Whiskey

He and that gang of his lived in a little bunch of lousy shacks with leaky roofs near the Forgotten Works. They lived there until they were dead. I think there were about twenty of them, all men, that like him, were no good.

First he lived there alone. He got in a big fight one night with Charley and told him to go to hell and said he would sooner live by the Forgotten Works.

“To hell with him” he said, and then built himself a lousy shack by the Forgotten Works. He spent his time digging around in there and making whiskey from things.

Then a couple of other men went and joined up with him, and from time to time, every once in a while, a new man would join them. You could always tell who they would be.

Before they joined the gang, they would always be shifty and unhappy or have “light fingers” and talk a lot about things that good people did not understand nor wanted to.

They would grow more and more nervous and no account and then finally you would hear about them joining his gang and now they were working with him in the Forgotten Works, and being paid in whiskey that he made from other things.

-paraphrased from In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan, 1968