Good Vibrations by Tom Cunliffe Page B

killing people. Earl was cruising through the darkness at a modest 100 or so when a pair of headlamps appeared in his mirror.
    â€˜That car come up fast,’ he said, ‘and he drove in so close behind me that I couldn’t see the lights no more ’cause they were under my trunk, just this bright glow. It had to be either a cop or a criminal and either way I didn’t want him, so I booted the Ford on some. At 130 the lights were still under my fender, so I stamped the gas pedal hard down on the firewall. We was flat out through them pine woods. That road ran dead straight for fifty miles clear to the state line and I knew I’d out-run him. At 160, when I had no more to give, he just cruised up alongside me an’ turned on his blue light.
    â€˜I stopped and he pulled in ahead of me. Wasn’t nuthin’ else I could do. I didn’t want to end up in the ditch at that speed. I climbed out quick, ’cause you’re always better looking ’em in the eye, and I checked their car. It was the Mercury all right. Fat bulge on the hood an’ it was burble-burbling away on idle, the whole thing sort of shaking like there was a wild animal inside it just waitin’ for the gas pedal to let her out.
    â€˜Well, let me tell y’all, one of the biggest men I ever saw climbed out of that car. The trooper who was drivin’ got out too. He was a sizeable man, but he looked like a little kid alongside this revenue man. That guy weighed three-fifty pounds and then some more and he had tobaccer juice runnin’ down from both sides of his mouth.’
    Jim had lit a hurricane lamp and now he passed around the bottle. I had been so engrossed in Earl’s tall story that I didn’t even realise my glass was empty. I poured a stiff slug as Earl continued.
    â€˜The trooper kept me covered while the big guy checked through the car. All the jars had gone of course, but we used to keep a whiskey tank in the trunk. He opened her up an’ she smelled to high heaven, but there wasn’t even a puddle left inside.
    â€˜â€œOK,” he says, “Where d’you drop the stuff off.”
    â€˜â€œNot in this state anyway,” I told him. I thought I’d get a pistol whippin’ at least, but they just steps back an’ the big feller says, “There’s a diner open twenty miles up the road. Seems it’d be the neighbourly thing for me to buy y’all a coffee there, but your ol’ Ford’s so slow the coffee’d be cold by the time you dawdled in to drink her.”
    â€˜It’s three in the morning by this time and it’s midsummer, but it’s still dark. Away goes the Mercury. I heard him burn rubber as he changed into third an’ he must have been doin’ well over 100 by then, but I wasn’t about to let him get away with his mouth. I was still tremblin’, I’ll tell you, but I give the Ford her head and ten minutes later I was walkin’ into the diner. Like the man said, it was twenty miles. They’d bought me a coffee, an’ it wasn’t cold. I drank it and tried to get neighbourly, but they just stared me down, so I cleared out an’ never used that road again.’
    â€˜Quit your jaw, boys. Supper’s on the table.’ Dolly called us through the open front door.
    We ate braised steak and potatoes with macaroni cheese and the ‘biscuits’ of the South. These are more like large lightweight dumplings than anything else and are generally served with gravy, which they soak up with remarkable efficiency. As we filled our boots, Earl mentioned his plans for hunting over the weekend and Haggerd remarked that things had quietened down a lot since he was a kid.
    â€˜In them days, we’d only get beef steak once in a while, when times was good in the store. Mostly, Pa’d go up an’ shoot squirrels. That squirrel gravy was often the bes’ thing we could manage with our