Chapter 183

"Well he would be wrong. I mind my own business and expect the cops to do the same, especially the Sheriff and his crowd." I said.

"You need to lay low a while," The Brit said.

"Good play, and what should I do with the twelve gallons of hooch I have left?" I asked with a smile.

"Well for one thing, I'll take a gallon from you," The Brit said.

'You know a gallon of this shit is $75 for you." I said with a smile.

"I can afford that," he said.

"Good, be careful who you give it to, Be double careful who you sell it to." I said.

The Brit was back in town and things had pretty much settled down. I found buyers for all the booze, so it was a good time of year. Things in the liquor business occupied me till well after Christmas. It was cold in January and I got bored easily around the house. I hung around the house bored and hating it. There was nothing I hated worse than being bored.

The dead of winter boredom set in after Christmas. I had a feeling it was the same every year. Not many new things started. I peddled a little shine, the twenty gallons hardly made a ripple so nobody was really out looking for me.

I even bought a few storage lockers looking for jewelry and of course I spent my retirement money. It was all rather routine through the winter.

By the end of February all of the shine was gone. Well all except two gallons I had flavored peppermint. I kept that for me. I really liked that and most folks didn't seem to like it as well. The liquor business just kept me out in the mix of people. I wasn't really a player. I was far too small and didn't really want to be any bigger.

You see The Brit and I both understood that we could be bigger, but what would be the benefit. More money, but we didn't need any more money. More money would not make our lives any better. The only thing that would make my life better was, if it was less boring. I really didn't want to stumble through the jungle on a daily basis, but I did like things to be interesting. I just hadn't figured out how to do it.

There was't any real heavy weight crime in Warren County. So there was nothing in need of fixing which the Sheriff couldn't handle. We were surplus and the only way to be useful was to go to some shit hole and do some jobs not worthy of us. I just didn't want to do it any more. I could tell I was getting antsy, but I didn't want to admit it.

I would love to go out and do something in the United States. Surely there is some job here that is worth doing. It would be even better if it were legal, but not absolutely necessary.

I searched for something of interest for months and found nothing. The most exciting thing I found was a piece of land for sale adjourning my home place. It was an almost ten acre parcel of woodland that was in need of cleaning of it's underbrush. I wasn't sure I wanted to clean it, but I knew I wanted to buy it. I entered into negotiations with its current owner.

"The current owner was trying to unload his share of the family farm, His real estate agent called all the neighbors looking for a sale. The parcel of land did have a two and a half acre meadow on the property otherwise it was in woods replanted when the area was clearcut ten years earlier.

I would own almost twenty acres if I could swing the purchase. The real estate agent and I met for lunch the day after his first call. We met at the Cafe' on the Square for lunch. It wasn't fancy but the people who knew me knew I wasn't impressed by fancy.

The Realty agent was a man, a fact which I supposed was a bit unusual in those days. There wasn't a lot of heavy development going on, so fewer men went into it. The reason I got a man is that he was less than dynamic. He mostly just wanted to slide into the sale. He could hardly bring himself to close the sale even thought I was begging him to take my money.

It took almost another week to get all the details handled. Anyone who ever bought real estate knows there are all kinds of details that seem to pop up along the way. In the end I owned the property and it seemed like a good thing. The piece of land I had bought had been in something called the Warren County land bank.

The Previous owner had six out of the almost ten acres in the land bank. Those were the old farm fields. He plowed and planted them in crops provided by the land bank. Then at the end of the season, but turned them under. It supposedly made the soil stronger. I had six acres of really fertile soil but I didn't want to plant anything on it. Hell I knew I was no farmer. Another reason the land was cheap is that it had no road frontage and was useless for development, but it did attach to my land at the wooded area.

The thing that had made me most interested was that the ten acres included about three acres of the fast and deep running stream. The spring fed stream wound it's way across those several acres of over grown woods.

I knew that if I wanted to actually cook off liquor, I had a really good place to do it, but I also knew I would lose everything if I was caught manufacturing there. It was really a lot more involved than I wanted to be, I did love having the option. Owning that land was really about the options for me.

It was two weeks after everything was finalized, before I made the final decision not to make moonshine on my own property that year. To be honest I didn't like the risk benefit ratio of the enterprise. I felt the day to day risks were just to high at the moment. Things might change at any moment though.