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  I nodded, couldn’t really see the harm.

  We took off in the truck with Desmond and Luther following us in the Geo. Eugene took some crazy route back through the countryside. He crossed a few main arteries, but he’d never ride on one. He had a real knack for finding the raggedest thoroughfares in the Delta. I spent half my time airborne since there weren’t any seat belts about. Eugene had the steering wheel holding him down. The rest of us weren’t so lucky.

  “What have you got against asphalt?” I finally asked him.

  Eugene just laughed and turned by a wheat field. I caromed off the roof of the cab.

  “He ain’t legal,” Tommy said.

  “You’ve got a tag,” I told him. “I saw it.”

  “Yeah, well,” Eugene said, “that ain’t exactly mine.”

  “So you’re hauling around what? Ephedrine and ether? On a stolen tag? Ever hear about those killers who get caught from parking tickets?”

  “That’d be some shit, wouldn’t it?” Eugene said, and then added, “I’m careful where I park.”

  Just then we met a state trooper in a turn not big enough for us both. We crowded him out, and he went off the road and mired up in a makeshift rice paddy—a ditch full of water with a foot and half of Delta mud underneath.

  It didn’t take a psychic to see what Eugene was thinking. It was along the lines of “I’m getting the fuck out of here.”

  As he stomped on the gas, I reached over and threw the shifter into neutral, which Eugene got all wide-eyed and incredulous about.

  “We run,” I told him in a low, hissed whisper, “and every one of his buddies’ll be scouring the Delta for us. Can’t just leave him here like nothing happened.” I paused to come up with likeliest story I could. “We’re going to pick up tractor tires. We’re sorry as hell for what we did.”

  It was something to watch. Three Delta hoodlums trying to be contrite out of handcuffs. That’s a thing you don’t get to see just every day. I took the lead a little there at the first because that trooper was hot and didn’t much care who he barked at. He was fairly low wattage, even by state trooper standards, so I just had to shuffle and scratch and let the ire all boil away. At least Eugene and Tommy and Percy Dwayne were all gifted at looking pathetic.

  That trooper was a Magnum, T. E., his tag said, and he was chafed about how some people drive, he told us.

  “I was fooling with the radio,” Eugene allowed. “Lord I’ve learned my lesson now.”

  I could see Desmond’s Metro well back down the road. He’d been following us at a considerable distance. Otherwise he and Luther would have been buried in Eugene’s dust.

  He’d stopped where he was and just sat there idling, waiting. I saw Luther get out of the car. I watched Desmond pull him back in. Not gently, but quick and hard. Doubtless Luther had seen some Tasing prospects in our bit of bother.

  We just had K-Lo’s shotgun, which I had permission to have, but it was laid out on the floorboard looking a little too ready to go, and I didn’t want to find myself quizzed about it. The object here was to keep that trooper thinking about himself and not worrying about us and what we might be up to.

  “I’m sure we can pull you out,” I told him. “It wouldn’t be right if we didn’t.”

  The boys all mumbled like they wouldn’t among them object to doing what’s right.

  “We been hauling tires,” Tommy said without anybody asking.

  “Tractor tires,” Percy Dwayne added. “Running empty right now.”

  T. E. Magnum looked from one to the other. He seemed to think we were all simple, and before Eugene could tack on something impertinent himself, I said, “Go get your chain, Buddy. Got one in the bed, don’t you?”

  Eugene nodded and said, “Use it sometimes. You know. For tractor tires and such.”

  They were a sight with their suit coats and all. They didn’t look like they had sense enough to get hired hauling anything. Fortunately, though, T. E. Magnum was a preening fool himself, and he was worried chiefly about getting Delta mud on his uniform trousers. So I told him to climb on into his cruiser and we’d take care of the rest.

  I got stuck hooking the chain to the chassis because Pearl hadn’t insisted on me any of Gil’s clothes. I was wearing the sort of grungy togs a fellow could get muddy in. Nobody said as much, but I’d still be standing there with that chain in hand if I’d waited for somebody to offer to do what I ended up doing myself.

  “Think you can drive?” I said to Eugene, and he climbed in under the wheel. “Don’t go until I tell you.”

  “Right, Chief,” he said, and laid hard on the gas.

  T. E. Magnum didn’t have to do a thing but try and avoid whiplash. Eugene jerked him out of that rice field as nice as you please. It might have been easier on his cruiser if he’d had the chance to shift out of park, but Eugene only dragged him about ten yards or so.

  He finally stopped and backed up enough for me to unhook the chain, and I got between T. E. Magnum and the tag on Eugene’s truck and went about apologizing as tediously as I could manage. When I got to the part about my daddy being laid up and sick, that trooper got bored, gave me a finger wave, and raced away toward Desmond. He would have put Desmond in the ditch if Desmond hadn’t been sitting still.

  “You’re about the worst liars I’ve ever seen.”

  They weren’t troubled or offended.

  “Don’t need to lie much,” Tommy said.

  Eugene ground the gears and got us going. “That’s why we’re way back here.”

  I’d been thinking about it wrong. Eugene and Tommy, even Percy Dwayne, were the sort who either went scot-free or got brought up on charges. Clean away or caught. There wasn’t any middle course where you had to talk yourself out of trouble. People knew what you did or they didn’t. Somebody had sworn out a warrant or not. It had a kind of integrity to it and couldn’t really get much simpler.

  So I didn’t say anything else to Eugene about taking the local blacktops. I just braced myself against the cab roof and tried to keep from levitating.

  NINETEEN

  Percy Dwayne’s uncle on Baconia Road lived with a woman who wasn’t Percy Dwayne’s aunt. The house was hers. The dachshunds were hers. The clutter in the front yard was hers. The Nissan was hers. The toolshed was hers. The self-propelled Toro was hers. Every damn nickel they collected so they’d have two to rub together came due to a job she hated but showed up to every day.

  To hear it from her, Percy Dwayne’s uncle didn’t do a blessed thing, which explained why he didn’t point out to us everything that was his.

  “Go on, tell them what’s yours,” the woman who wasn’t Percy Dwayne’s aunt insisted.

  Percy Dwayne’s uncle drew on his Pall Mall. He grinned and told us, “Nothing.”

  That wasn’t strictly true, not anymore. Percy Dwayne had remedied that. Just the day before he’d brought his uncle and the woman who wasn’t his aunt a forty-two-inch plasma television. They were watching it when the uncle opened the door and let us into what wasn’t his house.

  He wasn’t actually married to the woman who wasn’t Percy Dwayne’s aunt but was just living with her strictly due to her merciful dispensation. In return she seemed to have seized the right to belittle and emasculate him in a casual and almost sporting sort of way.

  Percy Dwayne called his uncle Doodle, but the woman who wasn’t Percy Dwayne’s aunt only ever referred to him as “this shitbag here.” For his part, Doodle just grinned and smoked, while Percy Dwayne was left to defend his uncle’s character.

  In this case, the uncle was suitably older than Percy Dwayne, but the woman who wasn’t Percy Dwayne’s aunt kept telling us she was just thirty. As claims go, it seemed wishful based on the evidence at hand.

  Her bare feet looked to be forty-five and her spider-veined legs about sixty. She had a lot more girth than her housedress had been built to handle, so she was leaking out of it where the seams were weak and everywhere else there was a hole. She had jowly underarms
and fifteen or twenty necks, a meth addict’s smile (a lot more gum than enamel), and a shade of hair on the order of a groundhog in July.

  If one of the things she owned was a vacuum cleaner, she must not have held it dear, because Eugenia (her name was) and Uncle Shitbag were parked right in the middle of domestic squalor on a monumental scale.

  Eugenia and Uncle Shitbag were living among Banquet chicken boxes, hamburger wrappers, burrito sleeves, and empty malt liquor forties. Their dog companions were so fat and aged that they could barely walk. Worse still, they weren’t regular dachshunds. They were the long-haired miniature sort, which usually come with gastrointestinal defects and deplorable attitudes.

  So while I was casting around for something redeeming about Percy Dwayne’s uncle and the woman who wasn’t his aunt, they were frustrating me at every turn with their prattle and shiftlessness. Eugenia mostly since Doodle made do as a whiskery affirmation. She’d announce some thought she was having about one thing or another, and he’d nod and say, “Lot of truth to that.”

  Most of it was Fox News–related. They had their forty-two-inch plasma set tuned to the Fox late-morning news. Effervescent talk about jihadists and the liberal seditionist front.

  Eugenia informed us in no uncertain terms that her and Uncle Shitbag hadn’t heard a peep out of Percy Dwayne’s wife, and she went on to wonder about a man who couldn’t control his woman.

  “Don’t you?” she asked Percy Dwayne’s uncle, and in a sign of, I guess, affection she reached out and tugged on his ear like she was hoping to pull it off.

  This time Uncle Doodle cackled and smoked and said back to Eugenia, “Angel’s pissing.”

  One of the dachshunds was irrigating a Hardee’s bag on the floor. Eugenia threw Uncle Shitbag’s ashtray at it, which helped account for how the house had gotten the way it was.

  Percy Dwayne’s uncle rose from the couch and picked his way toward the kitchen. He gave us a sort of wink as if to invite us to follow him there. We did to the extent the three of us could fit inside the kitchen, where they were making compost and penicillin together and at once.

  Doodle nodded and whispered, “She called this morning. That one”—he said of Eugenia—“was on the crapper.”

  “What did she say?” Percy Dwayne asked him.

  “Couldn’t say much, I don’t guess. He was hanging around her. I could hear him. And that baby of yours was crying.”

  “Was she looking for me?”

  “Didn’t really get that far. She was looking to find somebody who wasn’t him.”

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Doodle told me.

  “You know anything about Guy?”

  Doodle glanced toward the front room. He motioned for us to follow him out the back kitchen door and onto the porch. It appeared to have been a screen porch once but was now a sort of dumpster where all the rubbish that wouldn’t fit in the house ended up.

  “She had kind of a problem,” Doodle told us, by which he meant Eugenia, and he went on to give us some details about the people she’d run with, the narcotics she’d favored, the trouble she’d found, the redemption she’d finally won. “She’s a Christian woman now.”

  That surprised me a little. She’d not impressed me as Christian but more as a petty, sneering, and self-deluded witch.

  “She’s all cleaned up,” Doodle told us. I had to think malt liquor didn’t count. “She used to do some work for that son of a bitch.”

  “Guy?”

  Doddle nodded. “She seen him do shit to people. Treat them like dogs.”

  “Did you know any of this?” I asked Percy Dwayne.

  “I couldn’t stop her,” he told me, and shook his head. “Sissy’s always liked her men bad.”

  “Mine too,” Doodle said of Eugenia. “But she’s off it anymore.”

  “Know where we can find him?” I asked Doodle.

  “He’s all over the damn place. I can tell you this, got a house over in Fitler near the river. One of the boys cooking that shit for him over there isn’t a goddamn Mexican. Fellow from up by Nitta Yuma. Good as put his daddy in the ground.”

  “Who?” Percy Dwayne asked.

  “That middle Hobart boy.”

  “The one with the birthmark?” Percy Dwayne asked as he pressed his palm to his cheek.

  Doddle nodded. “That shit got hold of him. You won’t even know who you’re looking at.”

  “The one that played the fiddle?”

  “Yeah, well,” Doodle told him. “He don’t play it no more.”

  “We were already on our way there,” I said.

  “What are you packing?” Doodle wanted to know.

  Short of a shoulder-fired rocket, I don’t think I could have satisfied him.

  “I’ll fix you up,” he said.

  He went in a closet and brought out a gun wrapped in a towel. It was an authentic M4A1, the Colt model for Special Forces and an awful hell of a long way from Fort Bragg.

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

  “Got a buddy.”

  “Is he the Secretary of Defense?”

  I hadn’t held one in a few years, but got comfortable with it quick. I ejected the clip and checked the movement. Uncle Doodle’s had the pistol grip.

  “Damn,” Percy Dwayne said.

  “Damn’s right,” I told him. “You could cut Guy and all of his buddies right in half with this.”

  There was a sweetgum tree in the backyard. It was framed by the porch doorway where there wasn’t anything but an unscreened panel anymore. I let go a burst into the trunk. The dachshunds started howling, followed close on by Eugenia. Desmond came around the house at full glide with his machine pistol in hand.

  Uncle Doodle looked from me with his M4 to Desmond with his Steyr. “I think you boys’ll be all right,” he said.

  Doodle supplied us with two full clips. I paused in the front room to take the blame for the gunfire and temporarily get Uncle Shitbag off the hook.

  “That’s an awful nice TV,” I told Eugenia, and it looked a lot better sitting in Eugenia’s TV cabinet than it had on the floor of Percy Dwayne and Sissy’s house two days before.

  “He gave it to us,” she said, and glared at Percy Dwayne. “I don’t know why.” She made it sound like an accusation.

  Percy Dwayne was standing right beside me, not breathing at all. I’m sure he thought I was going to repo the thing. A day or two earlier, I might have, but I had other things than televisions on my mind just then.

  “That’s a thoughtful gift,” I told Eugenia. “You and Doodle here enjoy it.”

  Eugenia snorted and said, “Can’t imagine why I’d be needing you to tell me what to do.”

  * * *

  “That’s right. Hobart,” Eugene said when we repeated what Doodle had told us. “They call him Slim. He’s about as ruined as they come.”

  “Maybe we can help him.”

  “Yeah,” Eugene told me as he pointed at the M4. “Take that thing and shoot him in the head.”

  “Sure you know what you’re doing?” Tommy asked me.

  “Guy’s got you boys rattled,” I said.

  “He ain’t like any of you,” Eugene told us. “He’ll do any damn thing to any damn body as easy as you breathe.”

  “Evil bastard?”

  Eugene and Tommy nodded vigorously.

  I couldn’t help but think how much I preferred evil to shiftlessness. Evil has form and purpose. Evil has logic, even if it’s warped. Evil is unconflicted. It’s dependable and thorough. You never run across people who are only evil half the time.

  Shiftlessness doesn’t have anything but a galling lack of pluck. It’s mindless and almost incidental. You can’t be shiftless and evil, just like you can’t be shiftless and decent. Think of the commitment, the troublesome responsibility. When you go up against evil people, they drive all your doubt away.

  They followed us in the Geo, Luther and Desmond did, and I let Percy Dwayne get behind
the wheel of the truck. Eugene was suffering through a moderate collapse of nerve, and he was contaminating Tommy with his runaway misgivings. It was like we were going to pay a call on Lucifer at home.

  We took back roads down to Blanton and then the regular highway to Onward where Percy Dwayne turned west toward Fitler and the river on Route 1. By then, Eugene had worked himself into a certifiable state. He wondered who’d take care of his dogs and keep up his house when he was dead. Would they even find his body so they could put him in a grave?

  “What did you see?” I finally asked him.

  “Nothing,” he lied.

  “Look at yourself. You’re giving us everything but the story.”

  “I saw a man killed,” Eugene finally said.

  And Percy Dwayne told him sneeringly, “Shit.”

  Percy Dwayne added how he’d seen all sorts of people done away with. Drunk behind the wheel. Shot. Stabbed. Beat with bats and such.

  “Where?” I asked Percy Dwayne.

  “All over,” he told me. “The Delta’s a funny place.”

  “This was different,” Eugene said.

  “D-d-different,” Tommy added and nodded.

  “Did you see it, too?” I asked him.

  “Naw, but I heard about it once.”

  “Can’t sit on it now,” I told Eugene.

  He said he didn’t guess he could. “Shouldn’t even have been there. Having truck trouble. Couldn’t get no spark.”

  “Where exactly?”

  “One of Guy’s places. Down near Eagle Bend. Back on Steele Bayou in the scrub. He was having a problem with one of his slingers—some boy from over in Jackson. Skimming or something. I don’t know. It don’t take much with Guy.”

  Then Eugene got busy directing Percy Dwayne off a perfectly good paved road. He sent him down a track in the middle of a soybean field toward a row of trees that looked ten miles away.

  “Guy killed him?” I asked.

  “After a while. Just started in cutting him up.”

  The road was washed out from the field irrigation, and Percy Dwayne failed to slow down until we’d all been just about flung clear of the truck.

  “Creep a little,” I told him.