Ranchero Read online

  Drawn by the spectacle, three crop dusters converged in the vicinity. Two canary Ag Cats and a red Air Tractor circled the destruction like flies over cow flop. It was just the sort of thing Guy would hear about straightaway and maybe write off as the cost of doing business. Until, that is, they failed to turn up incinerated employees.

  It took a hell of a lot longer to get back across that wheat field than it had going out. That ratty, meth-eaten Hobart kept wandering off or stopping altogether. He didn’t seem to know what he was up to from one minute to the next. The sun appeared to dazzle and distract him, and he kept running his hands through the wheat as if he couldn’t quite figure what it might be and how he’d come to be in it.

  I like a good obliterating bender about as much as the next guy, but once you’ve hung it on hard and forgotten for maybe a night just who you are, there’s something reassuring about waking up dinged and sober. I couldn’t be wasted all the time. It would be staggering misery.

  That Hobart, though, didn’t function that way. He was the happiest meth head I’ve ever seen. He was one of those guys who can only tolerate this world when he’s high. You could see it in his face. Standing in the middle of that wheat field, bathed in late May sunlight and surrounded by limey green as far as you could see, he was so delighted he could barely bring himself to move. His smile was gummy, like a toddler’s, but it was sure as shit a smile.

  Everybody else went on ahead while I stayed behind to squire that Hobart. The whole enterprise had gotten surreal by then. The house well behind us was crackling and popping. The planes were all still circling. That Hobart was soaking in the world like he’d never been outside before.

  I wanted him to hurry along a little, but I didn’t want to touch him. He was bony and blistered and seeping here and there. It was bad enough walking beside him without having to lay on hands.

  So I just drove him like I’d drive a cow. I slung the M4 by its strap. I held out my free arm, the one without the boom box, and clicked my tongue to encourage him along. It succeeded after a while. There near the end, he saw Eugene over in the church lot standing next to his truck. The sight was something familiar to him and had the effect of pulling him on.

  Once we’d finally cleared the field, that Hobart shuffled over to Eugene and told him “Hey” with what looked like some variety of affection.

  “Hey here, buddy,” Eugene said back.

  “What are we doing?” that Hobart asked him.

  Eugene glared my way. “Fuck if I can say.”

  “You only ever work here?” I asked the Mexican with English who was actually Honduran.

  He’d become local to the extent that he said, “Naw.” Then he told me about another two houses of Guy’s that he worked in, too.

  “Where?” I asked him.

  He pointed at Eugene. “He knows,” he said.

  Eugene had been letting on that he was fuzzy up until then. Didn’t have any details, couldn’t recall where anything was. Been to a place or two once or twice, didn’t imagine he could locate them again. Come to find out from my Mexican friend from Tegucigalpa that Eugene knew an awful lot more than he’d let on.

  “So you do know,” I said to Eugene. “You know it all.”

  “I just drive and deliver shit,” he told me. “Why the hell did you get me into this?”

  “Because I had a 1969 calypso coral Ranchero. You helped it go away, and you’re going to help bring it back.”

  “It’s just a goddamn car!”

  “That’s not for you to say. Load these boys up and let’s take them out of here.”

  We found we couldn’t trust that Hobart to ride in the back of Eugene’s truck. He kept wanting to wander out of the bed, so we brought him into the cab and put Tommy back with the Mexican / Hondurans, which Tommy complained bitterly about.

  Those boys from Tegucigalpa took Tommy as he was and seemed happy to be out in the midday air, even if it was with a swamp rat.

  We ended up carrying the three of them to that Hobart’s mother’s house. It was a tidy little thing up near Nitta Yuma in a grove of pecan trees. She had a glider in the yard and a flower bed. Painted rocks along the driveway. Cucumbers growing in pots. That Hobart’s mother came out at the sound of Eugene’s jackleg truck pulling up the drive.

  I don’t know what I expected. Filthy housecoat. Glass of bourbon. Horns. She was something else entirely, a sort of oblivious throwback. We might have just rolled into 1945. She had on a cotton apron with daisies all over it, and underneath was the kind of shift that housekeepers used to wear. Gray with piping and a starched white collar. She was wearing hose and shoes so sensible they were crowding orthopedic.

  “Well, Lord,” she said, still smiling even after big black Desmond had climbed out of his coupe. “Danny, why didn’t you tell me you were bringing friends?”

  The first thought that popped into my head was that she was smoking something, too. It turned out she was just blinkered by nature. She’d probably started practical and a little more tuned in but had turned away from all of that to cope.

  I was the one who ended up having the fantasy exchange with her since everybody else was a little too thunderstruck by her behavior to talk. We helped her son out of the truck, and she planted a big kiss on his scabby cheek. She didn’t appear to notice the sores, the ravaged physique, the dingy underwear.

  “I’m making cobbler!” she told him about as brightly as Betty Crocker herself.

  The Mexican / Hondurans climbed out of the bed, and she clapped her hands and greeted them as well. She seemed to know them as Hank and Grady. She told them about the cobbler, too.

  I told her the boys were getting a half day off on account of Jefferson Davis’s birthday.

  “Isn’t that nice,” she said. “They all work so hard.”

  I’d rolled up despising the woman and planning to uncork a scalding thing or two, but seeing her standing there in her tidy yard in front of her tidy house with her doomed son and his immigrant coworkers, I discovered I could sympathize with what she was about.

  It turned out her husband had dropped dead a couple of years back. He’d had a coronary in the parking lot at the bank. Borrowing money to put their boy in rehab one more time.

  She told me all about it, lingered on the part where she was making shortcake when the phone call came in.

  “Daddy loved his shortcake, didn’t he, honey?” she called to her son, who’d wandered out in the pecan grove at the bottom of the lot by then. He didn’t appear to have an opinion about his father and shortcake.

  We got invited to stay for cobbler and tea, but allowed as how we couldn’t manage it at the moment, and we left that Hobart and his Honduran colleagues in the hands of that Hobart’s mother who was worrying over her irises—velvety and midnight black—as we returned to the truck and the Geo down at the bottom of the drive.

  I watched as the boys from Tegucigalpa strolled down among the pecans to fetch back that Hobart who’d wandered close to the road. That Hobart’s mother called out after them, all bubbly and light. Her high-pitched laugh from this distance sounded a little like breaking glass.

  “That boy’ll be dead in a month or two,” Luther said. “You think she even knows?”

  “I’m guessing if she knows anything,” I told him, “she knows that.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  I laid it all out for Eugene—Tommy, too, since he was right there. “You sort of get to pick sides,” I told them both, “except I’m going to help you.”

  Eugene went on at some length about how he didn’t want any trouble, just hauled chemicals and shit, picked up what he was told, and took it where he was ordered, made a habit of not looking at what he didn’t guess he should see. It was one of those traditional cracker explanations you hear whenever you catch one in an incriminating spot.

  “I know you think you see me,” is what Eugene was saying, “but the truth of the thing is I’m not really here.”

  “No more Guy after today. We’re taking
him out of the picture one way or another.”

  “Heard that before,” Eugene informed me and added beyond it, “Shit.”

  Eugene and Tommy were mired together in a philosophical quandary. They were trying to piece together how best to save their wretched asses without doing anything they couldn’t—if things went sideways—recover from.

  They came up with a game they wanted me to play. I’d name little crappy desolate wide spots in the Delta, and Eugene would tell me whether or not there was one of Guy’s houses there.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” I told him, and I took the barrel of Doodle’s M4 and laid it against Eugene’s left ear canal.

  Eugene proved awfully good at my version of the game and had soon sent us on the way to a place called (honestly) Africa, Mississippi. Not Africa proper, but the outskirts of Africa on a branch of the Sunflower River, which seemed to run every damn where water could go.

  This particular house was just a shack. It looked abandoned. Apparently Guy didn’t let his cookers drive to work and park their cars. I wouldn’t have guessed the place had power if I’d not seen the satellite dish. These boys weren’t the boom box sort. They had an actual TV.

  I took just Desmond and Percy Dwayne, left Tommy and Eugene with Luther and his school-bus yellow Taser. We came down along the riverbank and slipped up through what once had been a garden. That house was all unpainted cypress with half the front porch caved in. You had to climb a stepladder just to get in the door.

  Those boys were watching an installment of Law & Order, Jerry Orbach vintage, and Jerry was right in the middle of a bon mot when I stepped in the front room proper and tried to ease across the floor. The whole structure squeaked and moaned so I was in fear it might collapse.

  Desmond was at the top of the ladder, but I waved him off from coming in. I stepped into the kitchen just as those cookers were turning around to see who exactly was making the whole damn building jiggle and shake.

  I didn’t even have to raise my gun. I’d figured as much after the first place when nobody lifted a finger to do shit. The crew here was one Mexican and two black kids. They all looked eighteen or twenty, and they reacted identically to the fact I’d come to show them out.

  “Fuck it,” one of the black kids told me.

  That was the prevailing view, and I advised them to take the television. The last we saw of those fellows they were walking down what looked like a deer track into a thicket, and the Mexican and one of the black kids were carrying a Samsung forty-two-incher between them.

  This place had a little less ether inside but was hardly more than standing kindling, so we didn’t attract any crop dusters, but the house burned and fell in quick. We beat it back to the vehicles, and then Eugene sent us over to Colby, which was east of the national forest, and this place was set back in a swamp.

  It was a hell of a thing to get to. There was a trail down a hummocky stretch and then sagging planks over murky runs of water. I took Percy Dwayne and left Desmond halfway back once we’d found him a stump to stand on to get him up out of the scrub and away from the reptiles.

  This house on the bayou was a lot like Eugene’s, except a little less charming and sound. It’s hard to get away with jackleg construction in the middle of a swamp because there’s nothing about to help anything planned and hand-built remain standing. Everything in a bayou works toward rot and destruction, and whoever had built this shack was either worthless or resigned and had ended up just helping nature along.

  The place had a platform, but it was listing off to starboard. Somebody had tried to jack it up and firm it with cross braces, but the nails had pulled and the planks had warped and gravity had set back in. There didn’t seem to be a power supply beyond a generator, a little portable one on skids that we’d been hearing all the while.

  It was running rough, sputtering and coughing. It sounded like water in the gas, so the swamp was even spoiling that as well. It gave a last chug and quit as we were closing on the place.

  We crossed a final board bridge and slipped up tight, eased in next to a piling. Just like the others, this one was a three-man operation. We could hear two voices from inside the shack, and the third man was out on the platform. He was fishing for turtles with what looked like a sizable hunk of nutria or rat.

  He had a line, and a hook, and a seepy chunk of vermin with a little pelt and an entire foot attached, and he was dangling it over a half-sunk log beneath him in the bayou.

  We could see him through a gap in the decking. He looked a little like that Hobart, though not quite as far along. He was sinking into ruin and spoilage but could probably have passed for just ailing. His skin was sloughing off him, which was playing havoc with his tattoos, and he wasn’t so scarred and ulcerated as that Hobart had been.

  We were going to climb up and join him, but there weren’t any stairs we could find. Percy Dwayne spied the extension ladder they’d hauled up behind them, so we had to go about it another way.

  I got right under that boy on the deck. He was jiggling that line so that the rat’s dead foot was bouncing, and he was singing softly. It was a jumpy tune I couldn’t place at first, but it turned out to be the meth-head swamp-cracker version of “All the Single Ladies.” I would as soon have expected selections from Tosca or a Weavers medley.

  It was all so strange and wondrous, I almost hated to intervene.

  “Hey,” I said, and that boy looked around like he thought he’d heard somebody speak. Then he went back to jiggling his line and singing under his breath.

  “Hey,” I said. Now he was mystified and a little uneasy. He glanced around like maybe I was calling from the treetops.

  “Down here,” I told him, and he glanced at the decking and saw us through the crack.

  “Call your buddies,” I said. “Get them outside.”

  He grinned at me and spat my way. “Go on with you. We done pulled the ladder up.”

  I raised the M4 and fired a short burst straight up through the decking. It was crap wood to start with and saturated from the swamp, so the planks did more showy disintegrating than I’d anticipated. Beyoncé up top was suitably impressed.

  The other two came out to see what all of the racket was about.

  They were swamp rats as well. I guess the brothers and the Mexicans weren’t so keen to work back in the bayou, so it was just five of us white boys eyeing each other through a hole in the platform.

  “What the hell you doing?” one of the fellows from inside asked us.

  “Put the goddamn ladder down,” Percy Dwayne told him, and he decided for big-swinging-dick effect to let off a shotgun round.

  Lucky for us, the underside of the decking was so soft that most of those rubber pellets just embedded and stuck. But a few of them went bouncing and zipping around, both under the deck and above it, which made us about as excited as we could stand at the moment.

  “Damn, man,” Beyoncé said. “Them things sting.”

  Percy Dwayne was more than ready to lord it over his brethren, so he raised K-Lo’s shotgun and would have fired again if I’d not stopped him. I shoved my finger behind his trigger and called up, “Ladder. Now.”

  They dropped it down for us, and we climbed up, but that platform hadn’t been engineered for six legitimate adults. It sagged and swayed so much that I sent Percy Dwayne and those boys down. That shack was like a treehouse kids would build with scraps. They’d been working off a hot plate inside and packaging the stuff out on the back edge of the deck. They’d set up a board for a table, had a kitchen scale and a Tuffy tub full of Baggies. It was all crystal and felt like maybe two or three pounds altogether. Enough to keep the local tweakers happy for a while.

  “He ain’t going to like this.” That was Beyoncé talking.

  “Probably not,” I said, and I spilled some gas out of the generator and lit the deck on fire.

  This place didn’t explode like the first one or burn hot and quick like the second. It smoldered from all the damp and raised a cloud of b
lue-black smoke. I climbed down, and one of the inside boys said, “You going to kill us now?”

  “How’d you get in here?”

  He pointed at a flatboat over on the weedy bank.

  “Go on,” I told him. “I don’t need you dead.”

  They took their sweet time getting the thing in the water. It had a little trolling motor on the back, and they fumbled a fair bit before they got the battery hooked up.

  That gave them time for one of them to tell me, “He’ll cut your fucking heart out.” Not as a threat so much as a scrap of prognostication.

  They got out maybe thirty yards before they fired upon us with a rifle they’d had squirreled away in the boat. The bullet hit one of the pilings, and the whole structure quivered and shook.

  “Why don’t you give them one,” I told Percy Dwayne. That was all he needed to hear.

  Those rubber pellets came swarming at them out the barrel of K-Lo’s Beretta, and those boys couldn’t find the water fast enough.

  Too bad for them they’d left their trolling motor running, and as me and Percy Dwayne crossed the plank bridge to get out, we could hear them blaming each for the boat taking off and beating about in the swamp.

  Desmond had left his stump and returned to the car. He was leaning on the front fender and complained to me of being famished and weak. He’d been in consultation with Eugene, and they thought we were maybe thirty minutes from the Yazoo Sonic. That’d be like crossing the street anywhere else.

  Desmond told me all this in a dry and tactical sort of way. It was coming on mid afternoon by then, and my plan, which had been loose and vindictive, was finally solidifying. I knew, though, I’d need Desmond at full strength to help me see it through.

  “All right,” I told him. “But get takeout. And I don’t have any money.”

  “I want a corn dog,” Percy Dwayne said to Desmond, “that nobody throws on the ground.”

  “You’ll come find us,” I said to Desmond, and then turned to Eugene. “Tell him where we’re going to be.”