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moonshine.
    “Like I didn’t know that,” he told Jenny. He bit the end of his pen, then got back to his figures. He’d been bottling the stuff all year to meet the demand of Jamboree, with its private parties and inevitable drunken trysts. Even now, the still pushed forth his product. Thanksgiving and December were never too far away, bringing another spike in demand and more cash to feather Swarthbeck’s bed.
    “God bless Sammy Kelvig,” he said as he toasted Miss McCarthy again. The punctilious peckerwood could grate on a guy, but he’d made this Jamboree business a boon by turning it into a foot-tapping, body-swaying, beer-guzzling, rock-band-intensive tribute to town history. Sam Kelvig had a vision and he implemented it, and John Swarthbeck would by God make his annual nut on this event alone. Not bad for a guy with little more than some sugar-beet byproduct, yeast, water straight from city services, and a length of copper tubing.
    That girl had some nerve, Swarthbeck thought, ping-ponging back to Wanda Perkins. Somebody in town had done some gum-flapping, or the reporter was sourced up better than he was inclined to give her credit for. The thing was, he knew that no paperwork could come running back to his door. The forest service guys had been content to take the cub back—impressed, even, that the mayor had done such a good job of fattening him up, and for Swarthbeck it had been a relief, as he wasn’t quite sure what he’d do when the cub became a full-on bear, with appetites beyond his ability to sate. The cub had ended up in the sanctuary in Rapid City, disingenuously if accurately billed as an orphan, and Swarthbeck had even made a couple of pilgrimages out to see him. Now where was the harm in that? he wondered. As for the hooch, the feds had made the boundaries—and the considerable running room between them—perfectly clear: don’t embarrass us by selling the stuff out in the open, and we won’t come back to town and bust your still, embarrass you in front of your people, and throw your ass in the pen. Swarthbeck had found those terms agreeable indeed.
    The reporter had said Watford City was her next stop; she was going to dig into the way oil money had changed downtown and transformed a town built on agriculture. A “renaissance,” she called it. Five-dollar words aside, Swarthbeck had to think it didn’t amount to more than slapping fancy siding on a rattrap of a house. Watford, he sniffed. You couldn’t pay me enough . “Well,” he’d told her, “be sure to come on back for Jamboree. We’ll show you a good time.” And she’d said she wouldn’t miss it, that she’d be back Saturday with Larry Grubbs. Swarthbeck figured he could get on her good side yet.
    The mayor checked his figures one last time. Finding them satisfactory, he capped his pen, gave Jenny McCarthy a little squeeze where it counted, silenced John Coltrane for the night, and wheeled the dolly holding cases of spirits toward the door and into his office proper, where they would wait for placement with their rightful owners.
     
    Swarthbeck drove into the sullen blue of night, up Telegraph Hill and toward his place. The old farm lay three miles due southwest of town, set off the road a piece and given shelter by a cottonwood windbreak. He ciphered out some quick math in his head to put recent events in perspective. Martha had run off thirty-one months ago now, chugging hard toward three years, and the mayor found himself caught between amazement that he’d survived the breach and consternation that he still didn’t understand exactly what had happened. She’d never been afraid of him, which made her something of an anomaly in town. She said she was going, and she promptly did so, leaving precious little time for Swarthbeck to say anything of value. Her point had been that she didn’t want this anymore, and didn’t want him for sure. That she was now living in Grand Forks and going to college, at her well-curated