Ranchero Read online

  Desmond drove directly to the Sonic for a couple of Coney Islands. If Desmond had a bat cave, the Indianola Sonic was it. A city cruiser came by while Desmond was busy marshaling condiments. It eased up beside us with a couple of cracker cops inside.

  Just as the near one was asking us about the punched intended, Desmond shifted around and drew him up short with a glance.

  Desmond could be menacing. He was huge and eggplant black and had a way of looking feral when he wanted. The chances must have seemed good, even to pinhead crackers with badges, that Desmond might be trouble to bring in. The cop who’d been talking simply shut up, and the one behind the wheel dropped the cruiser into gear and drove out of the Sonic just like he’d driven in.

  “Damn, Obi-Wan,” I said in an admiring sort of way, and Desmond uncorked what passed with him for laughter. It sounded like somebody sneezing from the far end of a culvert. Then he punched me fondly in the arm, and I bounced off the passenger door.

  After that day, Desmond would do for me and I would do for him, and we didn’t have to say a thing about it.

  So I might have waited an hour, but I knew Desmond would show at last, and he finally rolled up and made a minor career out of parking curbside. I watched him from the porch steps with my fireplace shovel in hand as he fought his way out of his Geo like a man scrabbling out of a hole.

  “Who done that?” he asked me.

  I hadn’t suspected I’d look a fright from the street. I jabbed my thumb toward the house behind me. “Some boy. Can’t say who yet.”

  “What with?” Desmond wanted to know.

  I smacked the porch rail with that shovel. The steel pan rang out deep and pure.

  “Lord, Nick,” Desmond told me. “You just might ought to be dead.”

  THREE

  Burglary is a going career in the Mississippi Delta, and K-Lo’s rental shop had been broken into a half dozen times or more. One of the last batches of thieves had carried off K-Lo’s stuffed catamount not two months back. It had been posed on a rock primed to pounce with its red lacquered tongue sticking out. Kalil had killed it himself, which he was usually pleased to mention in part. He routinely left out the bit about how he’d hit it with his Civic.

  The theft of that cat had gotten entirely under Kalil’s skin, and he’d gone out in a righteous rage and bought himself a Beretta shotgun. His plan was to lay for the next thieving bastards and rain some vengeance on them.

  Of course, a shotgun doesn’t pair so well with a hothead like Kalil, so we took it as our common duty to keep the thing unloaded. Kalil would get in a snit and shove shells in, and we’d slip around and eject them, for selfish reasons as much as anything else.

  Even a calm, careful man who fires a shotgun in a store full of televisions is likely to take out a Panasonic or three. Kalil, we feared, might shoot us all straight into unemployment.

  We figured he was better off yelling, and he could be brutal with a tirade. I saw K-Lo lay waste to a fellow maybe a week after he’d hired me, an ex-con named Ronnie who unboxed freight and drove a panel truck.

  Ronnie had gone out on a delivery and caught his mirror on a light pole. He’d confessed as much to Kalil straightaway and had offered to pay for the damage, but Kalil had gone off on him nonetheless. He did a devastating job of poking Ronnie in his rawest places. Ronnie was a hapless fuckup, so there was plenty to exploit, and K-Lo managed in maybe ninety seconds to mount a scathing history of Ronnie’s abiding talent for benighted misadventure.

  That was the first time I had ever seen a tattooed felon weep.

  Happily, K-Lo’s wife would swing by the store a couple of times a week to lavish a little ungoverned abuse on K-Lo.

  Their marriage had been arranged. K-Lo had carried the woman from Beirut to a Leland ranch house on a fly-blown bayou, so she’d given up the Paris of the Middle East for the ancestral home of Kermit the Frog. She seemed to resent it a little more bitterly with each passing day.

  She liked to stop in and remind Kalil of all the Delta hardships she’d never have known if she’d just stayed back home in Lebanon. She seemed to prefer to do it at peak volume.

  They’d rage at each other throughout the store, no matter who was about. K-Lo would dip into the stockroom, and his wife would follow him, shrieking. They’d have alfresco screaming matches on the slab by the loading ramp. The ordeal had a way of deflating Kalil, and he’d be spent for the balance of the day.

  I happened to get beat with that fireplace shovel while K-Lo’s wife was away. She’d been up in Brooklyn for a week already visiting assorted cousins, so K-Lo had been raging unchecked for days and had gathered a vile head of steam. When me and Desmond pulled into the shopping plaza lot, he was out on the sidewalk smoking.

  “Where’s my goddamn TV?” he barked my way, letting it serve as well for “you look like shit” and “hello.”

  “They took it,” I said. “Hit me with this.” I held up my fireplace shovel.

  K-Lo spat with disgust and drew his cigarette down to the filter in a spasm of rage. Then he flicked his butt and bounced it off my shirtfront. It exploded in sparks and fell to the pavement, where I ground it out with my boot.

  “Hey!” K-Lo shouted, and his right hand, Patty, came scampering out of the store. “Get Dale,” he told her.

  Dale was a raging psychopath and Patty’s husband both at once. He was a county policeman, a bigot, a misogynist, a xenophobe, and a musclehead who appeared to live on supplements and Skoal. Dale had developed so much veiny bulk in his years of hoisting dumbbells that it had reached the point where he could hardly fit in his uniform. He was all chiseled contours and looked like he’d walked straight out of a Marvel Comic.

  K-Lo liked to call him in when customers defaulted because Dale was the sort of cop who lived to beat civilians up.

  Patty ran into the store to phone him. Even from out in the parking lot we could hear every word she told Dale because he was a tireless plinker who thought earplugs were for faggots, so he’d made of himself a burly heterosexual who couldn’t hear shit.

  Apparently he was over on the truck route making trouble for a pack of Mexicans. It seems Dale had pulled them for too damn much tread wear and was turning their car inside out. It should be said that Dale thought anybody who spoke Spanish was a Mexican, and it took only two of them together to constitute a pack.

  So as far as anybody knew, Dale might have been hassling a dozen unpapered migrants or engineering an ugly forenoon for the king and queen of Spain. Either way, it was plain Dale thought he might be tied up for a bit, and I figured we might have twenty minutes to get what we needed from K-Lo. This was all my business, and I didn’t want the pair of them mucking it up—Dale with his blundering stupidity and K-Lo with his scattershot rage.

  “I’ll want paper on that boy,” I told K-Lo, and he bolted straightaway, running headlong into the store like we wouldn’t know where to find him.

  Desmond and I followed him back to his office. We gave him the chance to unbolt his door before Desmond bucked against it once and blew it off its hinges. The thing hit K-Lo and knocked the shotgun from his hands. I stood on the barrel to keep him from picking it up.

  “Paper,” I said, and K-Lo looked like he might just vomit on me.

  When it came to the details of his business, K-Lo was clinically unwell. He couldn’t bring himself to let anybody know anything at all. We never went out on repos with actual invoices in hand but just scraps from a pad where K-Lo’d written a physical address. He wouldn’t even give us the customers’ names because he lived in nagging fear we’d go all devious and entrepreneurial on him.

  “PAPER,” I insisted, and K-Lo stood there stricken and forlorn until Desmond bent him over his desk and applied sufficient tonnage to tempt K-Lo to reorder what he cared about and why. Breathing moved up to the top of the list and paperwork drifted well south.

  K-Lo pulled a tissuey pink invoice from a file in a desk drawer and then held to it so I had to snatch it from him.

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bsp; “Hear that?” Desmond asked me.

  It was an approaching siren on full WA-WA, Dale’s preference for getting cars the hell out of his way.

  “Shit,” I said, and me and Desmond legged it through the store.

  We reached the parking lot just as Dale came wheeling off the truck route. He passed breakneck through the gutter and nearly left his muffler there. I had to guess Patty had called him back more than a little frantic, and sure enough Dale had just thrown his Mexicans into the back of his car.

  I didn’t have a clear idea of precisely what I’d do until Dale whipped in beside me and loomed up out of his cruiser. He laid one hand to the hilt of his Ruger and grabbed his toothpick with the other.

  “What the shit’s going on?” Dale asked me at a volume fit for cattle drives. All I had was K-Lo’s pink tissuey invoice and that fireplace shovel.

  I well knew there was no explaining anything to Dale. He’d not been designed and constructed for cogitation. I glanced at the woman and her three weeping children shut up in the squalid backseat where Dale usually hauled around meth heads and drunks whenever Mexicans weren’t handy.

  A two-fisted backhand seemed called for, a looping Björn Borgish sort of thing. I caught Dale just above his right ear with the flat of that shovel pan. If his head had detached, it would have been heavy with topspin. The steel rang so loudly that those three Mexican children stopped crying at once.

  All of us watched Dale teeter for about a quarter minute before his lower half decided it couldn’t support his upper bulk. He went down with stately deliberation, like a punctured ocean liner. I shoved a foot under his head to keep it from bouncing off of the pavement.

  There was blood, of course, where Dale’s scalp had parted cleanly from the blow. It spouted and flowed so extravagantly that Patty went a little daft, and I had to take Dale’s pistol from her before she could shoot me with it. Then I flung open the back door of the cruiser and told Dale’s Mexicans, “Adios.” It did the job, judging by how they scrambled.

  “Not quite the day I’d hoped for,” I said once I’d met Desmond at the Geo. “Sure you want to do this?”

  Desmond told me, “Doing it already.”

  FOUR

  Of course, Desmond needed a Coney Island just to settle his nerves, but we both doubted he could Obi-Wan us out of this mess, so we passed up the Indianola Sonic for the branch on the outskirts of Greenville, twenty miles west, and backed up to the Mississippi River.

  We got takeout and carried it over the levee to a weedy, trash-strewn park with a view of a flooded cottonwood grove and a derelict casino barge.

  By then I’d studied K-Lo’s invoice and knew what we were up against. That boy wasn’t just a shithead with a shovel anymore. He was a Dubois, a name they couldn’t be bothered to Frenchify in the Delta. Dew-boys—front loaded and hick specific—was good enough for them.

  Duboises were notorious unprincipled rubbish, and the region was filthy with them. That boy could have been an O’Malley in Dublin for all the sifting we’d have to do.

  “Percy Dwayne,” I said, reading it out. “Know him?”

  Desmond shook his head. He drew open his shirt at the collar to show me a leathery scar on his shoulder. “Luther Dubois, down by Yazoo.” Desmond said. “Him,” he told me, “I know.”

  Desmond had a buddy, Kendell, who was reliable police. He’d worked all over the Delta, from Clarksdale clear to Vicksburg, and was always getting laid off and rehired as the books and the budgets permitted. The last Desmond had heard, he was doing traffic stops out in Leflore County.

  There’s a spa hotel in Greenwood people come to for a treat, and the bulk of them get there on Route 7 off the interstate, through Leflore County. Like most Delta roads, it’s flat and straight, and you’ve hit ninety before you know it. A vindictive lawman can empty a summons book in an afternoon.

  “Kendell’s got no use for Dale,” Desmond told me. “Might help us run that Dubois down.”

  We were soon back in the Geo driving though downtown Greenville. It’s a hard place to be inconspicuous because there’s nobody much around, and Greenville’s a town that was grand once and sprawling and overrun with people. The boulevards are wide. The vacant buildings are ornate, Romanesque piles. When steamboats still called and cotton left the Delta on the river, Greenville had an opera house and a full-time chamber orchestra. It had hotels and restaurants and ladies’ boutiques, was invested with cachet and bustle, which had all drained away well past the point of exhaustion over the years.

  Now Greenville had empty storefronts and intermittent renewal projects that never got beyond bricking the crosswalks and changing out the lampposts.

  There were a couple of cars parked slant in at the diner near the levee, but otherwise the place was desolate except for me and Desmond. Anybody looking for two fellows in a Geo could have seen us from three hundred yards away.

  Desmond chose to dodge the truck route on a back way out of Greenville that would loop through open farmland and bring us to Highway 7 after a while. The road we were on had been house-lined at first and then shack-plagued and hovel-dotted before we passed beyond people entirely into an unbroken sea of green.

  We went from weeds and trash and leggy gardenia bushes and drowsy mongrels to luxurious jade green soybeans stretching as far as we could see. The transition was stark and instructive, a sort of Delta affirmation that the people could go to shit if they pleased, but the crops would go to market.

  We’d rolled in an instant out of food stamps and into agribusiness. There might have been chicken fingers and government cheese for the two-legged fauna, but the flora would get no end of what it needed to survive. Bug spray and herbicide. Fertilizer and irrigation. Seed engineered to make the plants impervious to Mississippi.

  There wasn’t much on this earth that could touch a modern Delta crop if the ag school in Starkville had decided it was better off unbothered.

  The soybeans eventually yielded to rice. The rice gave way to wheat. The wheat was eclipsed at last by several thousand acres of corn, all of it over head-high and meticulously level. A red crop duster, an Ag Cat, was flying back and forth dousing that corn with something. It banked steeply over the road as we passed beneath it and doused us a little as well.

  Time and ingenuity had drained the heartbreak out of Delta farming. It was primarily about money now. If you could buy the land, afford the seed, the tractors and the diesel, pay for the chemicals and the poly pipe, hire the dusters and the combines, you were all but sure to realize what the market would allow along with what the government would subsidize.

  These days a man could run a ten-thousand-acre Delta spread with a handful of tractor drivers and the odd combine operator, which left most everybody else with little or nothing to do.

  You could work in a catfish plant, but those jobs came and went with the price of feed. You might find some hourly clerking job in a box store on the truck route, catch on at the Long John Silver or repossess TVs, supplement your monthly government check with scattershot larceny. Or you could do what the bulk of people had done and simply pack up and leave.

  As a guy who’s spent his share of time knocking around the South, I’ve never come across a place as empty as the Delta, and it’s double desolate because the towns are still standing but the people are mostly gone. The folks remaining either couldn’t afford to sell off and get out or were comfortable enough already so they could stay no matter what.

  The place would probably be better off razed with every arable acre plowed under. The soil is black and loamy, tailor-made for agriculture, so it’d be smarter to let the people congregate around the edges and give John Deere and Allis-Chalmers the general run of the place.

  Life in the Delta demands sweet-tea existentialism, a view of the world narcotic at bottom and sugared over with courtliness. Heat and mosquitoes in summer. Scouring wind in winter. Anemic prospects lingering through the year. People steal and drink. They work when they can, get along as best they’re ab
le, and the mood of the place extends to the local police as well. Except for fools like Dale, no lawman in the Delta ever gets too terribly worked up. Such a wealth of civilians about are given to rampant shiftlessness that a cop with his gun out would find himself faced with too damn many people to shoot.

  I was still new to the place, maybe eight months in, and hadn’t fully acclimated. I wasn’t yet used to driving an hour and a half to get anywhere I needed to be, hadn’t acquired a taste for Kool-Aid pickles or venison tamales, wasn’t entirely at ease as part of the puny white minority.

  I was getting there, but I’d spent my last decade in the eastern Virginia uplands, working as Deputy Nick Reid in the middle of nowhere much. The hillbillies up there had come by their parsimony from Scotland, their marksmanship from Daddy and Daniel Boone, and their dunderheaded obliviousness from taking cousins for wives.

  They didn’t have any manners, barely had language I could understand, and seemed to live for hunting out of season and beating each other up. I’d passed the bulk of my time sorting out the same couple of dozen people until their children came of age for proper charges when I got to sort them, too. I don’t think I did an ounce of good the whole time I was up there, and once the job had brought out the Dale in me, I’d had the sense to quit.

  I’d lit in the Delta because I could tell it was something else altogether with terrain about as far from Virginia hillbilly hollows as I could get. Everything was slower and hotter, the local manners approached baroque, and racing down a Delta road with crop dusters on the horizon was like driving into 1952.

  The Delta was otherworldly, even for folks in the rest of Mississippi who’d explain away outlandishness that transpired in the Delta by shrugging and saying, “It ain’t like nowhere else.”

  The place had a reputation for the natives living a little too close to the ground. The black trash was trashier than in normal Mississippi. The Delta crackers were capable of almost any enormity sober and everything otherwise once they’d gotten drunk.