The Secrets of Benny Cruse

By Kevin Payton

Jimmie Lee Durham is just a regular guy with an extraordinarily normal life. His penchant for taking on people as projects leads him to one man, Benny Cruse, who will challenge his moral code in a major way. Jimmie reaches out to his brother, Cotton, who brings his own secrets into Jimmie's simple life. In the process, Jimmie learns a lot about himself. Injecting himself into the life of Benny Cruse forces Jimmie to lie, keep secrets, and live a covert life that is very uncomfortable. It's all for something greater, though, so Jimmie has to find a way to achieve that greater good without losing himself. Jimmie, Cotton, and Benny must take the journey of a lifetime. The physical trip is challenging enough, but the mental and emotional pilgrimage is what truly changes each one of them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098316372

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©2020 All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Print ISBN: 978-1-09831-636-5

eBook ISBN: 978-1-09831-637-2

Contents

Introduction

Part One: The Courtship

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Part Two: The Plan

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Part Three: The Trip

Part Four: The Aftermath

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Introduction

What’s so bad about a normal life? What seems to grab everyone’s attention is usually the extraordinary. People with amazing abilities always capture the imagination of others. Those are the smartest people; the athletes who can do things that are unheard of—hit a baseball farther, throw a perfect pass, run faster, jump higher. I could never do any of those things. It never mattered to me, though. Normal seemed so comfortable. With years of maturity and slow, incremental wisdom, I figured out that participating in life, interacting with people, developing relationships changes what I thought about what normal was and could be. Let’s face it, people aren’t that normal anymore. Everyone has a backstory. Everyone has a past and even a few dozen old skeleton bones in a closet somewhere. Maybe it’s a big, nasty bone or maybe it’s merely a simple knuckle of the pinky finger, but it’s a bone in the closet nonetheless. We all have them. If you choose to be an active participant in your surroundings, you’ll find that out. I did.

Part One: The Courtship

Chapter 1

Have you ever reached that point in life when you thought you had it all figured out? Maybe not all figured out, but you thought you had a good handle on things. For some people, it happens at a fairly young age. For most others, it takes a while. Some people need the scars and hardships that life hands out to them all before things become clear. For some lucky ones, maybe it’s a little easier. Either way, life is a continuous test that includes really hard questions. It’s like a perpetual game of Jeopardy where Alex Trebek never gets tired, and you don’t get to choose your category.

I didn’t answer all the questions correctly in my life, but I felt like I was barreling toward Final Jeopardy with some points. I was definitely in the game. For me, everything was quite predictable, until I met one guy who changed it all. We all take mental notes of our experiences and that’s our teacher. We all read people every single day, whether we know it or not. We continuously take all that information and filter it through our own moral code. That’s how we learn and grow. It’s also how we become comfortable with ourselves. I was pretty comfortable with myself, for the good or the bad. I was content with my family, my past, my decisions. Then that one guy made me step back and reconsider a lot of things. Our experience together made me reconsider how I looked at the world, other people, and myself. His past became my future. If we allow it, other people can change everything. If we allow it.

Chapter 2

I’m Jimmie Durham. Not James. My given name is Jimmie. The usage of middle names is common around here so most people call me Jimmie Lee. I grew up in a simple Kentucky town that just happened to be the capital city. Now, most capital cities in the country have a bit more to offer than just that big domed building where all the laws are made (and in some cases broken). Frankfort was ok, though. It’s like two towns, east side and west side, divided by the Kentucky river. When I was growing up, everyone seemed to work for state government or they made bourbon. At least that’s what I thought as a kid. I remember leaving my house each morning and seeing the dome of the Capitol and smelling sour corn mash cooking at the distilleries. Visitors always seemed to hate that smell. It was downright putrid to some. I simply loved that aroma. It made me feel like a Kentuckian. Back then, I didn’t have the first clue about what they were making and why it was such a big deal, but I did know that I sure loved that smell. As a true Kentuckian, I’ve learned so much about why that brown liquid grew to the level of a true libation from the gods, but at nine or ten years old, I just knew it meant I was home. It’s a distinctive smell I’ve never experienced anywhere else. I’d say Frankfort was a decent spot for us normal people.

I’m not especially trying to give extraordinary people a bad name. In fact, people who are brilliant, super athletic, crazy strong, or beyond courageous are, well, extraordinary. We normal folks simply outnumber them pretty dramatically. I’ve not done the proper research to provide the data on such a premise, but life has simply taught me that. At a reasonably early age, I knew I was destined for a fairly pedestrian life, and that was a great thing to me. I knew I didn’t have these special abilities that people write stories about, or who end up on 60 Minutes, and certainly not the SportsCenter Top 10 Plays. I also became very comfortable with that. I knew that I could live a wonderful life being normal. At eighteen-years-old or so, I knew what I wanted … an ordinary life and every so often to do some extraordinary things for people I come across. I thought that was a decent plan. I mean, what could go wrong, right? The lesson I learned, though, is that if you choose to actively participate in life around you, nothing is as normal as it might seem. Life comes at you fast, as the commercial says. I suppose if you lock yourself away and that becomes your normal then you might not encounter too many issues, except an occasional Wi-Fi outage and static on your satellite TV when it rains. But, if you engage with people, encounter life, include other humans in your journey, invest yourself in others … things are going to get weird.

Chapter 3

I had plenty of practice being ordinary. I grew up on the east side without too much excitement. Every so often, my older brother decided to liven things up with some kind of trouble. It was never too criminal, though. He was just a bit restless at times. He didn’t hold up liquor stores or anything. He apparently wanted everyone at Elkhorn Middle School to know his name, and they did. Our parents both worked in state government. They both had steady hours and were home every night for supper. They both were wonderfully normal people.

We lived in a modest-sized house and practiced typical American traditions. We went to church almost every Sunday, took a summer vacation with some regularity and, with the exception of my brother’s periodic capers, lived a very normal American life. After a modestly forgettable high school career, I did what most red-blooded boys with only slightly above average intelligence and no specific skills do … I went to college.

Like a lot of guys out there, I’d probably go back in time and do it all again. It was a great time. After graduation, I met an amazing woman named Janie Brunston. She was smart, from a great working-class family, beautiful, motivated, and most importantly … normal. Janie was everything a guy would want if he had a plan for an extraordinarily normal life. She became an elementary school teacher, for goodness sake. I was a decent human with a liberal arts degree and she was an elementary school teacher who every kid in town will love and every parent will want for their child’s teacher. The first years were amazing. We traveled some and took weekend trips we couldn’t begin to afford. We were making amazing memories. After a wonderful four years of marriage, the family thing started. The next phase of our wonderfully normal life was about to begin.

There is nothing normal about parenthood. When a woman carries a human being around in her belly for nine months and it pops out like that creepy thing in Alien, normal isn’t the word that comes to mind. This little creature we called Ryan, soon fit right in. He was a wonderful baby, toddler, and continued to grow into a normal kid with some truly extraordinary moments along the way. It was a fun time. A regular family doing regular things that made us happy and confirmed my original premise that an ordinary life can be a life really well-lived. Not even two years passed when Hannah made her appearance. Similar story. Everything went as planned and now we had the older son to protect and watch over his younger sister. It was just how it was supposed to be.

Normal people don’t always know what to do with their life when they finish high school, or even college. I mean, a guy with an engineering degree is going to be an engineer, right? A young lady who goes to medical school is going to be a doctor of some kind. When you graduate with a liberal arts degree, well then, who knows. You could end up any number of places. True to form, I ended up working for a distillery called Old James Harrod Distillery. James Harrod was the first man to settle in Kentucky in what is now Fort Harrod in Harrodsburg. Honestly, I don’t think he had anything to do with making whiskey, but he was the first dude here who thought it was a good spot to set up shop. Yep, I helped make Kentucky Straight Bourbon. Well, I didn’t actually make any. I did marketing, human resources, and whatever else needed to be done. It fit me well. I had really good people around me. I worked fairly regular hours, so I didn’t have to miss anything Ryan and Hannah did. It was a damn fine time to be in the bourbon business, too. The rest of the world had finally figured out why we enjoyed that brown liquor so much. Truth be told, I didn’t drink much of it, but boy did they love it in China and Japan. We couldn’t make it fast enough. Times were good. It was wonderfully normal. Just like in high school, my favorite time of the day was lunch. Old James Harrod sat in an older part of town. It was basically right in the middle of plenty of old, cool houses that had been there my whole life. There was a little diner within walking distance called Nanny’s that served the most amazing grilled pimento cheese sandwich. Southern caviar, for sure. I walked there for lunch at least three times a week when the weather was good. It was worth the trek. They basically made everything that reminded me that I’m a Kentuckian. It was also worth it since, during nice Kentucky weather, folks would sit outside on their porches and I made plenty of good friends during those walks to lunch. I had begun to know most of my regulars pretty well.

There was Orville Hoot Owl Taylor. He never told me where he got the nickname. I never pressed the issue. It always sounded kind of self-given to me. His was the first house I would encounter on my walk. He was retired from my very own distillery. The old dude loved me. His wife died in ’87, so without anyone to talk to on a regular basis, he had plenty to say to me. It was mostly old stories about how easy us youngins’ in the whiskey business had it with all this damn automation. He was a good, old guy so I listened and then disregarded most of his sage advice. Every so often, though, he would throw in something I could use. He was weirdly obsessed with the history of bourbon whiskey. He knew names and stories you won’t find on Google or even our dusty old museum. After a while, I figured out how to filter out the true mystery and romance behind the creation of the spirit that put us on the map.

A few houses down lived Lucille Bourne (no kin to Jason, as far as I know). She always offered me food. She knew I was headed to Nanny’s, but she usually insisted anyway. I always politely turned it down. I’m such a softy, though. Surely, everyone has experienced a sweet old lady who has been told for so long that her food is good that she finally believed it. She literally served a menu suspiciously similar to Nanny’s and believed in her sweet heart that it was just as good. It was most certainly not. It was fine, so I choked down more than one dry ham sandwich. Super sweet southern lady … bad cook.

The only house I wanted to avoid was that of Truman Muncy. He was a piece of work. He was a disgruntled old trial attorney who believed he got screwed on every case he ever tried. One day he insisted I sit a spell so he could tell me a story that sounded a lot like last week’s episode of Law & Order. He never had a client that was actually guilty and the prosecutor was always crooked. He was a sharp old cat for sure, but his grasp on the line between past and current reality was seriously fuzzy. I typically did everything I could do to get by with a wave.

Every now and then, at least one of them would invite me up to talk a while. These were (mostly) good old folks with some great stories. Some stories I heard several times and they’d take more liberties with the truth with each telling, but I’d always listen like it was the first time I’d heard them. It was a really fun part of the day and I missed it if I didn’t make that walk. It was during one of those walks that I met Benny. It started me on a path most guys who desire normality don’t take. I loved people and I loved stories, so naturally I especially loved good people with great stories. I really thought I had heard plenty of quality fiction, but Benny had a backstory I never bargained for.

Chapter 4

It was the early fall of 2017, which is a really fine time to be in Kentucky. Most days are comfortably warm and nights are cool. We had tailgate parties at football games, horses running at Keeneland and Churchill Downs, and were still cranking out that Kentucky Bourbon like there’s no tomorrow. I was on my regular walk to Nanny’s for a pimento cheese sandwich and I passed a house where, to that point, no one ever sat. I thought it had been uninhabited for years. On that day, Benny Cruse sat on that porch. He caught my eye immediately, mainly because no one was ever there and because you couldn’t miss him. He was an unusually large black man with grey hair and a scraggly grey beard. He wasn’t fat at all, but his size was simply imposing. Even intimidating. I had originally guessed he was pretty old, and I could tell this guy had really lived. I’m not exactly sure why, but it appeared to me he had been rode hard and put up wet a few times. I just had a strong feeling that he had some stories to tell. I made a decision that would change everything. I decided to do what any good Kentucky boy would do.

Hey, sir. My name is Jimmie. Most call me Jimmie Lee, I said.

He just nodded. That’s all. He didn’t say anything. You don’t do that in Kentucky. I was disappointed, I guess. I stood there for a few seconds that seemed much longer waiting for a response. Maybe he didn’t hear me. Maybe he was trying to think of something to say. I’d find out later that he was just sizing me up. I finally decided to keep walking to Nanny’s for my pimento cheese. I was a little miffed, so I got that deliciously fattening potato salad on the side as a personal reward for my disappointment. It was the kind made from real mayonnaise. I felt like I deserved a treat for some reason. I hoped the entire time that he’d be there on my way back. No luck. I passed back by his house and the porch was empty. I talked to those old folks almost every day and never had one of them stuck in my head the way he did that day. This guy had a mysterious way about him. It wasn’t because he didn’t talk to me. It was something else and I couldn’t put a finger on it. He wasn’t just staring out into the sky. He made intense eye contact with me and it felt like he could see my soul. I thought about this guy the rest of the day and night.

I decided that I would make the walk to Nanny’s every day until I met this guy. If I had to eat pimento cheese every day and gain twenty pounds, I was going to do it until he talked to me. So, the very next day, I made my walk from the distillery for lunch. As I approached his house, I saw him sitting there in the same old chair. It wasn’t even a rocking chair. Who sits on a porch in Kentucky in a chair that doesn’t even rock? This guy was different and I wanted to know why. As I approached his sidewalk, I was nervous. I mean, I have no idea why I was nervous. I stuck with my strategy as an overly friendly southerner.

Hey, sir. My name is Jimmie. Most call me Jimmie Lee, I said with extra conviction.

Another nod. I was livid. He never changed his expression. He sat motionless (since his chair didn’t rock). Again, I stood there waiting for something. Anything. He stuck to his guns. Never said a word.

Chapter 5

Kentucky is known for its southern hospitality. We wave at people on the road we don’t even know (especially if they’re in a pickup truck). We drink sweet tea, we love an authentic Kentucky Hot Brown, most listen to country music, and we always talk to people we don’t know. That’s just how it is. It’s pretty much a rule. This guy had grown from a mere curiosity to an old dude that was flat pissin’ me off. After a few more failed attempts, I decided to press the issue. I was going to build the courage to not take a nod for an answer. I built myself up the entire morning. It was a Tuesday because we were shipping out the twenty-year-old single barrel. That was a big day for us. As fate would have it, it was raining as lunchtime approached. I decided I didn’t care. Today was the day. I knew he’d be on that porch and, somehow, I knew he knew I’d come. I set out on the lunchtime walk I’d done a hundred times before. This time I was on a mission. I had a rain coat, but no hat. Again, I didn’t care. It