Wrong Side of the Briar Patch 24/27
Title: Wrong Side of the Briar Patch
Author: NDF/TS Blue
Fandom: Dukes
Rating: PG, maybe. It's not quite all sunshine and roses, anyway.
Summary: It's a summer of freedom and hardship, of love and calamities. Daisy and Bo have just graduated into adulthood and Luke is back from war. It ought to be the best time of their lives, but one disaster follows another. Who would want the Dukes hurt? Prequel, gen.
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Twenty-four: Dangerous with a Big, Black D
August 3, 1974
It was Luke's fault. She'd swear to that later. Luke had said he was off to Black Ridge, and then refused to answer any other calls on the CB. Jesse had moved quickly after that. Just-
"Follow me!"
-and the pickup's door was yanked open with a screech of complaint.
Or maybe it was Enos' fault. (But she didn't really want it to be. So much was already Enos' fault and besides, Luke was easier to think about.)
"Daisy," Enos said, distracting her from what she wanted to do. Which was to run for the passenger side her uncle's truck and hop in. "Reckon it's best if you stay behind, now. This could get ugly and I couldn't live with myself if anything ever happened to you."
Jesse's engine started; Molly was moving toward the passenger door. Heck, even Rosco had some worthwhile forward momentum, but Daisy and Enos were stuck where they were. Frozen to bare patches of the farmyard while the world moved and changed around them. Doors slamming and engines revving.
"I can look out for myself," she said, her face hotter than the morning sun. Her hair was in her eyes and she shoved it back with something close to violence. Tangles caught in her fingers and it hurt. "Bo's my cousin," was some kind of accusation. About love and trust, and things she didn't have time to work out. "I'm going."
"Daisy," Enos complained, but she already had him by the elbow. Propelling him toward his father's car, and all she really meant to do was deposit him there, then run back to Uncle Jesse. But Molly had taken up residence in the passenger side of the bench seat and Jesse was waving out his window as the pickup started to roll. So Daisy shoved Enos into his father's car, then across the bench seat just far enough so she could hop in and get behind the wheel herself. It wasn't exactly comfortable, half on his lap, half on the vinyl seat, but she could reach the pedals and the key was right there under her hand. The engine was coughing to life and they were moving before she had a lot of time to think about what she was doing.
Jerking forward through the dust that Jesse was leaving behind and Enos let out a squeak of surprise as she shifted roughly into second. Little jerk when the car took a heartbeat or two to catch up to her intentions, while Enos started squirming out from underneath her.
"Daisy," he tried.
"Now Enos," she cut him off. "I ain't got time to argue with you. Bo's already in trouble and Luke's headed that way, too. We're going after them, and I'm driving."
If Enos had an answer to that she didn't hear it.
It was simple, really. Uncle Jesse had wasted a couple of precious minutes insisting that Luke wait for reinforcements, followed by barked demands that he acknowledge his obedience over the CB airwaves.
Luke came from a good family, no one could argue with that. Their hearts were in the wrong place though - always on their sleeves - at least when it came to this sort of thing. When it came to trouble. When it came to Bo.
Adorable kid that he'd always been, charmer with a big smile and far too much blond hair for anyone's good, Bo was the link that made everyone's chain weak. Not that Bo himself was the problem - he'd always been able to handle himself better than most people gave him credit for - just, things tended to go awry because of how everyone felt about him.
(Luke included. It was Bo's damn birthday and where was the boy? In the hands of vengeful old Duke family competitor, that was where.)
Felt strange to be driving Tilly out in the broad morning light, but then again, maybe she had as much of a say in the outcome of this as any of the rest of them. She was a moonshine runner known for her speed and craftiness and her ability to just about disappear into thin air, and it was Bo who could coax the best out of her. In his hands she wasn't just great, she was legendary, and she probably wanted him back as much as any of them did. But she could be impartial about it, straightforward. She wasn't shedding any tears or begging Luke to be careful or to wait for anything at all. She was just rumbling underneath him, complicit in his radio silence and taking him where he needed to go as fast as she could roll.
Poison Ivy, that was the name that had sailed over the CB airwaves, and she was dangerous with a big, black D. Luke had heard all about her in his scab-kneed youth. So had Bo, but that boy never was much of a student. Didn't retain anything that wasn't a girl's name and number, never did a lick of math except to figure out how long it was until lunch.
But back in the days when sitting on the couch meant swinging his legs because they were too short to reach the ground (and that meant getting pulled onto Jesse's lap to make him be still) Luke used to get an earful about the Reaper (who was Thaddeus Reape by day) and Poison Ivy, and how the two of them had banded together and tried to form their own tri-county moonshine syndicate. They'd been ruthless and dirty, eliminating competition by any means necessary. They'd chased old Evan McCarthy right off of Dead Man's Cliff by impersonating revenuers in a simple black sedan. They intimidated customers into buying only from them, but their still was built out of an old Ford radiator, so their moonshine wasn't safe to drink. Not that it mattered when all they wanted was the money their wares could bring in, and if folks didn't want to buy, Poison Ivy would send her brothers out to collect a "tax" all the same. And wise men were right to be afraid of her. Jesse always said she'd buried far too many husbands for them all to be natural deaths.
Jesse had formed a coalition amongst some of the more honest moonshiners - Henstep and Sunshine and old Hard Luck, those were the first ones. Then later on Swamp Molly had joined, then Newtie, and finally, J.D. Hogg.
From there the details got fuzzy. Jesse always said little pitchers had big ears. Must have been talking about Bo, but it didn't matter, because that part of the story didn't get told in its full glory. All Luke knew for sure was that Jesse came up with a plan with which J.D. Hogg didn't agree, but the democratic vote went Jesse's way. And the plan had worked well enough that The Reaper and Poison Ivy had been caught by the state police and tried for their crimes.
The Reaper turned on Ivy and got a plea deal for 10 years, but only served five of it before his heart gave out. Poison Ivy got put away for a long time - that was how the tale was always told, and that was all Luke knew. Molly had gone back to the swamp, everyone else had picked up their businesses where they left off, and with the threat of the Reaper and Ivy gone, J.D. Hogg had tried a few tricks of his own and plummeted out of favor with Jesse.
All those tales had fallen away years ago, when Lavinia died and Jesse mellowed and there were more pressing problems to worry about.
But now, for whatever reason, Jesse thought Ivy was the one who'd kidnapped Bo. The family and all the friends they could scrape together on short notice were headed up to Black Ridge (and that explained why he and Bo had just about gotten their hides tanned that time they'd "discovered" that old shack up there and turned it into a one-day hideout) to rescue him. But none of them were in the right frame of mind to do it. They were angry and upset and worried, and they were fools.
Luke cleared his head of all the thoughts that didn't matter. About the past, about the way it had left him with so dang little, and even that much he'd had to hold onto with both hands and fight, kick and scratch for or it'd slip away. About how Bo could twist his stomach up in boatswain's knots with as little as a scraped knee, about how his cousin never had been known for holding his temper and if Poison Ivy and any goons she might have hired had threatened or even just annoyed him, Bo's mouth had probably dug him into the deep mud. Lord knew, he could be bleeding and broken. He could have a few bullet holes in him by now.
But Luke wasn't going to think about that. It was simple. Just had to focus on what he needed to do, what he had by way of assets and liabilities.
He had to get up to that crumbling shack over on Black Ridge as fast as he could, and he had about two things going for him. One was his military training and the other was however little he had by way of the element of surprise.
Everything else was a liability. He had no weapons, no cover of darkness, nothing but his own ingenuity to rely on. He had a bunch of help coming, but then again, they weren't trained for this sort of thing, not even as much as the freshest Marine recruit he'd commanded back in the war. More than that, they were people he'd known all his life, people he loved and while he never liked seeing anyone hurt, watching one of his family or friends fall prey to whatever violence this Ivy could unleash would be excruciating - but no. He wasn't thinking about that.
He was a Marine sergeant on a mission. He was about to have a squadron to command. (And what a squadron. Keeping Molly in line was a boggling notion all by itself. Throw in Alice and Rosco and the loose cannon that Cooter could be and he just about had a headache from trying to figure out how he was going to control them all.) They were young (some of them) and naïve (most of them) and vulnerable (all of them). But they were eager and committed, too.
And about all Luke could do to help them was to get there first, to scout the area and make a plan. Which meant a lot of fast thinking in a very short time. It was a dang good thing he had Tilly's wheels under him.
"You got any plans on feeding me?"
If Luke were here, he'd roll his eyes, he'd say something about Bo and food and how the two were lovers never meant to be parted. But it had been hours. Going on a day now, close enough to count anyway. It had been far too long since he'd eaten.
Besides, there seemed to be someone missing. First, his captors had been talking about needing Velma, but soon after Kevin and Jeremy had returned from wherever the van was parked, this Velma had shown up. She wasn't much of anything to look at. Maybe a couple years older than him with a nice enough body, but a sneer on her face that looked like it had been born there. Besides, she had a husband, which immediately made her less interesting. Especially when the man in question showed up sometime after she had, looking like a mole or a vole or just plain something that belonged underground. Squinty-eyed and pointy-nosed, and if Velma hadn't waited for someone better than him to come along, well, she must have been plain desperate. Desperate women weren't attractive. Then again, they were easy to wrap around your little finger, and Bo was good at doing that.
So now there were five of them: Ivy, Kevin, Jeremy, Velma, and Bob the mole-faced husband. And amongst them, they mustered enough smarts to make up about one brain, and that was mostly in Ivy's head.
Apparently they didn't have anything by way of soap, either. Hadn't anytime in their whole lives, if the overwhelming smell of sweat was any indication.
Now muscle, they had plenty of that. Any of the men alone would be a serious opponent. All three of them together would be impossible for him to beat in a fight, and they were just stupid enough to keep beating on him even if he was knocked out cold.
But they were also stupid enough that Bo could mess with them. Just keep throwing words out at them until a few stuck, and they started fighting amongst themselves. Time wasn't anything he could measure by this point, but if he had to guess, he'd say that it had only taken minutes for him to get them at each other's throats. Now he just had to keep them there.
"Because I'm really hungry."
Jeremy - or maybe it was Kevin; he had been never properly introduced to any of them - let the chair he'd been rocking back in flop forward onto all four legs again.
"No," Velma snapped at him. He knew who she was because there were only two women here and the other one was the creepily flirtatious Aunt Ivy, with whom Bo had spent plenty enough time, thank you very much. Trying like heck not to tell her anything important while she asked him awkward questions about Jesse and kept touching his hair. "We ain't going to feed you."
And that was all Jeremy (or Kevin, the one who had been teetering on his chair) needed to know. "Why not, Vel? You figure you're too good to cook for us anymore?"
The other Kevin-or-Jeremy snorted his agreement with that sentiment, as he spent time carving something into the already disastrous little table around which most of them were huddled.
"Yeah," Velma snapped right back at him. Her husband stood behind where she was sitting in one of the chairs, squeezing her shoulder and leveling a hard glare at the two Kevin-Jeremys. "I reckon it wouldn't do you two any harm to lose some weight. Or you could learn to cook for yourselves," which made one of the two squint hard at her. Bo could relate. Every now and then Daisy would get a wild hair about how he or Luke learn to cook, and it never made him too happy, either. "Which would amount to the same thing since can't neither of you take care of a single thing without me." That sounded like Daisy, too (and that was half of what Bo was counting on).
"Cooking ain't taking care of ourselves. Hunting up the meat, that's the important thing. All you got to do is-"
"Would you all quit that infernal noise?" That was Aunt Ivy, and Bo was counting on that, too. Every time she took to lecturing her kin, she turned her attentions away from him. Which left Bo with a minute or two to try to work through the knots on his ropes. "And just sit in peace for a while. This will all be over soon." Of course, it would be a lot easier to get through the ropes if Bo had his knife. But as dumb as this band of… whatever they were… was, they'd been smart enough to take his knife out of his pouch sometime when he was out cold.
"Not soon enough," the one guy said - the one that was carving up the table. With Bo's knife and that was just annoying. He was going to leave it dull enough that it wouldn't cut through melted butter.
"Soon," Aunt Ivy asserted. Harrumphs all around, and then there was silence.
"I'm still hungry, though," Bo pointed out. "Thirsty, too." He offered up his most innocent smile. He was an honest guy, after all, a Duke. (Too honest - he was plenty thirsty, and maybe he'd been trying to ignore that little fact until now.) "Don't suppose I could trouble you for some water?"
That set them to squabbling again. About how Bo wasn't the only thirsty one and how much trouble was it, really, to get some water? Well, did any of them see a sink in here?
No, Bo didn't. No sink, just like there hadn't been one in here that afternoon when he and Luke had stumbled upon this place as kids. But as long as the rest of them were busy pointing out the lack of running water to each other, he could keep trying to loosen the bottom of the knot. He was getting somewhere, maybe. At least he thought he was, but it was hard to tell when one of his hands was bruised and swollen from where it had been nearly crushed in the struggle of the night before, and both of them were pretty numb by now.
"There's the creek," the one who liked to rock his chair up onto two feet was saying. "Reckon someone could fetch some water back here from there."
"And by someone, you mean me, right?" Velma answered back, and the argument started up again about who did more work than everybody else.
New skin on the palms of his hands and pads of his fingers where they were still healing from the burns, making the rope harder to grip, harder to manipulate. But he was getting somewhere; he had more slack around his wrists. It wouldn't be long now.
"Now, if we was at the Boar's Nest," he mused, right up into the middle of their arguing. Smile on his face that wasn't even planned, because he could just picture himself in the Boar's nest right now, and the image made him happy. "I wouldn't have to go nowhere to get a drink. Why, I'd have girls fighting each other for the chance to bring me one." And then the feeling faltered and stumbled. Almost fell. He was supposed to be out with Luke tonight, drinking his first legal beer. Today was his birthday.
"Me too," one of the Kevin-Jeremys echoed.
"Hell, wouldn't no one bring you nothing," Velma was saying back. "Unless it was a bag to put over your ugly face."
She kind of had a point there. Bo smirked in spite of himself. Downright grinned all over again, because all he really had to do was get himself free. Well, that and outrun some bullets. Should be a cinch.
"Shut up, before I smack you in the mouth," got snapped back at Velma.
"You just watch what you say to her." That was Bob.
He was close. So close to being untied. His hands were loose enough that he thought he could easily throw the ropes off when the right moment came. He still needed his feet free if he was going to run, though. The ropes wrapped around his shoulders would fall away easily enough.
"Or you'll what? You ain't going to do nothing to me. Aunt Ivy wouldn't let you. You ain't even technically a Culpepper."
And he was going to need to run. He'd buy himself a few seconds with their infighting and maybe a few more with surprise, but after that it would be all up to him to move faster than they could shoot him.
"He's married to me, ain't he? That makes him a Culpepper."
"No, Vel, that makes you a Donnelly. Ain't neither of you Culpeppers anymore."
But it was tricky, because Ivy was mostly ignoring the fighting this time. She wasn't staring at Bo with that strange fixation anymore, but she was still facing his general direction. Looking past him, and too much wiggling on his part would catch her eyes again.
"I'm more Culpepper than you are."
He shifted his weight, tried to make it look like he was just stiff, and not like he was trying to get his hands down near his feet. Seemed to work okay. Ivy was still staring off over his head, anyway.
"How do you figure?"
Meanwhile the rest of them were still arguing. He shifted again, felt for the knot that bound his legs, touched it with his fingertips. He had enough slack now to untie it quickly. As a matter of fact, it was already coming loose. Of course, he'd have to just about kiss his own knees to get it all the way free.
"She's only your aunt, but Ivy's my ma."
As if the sound of her name had startled her, Ivy turned toward the group of younger folks. "Hush now," she said.
"That don't even make no sense," Kevin-or-Jeremy blurted.
"Hush, I said!" Ivy said in an urgent hiss that stopped the fools from sniping at each other. Then she was staring back over Bo's head. The rest of the group turned their heads to see what she was looking at. Bo tried to do the same, but the back to the chair was too high. All he knew was that there was sunlight coming through a window over there somewhere.
"Well, I'll be." A slow smile crept onto Ivy's face. It wasn't a precisely pretty thing to see, not with the cruel curve at the corner of her lips. "It's the other one. Well, well. Bo, I reckon we'll keep you around a bit longer. And once we get your cousin in here, I reckon Jesse Duke's going to have to negotiate with old Poison Ivy after all. Go get him, boys!"