Ranchero Read online

  Even he’d bounced off the cab roof by then and so thought I might be talking sense.

  “Guy’s got this knife,” Eugene said. He held his hands a foot and a half apart. “Some Japanese thing he took off a fellow. He strops it to keep it sharp. It’s always around him somewhere, and he pulled it out of his car when him and that boy were having words. He just lopped that fellow’s arm off right there at the elbow, and suddenly Guy didn’t seem mad anymore.”

  “Shit!” Percy Dwatne said. “Whacked a boy’s arm clean off?”

  Eugene nodded. “Yes sir,” he said. “Right through gristle and bone, every damn thing. Like he was taking apart a fryer.”

  Tommy nodded. Tommy said, “Yes sir,” too.

  “Funny thing about Guy,” Eugene went on. “He can get as pissed off as anybody, but you and me would get stirred up and do harm because we were mad. Then we’d be sorry about it. That’s the way with people, isn’t it? People I know anyway. You chop a fellow’s arm off, the next thing you’re going to do is wish you hadn’t.”

  “I hear you,” Percy Dwayne said. “You ain’t telling me a thing.”

  “This wasn’t that,” Eugene insisted. “Two boys can get to fighting, and it can go bad. But this was something else. This was Guy’s sort of fun.”

  Eugene said he was pulling spark plugs when that boy let out a shriek. He looked over just as Guy bent down and plucked that boy’s arm off the ground. They were standing just off the bayou, not ten yards from the water, and Eugene said Guy took that length of arm and tossed it right on in.

  “His gator must have been there waiting. He had one he fed goats to, and the water started churning and boiling. Guy whipped around with knife of his and set to whacking at that boy again. He took off his other arm up near the shoulder.”

  It was the laughing that got to Eugene. Guy was having a grand time, and the more that boy screamed and bled, the happier Guy seemed to get.

  “I’d known Guy a little while by then. We’d played some poker together. He’d laugh at the table when you’d tell him a joke, and this was just like that. Fun,” Eugene told us. “Just something to do.”

  “Jesus,” Percy Dwayne said, and it was easy enough to tell he was thinking of his wife and son. “Yesterday he seemed like anybody. But smooth, you know. A little slicker than regular people.”

  “That’s the thing about Guy,” Eugene told us all. “He fits in until he don’t.”

  Eugene couldn’t get his truck to turn over. “I half figured I was next. He was having a high time taking that boy to pieces and feeding him bit by bit to that stinking alligator. It looked like the fellow was a third in the swamp before he finally died. Guy all covered in blood and laughing like the devil’s own first cousin. And those boys of his, you know…” Eugene turned to Tommy.

  “Big guys,” Tommy said. “Muscles all over.”

  “They didn’t look like they were caring for it, either. But they didn’t try to stop Guy. No sir. Didn’t say a thing.”

  Eugene said the worst of it was when Guy came over to him.

  “Blood everywhere, all over him, but he didn’t seem to care. He’s got that knife in his hand, big shiny thing, I’m standing there on the bumper wondering if I’d even feel it when it passed through my neck.”

  Eugene shook his head and gave a little quiver like he was having a chill. “‘What’s your trouble?’ Guy asked me.” Eugene laughed. “What’s my fucking trouble, and him standing there looking like he’d been dipped in guts. What’s my trouble? Shit.”

  “What did you tell him?” Percy Dwayne wanted to know.

  “Told him it didn’t have no spark. He reached in and wiggled a wire or two. He don’t know shit about cars. Said Gary would take me home and I could come back for the truck. I figured Gary would haul me a couple of miles, put me out, and shoot me dead.”

  “Must not have,” Percy Dwayne said.

  “No. Dropped me off about a half mile from the house, afraid he’d get mired up. Didn’t say a word to me on the way. Gary never was a talker. I was getting out when he finally asked me if I’d ever wondered what hell was like.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  Eugene shrugged. “Said I’d heard it was hot or something. After that night, I never saw Gary again.”

  “He quit?” I asked him.

  “You don’t quit Guy. He probably got a whiff of what was going on in Gary’s head. He’s pretty good about that sort of thing, can tell what everybody’s thinking. And it was just Gary. There’s lots more where he came from. He’s probably passed through that gator by now.”

  I was coming to think I’d have to treat Guy about like I’d treat a rattler—stay out of his reach if I could manage it and brain him if I couldn’t. He wasn’t impressing me as the sort you could hope to reason with. I knew we were heading for the brand of trouble that just might get ugly fast.

  Eugene directed Percy Dwayne onto a side road into a grove. Pecans and oaks and cottonwoods down where a church used to be. There was a bit of stone foundation left and a couple of wooden grave markers. Desmond pulled in behind us, and we all piled out and stretched.

  Eugene pointed through the trees. I could just make out the glint off a propane tank.

  “House is up through there. I’d leave it be,” he said. “You haven’t done a thing yet you can’t undo.”

  TWENTY

  “I trust you,” I said to Eugene and Tommy, “but only up to a point.”

  Desmond pulled the coil wire off the truck and the one off the Geo as well, and I told Eugene and Tommy they could stick where they were or walk out if they had to.

  “I don’t give a shit,” Eugene said, “as long as I’m not going over there.”

  Over there was through a wheat field and beyond it a scrubby hedgerow. Past that was just a house like a lot of houses out in the Delta—single floor frame on fieldstone pilings in the middle of nowhere much.

  I gave Percy Dwayne the shotgun, kept the M4 for myself. Desmond had the Steyr on a sling over his shoulder. Luther had left his double-breasted suit coat in the Metro and had his school bus–yellow Taser in hand. We weren’t the magnificent seven exactly. More like the middling four, and it didn’t help that we had to hold up at the near edge of the wheat field while I argued Desmond out of walking around it instead of through.

  “You don’t know what’s in there,” Desmond told me.

  “Wheat,” I said.

  But Desmond had reptiles on his mind and was lobbying for a detour, which looked to me about a mile away.

  “I’ll go first,” I told him. “You walk behind me.”

  “What if you get bit?”

  “I’m guessing you’ll turn around.”

  Of course, now I had reptiles on my mind, but I suppose that was better than worrying about getting fed to an alligator, especially in bite-sized pieces carved off by a maniac.

  After about thirty yards, the setting took over, and I lost my interest in snakes. We were thigh-deep in luxurious wheat in a field that covered three or four hundred acres. It flat disappeared off to the north and ran to a far hedgerow on the south end. The sky overhead was bright spring blue instead of the scorching white it went to in the full heat of summer. The wheat had that limey color that hardly looks natural and real.

  It was a spectacular place to be. Life on the ground doesn’t get much more vivid, but then I’d shift the M4 from one hand to the other and remember what we were about.

  Maybe halfway across the field we started hearing the music. It was hardly the sort of stuff you’d expect to find pouring out of a meth house. Not rap or metal or techno funk rubbish but Scottish fiddle music. Airs and jigs on viola and guitar.

  I was tempted at first to believe it was that ruined Hobart playing. That was a foolish fantasy, of course. I’d seen enough of meth in Virginia to know the furious power it had in a life for crowding out everything else. Of course that Hobart had long since sold his fiddle. It was a wonder he still had a boom box.

 
; We slipped out of the wheat at a hedgerow on the far side of the field. It was a stand of trees three or four deep, mostly slender ash and elm, with a view across the junky back lot of a shabby bungalow. The building had that low, squat look of a former Delta commissary, a store where farmhands for many decades had bartered off their wages for overpriced foodstuffs and supplies.

  They’re a common sight in the Delta, low and sturdy, used now for storage mostly and the occasional residence. They’re thought quaint these days and historical like the slave cabins people rent for weekends, all sun-bleached and spartan on the outside but pure rococo within.

  You haven’t really lived until you’ve seen a pasty Hattiesburg attorney sitting out on the porch of a refitted slave shack in his Bermuda shorts and loafers, running with sweat from the stark exertion of draining a Michelob.

  The place in front of us, at least, was operating in the spirit of profiteering, which was the reason the thing had been built in the first place. It struck me as appropriate that it would end essentially like it had started.

  We could hear people every now and again. Not talking so much but mostly shifting and rustling like mice in a wall. The occasional tinny clatter of pots banging. The sound of the front screen slamming as they went in and out of the building to get away from the fumes. And then the music, of course, lovely and with a highland melancholy. Not as out of place as you might think.

  “So?” Desmond said.

  “I can’t imagine they’re armed,” I told him. “What would be the point? Fire a gun in that place, the whole house’ll go up. I can smell the ether from here.”

  We had fertilizer funk and caustic pesticide stink off the field behind us, but it was no match for what was coming out of that house. Ether and ammonia and lye and acid. Methamphetamine might be slow poison finished and refined, but uncooked and in its component parts, it’s the makings of a terrorist plot.

  “You can’t use that,” I told Luther, pointing at his Taser. “No guns. No spark. No nothing. Got it?”

  Luther nodded and then he went all drug-dealer indignant, went chattering on about how a man was obliged to draw a line. He seemed to believe he was on the side of the drug-slinging angels and that Acadian fuck stick was well off the other way.

  I have to say, the distinction between meth and OxyContin wasn’t so clear to me as it appeared to be to Luther. But then all of us can convince ourselves of almost anything.

  “Think they got money in there?” Percy Dwayne wanted to know.

  “Nope,” Desmond told him.

  “Got to work our way to the money,” I said. “This is just where it starts.”

  We went sneaking up to the back of the house with the propane tank for cover. I peeked in a window on a room that was vacant except for scattered muriatic acid jugs and a few empty Mason jar boxes. I’d decided that me and Desmond would be the only ones in the house. Luther was just too Taser-happy, and I half feared Percy Dwayne would go all vengeful husband on those boys.

  So Desmond and I broke off to the left and circled around front that way while Luther and Percy Dwayne, hanging close to the sidewall, approached the front porch from the right. Me and Desmond climbed the rickety stairs to the decking and waited on either side of the front door until we’d heard enough to piece together what was going on inside.

  There were three of them, like we’d figured. Two speaking Spanish, but only briefly and occasionally, the other one only coughing every now again. Fits of phlegmy hacking, which he’d punctuate and annotate with a “Whew!” or a “Well, shit!”

  I was reaching for the screen door pull when we heard footsteps approaching, so I drew back and waited. A bare arm pushed open the door and a fellow came out. He looked maybe twenty, was hardly over five feet tall. He didn’t appear so much Mexican as Mayan. Kind of café au lait, thick but not stout, and surprised to see us but in a passive and unflustered sort of way.

  He was wearing shorts and shower shoes along with a paper face mask, the kind they sell in the hardware store that protects you from nothing much.

  I jerked him clear of the doorway and pressed him against the siding, covered his face mask with my hand in case he was tempted to call out or yell.

  He just looked at me like he couldn’t imagine what I was doing there.

  I suspect he’d long since made a perfectly rational calculation. He was out in the middle of nowhere cooking meth for a psychotic, so the chances of anybody showing up other than to butcher him for sport (given the tireless homicidal way that psychotics are known to work) were probably about as slim as they could get.

  So once he’d glanced at me and Desmond and satisfied himself that we weren’t Guy, he seemed prepared to be okay with whatever we were up to.

  “English?” I asked him, leaning close and whispering in his ear.

  “Sí.”

  “How many inside?”

  He held up two fingers.

  “Call one out, in español.”

  He did a winning job of it, chattered out an invitation to his buddy who threw open the screen and failed to yelp when I grabbed him and drew him over. I didn’t even need to press a hand on his mask. I waved Luther over to where they could see him and directed those two boys down the stairs.

  They both pulled their masks up onto their heads and stood in the yard in their shorts and flip-flops. They seemed interested in finding out what we’d be up to next. Not fretful about it but curious and pleased to have a break in their day.

  I reasoned it’d be best to go inside and grab the last one, so I eased in with Desmond gliding up behind me.

  The décor was a lot like at Percy Dwayne’s house except for the staggering stink. The smell was little short of overpowering, and I revised my assessment of that pair of Mexicans. They weren’t calm so much as addled. I’d been inside thirty seconds when my eyes started stinging and tearing so that I could hardly see.

  We picked our way through the front room trash and fairly blundered into the kitchen. I think all either one of us wanted by then was to get the hell out of the house.

  That Hobart was wearing just underwear. He was standing at the range against the far wall. His bare back was to us, and it and his legs were covered with sores. Some fresh and raw. Others scabbed over. More than a few were dark scars. His bony shoulder blades looked like they might just break through his skin.

  He couldn’t hear us for the music, didn’t have any sense that we were there. He just stood at the stove swaying a little, maybe to the jig that was coming from the boom box. Maybe on account of the fumes.

  “Hey, buddy,” I said.

  Not a dent on his end. He just swayed and stayed where he was.

  “Hey!” I said, with volume this time, and he finally turned and saw us. Front on he was a ghastly sight. He looked like an actively rotting cadaver. All ribs and ruptured flesh. There was a wine stain covering his left cheek, and he didn’t appear to have any teeth left. The meth had eaten away at his chin line as well so that he looked like Jacob Marley’s ghost.

  He glanced from me to Desmond and back again.

  “Hey,” he told us both.

  We each took an arm and hauled him out, though Desmond and I together were both a little reluctant to touch his skin.

  Once we had them all in the front yard in the shade of a pecan tree, I went back inside with Luther, and we picked a little through the litter, not that we expected to find any sign of Guy. There was a typewritten meth recipe, with amounts and specific procedures, taped to the inside of one of the kitchen cabinet doors. Otherwise it was all just wrappers and trash and tickets from the propane guy.

  I grabbed the boom box and a couple of CD cases off the counter. It turned out that Hobart had been listening to Bonnie Rideout. Airs and jigs and piobaireachds to accompany the meth.

  “Now what?” Luther asked me.

  I glanced around, found an unopened bottle of ether. It was proper hospital stock, not spray starter from the auto supply. If there’s such a thing as high-grade me
th, Guy’s boys were making it.

  I showed that bottle to Luther. I told Luther, “Boom.”

  Percy Dwayne was out in the front yard quizzing those boys a little, but they weren’t equipped to tell him anything.

  The Mexicans were all shrugs and a chorus of no ses while that Hobart slouched and gazed around like he didn’t know where he was.

  “Got a car?” I asked.

  The first boy out, the one with the English, said, “Uh-uh.”

  “How do you come and go?”

  He told me they walked to the road and his mother picked them up.

  “Whose mother?” I asked him

  He pointed at that Hobart.

  “She knows he’s here?”

  He nodded like I was slower than he’d hope for.

  And there I’d been thinking how sweet it would be to carry that Hobart home to his mother. She’d nurse him and help to break his habit. She’d bring him back to fiddle shape. What a rich and rewarding and, come to find out, purely fictional thing that would be.

  “How does a mother even stand to look at that?”

  “Mother, hell,” Luther told me, “I can’t hardly take it myself.”

  “What are we going to do with them?” Desmond asked me.

  “Carry them up the road, I guess.” I turned to the Mexicans and asked, “Where’s home?”

  The one with the English misunderstood me. I meant where in the Delta. He drew himself up to his full five feet, smiled, and told me, “Tegucigalpa.”

  “Where the fuck’s that?” Percy Dwayne asked.

  “Them Mexicans,” Desmond told him, “ain’t Mexicans after all.”

  Everybody went but me. Through the hedgerow and into the wheat. I dumped out that bottle of ether on the naked front room planking. I stood at the front door and fired a burst from that M4. The spark ignited the fumes and the ether caught with a POOFT. I didn’t wait around for what was coming next but lit out for the wheat myself.

  I was maybe twenty yards into the field when the house simply exploded. The roof lifted and walls blew out. A jet of flame shot into the air. The heat hit me almost immediately, came in a gust that moved the wheat.