Heartland Junk (Part II): Sanctuary by Eli Nixon Read Free Book Online Page A

thirst of an army.
                  I was going to become a brewer.
                  There are four ingredients in beer: Malt, hops, yeast, and water. I didn't have malt—not yet—and I sure as hell didn't have any hop vines growing anywhere nearby, but I could at least improvise with what I had.
                  This required dipping into our precious stores of water, but I faced surprising little resistance when I began lugging gallon jugs of water, four each trip, up the stairs. Only Rivet had a comment for me, which was, "Save some for the fishes, maestro."
                  I emptied a little bit of water from each jug, then poured two pounds of sugar into each one, shook the hell out of them to dissolve the sugar, and topped them off with a pinch of yeast from those packets you can buy for baking your own bread. Instead of capping the jugs of brownish sugar water, I tore into the pack of condoms and performed an act that is surely in the top ten nightmares of every male on Earth: I poked a tiny hole in the tip of the condom, right in the sperm reservoir.
                  Beer generates carbon dioxide as it ferments. In a tightly capped vessel, these gases build pressure until the container explodes. When I'd spent a summer brewing beer with Rivet a few years ago, we ordered these plastic cylinders online that allowed carbon dioxide to escape without permitting the ingress of outside air into the bottle, which could carry bacteria and mold. Even the shakiest alky would snub moldy beer.
                  Since I didn't have any of those airlocks handy, I had to resort to condoms. I slid the base of the first condom over the mouth of the water jug, stretching it tight across the ribbed threads molded into the plastic. It hung limply down the side of the jug, a glistening, deflated slug. Within a few hours, however, it would inflate as the yeast in the jug chowed through the sugar and shit out alcohol and carbon dioxide. The pinprick hole in the tip of the condom would allow enough gas to escape without blowing the whole jug and spattering me with half-fermented sugar water, but since there would always be more pressure inside the bottle than outside—always pushing out through that little slit—contaminated air wouldn't be able to get inside and spoil the beer.
                  One by one, I condomed off the remaining jugs and stepped back to look at my handiwork. There were twelve jugs in all, lined up on the floor like pretty little ducks and filled with your basic Brew Science 101 toilet hooch. They made a man proud.
                  Next, I turned to the grape juice. "Grape" was a misnomer—I'd grabbed jugs of crangrape, blueberry-grape, raspberry-grape, blueberry-raspberry, blueberry-pomegranate, and a dozen other combinations of fruits and berries and artificial flavoring. Bloody thick, saccharine sweet, and chock full of corn syrup that would ferment like a dream. I ran out of condoms halfway through, so I taped squares of paper towel and coffee filters over the rest of the jugs' mouths. It would serve the same purpose, more or less.
                  Abby and I barely looked at each other for two days after my birthday, but on the third day, she helped me carry some jugs of water up the stairs, and after that she just sort of hung out on the third floor with me. We didn't say anything, but the silence wasn't empty. Her presence alone was a strange form of comfort. I liked having her around.
                  Theo joined us that afternoon and asked questions about what I was doing. I took him around the room and explained how each of the different brews worked, how the yeast and sugars and enzymes worked together to make alcohol, why there were "balloons" on all the jugs. Abby watched us closely, a small smile on her lips. I think she'd smiled once on the night of my birthday, but I'd never seen one stick