Ranchero Read online

  “All right, all right. It’s all coming back.”

  “Get up.”

  He made five minutes of groaning labor out of just standing from the ground. Then the fool tried to bolt, and Desmond put a shoulder in him and knocked him back over. I tapped him again with the shovel, just because.

  “Where’s my car?” I asked him.

  “Where’s my money?” he wanted to know.

  “Explain to him,” I said to Luther, “I’ll make his brains leak out of his ears.”

  And Luther turned toward Percy Dwayne and opened his mouth to speak, but Percy Dwayne headed him off by reminding Luther, “I’ll kill you.”

  “Where’s my car?”

  Percy Dwayne indulged in what I believed to be stalling, which I decided to take as provocation for further shovel blows.

  “Where is it?”

  That’s when he told me about the worst thing I could hear. “I don’t know,” Percy Dwayne said.

  “Hold this,” I told Desmond, and gave him the shovel.

  I grabbed Percy Dwayne by his damp blue shirtfront and helped him up off the ground so I could pitch him into the corrugated warehouse siding.

  “Where is it?” I asked him.

  He wouldn’t talk, just shook his head and dithered, so I smacked him once across the jaw with the back of my open hand.

  “Did you sell it?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “Then where is it?”

  “I kind of gave it to a guy.”

  “That doesn’t sound like you. Does that sound like him?”

  Luther told me it didn’t sound like Percy Dwayne at all.

  “What guy?”

  He stalled again, and I cocked my fist but didn’t hit him.

  “Bad guy,” Percy Dwayne told me.

  “You gave it to him or he took it?”

  Percy Dwayne nodded, which I found unhelpful, so I did in fact hit him again.

  “Couldn’t we be doing all this over at the Sonic?” Desmond wanted to know.

  Desmond wouldn’t settle for anything less than the Indianola Sonic, and Percy Dwayne rode over folded up between Luther and Desmond’s shoulder. He whined most of the way over, told us how the world was stacked against him. Percy Dwayne had a thing for going around wounded all the time. Everybody owed him something. We’d all made out but him. There’s no telling what heights he could have scaled if the world didn’t have it in for him.

  I didn’t have to hit him once he’d started with that crap. Desmond knocked him silly before he could even get moaning good. Desmond was a 350-pound black man in the Mississippi Delta. If the world was stacked against somebody, it was more than likely him.

  Percy Dwayne had the gall to ask me to replace his lunch. Luther, in the way of a peace offering, bought his uncle another corn dog, but chili cheese Tater Tots didn’t strike Luther as food any sane man would eat. That chafed Percy Dwayne, who was hardly hoping for dietary advice from Luther, and they got into a family spat all piled up in the Geo’s backseat.

  Desmond’s preferred space was down at the end of the car hop line facing back toward the corner of the redwood fence that separated the Sonic from the duplex shared by the Long John Silver and the Taco Bell. This was Desmond’s Zen garden. Three Coney Islands and a sunny day and Desmond was about as close to heaven on earth as he might get.

  He wasn’t inclined to tolerate squabbling, preferred no speaking at all, and he certainly wouldn’t take his lunch with chatter from Duboises, which Desmond conveyed to both of them together with the meaty palm of his hand.

  “Shit, buddy!” Desmond had caught Percy Dwayne entirely by surprise. “Is knocking people around all you guys know?”

  “That’s rich,” I told him, “coming from you.”

  “I needed my TV,” Percy Dwayne said, almost by way of apology.

  “All you had to do was pay on it.”

  “Things been tight,” he whined.

  I had to divide my attention between Percy Dwayne and keeping an eye out for Dale or his pinheaded colleagues on the Indianola PD.

  “Now then,” I said to Percy Dwayne once our food had come and Desmond was fully occupied with his condiment packets. “Where’s my Ranchero?”

  “I knew,” Percy Dwayne said, “I should have stayed clear of that son of a bitch.”

  “Start at the beginning,” I told Percy Dwayne, but it soon became plain he wasn’t sure where the beginning might be.

  “I know this guy down by Spanish Fort. Name’s Eugene.”

  “I know him,” Luther said. “Comes around selling shit sometimes,” he told me. “You know—stole shit mostly.”

  “Stickiest goddamn fingers you ever seen,” Percy Dwayne said. “So I’m down there around Rolling Fork getting some gas…” And here Percy Dwayne winked at me and grew vehicularly chummy. “That damn thing flat burns it,” he said.

  It hardly seemed worth the effort to smack him again.

  “So I’m filling it up,” Percy Dwayne told me, “and here comes Eugene in that piece-of-shit thing he drives. It’s like four different trucks slapped together, and he hauls all his stole shit in it. Anyway, he sees that truck thing of yours.”

  “Ranchero,” I told him.

  “Yeah, that. And he gets all worked up about it because he says he knows this fellow that’d go flat to pieces for it. I can tell this is some guy Eugene’s looking to get in with. So I ask him, ‘Who is he?’ But he won’t say. Just tells me this guy’d probably give me real money for the thing.”

  “So you sold it?” Percy Dwayne was making me tired.

  “I fucking wish. Went kind of crooked after that.”

  Percy Dwayne went back to his corn dog and gnawed on it with commitment until I snatched it from him and flung it out the window.

  Then Desmond studied me in such a way as to make me understand he couldn’t begin to countenance that sort of behavior at a Sonic.

  So I got out of the Geo, picked up that corn dog, and laid it on the tray. Percy Dwayne was picking grit off it by the time I’d settled back into the car.

  “Crooked how?” I asked him.

  “Eugene wants me to follow him back to his place. I don’t want to go there, and Sissy sure as shit ain’t hoping to pay him a visit.”

  “Sissy?”

  “The missus,” Luther said.

  “Eugene says this guy he knows’ll pay real money for that Ranchero, and I don’t want it really because—I’ll tell you something—it ain’t too awful good for much. Can’t haul nothing. Carry maybe what? A quarter cord of wood? Ain’t no kind of truck and too tight inside for a car. It’s no wonder they don’t make them anymore.”

  Eugene, as it turned out, lived in a house down on the False River that runs through the Delta National Forest. He was one of those mud cats with a place in the swamp, up on stilts and more or less out of the way of the alligators. Him or his people had been there a while with rights and claims and privileges, and as the national forest had grown and spread, it had just filled in around them.

  “So you went to Eugene’s place after all?” I asked Percy Dwayne.

  He nodded and then managed an expression of considered regret, which I’d have to say is fairly rare for Delta cracker trash.

  They’ll regret taking a hit at the casino blackjack tables, and they’ll sometimes regret being caught at a crime once they’re on their way to Parchman, but Delta crackers as a rule are forward-looking people if by forward-looking you mean a scant ten minutes ahead.

  “Yeah,” Percy Dwayne said at last with something approaching rue. “We followed Eugene to his place.” Then he shook his head and grunted—kind of a triumph for a Dubois without a gun pointed at him.

  “Give me the short version,” I suggested to Percy Dwayne.

  “They got took,” he told me.

  “Who?”

  “Sissy and PD Jr. Your goddamn Ranchero.”

  “Took?”

  Percy Dwayne nodded.

  “What exactly does that mean?�
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  “Eugene’s buddy … who ain’t Eugene’s buddy … swooped in and got them all.”

  “Kidnapped?” I asked him.

  “Ain’t that what took means!?”

  Now Percy Dwayne was making Desmond and Luther tired as well.

  “Didn’t I tell you,” Percy Dwayne reminded us, “the whole goddamn thing went crooked?”

  THIRTEEN

  “Gee,” he said. “You know, like Guy but Gee.”

  “He’s French?” I asked Percy Dwayne.

  He shook his head. “Some half-assed Acadian fuck stick.”

  “Tell me you ain’t messing with him!” Luther was fairly shouting. As it turned out, he knew Percy Dwayne’s half-assed Acadian fuck stick by his purely diabolical reputation. “Not that guy!”

  “Gee,” Percy Dwayne told him.

  “Who is he?” By now I was more anxious to hear from Luther than his uncle. Luther at least knew how to tell a thing straight.

  “Got run out of New Orleans. Feds or something. Set up down around Vicksburg. Been coming north ever since.”

  “What’s his thing?’

  “Meth mostly,” Luther told me, “but he’ll move whatever he can. Deep into hash and some kind of Ecstasy bullshit for a while. But he’s cooking meth all over these days. Illegals do it for him.”

  “And he took my car?” I asked Percy Dwayne.

  “And Sissy,” he told me, “PD Jr., too.”

  “What the hell for? A meth dealer / kidnapper? Who has the fucking time?”

  Percy Dwayne shrugged and then rubbed his fingers and thumb together. “Wants three thousand. And that’s just for them. He’s figuring on keeping the car.”

  Percy Dwayne didn’t seem too bothered by the trouble his family was in.

  “This guy ain’t no damn good,” Luther told me.

  And Percy Dwayne said, “Gee.”

  “Calvin said you were taking drugs instead of money.”

  “Hoping to turn them around, make a little off the top.” He sounded like a man whose wife was home in the kitchen making dinner.

  “Heard of this guy?” I asked Desmond.

  “Gee,” Percy Dwayne said.

  Desmond had finally gotten his Coney Islands dressed to suit him and decided to take a bite of it first and answer my question in time.

  Desmond nodded. Desmond chewed. “Killed a boy I know.”

  “Really?”

  “Must have,” Desmond told me. “Nobody else needed him dead.”

  “You supposed to deliver the cash?”

  Percy Dwayne nodded.

  “When?”

  “That ain’t all worked out yet.”

  “You don’t have the first fucking idea what you’re up to, do you?” I said to Percy Dwayne.

  Of course he got defensive and pitiful all at the same time. He knew just what he was doing and the world was stacked against him.

  “You know how to reach this Guy?” I asked him.

  “Through Eugene,” he said.

  “How are you going to reach Eugene?”

  “I could call him, I guess, but your damn phone’s near dead and it don’t have none of my numbers in it.” He said it like it was all my fault.

  “You hearing this?” I asked Desmond.

  Desmond held up a hand to suggest that he was unavailable at the moment. That he wasn’t about to let any cracker fool spoil his Sonic lunch.

  “We’re just going to be quiet for a minute and let Desmond eat.”

  “My corn dog’s got shit on it,” Percy Dwayne told me, and showed me some corn dog grit.

  “Shhhh,” I said, and put a finger to my lips.

  While I was waiting for Desmond to eat his lunch, I used the leisure to piece together Percy Dwayne’s previous twenty-four hours, which had started off with me and him and that fireplace shovel. He’d then gone joyriding in a freshly stolen calypso coral Ranchero, had headed down to the southern Delta where Duboises were thick on the ground.

  He’d then run by chance across Eugene at a Rolling Fork gas station, and Eugene had thrown him in with that evil Acadian fuck stick Guy, who’d taken his wife and his son and the car he’d originally stolen from me. Now he was hoping to buy them back or dope them up or something. I wasn’t entirely clear on what he meant to do or why.

  That was one full day, but I had to figure me and Desmond could match it. I’d started out on the wrong end of Percy Dwayne’s late morning. We’d roughed up K-Lo, put Dale down, and let some Mexicans loose. Then we’d beat down a couple of fellows we didn’t even know on Longstreet Street in beautiful Creekside Estates just outside Yazoo.

  That had led us to Tootie’s, where we’d packed Luther upside down on the back Geo floorboard. Then an evening featuring Angela Marie—and I dwelled on her for a moment—up in Memphis, in her office, being responsible and running things. K-Lo and his burglars seemed like it happened a year ago by now. A slumber party at my garage apartment, a trip to Webb. My new friend Calvin in his dashiki with an Austrian machine pistol underneath—about the last thing I expected to find in Webb.

  And now me and Percy Dwayne had closed the circle—me without my TV payment and him without Gil’s car.

  I couldn’t help but think how very different my twenty-four hours would have been if Percy Dwayne had just put down twenty dollars on his television or had even sat at his dinette with me and told me why he couldn’t. I wondered what we’d be up to if he’d just acted like a grown man. Certainly not sitting four-deep in a Geo thinking about a diabolical Acadian fuck stick who’d been driven from New Orleans by the Feds.

  It was maddening to contemplate, really, much of it easily avoidable, so I tried to go philosophical and take it all in stride. I failed at it, of course. I usually do.

  The plan we worked up was to go down Delta by way of Rolling Fork, stop somewhere there, and make another plan. I offered to drop Luther out anywhere along the way since we weren’t intending to travel down by Yazoo. Desmond was cutting south and west over toward 61.

  “No sir,” Luther told me, and he made noises like we were all kind of in this thing together. Who the hell would he be, he seemed to want to suggest, if he let his uncle face his trials alone.

  It rang hollow, of course. There was the chance of swag at Eugene’s, and Luther had a business stake in seeing us take the Acadian fuck stick down.

  “I’ll just ride on, if that’s all right.” He almost made it sound noble.

  Desmond was drifting and whistling and distracted about some farming he’d done back in his skinny past, which is why he missed his turn and ended up driving all the way to Highway 1. That road runs north and south over by the Mississippi, a part of the Delta that made me antsy even from the first.

  Something got in my head about being backed against the river between the bridges up by Greenville and the one down Vicksburg way. I felt like cornered vermin anywhere west of Leland. If you found trouble back in those parts, you were well and royally stuck. About the only thing you could do was fight or drown.

  Delta boys like Desmond, though, were used to being hemmed in. That was part of the general psyche of the place. So we rode down Highway 1, and I carried on like I was fine, but I was living for Desmond to cut back east, which he took his sweet time about. He finally turned at Grace and headed down past Otter Bayou to Lorenzen. Then he crossed the tracks and we came out hard by Rolling Fork.

  Percy Dwayne remained indignant and pouty most of the way. He made the occasional pitiful noise about having his wife and his son snatched from him, accused me of worrying about nothing but a car.

  He did his whole put-upon, victimized, it’s-so-hard-to-be-a-white-guy thing that nobody with bat sense could possibly put an ounce of actual stock in. If he’d been black, he would have been rotting in Angola or Parchman for years already. Even cracker trash in the Delta got a better shake than Desmond and his ilk.

  We stopped at the very service station where Percy Dwayne had met Eugene because Percy Dwayne had figured he could re
member how to get to Eugene’s from there. But Desmond and I together had soon noticed that something was off with Percy Dwayne. He wasn’t acting like a man who was burning to get his wife and baby back. He didn’t seem to have the drive you’d expect from a fellow in his shoes.

  He went in the grocery mart after a soda and loitered for a while.

  “What’s up with him?” I asked Desmond, and together we put the question to Luther.

  “Don’t want to talk against him,” Luther told us by way of preamble before acquainting me and Desmond with a raft of Percy Dwayne’s failings as a Dubois, as a husband, as a man. “Could be Sissy just up and left him and ain’t hoping to get found. Could be Percy Dwayne was telling damn lies all along.”

  “Then what’s really up?” I asked him.

  Luther shrugged. “Who the hell knows?”

  “Tell me,” I said to Luther, “about his wife.”

  He shrugged in a what’s-to-tell sort of way. “He met her in Jackson. Some buddy of his threw them together. She comes from Vardamans over near Starkville.”

  “What do you think of her?”

  Luther’s face pinched up like he was smelling something unsavory. He shook his head a little. “She’ll do any damn thing.”

  “Sort of girl to let herself get … kidnapped?”

  “Can’t figure why anybody’d want to take her. She’d cut your liver out if you gave her half a chance.”

  “What are you thinking?” Desmond asked me.

  “The Ranchero needs saving,” I told him. “Sissy and that baby? I’m not so sure about them.”

  “What difference does it make?” Luther wanted to know

  “If the bullets start flying,” I said, “I want to know who they’re flying from.”

  “What bullets!?” Luther asked me.

  “Won’t come to that probably.”

  I glanced at Desmond for reassurance, but Desmond looked like a man persuaded that everything comes to a gunfight in the end.

  FOURTEEN

  Percy Dwayne finally came out of the grocery mart and joined us. He’d been reading the trading post. He’d found an El Camino fixer-upper near Belzoni. He’d torn the page out so he could show me the ad.