Ranchero Read online

  “I see you’ve got chicken,” Pearl said. It’s hard to miss those red and white buckets. “Come on in. I’ve got a big table we can all sit around and a bowl of potato salad I made this morning.”

  I thought of Pearl’s mayonnaise that had gone more yellow than beige. I wondered if Rusty was dead.

  Pearl and Luther and Percy Dwayne went on into the house while I lingered on the back porch with Tommy and Eugene.

  “Where the hell is this?” Tommy wanted to know.

  “Still Mississippi,” I told him. “I’ll cut you loose if you can behave.”

  “I’m fucking starving,” Eugene said.

  “Mouth,” I told him. “You treat that woman like your mother.”

  Come to find out Tommy and Eugene never had much use for their mothers, and worse still, Eugene announced he’d like to turn Pearl upside down. Then him and Tommy started in on who had the tool and the prowess to make Pearl squeal like Dotty and Ailene.

  I didn’t know what else to do but smack them each one time, which they curled their lips and got all peevish about.

  “You’ve seen people on TV, right, people with table manners?”

  They nodded. Each had a hand to ear I’d cuffed him on.

  “Act like them for the next little while, and you’ll be all right. Otherwise I’m turning Luther loose with the Taser.”

  The hell of it was, they were perfectly stellar company in the house. It was partly the threat of getting electrocuted, but it was mostly Pearl’s way of treating everybody the same. I can’t say how she came by it since it’s hardly the Southern way. Class lines down in Dixie rival those of the British peerage, but Pearl just didn’t see the world that way. She wanted company, so she made allowances, saw in people what she wanted to see, and her approach had a way of making guests more than they should have been.

  Once Pearl had gotten out the silver and the tatted linen place mats, the crystal water glasses even though they were cracked and chipped, once she charged Tommy and Percy Dwayne to bring the china out, nobody was a lowlife or a swamp rat anymore.

  Pearl put the chicken on a platter, brought out the poison potato salad, and chirped that we should all join hands for grace. Eugene, of all people, volunteered to say a prayer he knew, and he was going on about the Savior in heroic couplets when I peeked around the table like I had the night before.

  “God help me,” I prayed to myself in silence, “if this gets ordinary.”

  SEVENTEEN

  “Gentle giant,” Pearl told me.

  I was in the kitchen drying the dishes by then, and she’d been asking after Desmond, who Pearl had taken a real shine to.

  “I like a man who’s neat,” she said. “Gil was neat.”

  “I’m hoping,” I said to Pearl, “I’ll have Gil’s car back by tomorrow.”

  “I know you’ll do what you can,” she told me. I’m sure that would have been enough for her whether it produced a Ranchero or not. The trouble for me was that doing and failing wouldn’t have been sufficient.

  Then I got lost in a reverie over what I might meet with in Guy, since I’d come across lots of Delta trash since I’d moved to Mississippi. A ruthless Acadian fuck stick in charge of a genuine criminal concern was not the sort to rent a TV and have it reclaimed on him. I had to think Guy was entirely his own type of thing.

  While I was standing drying dishes and ruminating, I lost track of my charges. I suddenly realized I couldn’t hear them in the dining room anymore. I asked Pearl if she knew where they’d gone.

  She led me back to her guest room where they were all deep in Gil’s closet. Eugene was wearing a navy blue double-breasted blazer over his bib overalls. He didn’t look transformed exactly, but the swamp rat was largely submerged. Even Tommy, who’d found one of Gil’s impeccably clean jump suits, could have passed for a suburban husband with a Chevrolet to tinker on and lawn fertilizer to spread. Percy Dwayne had found a suit coat and, just like his nephew Luther, he looked like a minor Chicago thug from eighty years ago.

  “You mind?” I asked Pearl.

  “Lord no,” she told me. “Somebody should get use of those clothes.”

  “How did he end up with so many?” Luther asked her.

  She fingered Luther’s lapel with a sad, distracted smile. “I’d buy them. I doubt he ever put half of them on.”

  On the way back to the kitchen, Pearl remembered a charge she’d been given. “That policeman came by,” she told me, and tapped her head. “The one with the bandage. He doubts you’re in Texas. Wanted me to give you this.”

  Dale had written me a note on the back of a traffic ticket. He had the penmanship of a middle schooler. “The longer you hide,” he’d written, “the worse it’ll be.”

  “I don’t care for him,” Pearl confided. “He’s got those beady eyes.”

  I marked Dale down as one of the few humans Pearl wouldn’t give a sports coat to.

  We bid Pearl good night and marched up the steps to my place over the car shed. I turned on my TV, and Tommy and Eugene sat down on my ratty settee. I tossed them the remote, and they went sailing through the channels all but hypnotized. It was like I’d given them a double dose of Benadryl, and I couldn’t help but think they’d be content there for a while.

  “I’m going to go check on Desmond,” I told Luther and Percy Dwayne. “I need him,” I said of Eugene, “for tomorrow. It’d be a good thing to find him here when I get back.”

  “I hear you, Chief,” Luther told me. He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out his school-bus yellow Taser.

  “There’s beer in the fridge. Chips in the cabinet. I won’t be long.”

  I went out the door and down the steps. I skulked around the yard for a bit, in the shadows out of reach of the vapor lights. There wasn’t a thing parked on the street but Eugene’s claptrap truck. I jogged down to it, climbed in, and drove away in a cloud of incinerated engine oil.

  I got up to Sunflower before I stopped for gas. I was going to do Eugene a favor by filling up his tank, but I kept pumping and pumping and the damn thing wouldn’t finish. It turned out he had four or five gas tanks daisy-chained together. Filling that truck was like trying to fuel a passenger jet. I quit once I’d closed on sixty dollars, the far end of what my Visa would currently allow.

  I drove past Desmond’s on 49 and then cut back down at Blaine. It didn’t seem sensible that Dale would be sitting on Desmond instead of me, but Dale wasn’t the sensible sort. I scoped out Desmond’s place up and back since Dale wouldn’t know the truck, and I finally pulled in once I was satisfied nobody was about.

  I went around to the back door, and Desmond let me in. I could smell the Oxy as soon as I stepped inside.

  “Momma had a bad day,” Desmond told me.

  “Has a doctor seen her lately?”

  Desmond shook his head the way people do in the Delta when, instead of “No,” they mean, “How am I going to pay for that?”

  I went back to say hello to Desmond’s mother and walked into a thing I’d never expected to see. She was in the bed, under the covers from about the waist down. She was wearing a flannel house dress with daffodils all over it, and her wig was sitting pretty nearly straight upon her head.

  She had one of the pills I’d bought from Luther on a square of Reynolds Wrap, a little piece about the size of an unfolded chewing gum wrapper. She held a lighter underneath and heated that pill until it was smoking and melting. Then she inhaled the vapor through a little piece of drinking straw.

  It was the sort of thing you’d see every day on the outskirts of Lauderdale, where the storefront doctors write script for Oxy junkies, but in an old black lady’s bedroom in rural Mississippi? I’d thought she’d just break those pills into pieces, swallow one, and go to sleep. This felt a hell of a lot more desperate than that would have.

  “Hey,” I said. “How we feeling?”

  “No good,” she told me, and took another hit.

  Then she set her works on the nightstand and lay b
ack against the headboard. I watched her for a little while and then went back to the kitchen.

  “How’d she get started on that stuff?” I asked Desmond, which was exactly the wrong thing to ask him because he was the one who’d gotten her going when her regular pain meds had run out.

  “Right after Shawnica, I was in a bad way. Couldn’t take life straight anymore. Never had much stomach for liquor, but the Oxy worked all right.”

  “How’d you get off?”

  Desmond gave that one some thought. The easy answer was he got sick of bouncing along the bottom, but it’s always a little more complicated than that.

  “You get fed up with nine-to-five, you start doing drugs. You get fed up with drug life, you go back to nine-to-five.”

  “Did getting stabbed by Luther fit in there somewhere?”

  “Maybe,” Desmond told me. “A little.”

  “We’ve got to get your mother to a doctor somehow before she burns the goddamn house down.”

  Desmond nodded, but he was just humoring me now.

  We walked out the back door and into the yard. It was one of those beautiful Delta nights, but for the mosquitoes. Stars from horizon to horizon, just a smudge of light from Indianola down south.

  “How are the swamp boys?” Desmond asked me.

  “Watching SportsCenter. Seemed happy enough. Pearl’s got them all in jackets.”

  Desmond laughed his muffled snort like a sneeze from the end of a pipe.

  “What time tomorrow?” he asked me.

  I shrugged. “Up and out early, I guess. You know you don’t have to come. I can probably handle Guy.”

  “I’ll be there,” Desmond told me.

  “I’ll get that Ranchero tomorrow or quit trying. Damned if I’ve ever gone to such fuss for a car.”

  We walked around toward the front of the house where I’d parked Eugene’s truck.

  “How’s that thing drive?” he asked me.

  “Better than you’d think, but it gets the mileage of a motor grader.” I climbed up and in. “Take care of your mother,” I told Desmond.

  “Can’t do nothing else.”

  I drove down the Dwyer Road to Sunflower along the railroad track. There was moonlight shining on the cornstalks, across the soybeans and the wheat. The few houses I passed were still and unlit. I didn’t meet any traffic. The Delta at night can be like a trash pile under a few inches of fresh snow—beauty alone untouched by squalor and unleavened with desperation. I took my time driving back to Pearl’s and enjoyed myself a little too much.

  What I mean to say is, I got sloppy. It’s hard to be looking out all the time, particularly when you know you’re being dogged by a troglodyte like Dale. When I didn’t see his cruiser on the street in front of Pearl’s, I just parked the truck with two wheels in the ditch and headed for the driveway.

  I was ten yards up it when Dale came out from behind a camellia bush. He was wearing a bandage on his head that looked like a sanitary napkin, and he was in street clothes, which for Dale meant a velour track suit. This one was maroon with navy piping, and it made Dale look out of place there in the middle of Pearl’s driveway. He would have been more at home in the Short Hills Mall or an Olive Garden anywhere.

  “Texas my ass,” Dale said.

  “Hey, Dale,” I told him.

  “Where’s your shovel, little man?”

  I showed him my empty hands.

  Dale had a sap in his waistband. He pulled it out and waved it at me, tossed it into the yard.

  “Just me and you. Let’s see who goes down now.”

  By then I was actively sifting through my options. High on my list was running down the street as fast as I could manage. The track suit notwithstanding, Dale was anything but fleet. I’d seen where the sap landed, and that was a possibility, but what if I hit him with it, and it only made him madder? A sap’s all right, but it’s not in the league with a Dubois fireplace shovel.

  Dale was hoping for a fight. He was so juiced and built that I had to doubt a human fist could hurt him. There was a small chance he had a glass jaw and I could put him down, but I didn’t want to get taken apart trying to find it out.

  So I was looking for a tool, anything stout I could poke or pummel him with. There was a cement deer in the neighbor’s yard, but I doubted I could pick it up. I glanced down the road the other way. Just garbage cans and recycling bins.

  I knew he wouldn’t be much of a puncher. Dale was too musclebound for that. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t crush me into a powder, and I found myself actively trying to calculate which hospital was closest—in case I needed something set or sewn.

  Dale began dancing on his toes and telling me, “Let’s get it on!” I flashed on Dale and Patty, perched together on their sofa, watching far too much Spike TV.

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s do that.”

  I figured on being all elbows. I’d break his nose like Tommy’s. I’d try to catch him in the throat, kick him in his shriveled testicles if it came to that. I would have preferred to pull a thorn from his paw, but that didn’t seem to be an option.

  So I went through all the usual prep for getting myself beat up, was trying to get psychologically set for the pain, but Dale kept distracting me. He was the sort who had to talk his way into a fight.

  Dale felt compelled to tell me about my upcoming destruction, the hurt he’d rain down on me, the blood he’d cause to flow. I watched him shadowbox in a bid to loosen up his veiny arms and listened to him talk about pieces of me he meant to pulverize. The effect was more in the way of boredom than intimidation.

  I was five seconds away from just bum rushing the guy. I figured I might as well fly all over him and see what that accomplished, and I was cocked and poised and primed to spring when Dale began to jiggle and drool. I thought the steroids had finally gotten to him and he was having some kind of stroke or that maybe there was such a thing as a too-dumb-to-live seizure.

  He stayed on his feet and just wiggled around, all spastic and galvanic, until he finally toppled over on Pearl’s cement drive and broke his fall with his forehead. Only then did I see Luther, who’d been eclipsed by Dale’s bulk. He was standing there on the driveway with his yellow Taser in hand, attached to Dale by the darts in his back and the wires that ran out of them.

  Luther had caught Dale in the trapezius, a slightly left of center shot. He gave a recreational pull on the Taser trigger just to see Dale flop a little on the drive.

  “Never did much care for baseball,” Luther told me.

  “He’s bleeding,” I said.

  It was worse than that really. Dale was sluicing blood onto the driveway. Dale groaned and rolled around enough to earn another jolt.

  “We ought to take him somewhere,” Luther said, and I was picturing some pullout on the roadside, but Luther had the emergency room over in Greenville in mind. So we wrestled him into the back of the truck and drove him west toward the river. We set Dale off by a dumpster where they threw out medical waste. Then Luther went in and made out like he’d just strayed across him and some other shiftless sorts had dropped him off.

  “Bad cut,” Luther told me once we’d got back on the truck route. “I think I saw his skull.”

  “He’s a tough one,” I said. “Dale’ll be all right.”

  You would have thought the previous two days would have taught me how fragile people are, how things can be going along just fine and then you’re down and bleeding. But I was moving the other way with it. The great surprise to me was how tough and resilient people tend to be.

  You club them, you punch them, you stick them, you shoot them, and they just hang around. It doesn’t really seem to matter what they have to live for—wives and children, a favorite hound, a momma at the home place—people just keep on going out of pluck or habit or spite.

  Who the hell knew? I found myself thinking it was all a little inspiring.

  “He’s going to be pissed,” Luther assured me.

  “Only gear he’s got
.”

  EIGHTEEN

  Desmond rolled up early and tried to come in the apartment, but the stockyard bouquet kept him on the landing. He just opened the door long enough to tell us all that he was there.

  “Where are we heading?” Desmond asked me once I’d slipped outside.

  “Not sure. The Braves lost. I couldn’t get Eugene to talk any sense.”

  I told Desmond all about Dale and how he’d be looking now twice as hard.

  “Kind of a tough few days for him,” Desmond said, and we stood there being sympathetic for very nearly a half minute.

  According to Eugene, Guy the diabolical meth lord didn’t have what he’d call a regular home. He had houses and trailers all over where Mexicans cooked drugs for him, along with a couple of hunting camps and some sort of warehouse up near Batesville, but Eugene was of a mind that he rented that out.

  “What I’m saying,” Eugene told me, “is Guy ain’t so easy to find.”

  “That’s pretty much what I’m hearing. If you had to find him, how would you do it?”

  “Call him maybe until he called me back.”

  “So call him.”

  “Phone’s in the bayou,” Eugene told me. “It knew his number. I don’t.”

  “All right. So what if you can’t call him?”

  “I’d look at his places and maybe ask his Mexicans.”

  “What do they know?”

  “Maybe nothing, but sometimes they hear shit.”

  “First stop?”

  “Probably his house out by Fitler. I drink Pepsis with the boys down there. Ain’t but kids. Two wetbacks. White guy’s a meth head.”

  “I’ve got an uncle on Baconia Road,” Percy Dwayne piped in. “It’s down around there, too. If Sissy’d decided she’d had enough of Guy, that’s probably the first place she’d go. Can we swing by for a minute? It’s right on the way.”