Page 4 of The Bootlegger’s Bride

J an Nowak worked not to stare at Hazel Robinson.

She sat beside him in a folding chair at the card table that had been set under a maple tree atop the lake bank at her sister’s home.

She looked like a gypsy princess—dark eyes, full lips, square shoulders, and crossed bronze legs peeking from a flowered skirt.

So instead he gazed across the table to her sister Helen, who was fine to look at as well and bright, like Hazel. A nurse, she had told him.

“That was a great meal, Helen. A treat for me to get away from the city, breathe fresh air, eat outdoors, and feel the breeze. I love the lake—so serene. Thanks for the invitation. You’ve got a beautiful home.”

“It’s humble for sure, but we love it. Should have seen it two years ago when we bought it.

Ready to fall down. Only reason it’s still standing is that Raymond, his dad, and his brothers worked day and night for months to make it habitable—a new roof, new wiring, floors, and windows.

And indoor plumbing. We bought it ‘as is,’ meaning with an outhouse and a hand pump at the kitchen sink. ”

“What about, you, Jan? Are you handy around the house?”

This from Hazel. A throaty voice, but she didn’t smoke, Jan noted as he held a match to another Lucky Strike. He turned to her, feeling a light wind off Long Lake tempering the hot afternoon. Yet she seemed perfectly cool.

He nodded. “Yes, I am. For example, if you had some Cognac and Cointreau, I could mix you a sidecar. Though when it comes to hammers, nails, saws, and pipe wrenches, I’m afraid I’m not much help.”

She laughed. “I don’t think we have the sidecar makings, but I could get you another beer.”

“Perfect. Thank you.”

He watched her walk to the house, the full skirt swaying and adding to the mystery of her movement.

Subterfuge and concealment. Two formidable weapons in the female sexual arsenal and to which he always surrendered without much of a fight—though never remained a prisoner for long.

He had fought too long and hard for his independence to relinquish it hastily.

She disappeared through the screen door to the back porch, the door plap-plap-plapping shut on its long spring.

Birdsong drew his gaze upward to the tall maple.

He saw a brilliant black-and-yellow bird wing away over the lake, undulating as if on an invisible roller coaster.

Jan gazed out over the water, thinking how Jung in his memoir rhapsodized about his lake, calling it an “inconceivable pleasure…an incomparable splendor” and saying that he must live near a lake.

“…Without water, I thought, nobody could live at all…” At the sound of Raymond’s voice Jan turned back.

“You seem to be getting along fine in these tough times without using your hands,” he said nodding at the green Buick sport coupe sitting in the driveway beyond a cluster of shrub roses.

“I’ve been lucky.”

“At the racetrack?”

Jan laughed. “Not just there. I made some investments that paid off as well.”

“In the stock market?”

Hazel returned with two damp, brown beer bottles and set them before the men. Jan raised his.

“No, in this,” he pointed. “Beer and liquor…”

Jan felt Hazel’s eyes on him as she again sat to his left.

He never knew how people would react when he told how he had grown successful—if that was the right phrase for it—flouting federal law.

Though he figured he might as well shoot craps with her.

If you think a relationship might have some legs—he glanced down at hers again—you don’t want to start off telling lies, at least not big ones. So, he went on.

“In Prohibition days I was an aimless kid. Had a school chum at Beaumont High, Stanley Goldberg, whose Uncle Leo was running liquor and wanted to break into the Cass Avenue Polish community. To do so he needed someone who spoke the lingo, since English wasn’t that common there.

That turned out to be me. I became his right-hand man.

When Leo suddenly died I took over the operation.

Then I cashed out before Congress repealed the Volstead Act and went into the banking business. ”

Hazel sat with hands folded under her chin, elbows resting on the table, red lips pursed. “Banking doesn’t sound nearly as interesting as bootlegging.”

“Agreed. But one is less likely to suddenly die.” He took a sip from his beer glass. “Besides, I am the bank and make my own hours.”

The only sounds were birdsong and leaves rustling in a gust as a cloud passed before the sun.

Hazel, Helen, and Raymond sat silent, staring at him as if he might have been a Martian—maybe one that slipped away from New Jersey in Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds radio broadcast the previous fall, and somehow landed in Southern Illinois.

He smiled at Hazel, hoping he hadn’t scared off the schoolmarm. She really was a looker.

§

The two men stood at the end of the dock, cane poles and beer bottles in hand, red-and-white cork bobbers floating on the blue-green lake.

A cow lowed on the far bank where it stood in the shade of a tall cottonwood tree, drawing Jan’s gaze.

Flies buzzed, crickets creaked, frogs croaked.

Willows on the near bank rustled in a puff of wind, carrying to him the mossy, green, fresh smell of the lake.

An earthy aroma, but miles apart from St. Louis sewer gas.

Behind him Hazel and Helen sat side-by-side on the dock murmuring, bare feet dangling toward the silvery still water.

“A little early in the afternoon for them to be biting,” said Raymond nodding at the motionless bobbers. “I like to grab my fly rod and take the rowboat out just before sunset.”

“You’ve got a fine life here, Raymond. Peaceful. I envy you.”

Raymond nodded. “It’s hard work at the mill. Particularly when you’re pulling hot brick in the ovens and breaking your back. I’m not complaining though. Lots of guys got nothing.”

“I know all about steelwork from my father.”

Raymond looked at him. “There’s a Josef Nowak who represents the Polish workers. Has a lot of clout.”

“That’s him.”

“He came over on the boat, right? What’s he think will happen with Hitler? Germans gonna invade Poland?”

“I don’t know what he thinks. We don’t speak.” The two women fell silent behind him. He went on.

“The Poles will never give in to Hitler. It’s not in their dreamy nature. They’d rather die fighting for a hopeless cause—they’ve demonstrated this before—than live under Prussians, Russians, Nazis, or what have you. Which means there will be war. Good for the steel mills.”

Raymond lifted his line from the water and repositioned the bait a few feet further out in the lake.

“I’d be happy to go on the breadline if it meant people wouldn’t have to die…

It’s always the innocents and the little guy who pay with their lives and their livelihoods.

Not the kings, generals, and tycoons who start it all…

Sorry. I sound like some Bolshevik. I’m not.

I just don’t like being deceived, manipulated, and pushed around.

You don’t know what to believe. That European stuff’s got nothing to do with us here. ”

“No need to apologize. I’m with you. That’s why my people came here, to get away from being pushed around and all that ongoing strife an ocean away. Doesn’t make much sense to go back and get involved in something that can’t directly touch us.”

“Let’s pray it won’t.”

§

As dusk arrived, Jan—with everyone’s seeming complicity—offered to drive Hazel home to her parents’ house in Granite City.

She directed him along the lake road toward Pontoon Beach, the sun setting to their right, cooling evening air streaming through the Buick’s windows. It enveloped them in a sweet, corn-scented atmosphere—along with the fecund aroma of the lake and the floral fragrance of her perfume.

“Nice car. What kind is it?”

“Buick. It’s called an opera coupe. Not sure why.”

“Looks brand new.”

“It’s a 1938… If one is in the banking racket it helps to look prosperous. Like you’re not going to up and disappear with the deposits.”

“Is it a racket?”

He glanced at Hazel. He’d have to watch himself with the schoolteacher—his connotations as well as his denotations.

“Wish it was more of one. The commercial side does okay. Consumer side’s a bit sketchy right now. A lot of folks short on cash. They don’t have jobs but still have rent to pay and mouths to feed. Who knows when or if they’ll ever be able to pay it back.”

He looked to the mossy lake, the palest green, sliding by on his left. “It’s nice out here. Quiet. Restful. Clean. So different from what I’m used to in the city.”

He slowed the Buick as a lighted beer sign came up on the left. There two cars sat in a gravel lot before a tavern on the lake.

“You know this place? How about a nightcap? Our first chance to talk without adult supervision.”

Hazel smiled. “Sis is a little protective. Raymond’s worse, like I’m still twelve.”

“That means they value you,” he said as the car slid to a stop on the gravel.

“Or they don’t trust me around men.”

He looked at her, wondering if she was suggesting there was a reason for that. Or maybe she was just being playful.

She gazed ahead at the dark, windowless saloon that sat on short stilts at the lakeshore. It looked more like a rambling fishing shack than nightspot.

“Don’t expect too much,” she said. “This is a homely hangout for local country folk.”

“I’m becoming rather fond of country culture. Fascinating field study for a city slicker like me.”

“You could get a graduate degree in this place on Saturday night.”