Ranchero Page 12

  They’re suspicious of everybody who’s not swamp trash like them, and they’d just as soon sink you in the bayou and let the gators at you than run the risk of getting lied to and beguiled by you.

  “You the law, ain’t you?”

  “No.”

  Percy Dwayne called down helpfully, “He ain’t no goddamn body.”

  “Then what the shit you doing out here?”

  It was all a little too Socratic for my taste at the moment. I managed to grab Eugene by the leg of his overalls. His pal didn’t like that much and poked my kidney with his pistol, which put his face about where I needed it to be to break his nose.

  I shot an elbow back his way, quick and brutal like a piston. I caught him flush on the bridge but maybe a little harder than I’d meant to. It was his own fault. He was making stupid trouble where trouble didn’t need to be.

  He managed a groan and pitched over backwards. His pistol went flying out into the swamp, and he sank beneath the surface in a mix of blood and bubbles.

  I turned Eugene over, shook him hard, and he brought up a quart of bayou. I had to drag him by the collar over to Desmond who was perched upon a hummocky clump of weeds beneath the house. He yanked Eugene clear of the water and dropped him onto the ground which knocked another dose of bayou from him and probably a couple of Milwaukee’s Bests.

  “What about him?” Desmond asked me, and pointed with his forehead to the other fellow still out in the swamp. The only thing breaking the surface was the toe of his right boot.

  I moaned and turned to wade back out. That boy was a bloody mess. His nose was flowing, and he might have thought he was sputtering before, but he was truly sputtering now. He was deeply indignant, of course, and wanted to tell me all about the world of hurt him and all his slack-ass swamp-rat relations were going to put on me.

  What with the blood and the swallowed water and all the heated stuttering, there was an awful lot of gruesome splatter attached to the whole ordeal. I paused before handing him over to Desmond so I could advise him, “Shut up!”

  We laid the two of them out on the ground at the bottom of the stairs, and once they came to their regular senses, they started arguing all over again. Eugene was persuaded his buddy, Tommy, had shoved him through the railing. Tommy didn’t remember it that way at all.

  “I can tell you this,” Eugene said at last, “you don’t know shit about Dotty.” And with that, they started tussling all afresh.

  There was yelling and blood and biting and swearing and rolling around on the muddy ground. Luther and Percy Dwayne watched it all from high on the landing while me and Desmond stood there and watched them from up close.

  “And here I thought the day might come,” Desmond told me, “when I’d understand white people.”

  SIXTEEN

  Eugene’s house was about the damnedest thing I’d ever seen. It was all Li’l Abner—put together as providence allowed. To judge by the evidence, Eugene had built a platform and slapped a dwelling on top of it. Then he had added and demolished and tweaked and rearranged, depending on what he’d stolen or found or maybe even bought outright.

  There was one whole room where the outer wall was made entirely from doors, and Eugene had popped a few panels here and there to caulk in glass for windows. He had siding made from rusty sheeting off some kind of grain bin and roof shingles that were road signs upended and nailed down. He’d made lavish use of tar paper and tin flashing, and he had a chimney pipe that was a culvert he’d probably pulled out of somebody’s driveway. He’d fashioned a deckside toilet out of a plastic water tank. Everything went straight down into the bayou, which filled me with desperation for a tetanus shot.

  Tommy’s nose bled for longer than was interesting or convenient. We finally ended up packing his nostrils with balled-up pages from a Cabela’s catalog just so he’d shut up about the leakage.

  For people as filthy as those two, they were confoundingly particular about their clammy clothes. That dunk in the bayou was probably the first time they’d been wet in a couple of weeks, and all they could do was complain about the mud and the blood and the swamp stink. Before we knew it, they’d both stripped down to their filthy underwear. Then they shed their briefs and stood around complaining naked.

  Eugene had a thing or two to say to Percy Dwayne about all the trouble Percy Dwayne had caused him. It seemed Eugene hadn’t gotten much peace at all since they’d run up on each other at the gas mart. Guy was all over him to work on his car and haul stuff for him and shit.

  “What car?”

  “That damn pink thing,” Eugene told me.

  “What kind of work?”

  “Pipes and paint mostly. A little carburetor tweaking.”

  “Done any of it?”

  “What the hell do you care?”

  “It’s kind of his car,” Percy Dwayne said.

  “Not no more,” Eugene told me, “unless you want to be fucking with Guy. And ain’t nobody nowhere wants to be fucking with Guy.”

  “He’ll kill your ass,” Tommy said. Then he cackled so enthusiastically he shot a bloody catalog page from his nose.

  “Tell me about him,” I said to Eugene.

  “Can’t he put some damn clothes on first?” Luther had endured all he could stand of nasty, naked swamp rats.

  We all stepped inside Eugene’s house proper, and Luther yanked a blanket off the couch to give to Tommy so he could cover himself up. It turned out to be the only thing holding the stuffing and the ossified mouse shit in. A cloud of dust boiled up, all desiccation and dander. We threw open what doors we could find, and Desmond punched a Desmond-sized hole in a width of tar paper siding that was the only thing between Eugene’s sitting room and the great outdoors.

  “That’s right,” Eugene told us all, “tear it up.” Then he went and got wounded and pouty, and him and Percy Dwayne bonded over how plagued and put upon they were.

  “Where does Guy live?” I asked Eugene.

  “Who the fuck wants to know?”

  Weary now, I raised the shotgun barrel toward the ceiling, more or less aimed it at an orange and black MOWING AHEAD sign, and squeezed off a shell without really thinking just what I was up to.

  Lead pellets would have punched on through, and we’d have been left with just some instructive racket, but the little rubber balls I was shooting stayed in the house and went everywhere fast. They hit that sign and came back down, bounced all over the place. They filled that room just like a swarm of hornets.

  Those pellets hurt so much through my clothes I was doubly glad I wasn’t standing around naked. Tommy, for his part, balled up on the couch and ducked under his filthy blanket while Eugene couldn’t think of a thing to do but wail and leap and dance.

  “What the hell did you do that for?” Luther wanted to know.

  “Crazy son-of-a-bitch,” Percy Dwayne added.

  Tommy came out from under his blanket to add a few choice words as well. Eugene just whined and flopped around on the floor.

  Like most rash things I get up to, that one hadn’t been helpful.

  Even Desmond, after a great while, told me, “Let’s don’t be doing that again.”

  It did have the effect of prompting Eugene to pack his jewels away and put on some clothes. While he dressed, I took occasion to soak in his décor. One part tumbledown furniture and one part dusty taxidermy. He had stuffed deer heads and stuffed racoons, a stuffed carp, a lacquered rattler, a couple of dusty armadillos, a mangy bear cub, and way up high on top of a cabinet a spotted stuffed bobcat. It was perched on a rock, ready to pounce, with its red lacquered tongue sticking out.

  “Hey,” I said to Desmond, and pointed.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  I opened the cabinet doors, used a shelf for a step, climbed up, and fetched it down.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked Eugene.

  “Aw, hell,” he told me, and started in with a fanciful spot of rubbish about how he’d run up on it down bayou a bit while he was out one
morning baiting trot lines.

  “He was downwind,” he told me. “Had the sun behind him. He was setting up an awful fuss.”

  As soon as I’d opened the cabinet door to climb up and fetch the thing down, Luther had taken the exposed contents as an invitation to plunder. That cupboard was crammed full of other people’s mail, a couple of rusty old pistols, a few rifle parts, and one school-bus yellow Taser that caught Luther’s eye.

  “I’ve always wanted one of these,” he said. “It’s like having a super power.”

  By then Eugene was describing how he’d eased down in a slot where he could get off a shot at his bobcat. Luther, for his part, was turning that Taser around his hands trying to figure how to fire it up.

  “Think it works?” he wanted to know.

  I took it from him. “Let’s see.” I switched it on. It charged right up. I fired a dart into Eugene’s shoulder just as he was about to bring his bobcat down.

  The element of surprise coupled with fifteen hundred volts put Eugene off his story all at once.

  “Try again,” I told him, and then pointed at K-Lo’s stuffed bobcat and pulled the trigger to give Eugene a little electric incentive.

  “Got it from a boy.” He was shouting by now. “Some gang-banging nigger up in Greenville. Take it,” Eugene told me. “Go on. I don’t care.”

  “Works fine,” I told Luther.

  “Can I have it?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  There were a dozen tactical reasons against lingering at Eugene’s, in addition to the fact that Desmond couldn’t tolerate a filthy house with a lacquered snake inside. Desmond motioned for me to join him on the deck so he could tell me as much.

  “All right,” I said. “So what do we do?”

  It was nearly dark by then. The frogs were starting up out in the bayou, and the mosquitoes were fairly swarming.

  “We’ll head up north. Take them with us. They can lead us to Guy tomorrow.”

  “Take them how?”

  And we both stood there studying Eugene’s welded, jackleg truck.

  * * *

  It drove pretty well for a vehicle made by a swamp rat with marginal skills. The drive shaft knocked, and it drifted if you let it, but that truck got up the road well enough for a slapdash piece of junk.

  I was following Desmond. He was riding alone in his Geo, which I’d arranged as a courtesy to him. I had Luther and Percy Dwayne up front with me and Eugene and Tommy in the bed. They were under a tarp and taped up snug because they’d assured me there wasn’t a fellow on earth who could take them any damn where.

  “Tell me about Guy,” I charged Percy Dwayne.

  He went agonized on me and started in with Sissy and little PD, but I had a question for him about them as well. “What in the name of hell,” I asked him, “would he want with your wife and son?”

  Luther piled on. He had Sissy issues and general toddler misgivings, so he also was anxious to hear what sort of ruthless meth lord bastard would snatch a woman and her baby and keep them kidnapped in his house.

  “What’s he need the headache for? He can buy any woman he wants.”

  Percy Dwayne just snorted and groaned, couldn’t find the truth at first. That’s the Dubois way. When you’ve been bred and raised to connive, the facts never feel quite right in your mouth. There’s no finagling or fabrication to the honest gospel truth, no angles to work, no details to plant, no foreseeable payoff. That made being square tough for Percy Dwayne because he wasn’t remotely a truth-is-its-own-reward sort of guy.

  But a kidnapped wife and toddler didn’t make enough sense to swallow, so we teased it out of him a little at a time. It turned out he and the wife had been butting heads for a month or two by then. As a Vardaman, Sissy came from a pack of ambitious, cold-blooded felons, the sort of people who adjusted their lawlessness and thuggery to the times. She couldn’t see that sort of flexibility or drive in Percy Dwayne. He’d started out as a thief and a chisler and had stayed one ever since.

  “Always on me about gumption and how I don’t have enough,” he said. “Then she met Guy. He’s fucking gumptioned to the gills.”

  “I hear he looks like some kind of movie star,” Luther added, burying the shiv.

  Percy Dwayne told him. “He ain’t all that much.”

  Luther shook his head and spat out the window. “You’re just a nickel and dimer. All you’ve ever been.”

  “Listen to you,” Percy Dwayne said, disgusted.

  “I’m entrepreneurial,” Luther informed him.

  “Sitting in a bar all day selling pills and shit?”

  “I’ve got clients,” Luther said as he smoothed out a lapel. “I’m building relationships. What the hell have you got?”

  “I don’t see how slinging dope is better than what I do.”

  “I don’t even know what the fuck you do,” Luther told him.

  “So did he take them or not?” I asked Percy Dwayne.

  Percy Dwayne didn’t say anything for about a half a minute. Then he shook his head and mumbled, “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “They was there and then they weren’t.”

  “And all that shit with Calvin?”

  “Just trying to get me some…” Percy Dwayne trailed off.

  “Gumption?” I said.

  “I guess.”

  “So the Acadian fuck stick picked you clean?”

  Percy Dwayne dropped his head and nodded. “I’m going to get her back,” he told us, “one way or another.”

  Once we’d reached Indianola, Desmond shot straight over the truck route and went up to check on his momma. I pulled in behind the KFC and parked beside the dumpster. It was half past eight by then, and K-Lo had been closed for an hour and a half. I figured, if I was lucky, he might be only about half drunk.

  I fished that bobcat out of the back of the trunk and checked on Eugene and Tommy. They’d been bounced around enough by then to have altered their attitudes. I took the tape off Eugene’s mouth long enough for him to tell me that they were ready to be decent and ride up front in the cab. The mercury lights at the KFC made him think we were in Jackson, and Eugene got frantic just being out of the woods and away from the swamp.

  He started yelling. Not for help, but more in the way a wild pig might squeal. It was as if, in his puny swamp-rat brain, he couldn’t think what else to do. So I retaped him, pulled the tarp back over them both, and tied it off.

  I went to the front door of the rental store so K-Lo could see me come up. I looked for him on the ugly sofa, but he didn’t appear to be about. I peered in through the glass doors, and when I couldn’t find him, I knocked. He came out of the back with his little plastic lunch container in hand, the one he brought in every morning full of rice and eggplant and chicken and carried home rinsed out every night.

  K-Lo unlocked the door and pushed it open. I was planning on going in, but he came out and bolted the thing behind him.

  “Where are you going?” I asked him.

  “Home,” he said. “I can’t sit around here. I’m still shook up about last night.”

  “You’re not even drunk,” I told him.

  “I’m drunk a little,” he said, “but I don’t want to die in this place on that ugly sofa.”

  “So you’re just locking up and going on home?”

  K-Lo nodded.

  “Good for you,” I told him. “Why don’t you take this with you.”

  I stepped clear of the bobcat, which had been sitting behind me on the sidewalk all the while.

  K-Lo gasped. He flat sucked air. He reminded me of those people who used to show up on TV and get reunited with long-lost siblings, old army buddies, former loves. They’d gasp like that. It was a way of saying with just air and spasm, “For the love of Christ, I thought you were dead.”

  K-Lo didn’t move at first, appeared as if he couldn’t, as if the sight of his bobcat had to be some sort of galling mirage.

  He said, “But�
�” a time or two while he stayed just where he was. I picked that cat up to prove it was real and put it in his hands.

  I was sure for a second there Kalil the hothead was going to up and cry, and not the usual tears of bitterness and disappointment, but genuine tears of joy and of relief. He didn’t, though. He remembered himself.

  “Did I ever tell you how I killed him?”

  I shook my head. I told him, “Not that I recall.”

  “I was driving home one night, almost to Leland. I seem to recall I hit him with my car.”

  “Never heard you recall that part before.”

  K-Lo shrugged. “Where did you find him?”

  “Down Delta. A fellow had bought him somewhere. Gave him to me when I said it was yours.”

  “Tell him I’m glad to have him back.”

  “I’ll do that. Don’t leave him here. Somebody’ll just snatch him again.”

  K-Lo nodded. K-Lo said, “All right.”

  I watched as K-Lo loaded his bobcat in the backseat of his Honda. Then he pulled out on the truck route, marginally sober, and drove home to his wife and son.

  I bought two buckets of chicken from a pimply kid at the KFC counter who appeared to have taken his corporate training to heart. He was polite and efficient, must have been new on the job. Everybody else in the place—the employees and the diners—looked to be wading through honey to get wherever they went.

  Pearl intercepted us in the driveway, halfway to the car shed. She’d already eaten her supper, but she put on like she hadn’t. Luther made a fuss over her and introduced her to his uncle. Eugene and Tommy were more of a problem since their hands were taped behind their backs. They were properly dressed by now and not conspicuously nasty, but Tommy still had catalog pages up his nose.

  “Say hello to Mrs. Jarvis,” I told them.

  “Pearl,” she said, and invited the whole pack of us in.

  She didn’t appear to let herself see that Tommy and Eugene were restrained. Pearl had a talent for selective obliviousness. It always applied to family, especially her worthless son, who Pearl could construe as loving and attentive, but she could extend it when she wanted to the rest of the world as well.