After she’d cut off her hair and could be taken for a boy （voice kept to a mumble, face turned to her shoes）， farmers sometimes hired her as a cheap hand, but picking apples and sawing pumpkin stems brought little income. Shelving books brought less. Her only ideas for making the kind of money she needed （opening up an auto mechanic’s shop, for example） were not the kinds of things a fourteen-year-old girl, no matter how audacious, could do.
As she lay on the sleeping porch after a day of farmwork, sunburned and with aching arms, a wisp of recollection had come to her. Caleb had once sold empty bottles to a moonshiner up the valley. He’d earned enough to keep himself in candy for weeks, but the work had struck him as drudgery. I’m not digging around in the garbage for that old coot, Caleb had said. But Marian didn’t mind digging.
Potshot Norman, the moonshiner was called. She knew his cabin and the shed where he kept his still. Walking in the woods, she’d smelled the hot mash. So she had gathered her nerve and knocked on his door, which cracked open to reveal a profusion of wild white hair and beard around startled, darting eyes.
“Eh?” he said as though she’d already spoken and he’d misheard.
“Need any bottles, mister? I can bring you bottles if you need them.”
He nodded, chewing his lips. “Always need bottles, don’t I.”
Dimes for gallons, nickels for quarts, two and a half cents for pints. She rustled in the alleys behind the speakeasies and soda shops and pharmacies, around the city dump, in the chaotic backyards of drunks. She filled sacks with empties, green and amber and clear. Some had labels stuck on them. Premium Canadian whiskey. Premium English gin. Most were probably counterfeit printed by bootleggers, but some were likely authentic, even if the booze would have been cut with water and grain alcohol. Potshot, scrupulous in his way, boiled off the labels before he poured in his white lightning. Marian traded her sacks for bills and coins. Eventually Potshot told her he didn’t need any more bottles for a while and sent her to see Mr. Stanley, the baker, who bought what she had, amused.
One day Mr. Stanley stood smoking in the back door of his bakery while she pulled her clattering sacks from Wallace’s car. （Baking bread, cooking mash—smells that might reasonably be confused, though Stanley had other stills squirreled away around the valley.） Stanley said, “How’d you like to expand your business, boyo?”
“I’m always looking for business,” she said. A small crisis of conscience: “But you know I’m not a boy.”
“It’s a girl under there?” He bent to peer beneath her cap brim. Narrowed eyes, a cloud of smoke, flour dust on hairy forearms. She was sure he was putting her on, indulging her disguise. “All right, well, how’d you like to expand your business, girly?”
* * *
—
By the time she crossed the railroad tracks, Marian had visited six houses, a veterans’ club, two doctors’ offices, and four restaurants. The dusk sky sagged with unfallen snow. At each stop she delivered baskets, some with only baked goods, some only liquor, some both. She knocked on doors; she descended into cellars; she took money from inside certain birdhouses and certain hollow trees and left bottles behind. Stanley didn’t let her make the big deliveries to speakeasies and roadhouses, which required more stealth and odder hours and ran the risk of hijacking. He kept her to the small orders. A pouch strung on a cord around her neck slowly filled with bills and coins, and after each round she handed the cash to Stanley, who peeled off a few bills for her, which she took home and deposited in one of her hiding places in the cottage （hollowed-out books, a pouch buttoned to the underside of the armchair）。 Stanley didn’t mind she was a girl. His other bottle men had stolen booze, tried to steal business. She didn’t.
The previous summer, she’d told Wallace she intended to leave school after her fourteenth birthday.
He’d been in his studio. He set down his brush, wiped his hands with a rag. “But why, Marian?” he said. “There is so much to learn.”
“I want to work. I’ve already started driving Mr. Stanley’s delivery truck.”
Wallace settled into an armchair, gesturing her into the other. “I’d heard.”
He wouldn’t interrogate her about what she delivered. He wouldn’t want to know; he’d already know anyway. She said, “The law says I only have to finish eighth grade, and it’s not fair you’re still having to take care of us when you didn’t want us. I’ll pay you good money for room and board.”