Ranchero Read online

  “That won’t quite do,” I told Percy Dwayne, who hadn’t guessed it would.

  “Where to?” Desmond asked him, but there were only a couple of choices. We could head south toward Vicksburg or east past Choctaw Landing in the direction of Holly Bluff.

  Percy Dwayne directed us east through Delta wilderness, a whole nest of wildlife management areas. Scrubby, overgrown tax dodges for people too lazy to farm. Then we followed the road south toward the Delta National Forest—a primal, hellacious reminder of what the whole Delta used to be like. Before they’d cut down all the trees and plowed under all the thickets.

  Once we got over to Holly Bluff and turned on the Spanish Fort road, Percy Dwayne couldn’t quite recall how he’d gotten down to Eugene’s.

  “Sissy was driving,” he told us, “and we were just following his truck. I know he’s back in the woods somewhere. It’ll hit me when I see it.”

  Desmond stopped and swallowed hard before he pulled into the national forest proper. There was just one road that bisected the place, and it was gravel and had snaky underbrush crowding it on either side.

  “I know,” I said to Desmond, “no bayous and no woods. I just want to thank you for doing this for me.”

  “I ain’t done it yet,” he told me, and we sat there for a while longer. But Desmond finally loosed a “Hmm” and gave the Geo gas.

  The road followed some kind of pipeline. It was off in a ditch to one side. I can’t say what might be getting pumped through the Delta National Forest. Could be sewage from Yazoo City, for all I knew, sent west to get sluiced into the mighty muddy. But that pipeline made for just the sort of landmark Percy Dwayne would be likely to recall.

  “Yeah, yeah,” he said. “That damn thing. The road’ll bend up here, and you’ll put that pipe behind you.”

  That’s just what happened. The road turned right, and the pipeline kept straight through the scrub.

  “It’s up here on the left somewhere.”

  “What’s it look like?” I asked Percy Dwayne.

  “Hunting lodge, up on posts. We come out of the woods and there it was.”

  “Ain’t no end of marijuana in this goddamn place,” Luther piped in after having run silent for a while. “A man takes his life in his hands if he goes in there and thrashes around.”

  “I don’t like the woods,” Desmond announced. He seemed to need to hear himself say it.

  As national forests go, this one wasn’t easy to like. Bugs and bottomland. Scrub and hardwoods. Gators and vipers along with the biggest cypress trees I’d ever seen.

  Luther wanted us to stop at every sign and pullout along the way. He seemed a little like a fellow on vacation.

  “Don’t you live around here?” I asked him.

  He nodded and pointed nowhere much. “Didn’t never hunt or nothing,” he said. “Got no call to be in this place.”

  “You could come take a walk or something,” I suggested, and Luther and Percy Dwayne (and Desmond a little, too) looked at me like I’d proposed they build a rocket and fly to Saturn. They were ready to ride an hour to get a loaf of bread but wouldn’t have walked through the Delta National Forest without a blown head gasket or some sorry bastard making them do it with a gun.

  I couldn’t really blame them. It was about as gloomy a place as I’ve ever seen. Even though it was mid afternoon, the canopy was choking off the daylight, and everything seemed a little creepy there in the forest. We stopped to look at a sign planted along the road. It showed the way to a half-dozen camp sights off in the underbrush.

  “Who’d camp in here?” I asked just generally to the wrong crowd altogether. They seemed to feel camping was like hiking only staggeringly worse.

  We stopped so Luther could see a giant cypress tree up close. It was set off by a rail fence that circled it around. The trunk was about the diameter of a garage. Luther pulled out a pocket knife and plunged the blade in the trunk just because he could. For my part, I learned from an adjacent sign that the Delta National Forest was sixty-thousand acres of cypress trees and elms, sweetgums and giant nuttall oaks, not to mention the carpet of snake-rich underlay.

  “It says here,” I told Desmond and Luther and Percy Dwayne as well, “a Mississippi steam boat could burn thirty cords of wood a day.” They all called me a damn liar, even Desmond, until they’d read it themselves.

  We were stalling a little, I suspect, because once we started in with Eugene, that would put us onto Guy, and he promised to be genuine adult trouble. The meth lord career path tends to attract people you’d be better off leaving alone, and there we were on our way to bothering him but good. For a woman. For a baby. For a 1969 Ranchero. You could no more unbother a meth lord than unprovoke a cougar.

  So we went slow and soaked in the peculiar attractions of the Delta National Forest. We stopped at trail heads and at a bayou full of turtles. We were all standing outside of the Geo peeing when Luther saw a bear. He thought it was a dog, then was sure it was a goat. Once it reached the road, Luther fell silent and climbed onto the roof of the car.

  We finally came to a rough road off to the left four or five miles in. Percy Dwayne recognized it. Desmond pointed out the tire tracks in the mud. “Somebody back in here,” Desmond said.

  “Eugene’s maybe a half mile back,” Percy Dwayne told us. “Road gives out at the water.”

  It wasn’t the sort of track that looked suitable for a Metro, so we left the car at the junction and got ready to walk in. I tried to take Desmond’s mind off the deep, boggy woods that I’d personally dragged him into by giving him first dibs on our two-gun weapons cache.

  Desmond selected Calvin’s Steyr over K-Lo’s shotgun. He said he didn’t want to get in a firefight and find himself shooting rubber pellets. Desmond meant for anything he shot to go down and stay hit. Percy Dwayne insisted on getting armed, too, so I gave him the fireplace shovel. Luther was so fixed on his tap shoes—it seemed likely he’d get them muddy—that he didn’t care if he was armed or not.

  As we headed down that boggy tract, we weren’t nearly as inconspicuous as we might have been. Luther leapt from rock to rock and clack-clacked on every one while Percy Dwayne vented every little thing that popped into his head. Some of it was pertinent to the job at hand, but most of it was culinary. He’d gotten lunch twice at the Sonic, he told us, and still hadn’t eaten shit.

  Desmond would tell us “Hold on” every now again, and we’d stop so he could catch his breath.

  “How much farther?” he kept asking Percy Dwayne, who kept being unable to say.

  “You brought that Ranchero through here?” I asked him.

  He nodded in a way that told me, “So fucking what if I did?”

  About a half mile in we spotted the first deer. It was hanging upended from a sweet gum limb, neatly slit and bled.

  “Eugene?” Desmond asked Percy Dwayne.

  He nodded. “Half the tamales all over this place got his venison in them.”

  I heard the first dog along about then, and it didn’t sound like a hound. More like the kind of dog you’d have if you lived out on a bayou and didn’t want anybody messing with your shit.

  “Did you see his dogs?” I asked Percy Dwayne.

  “Only heard them,” he told me.

  “How many?”

  “Wouldn’t worry about them. They was shut up in a pen out back.”

  The road opened up about fifty yards before us. The sunlight managed to find it, anyway, and I could make out the hint of a roofline through the trees off to the left—the only purely straight thing anywhere.

  “Does Eugene have a wife or kids? Anybody else up there?”

  “Not fit for people,” Luther said, which was a hell of a thing coming from him. “He’s got running buddies. Cousins and such. Some of them might be around.”

  “He took you to Guy or Guy came to you?”

  “Come to us,” Percy Dwayne told me.

  “Eugene called him?”

  Percy Dwayne nodded.

 
; “How long before he got here?”

  “Half an hour at the most.”

  “So he’s around here somewhere, too.”

  “Maybe. Somewhere. There’s an awful lot of here to go around.”

  That was just the sort of sentiment to register with Desmond, and he must have felt the great swarming weight of the wilderness upon him because he stopped where he was. He peered all around. He swallowed hard and uncorked a doleful “Hmmm.”

  “What?” I asked him.

  “Promise me something,” Desmond said.

  I nodded that I would.

  “Whatever happens,” he told me, “swear you won’t leave me here.”

  FIFTEEN

  Percy Dwayne and Luther together identified Eugene’s truck, which we could see a little of in the clearing up ahead. It was a Ford / Chevy / International hybrid that somebody with middling welding skills had slapped together and fitted up. It was the sort of thing the Clampetts would have driven to Beverly Hills if they had been a little less fussy and safety conscious.

  The bed was loaded with chairs, wooden folding ones. It turned out Eugene had spirited them away from a Moose Lodge across the river, over in Lake Providence. He’d been hauling them around the day before and had boasted about them to Percy Dwayne. Eugene had come to believe that if he crossed the river into Arkansas and stole something over there, they couldn’t arrest him for it once he’d brought it back to Mississippi.

  “I sure don’t want to get shot,” Desmond said, “by somebody as stupid as that.”

  We worked our way on up the road until the scrub thinned out and the thicket gave way where Eugene had been fighting it a little. I can’t really say why he’d bothered given the calamitous state of his yard. The truck he drove was parked at the edge of it, flanked by the trucks he’d made it from. Then there were lumpy bits of other things that the grass and the sticker vines had taken. Cast-off appliances, tractor parts, a couple of leaky johnboats—all of it swallowed up with thickety weeds and ornamented with garbage. It looked like nearly every thorn in the yard had snagged a shopping bag.

  We could hear someone talking. Two people, it turned out, having an argument. They were yelling at each from over toward the house, which was stirring up the dogs. They were yelping and barking and snarling in what I hoped was a sturdy pen.

  “Eugene?” I asked Percy Dwayne.

  He listened close, and when one of those men held forth about what a jackass the other one was, Percy Dwayne told me, “That one’s him.”

  “What about the other one? Guy?” I said hopefully.

  Percy Dwayne just shook his head and shrugged.

  It was difficult to figure a good way to go at Eugene’s house. The building was up on stilts, and there was just one set of steps leading to the deck. We could see underneath clear out to the water, which turned out to be a section of the Little Sunflower River. It was a slow, swampy passage, a half-stagnant bayou. The shallow eddies under the house were full of beer cans and trash.

  The only way in was up the steps, and Eugene might well hear us coming. Everything looked set to give and waver once you put your weight upon it. I wasn’t quite sure but that Desmond might bring the whole place down.

  Eugene and his buddy were arguing, it turned out, about catfish they’d caught. Not so much the weight and size but what they’d caught them with. Eugene’s buddy had some kind of spinning lure with holy properties, while Eugene had a plug he swore by, which he smeared all over with Baitmate. They went on at heated profane length about who’d caught more with what.

  As we stood there figuring what to do, beer cans started hitting the water. The more they argued about their catfish lures, the quicker they seemed to drink.

  “All right,” I said, “let’s try this. You,” I told Percy Dwayne, “go up there and knock on the door. Tell Eugene and his buddy you’re coming with Guy’s money.”

  “Why am I bringing Guy’s money to him?”

  “Because you can’t find Guy, and you’ve come out here to see if Eugene’ll help you.”

  “I wouldn’t come out here with money. He’d knock me on the head and take it.”

  “Then what do you want to tell him?”

  “I want to ask him for a beer. Tell him I’m lost or something.”

  “He’ll go for that?” I asked him.

  Percy Dwayne nodded and spat.

  “Well, go on, then,” I said. “We’ll be under here.” I pointed to a moderately swampy spot beneath the decking. “You get him down those steps any way you can.”

  Eugene and his buddy had worked each other into twin dudgeons by then. They might have started out with catfish lures, but they’d progressed to larger matters. I couldn’t tell who was who at the time, but the one with the phlegmier hack was informing the stutterer he knew precisely fuck all and so wasn’t just a fishing lure ignoramus but made do as an all-purpose tool.

  The one with the stutter took exception. He was convinced he had talents and skills far in excess of anything the phlegmy one could hope for.

  Because they were swamp rats, they got down to dicks and women straightaway. Most men—particularly your suburban two-cars-and-a-mower sort—would have descended in stages from fishing lures to mechanical aptitude to sporting ability to alcohol tolerance to women and manly equipment. These fellows went straight from catfish lures to gals they’d pleased and how.

  They had in common a woman named Ailene and some creature named Dotty, and they started trading descriptions of just how they’d gone at these girls. It would have qualified as clinical if they’d known between them anything about female anatomy. That exchange was hard to tolerate in the muck under Eugene’s nasty house.

  Even Percy Dwayne stopped halfway up the stairs and gave us a pleading look. He didn’t appear so much leery and fearful as disgusted. The phlegmy one had a particular way with bodily descriptions in that everything came out sounding like science fiction. All the parts he’d seen and touched and licked and probed with his mighty saber could have passed in the telling for bits of a lizard warrior from Alpha Centauri.

  The stutterer was more of a romantic in that he only strangled his girls a little. He went on at some length about Dotty, who, apparently, was livestock-sized and lived her whole life in front of her television. He claimed to have gotten a rise out of her, some sort of orgasmic discharge that the phlegmy one told him emphatically was a goddamn lie.

  That’s about when they stopped chatting and started grunting and swearing instead.

  Percy Dwayne had gained the landing by then and was loitering just above us. He looked down at us over the decking rail and shook his head. Whatever was going on between those fellows was nothing he wanted to walk into. I pointed K-Lo’s shotgun at him to help him along.

  So Percy Dwayne decided to ease around at least a little. Eugene and his buddy by then didn’t even have the breath for swearing but were chiefly wheezing instead.

  “Tussling?” I asked.

  Luther and Desmond suspected I was right.

  Luther buffed his shoe tops on his trousers and added, “Wouldn’t want them to kill each other.”

  “Right,” I told him. “Go up there and help your uncle out.”

  “I ain’t like him,” Luther told us as if we were Delta Muskateers. “I could have gone home.”

  “But you didn’t,” Desmond told him and showed him the barrel of that Steyr. “Go give Percy Dwayne a push.”

  Luther marched up the stairs all clickety-clacking. He shoved Percy Dwayne before him and said, “Go on.”

  They rounded the corner and must have slipped up on Eugene and his buddy who had every right not to expect a drop-in visit where they were.

  “Hey here.” It was Percy Dwayne.

  The next thing we heard was the deck rail cracking. A length of it smacked the water behind us, and me and Desmond had just turned at the sound when Eugene and his buddy hit the bayou all tangled up together.

  “Gone over,” Luther shouted.

 
; “We see it,” I told him.

  The fall stunned them both, one worse than the other. They were filthy, whiskery coots, looked like a pair of waterlogged muskrats, and one of them was flapping his arms and sputtering while the other was floating facedown.

  “Well, shit,” I said as I handed my gun to Desmond and waded out in the swampy water. It was warm and silty and trash strewn. I kept waiting to step on an alligator. The alternative was about two feet of mud.

  “Turn him over,” I yelled to the sputtering swamp rat, but his eyes were big, and he just flapped his arms and snorted. He wasn’t in danger of drowning. The water where he stood was only waist-deep.

  “Eugene?” I asked him, and he pointed at the guy facedown beside him. I felt at that moment put upon and pathetic like a proper Delta cracker. Wouldn’t you know the shiftless bastard we had authentic use for would be the one in the bayou about to drown.

  “Help him,” I suggested, and the fellow with the wide eyes and the flapping arms told me I could g-g-go f-f-fuck myself.

  Once I got close to him, I glanced up at Luther and Percy Dwayne on the deck. “They just fell,” Percy Dwayne said, and pointed. “That one there’s Eugene.”

  “Got it,” I said, and looked back down in time to see Eugene’s buddy pull a pistol out of his pants and point it at me.

  It was a soaking wet .22 buntline, a revolver with the barrel sawn off. It had live rounds in the chambers. I could see them plain enough.

  “I don’t know you,” he told me.

  “He’s going to drown.”

  “So?” he said.

  “Isn’t he a buddy of yours?”

  “Don’t know that he is,” he said.

  “Well, today he’s a buddy of mine. Let’s you and me roll him over.”

  I took a couple of steps toward him, was almost within arm’s reach. He drew the hammer back with a soggy click.

  “Hold on here,” he told me.

  Dry-land trash is bad enough. But they go out in the world with people as a regular sort of thing, so they can behave like they’re domesticated whenever they see fit. Swamp trash is something else altogether. They tend to feed themselves from what they catch and shoot, rarely get past the nearest grocery mart and service station unless they need hardware they can’t manufacture or have had an appendix explode.