The guineas set up a racket when the pickup came rattling up the rutted and weed-choked lane. Pulling into the ranch yard of the old Simpson place, Rollie swung the wheel toward the house trailer, his face grimy and streaked with black coal dust from his day’s work in the strip mine. In his idle sweep of the yard, his glance briefly touched on the wiry, thin figure of his mother, coming from the direction of the old barn, the vegetable basket under her arm mounded with fresh lettuce.
“You’re late.” The sharpness of her voice turned the observation into a criticism when he climbed out of the truck.
“I had to stop for gas.” Rollie gave his ponytail a quick flip, lifting it off his sweaty neck and letting it fall back, a gesture of his discomfort with her reproach.
“Fedderson got his new pumps installed, did he?” She continued toward the trailer.
Rollie nodded. “They finished hooking them up early this afternoon. Nearly every vehicle in town was there waiting to get gassed up.” He looked around. “Where’s Lath?”
“He’s been messing around all day fixing up that old root cellar. I expect he’s still at it,” she said. “Leastways, come canning time, I’ll have a place to store all our vegetables.”
The root cellar was more like a cave that had been dug out of the hillside. The instant Emma had learned of its existence, she had insisted that the house trailer be positioned near it.
“I hope he shored up that one beam.” Rollie glanced toward the cellar’s entrance, its framework slanted to match the slope of the hill. Its warped and weathered wooden door lay open at a crooked angle, a visible reminder that it needed new hinges as well as boards. “I heard a bunch of hammering earlier, so I expect he has. I wouldn’t worry about Lath. He knows what he’s doing.” Something in her voice insinuated that Rollie didn’t.
Rollie smothered the flare of resentment and bowed his head, accepting that he would never be equal to his brother in her eyes.
“Hey, Rollie!” Lath waved to him from the cellar’s tunnellike opening. “Come take a look at this. Not you, Ma,” he added when she started toward him as well. “This isn’t something you should know-about.”
Without questioning his decision, Emma resumed her course to the trailer steps. His curiosity heightened, Rollie headed for the root cellar as Lath ducked back inside it.
An electric work light hung from one of the overhead beams, and it lit all but the corners of the earthen cellar. Sidestepping the extension cord that ran to it, Rollie walked a few feet inside and stopped in surprise. On all three sides there were nothing but shelves, stacked three high, strung with cobwebs and coated with a decade’s accumulation of dirt.
“Lath?” He turned in a complete circle, his searching glance ransacking every dark corner. But there was no sign of his brother. “Lath, where the hell are you?”
The musty smell of bare earth and stale air pressed in around him. The silence of the place was suddenly eerie. The skin along the back of his neck crawled with it.
“Damn it, Lath,” he swore, angry now. “I don’t know what kind of trick this is—”
“No trick, little brother,” was the muffled reply. “Just a hidden door.”
The short shelving on the back wall moved, one side swinging open. A grinning Lath poked his head out, a flashlight in hand.
“Care to come into my parlor?” he invited. “Watch the corners of those shelves, though. I need to make them narrower.”
Rollie had to squeeze through the opening, made tight by the jutting shelves. On the other side was near-total darkness. The play of Lath’s flashlight beam ran over dirt walls that confined an area of roughly four by five feet.
“I didn?
??t know this was here,” Rollie murmured.
“It wasn’t. I took out the shelving that was in this area, used some of the old boards from the barn to create a false wall, then covered it with part of the old shelves. Clever, huh?”
“It’s clever all right, but what’s it for?”
“I needed someplace to stash the shipment of automatic rifles I’ve got to pick up.”
“Rifles?”
“That’s right, little brother. Rifles.” Lath clamped a hand on his shoulder and steered him toward the narrow doorway. “You don’t think I’ve just been sitting on my hands while you’ve been working all day?”
Crowded by Lath, Rollie pushed his way through the opening, then turned on him. “You aren’t selling guns again, are you?” It was an accusation rather than a question.
“Now, I know what you’re thinking, little brother.” Lath held up his hands in a placating gesture. “But I made the mistake of selling to somebody I didn’t know once. I’m not about to repeat that. I’m buying from a guy I’ve known for years and I’m selling to one I’ve known even longer. Neither one of ’em can afford to turn informant.”
“Just make sure you leave me the hell out of it,” Rollie warned.
“Whatever you say. But I will need you to drive me into Blue Moon tonight. I finally talked that Kershner fella into sellin’ me his van with only three hundred dollars down.”