Moonshiners' Hollow

Chapter Three

Brown and red checker pieces surrounded a wooden chessboard. Tyler was in his comfortable chair, a smug look on his face as Papaw leaned over the board.

"Ya ready to give up?" Tyler asked. Papaw looked up at him and pointed at Tyler's nose.

"Now just ya wait, right now, Boy," he said. He kept his finger pointed at Tyler's smile until he eventually moved a red man into position. He let his finger linger on the piece for a few moments after moving it, asserting to Tyler that he had not yet finalized his move. He straightened in his chair and nodded.

He had fallen into one of Tyler's traps, and Tyler was ready to move the first man into its position of necessary sacrifice when someone knocked on the door.

They looked at each other, confusion in their expressions. The person behind the door knocked again—harder.

"I reckon I oughtta get that, huh?" Papaw was already on his feet by the end of the sentence, and he shuffled across the room to the door. He peered through one of the thin rectangle windows and immediately grinned.

"Hey there, Missy!" Papaw said after he flung the door open. Courtney immediately gave him a hug, and Papaw said, "We wasn't expectin' ya 'til later."

"The traffic wasn't too bad coming back," she said. They pulled away from their hug. Courtney looked at Tyler, staring at him for an uncomfortable length of time before finally moving. As she walked toward him, she said, "Long time, no see, Tyler!"

Her voice hardly carried an accent, and the question was lighter in tone than he was used to. Papaw was the only family member who didn't coat their words in poison; he hoped Courtney remained peachy.

"Yeah, well," Tyler said, wringing his fingers, "leavin' the family to figure yourself out does do the whole, 'long time, no see' thing." Courtney's hair was naturally blonde, but it had since been dyed black with pink strips that framed her face. "By your hair, I bet it's comin' for you too."

Papaw laughed and Courtney rolled her eyes, though a smile remained on her black lips. She tossed Tyler's keys to him. He wasn't sure how she had gotten them; he assumed he must have fallen into the water with all his nightmares involving drowning. Maybe his keys were on the deck, or... maybe they were in his quarters—the whole night was disorienting and mostly erased from memory.

"What am I going to do with these?" he asked, dangling the keys. Courtney shrugged.

"Up to you, but you've persuaded me to never ever live in my car," she said. "Also, why do you have a whole box of taxidermy books?"

"It's interesting!" he said.

"An' how many jobs have ya had?" Papaw said, shutting the door and turning back to them.

"Hey!" Tyler said, mocking hurt. "Don't y'all pile on me like that."

"Pfft, c'mon Tyler, you could have gotten in at a taxidermy studio as an apprentice," Courtney said.

It wasn't quite that simple. He had looked into becoming a taxidermist before, but apprenticeships were unpaid and required experience he simply did not have. He wondered if she had found his small collection of poorly taxidermized songbirds on top of the box of forever-overdue library books, or if they had fallen elsewhere in his car.

In his brief silence, Courtney had turned to Papaw and was asking how he was doing. They both stood in the middle of the room, Papaw towering over Courtney with a wrinkly smile on his face.