they sold. Then his take would drop to seventy percent.
She pointed out that it would be almost twice as much as his current income counting his day job and running his one still.
He said that sounded like a great deal for him but what about her?
Hillary said that she hoped that he would help her make similar deals with enough other moonshiners so that she could get enough from each still that she would make a small fortune.
He nodded and said that he knew of about six other people running stills, but he figured he could ask around and get more names. He was not sure if they would all be interested but he figured if she expanded their businesses, they would likely take her up on a similar deal to his.
It took her only three years to expand her moonshine business to the point that she was partners with eighteen operators that in total operated fifty-one stills.
She was shy of the sixty stills that she had at one time estimated she would need when she had done her first calculations, but it put her close enough that she figured that it was time for her to recoup her investment before going any farther.
She smiled as she looked in the mirror, realized that she had taken that other branch in the road and that she was happy about her choice.
2 Dam Right
Samuel stood on the grated metal walkway of the dam looking into the clear water that seemed to go down to a deep black depth. He could see fish eating the gear algae growing off the walls of the dam. The water of the Ohio was still clear, but Samuel knew that even this high up the river, the pollution whether visible of not was already in the river.
The Pittsburg buildings and factories were spewing their waste all along its banks.
As a dam lock gate operator, he also saw how the tugs seemed to treat the river as their garbage disposal container. He often envisioned not opening up the lock for one of the polluting tugs and making them pay a fine. It was a fantasy that he knew would never happen.
He had grown up boating, swimming in and fishing in the Ohio. His family owned a cottage on its bank and had a pier that ran a short distance out. This was where during the warm weather months they kept their ski boat and the fishing boat that was his father’s pride and joy.
He still went out almost every weekend fishing with his dad.
Skiing was still high on his list, but his dad had more or less turned the black twenty-five-foot ski boat with its two one hundred horsepower outboard engines over to him.
It was usually he and his friends that did the skiing almost every weekend of the summer. He usually held a grill out on the pier.
They would ski off the end of the pier. He was a good enough skier that he could take off from the pier, ski up the river and on the return, he would let go close enough that he would ski in toward the side ladder and get on it before the water got above his knees.
It was his way of showing off to the young women that were watching.
He knew that he was fortunate to be living the good life.
His job as a lock operator was rather boring except when a barge was coming through the lock. At this stage in the river, most tugs were only pushing a couple of barges. His lock could only handle three at a time. This meant any ambitious tug operators choosing to push more than three barges needed to make more than one trip through the lock. The process of going through was time-consuming and most operators chose not to do so.
He and his friends often spent Friday nights at Mallard’s Bar and Dance Club in downtown Weirton. The normal routine was to meet for dinner, sit and drink beer, and then dance the night away.
He lived within walking distance which allowed him leeway in how much he drank.
It was during one of these nights where a friend of his introduced him to Hillary. He enjoyed the evening chatting and dancing with her.
He was disappointed when she turned him down when he invited her to his apartment but perked up when she said she would love watching a barge go through the lock.
It was during her visit to watch a barge go through that she invited him to come down and party with her in Wheeling.
He accepted and the weekend he went to Wheeling and enjoying a great night dancing she invited him to her apartment.
Since then, he had been in Wheeling about once a month.
So far, he could not figure out how she made her living, but he learned that she traveled throughout West Virginia checking on her business investments. He was really curious what type of investments one could make in the state that would have you traveling around to check on it. He figured it had to be property and that she was some sort of realtor.
He wanted to go to the next level with her, but it was clear that she was not ready for anything like that, so he focused on his job and periodically going to Wheeling.
He knew that he was living the good life and that she seemed to be the last piece to that puzzle, but she seemed to be just out of his reach.
Hillary indeed was not ready. She liked Sam and enjoyed spending time with him, but she had similar relationships with at least a half dozen other very handsome and virile young men.
Sam was the oldest of those and the one that seemed the most stable and held the most promise, but she knew that she wanted to do much more before she settled down and settling down was at the bottom of the list.
She pushed forward and focused intensely on the expansion of her business.
She found that it took time to befriend the still operators. Many seemed to be from the shy and recluse side of the social spectrum. In each case she spent time to get to know them where they operated their still. She partied with each of them and learned who their friends were.
Several of her prospects were true loners and she spent significant time just getting to the point where they would sit with her at the bar and share a drink with her. She was often more successful asking if they would take her hunting.
When she was introduced to them at a bar, getting to their stills was often even more of a challenge.
The challenge multiplied when she got into proposing the expansion of their moonshine business. She lost that challenge to two of them but the rest, once they understood her proposal, accepted. Later when they realized how much more money, they were making they thanked her for being patient with them.
Some of the still operators ended up in her apartment but most did not. She had straight business relationship with most of them.
She spent more than two years and most of her inheritance expanding her still kingdom and making each still almost three times as productive as they had previously been.
She had to drastically sharpen her marketing and distribution capability in order to move the increased moonshine volume that each still was producing. She moved more volume by decreasing the unit cost of each jar of moonshine, and she was smart enough to decrease the quantity in each jar by a few ounces.
She also had to get the people running her stills to be more productive.
She coached them on how to time their three stills so that the work was balanced.
She made a point setting up a schedule of bringing up the materials for the still so that the work was distributed throughout the week or month.
The same was true for bottling and then distributing the moonshine.
She made sure that she watched the futures market to get the best price on corn and the other ingredients and set up a central distribution hub where all her still operators picked up their supplies.
Her ability to organize her supply chain, the production and distribution system was an example of supply chain management that would have ranked among the best in the country but of course she could not share what she was doing. Had Ford been alive and known what she was doing he would have been proud of her and named her his star pupil.
She did all this on a minimum of sleep and a minimum of partying.
It took its toll.
One morning as she brushed her hair and looked in the mirror, she saw a white streak of hair on the left side of her head. She held that strand of white out and looked at it for at least ten minutes. Then she laughed because she realized that her business was finally producing the cash flow that she had calculated that day, just a few years past, when she had figured what it would take for her to build her moonshine empire.
It had cost her but now she was in control of a business that was churning out the cash that was rushing into her money well. It was as if it was being pumped in by a powerful water pump. In the next year she would recoup her more than two million dollars of investment and then in the following year she would more than triple the money that she had started out with.
Life could return back closer to normal. She could take time to enjoy some parties with her friends.
Layton had been one of the still operators who had taken the deal to expand his moonshine making operation. The increase in his income meant he could quit being a common laborer and enjoy some of the other pleasures such as chasing some skirts and partying on the weekends.
As his still operation tripled in volume, he realized that he was working harder than when he ran only one still and worked as a general laborer. After a year he came to the conclusion that what he was making was not enough and that he was going to demand a bigger share than he was currently getting. He figured he was in a great position to do so.
Hillary was surprised when Layton, the operator that she recognized as the least capable, producing the least and least trustworthy demanded a bigger share of the take. She knew that was not going to happen.
She explained to him that he was getting the biggest portion of the money that his three stills were producing and that he had the same deal she had with every other still operator. She shared that every one of those operators had let her know that they felt it was a great deal and were very happy about it.
Layton listened and negatively shook his head and said he didn’t believe what she was telling him. He figured she was getting most of the money being raked in on the moonshine he was operating.
Hillary took him through the books that she kept on his still operation. She explained the arrangement, drew it out on paper so she could show how the finances were managed and the fact that his still was actually making slightly less than most of the others.
Layton got angry and accused her of trying to confuse him and that he was going to bring in the DEA and share what he knew about her operation if he didn’t get a better percentage.
Hillary decided that she needed to meet his demand, until she could figure a way to get rid of him.
It was as if he had read her mind, he pulled out a pistol, that she recognized as a thirty-eight or something similar, and threatened to shoot her if she didn’t double what she was currently paying him.
She recognized the danger she was in, nodded and said that she would write him a check for the money.
He said he did not want a check but wanted cash and that the two of them should go to the bank and get it.
She put her check book away and said that they should go down to her car and go to the bank. On the way down the path, she waited until the trail took a sharp turn and then grabbed his gun hand and turned it upward and under his chin.
Layton was surprised by the move and inadvertently pulled the trigger and killed himself.
Hillary was shocked by what had happened. She looked around to make sure no one was on the trail or in the woods. She pulled Layton’s body back into the brush. She was thinking hard about what she needed to do.
She needed to get rid of the body and she needed to get someone to run the still.
Two people came to mind.
Crayton, her first and best still operator, had his stills only fifty miles away. She would offer him the opportunity to more than double his income if he ran both operations. She figured he would be willing since it would put him into a much better financial position. He was one of the still operators that she had come to trust.
Getting rid of the body was a little more of a sensitive issue. She thought about burying him somewhere on the mountain side but figured it might be too easily discovered by hunters or dug up by animals.
She decided to call Samuel to see if he might help her figure out what to do.
Samuel listened to Hillary explain what had happened. He said that he knew how to handle the situation and that they should do it that night.
He told her to meet him at the bottom of the trail. He would bring his pickup to where the trail came out of the forest. He would go up with her and bring the body in the back and then take the body to the Ohio river, weigh it down and dump it down stream of the dam where he worked. He figured the body would sink to the bottom and decay. It would never be discovered.
Hillary thanked him. She led him to Layton’s body, followed his pickup to the dam, and watched as the body totally wrapped with a heavy-duty link chain was dumped into the river. She noted that Samuel threw the gun into the river as well.
She then followed Samuel to his favorite bar where they spent the evening dancing and having a few brews.
That night was the first time she went to his apartment.
Thank you for reading this far.