Morning all. Feeling a bit under the weather today. May make it a short one, but for now, let’s start the day with a prompt. Timers set and off we go…
Not sure about the story but I really like the back story of the family. That might be worth looking into.
Wednesday, December 11th: He made a ninety-degree turn.
He made a ninety-degree turn. The gps on the dash squawked at him to veer left. There was no road to the left. There was just a road that snaked along nearly doubling back on itself as it continued in a vaguely left ward course. The gps was not thrilled with him, and hadn’t been since he hit the county line. He might have been one of those ships that sailed off the edge of a a midlevel map, off the edge of the world as far as the gps was concerned. It did not like the wooded land that stretched between two larger cities. The suburbs petered out well before he hit the county line and wouldn’t pick up again until he got close to the other major city. From experience he knew that the gps and it’s polite yet somehow irritated sounding voice would seek to course correct him all the way until he reemerged close to the suburbs.
‘And yet I always turn the machine on,’ he thought to himself. Jake wondered if that was simply habit or if he was hoping that repeated visitations would help retrain the gps to recognize the vast wooded space and snake back roads as something worthy of adding to it’s maps.
The area he was driving through had at one time been considered arable land, if barely. Farmers eked out a bare crop subsisting on what they grew but never really profiting. At least not from food. They found that corn could grow in small plots on the rocky soil. Not enough to make a harvest worth taking to market, but enough that profit could be made in home based distilleries.
Illegal moonshine had propped up the economy in this area. Even then, people were sent to work in the cities either bringing or sending money home. In his family there was always someone at the old house and always someone working in the city. In many instances the city was more town than city and the work was often hired day labor, but it allowed the family to build connections.
His granny called it expanding the customer base.
And expand it had. There was a time where their home stills supplied a large part of the county with it’s liquor. That time was passed. While his uncles still had stories of out running the police with their moonshine runs and hiding stills from the revenuers, these days things were a bit more staid. He had learned to drive as though he was racing away from the law, but that had been Uncle Jerry’s default driving method by that point and Jake wasn’t certain he knew how to drive any other way. A stack of speeding tickets bore testament to his opinion,
While Jake could race with the best of them, he tended to air on the side of caution. The stills were gone, but unlike many who spent what they earned, his family took their ill-gotten gains and squirreled it away. They slowly ferried small amounts into bank accounts, peppering their ledgers with things like, ‘sale of pottery’ or ‘payment for fixing car’. Everything had some sort of off the books yet still legitimate source marked down and all of the amounts were small.
Then the money was invested. And reinvested. And funneled into an off shore tax haven. Where it gathered interest. Jake was one who inherited one of those accounts. Thus far he had yet to use any of it. As far as he knew, no one ever used any of it.
Ten til Midnight 