Beluga Read online

  I remember the afternoon she came home from Ailene’s because of all the screaming. I was changing my oil in the car shed and came out to check on Pearl. She was sitting in her Buick with the driver’s door open. She was quivering and close to tears.

  “You all right?”

  She shook her head. “Went right across my lap.”

  I looked around. I didn’t see anything. “What?”

  “Possum, I think.”

  “Coming in? Going out?”

  She pointed toward the side yard, more specifically toward a Nuttall oak that her Gil had planted and nursed. It came with a story like most everything around Pearl’s house, and she launched into it automatically. That was the way with Pearl and her stories. Of course, I’d heard about Gil’s Nuttall oak by then. How he’d dug it up down by Yazoo in a spur of the national forest and had brought it home wrapped in a towel and little more than a twig. Then he’d fenced it in to keep the squirrels away, had raised it to a sapling, had very nearly lost it in the ’77 drought. But he’d watered it every night in direct opposition to city ordinance, and there it was—a glorious Nuttall oak right in Pearl’s side yard.

  It was south of glorious, truth be told, because the power company tree trimmer had been through a few years back while Pearl was off in Birmingham. He’d butchered the thing quite thoroughly. Those boys have a talent for that. So it was a glorious Nuttall oak up to where it turned to power line topiary.

  Pearl was carrying on about that tree, the way she seemed obliged to, while I looked for the possum that had run across her lap. I checked under the car. I checked in the backseat where Pearl had laid a pile of Ailene’s Salem-stinking clothes. Then I walked over to Gil’s Nuttall oak and looked up in the stunted canopy. There was a tuxedo cat on a limb up there about the size of a beagle.

  “Where have you been?” I asked Pearl.

  “Ailene’s.”

  “She have a cat?”

  Pearl nodded. “Fergus.”

  “Black and white?”

  Pearl nodded.

  I pointed him out, and Pearl said, “Oh.”

  She’d tried to feed and tame him during the time that had passed since then, but Fergus was on the feral side and wouldn’t be domesticated.

  With Desmond out on the driveway, Pearl could give him both the Fergus story and the saga of Gil’s transplanted Nuttall oak. He was a trapped man and knew it. For my part, I veered off toward the basement.

  “Checking on something,” I called to them both once I was halfway across the yard.

  Pearl never locked her basement, so we were taking a chance keeping money down there, but the place was such a cluttered mess—almost everything in it was broken—that you could look inside and see there wasn’t anything to take. Since there weren’t any stairs up into the house, it was just its own junky thing and didn’t even lead to a place that might be better. A fellow would have to be sorry and industrious both to wade into that thicket, and those are traits you rarely find paired together in a man.

  Our cash was all in a big plastic toolbox on a low shelf in a back spidery corner. There were lawn chairs leaned up against the cabinet in case the spiders weren’t enough. Even Desmond wouldn’t mess with the thing. He’d linger in the basement stairwell and have me go get money out whenever he needed some.

  I moved the chairs. I opened the box. We had maybe two hundred and forty thousand left from the three and change we’d started with. As I counted out Larry’s money, I was already writing it off.

  I might even have dwelled a bit on Larry and grown sullen in the basement if Fergus hadn’t scared me half to death. He didn’t leap out or anything. He had too much bulk for that. Fergus was just sitting on a patio table, an old wooden one with a couple of splintered slats. He was watching me with his yellow eyes until he got a sudden urge to bathe. When he went to lick a paw, I vaulted and nearly hit a rafter.

  “How’d you get down here?”

  Fergus yawned.

  “She’s looking for you,” I told him.

  Fergus got an urge to lick his belly, indulged it, and then studied me the way cats will. If he could have talked, he probably would have said, “You still here, asswipe?”

  I’d been around cats enough to know how to pick a strange one up, but I couldn’t be sure that Fergus’s neck scruff would support Fergus’s tonnage. He burbled some when I hoisted him. For my part, I swore quite a lot and then went running up the steps and across the yard, desperate to set him back down.

  “Look here,” I shouted, and Pearl turned her wan light beam upon us.

  “Oh, baby!” Pearl made me give him to her against my better judgement, and he stayed in her arms for a nanosecond before clearing out for Gil’s oak. Fergus scrabbled up the trunk and perched on a limb. Pearl turned her flashlight on him.

  “Kind of big for a cat,” Desmond said.

  “Kind of big for a pony,” I told him.

  * * *

  I let Desmond handle Beluga. I’d done my bit by showing up and listening to Larry’s spiel. It seemed certain somebody would make some money. I just wasn’t convinced it was us.

  “You going to give it to him all at once?” was the only thing I asked Desmond.

  “To her,” he told me, and that was about the best thing he could do.

  Then four or five weeks went by. I didn’t think much about it except for when the twinges hit. I’d imagine Larry in new sneakers we’d underwritten. Larry in Gucci glasses. Larry riding around in a Range Rover with a gold-plated Rolls-Royce grille. I kept it all to myself since I knew that Desmond was just doing for an in-law, by which I mean I didn’t come right out and complain, but me and Desmond did chafe for a bit.

  We work together. That’s how we met. For a couple of months there, after we’d taken all that meth kingpin’s money, me and Desmond were men of leisure, up to nothing in the middle of the day. It was all right for the first few weeks, but it wore poorly after a while. We were like kids out of school for the summer, hating the classroom but bored half to death.

  So we started showing up back at the shop where we’d worked and getting in the way. Kalil, who runs the place, tolerated us for a bit. It’s a rent-to-own store, and he let me and Desmond hang around the showroom and harass all the guys who were actually working until a call came in one day, probably about a year ago now. Kalil had sent Ferris out to repo a stove, just him alone with his ratty Ford Ranger and a hand truck. We didn’t like Ferris. Nobody liked Ferris. His girlfriend would even come by to belittle him two or three times a week. He was a bony, tattooed fellow with his eyeteeth missing and no experience with a bathtub or a comb.

  Every time he introduced himself he said, “Like the wheel, goddammit.” It didn’t matter the circumstances. He would have said it to the pope.

  “Got him in a closet,” Kalil told us and handed Desmond a scrap of paper with an address scribbled on it.

  “Who’s got him?” I asked.

  Desmond studied the address. “Down below Moorhead?”

  Kalil nodded. “Lawtons.”

  “Which Lawtons?” I asked him, and Kalil just flattened his lips and shook his head.

  “They’ll feed him to their pigs,” Desmond said.

  It was a real possibility with those Lawtons. The good side of the family wasn’t prosperous exactly, but they were decent and reliable. When they got behind on payments, you knew there was nothing else they could do. The bad Lawtons were mean and sorry and didn’t care who found it out. They were all cousins or something—the good and the bad—and spent holidays together. There would reliably be a picnic ham and most usually an assault.

  Desmond waved the scrap of notepaper. “Who?”

  Kalil hated to tell us. “Oscar.”

  “Give it back to him” was my suggestion.

  “Send one of them,” Desmond suggested to Kalil.

  We all looked at Kalil’s staff on hand. They were sitting on the homely sofa Kalil could never sell. With the tufts and the skirts and the Chesterf
ield buttons. They weren’t, as a group, inspiring. I knew the boys on either end. They’d get put in a closet, too. The ones in the middle were entirely new to me, but Desmond was acquainted with one of them.

  “What about him?” Desmond asked and pointed at the boy he knew.

  “Some fool went after him with a Garden Weasel. He’s still a little gun-shy.”

  “We don’t even work for you anymore.” I knew that was a last resort when I said it.

  “Maybe you miss it,” Kalil suggested. “Or maybe you ought to find out.”

  “It’s a stove?” Desmond asked him.

  And there we were, right back in it again.

  We drove over in my Ranchero and parked it back beyond a hedgerow, well out of gunplay range. The good Lawtons lived in a Lawton compound that backed onto a rice field. They had dirt instead of grass and a couple of cannibalized sedans, but their place overall was a shade more neat than not. The bad Lawtons lived in a domesticated landfill. They just went to the doors, both front and back, and pitched out whatever they’d decided didn’t belong under the roof anymore. That might be last night’s pizza boxes or a dinette chair.

  When we peeked around the trees, we spied a county cruiser parked in the Lawtons’ yard. Parked, anyway, behind a harrow and some sort of busted seeder. The driver’s door was open, and Kendell was sitting under the wheel.

  He saw us, too.

  “Can’t leave it alone,” he shouted out our way.

  We went over to him crouching low since you couldn’t be sure a Lawton might not squeeze off the odd recreational round.

  Kendell was Desmond’s cousin somehow. He was a ferocious Baptist and had disapproved of how me and Desmond hadn’t been up to much for a while. He had suspicions about what we were living on and everything we’d gotten up to, but I guess he decided to pray for us both instead of haul us in. I liked Kendell. He was what I had instead of a stout, unwavering conscience.

  “Kalil snared us,” I told him.

  Kendell nodded. “Bound to in the end.”

  “What are you here for?” Desmond asked him.

  “They took a shot at the meter reader.”

  “What the hell for?” I knew when it came out the sort of looks I’d get. Desmond and Kendell eyed me the way Delta people often did when I tried to apply some regular standard of cause and effect to the place.

  The bad Lawtons were essentially sovereign citizens without the impeccable philosophical underpinnings and the patriotic good humor of constitutional crackpots most everywhere else. They’d shoot at you, if you were a meter man, because they had bullets and a gun.

  “What brings you?” Kendell asked us.

  Desmond sort of pointed at the house. “Boy in the closet. One of Kalil’s.”

  “Who?”

  “Ferris,” I said. “Know him?”

  Kendell nodded. “Like the wheel.”

  “You waiting on backup?” Desmond asked him.

  Kendell climbed out of his cruiser. “Guess you’ll have to do.”

  They didn’t believe in SWAT in the Delta. There was never a shortage of hulking rednecks wearing a county badge, the sorts of eager brawlers you could pitch into trouble like a terrier down a rathole. I could tell by the way Kendell glanced at me, I was his cracker for the moment.

  “Me and him,” he said and pointed at Desmond, “we’ll work our way around back. You get them talking. See what they want this time.”

  “Want to keep their stove, I’m guessing.”

  “Why don’t you talk them out of that.”

  “Already shot at the meter reader,” I reminded Kendell.

  “Make yourself little,” he told me. Beyond that he only winked.

  Kendell and Desmond went the long away around, through the corn instead of the rice field, and I saw them take cover in the back of the lot behind what had once been an outhouse. It was vine-choked and tumbledown but big enough to crouch behind.

  “Hey, Oscar,” I shouted.

  A couple of dogs barked from under the porch. They’d been Lawton dogs long enough to have the good sense to stay just where they were. People who’d shoot at a meter man wouldn’t think twice about a mongrel.

  After maybe half a minute, Oscar shouted back, “He’s not here.”

  “It’s Nick Reid, Oscar. I know it’s you.”

  “Ain’t me.”

  “You got a fellow in the closet?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Think I can have him back?”

  “Well,” Oscar told me, “I don’t know about that.”

  So we’d finished with the preamble and had arrived at the terms.

  “What’ll it take?”

  I could hear racket from inside and Lawtons shifting around. It wasn’t much of a house. The windows were all flung open, and the nasty curtains were hanging over the sills.

  “Says he wants our stove,” Oscar finally shouted. “Can’t have it.”

  “All right.”

  “And we want some Fritos.”

  “Fine.”

  “The big bag. And a twelve-pack of Busch.” There was some muttering in the wake of that. “Hell, a case.”

  Kendell eased out from behind the viney outhouse far enough to look my way. I just shook my head and shrugged. A Lawton would want what a Lawton would want.

  “All right,” I said. “I can do all that.”

  I let the Lawtons enjoy their moment of triumph before I shouted out, “Hey, Oscar.”

  “What?”

  “You’ll need to send that boy out first.”

  “The hell I will.”

  “That’s the only way it’ll work.”

  There was discussion about that inside.

  “And some cigarettes,” Oscar called out. “Three whole damn cartons. Winstons.”

  “All right,” I said and waited.

  The front door opened, and Ferris came out. He was blinking and in his stocking feet. I motioned for him to come over to me, but he turned instead toward the doorway to piss and moan about his shoes. Then he changed his mind the way that people often do at gunpoint. He crossed the yard to join me at a trot.

  “Shit, man,” Ferris told me. “I ain’t had them boots a week.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Quitting this damn job.” Ferris went stalking toward the road in his filthy socks.

  “So?” Oscar called out.

  “Going in a minute. I’ll pick up all your stuff,” I told them. “Got to get this guy you shot at straightened out first.”

  “What guy?”

  “Meter reader.”

  “Ain’t done it!” Oscar had a gift for righteous indignation.

  “Somebody did.”

  I could hear from inside the sound of a Lawton huddle. That was how they always decided who exactly would get blamed for what. It was like what people do with their Visa cards, trying to pick out the one to use that’s got a little more room on it than the others. If a Lawton in there had no charges pending, he was going to get the blame.

  They must have all been in trouble, because Oscar soon told me, “That boy of yours, he did it.”

  “Ferris shot the meter man?”

  By now Kendell and Desmond had slipped up through the side yard and were pressed against the house, easing toward the front.

  “Tried to stop him. Wouldn’t pay me no mind.”

  “So you put him in the closet?”

  “Couldn’t figure what else to do. Got a bad streak or something. Ought to tell somebody about it.”

  I glanced toward Ferris out in the road. He was having an animated conversation with himself.

  “Well, all right, then. I’m sorry for all the upset.”

  I waited until Kendell had slipped up just alongside the front door. He nodded.

  “Fritos and what now?” I said, and that was enough to bring Oscar out. He hated to have to repeat a thing. Everybody in the Delta knew you didn’t ask Oscar Lawton to say something twice.

  Oscar jerked open the door
and came onto the stoop. He looked half determined to shoot me, but Kendell grabbed Oscar’s rifle barrel and snatched his gun away before Oscar could react.

  Like usual, he was wearing a pajama top and a pair of undershorts. What hair he had left was standing straight up. I had to think Oscar was pushing eighty.

  He told Kendell, “Aw,” which was Oscar’s standard version of “I guess I’m just giving the hell up.”

  Kendell supplied him with the usual instructions, and Oscar invited his household out into the yard. His two boys carried their mother out on what looked like a toilet chair and set her down hard enough to prompt her to bark at them a little. One of those boys was sixty if he was a day. I think the other one was about seventeen.

  “Who’s going in?” Kendell asked them.

  They all pointed at the teenager. He shoved his hands together to make it easy for Kendell to cuff him up.

  “How much?” I shouted at Ferris.

  He stopped raging in the road and looked at me.

  “What do they owe on the stove?”

  Ferris scratched his head. He fished a sheet out of his pocket and studied it briefly. “Thirty-two dollars,” he said.

  “I ain’t got it,” Oscar told me. That’s what he always told us.

  Me and Desmond went inside and found two twenties in the Bible. We left change and came back out. Even if it was only thirty-two dollars from bad Lawtons, it felt good to be up to something after nearly a year of swanning around and living on our swag.

  Kendell was having a word with Oscar. The Baptist in him made him tireless.

  “You can’t just shove folks in your closet.”

  Oscar nodded. “Tell me about it.” He pointed at his son, the older one. He had on a pajama top, too. “Weren’t no room until he took his golf clubs out.”

  THREE

  So we went back to work, but me and Desmond were like the special forces. Kalil called us in on the thorny jobs, and as the economy sank in the Delta and the available work ebbed away, Kalil would have me and Desmond go in and sort his business out.