Beluga Page 3

  He stayed firmly unsympathetic. You couldn’t bend him with a story. People would try all sorts of calamities on him. They couldn’t pay for their dinette, their sofa, their TV because of the flood or the E.coli or their momma’s emergency surgery or some Social Security snafu or the radiation in their basement or a boss (for no damn reason) holding up their check. A few of them would even come right in the store and try to be persuasive. They’d drag children with them and have them rehearsed so they would cry when the time was ripe.

  Frequently, Kalil would hold his fire until they’d finished. Then he’d tell them, “Thirty dollars,” or whatever sum they owed and assure them me and Desmond would come haul away their stuff.

  That’s when the crumpled bills would come out from handbags and trouser pockets. I even saw a boy once pull (I figured) his last twenty from a tiny pouch on his daughter’s tennis shoe. Kalil would do the math on his clipboard. The thing was always right at hand. He’d produce a receipt and offer it like he was conducting regular commerce.

  There was never so much as a hint of compassion from him. I guess that’s why Kalil drank. Armagnac mostly with a splash of Tab. Once he had two in him, he’d sing.

  So me and Desmond, if you can believe it, were the human face on the operation. We’d agreed to take the “troubled cases.” That’s what Kalil liked to call them. He knew if we came back empty-handed, there wasn’t a thing to be done. He paid us a retainer—cash on the first of the month with no taxes drawn from it. It all went straight into our big plastic toolbox down in Pearl’s basement.

  I don’t know why we hadn’t thought to work a little before we went back to Kalil. If you roll around all day doing nothing, people get suspicious. People who wouldn’t pay you any attention otherwise. So not just Kendell but Kendell’s colleagues, and not just Pearl but Pearl’s friends, too. Everybody suddenly wonders how you get by doing nothing, where the profit might be in spending your afternoons detailing your car.

  I’d even lost a girlfriend over it. I’d sort of been seeing Pearl’s niece, Angie. She worked at a hospital up in Memphis, all but ran the place really, and she sort of knew where me and Desmond had come by our pile of cash. Only because I’d gotten full of wine one night and had essentially told her.

  She was okay with it until she’d decided she was less okay than she’d thought. So we drifted off the way people will, her one way and me another, and I didn’t want that to happen in the general course of things. I didn’t want me and Desmond to fall out of favor with everybody. Or just have people like Larry and his buddy Skeeter left for friends.

  Once we could say we were back with Kalil—he let us call ourselves supervisors—it was a handle folks could hold to, and that’s exactly what they did. The trouble was that as the economy in the country soured, opportunity dried up in the Delta to the point of desiccation. So the ordinary cases got special at a pretty alarming rate.

  Kalil wanted to be paid. He had the right to be paid or get his merchandise back, but his clients as a rule were only barely slipping by, so every hiccup turned into a problem. They’d get furloughed from the catfish works for a week or two, and there me and Desmond would be at the door to repossess their bedstead or relieve them somehow of cash they didn’t have. It was a sorry state of affairs to be caught between Kalil and decent, luckless people. And me and Desmond without much appetite for Armagnac and Tab.

  We weren’t three months into supervising when it all came to a head. Kalil had sent me and Desmond out after a washer-dryer. The people only had a couple of payments left, but they couldn’t come up with the cash, and the boy Kalil sent out first had only brought back washer hoses.

  So me and Desmond rode out. They lived on Black Bayou halfway between Leland and Greenville. Their house wasn’t much, but the grass was cut, and there was hardly any junk in the yard. They were out where we could see them, the whole family, I guess. The mother and father, a couple of kids. They were all gathered around a swing set, a brand-new one the man of the house was finishing tightening up with a wrench.

  When he gave them the high sign, the kids swarmed the thing. Two girls. One tall and slender, the other half her size and chubby. They parked on the swing seats, and their father pushed them. Their mother, pregnant, sat on an upturned joint compound bucket and watched.

  “Probably sold the washer,” I told Desmond.

  He’d decided the same himself.

  The girls laughed. The skinny one jumped out at the height of her arc and rolled through the grass.

  “What do they owe?” Desmond asked me.

  I checked the invoice. “Forty-seven ten.”

  Desmond fished out his cash. He counted out fifty. This was something we’d promised each other we’d never do. Or never do again, anyway. We’d let a woman sway us with a pitiful story about her stomach tumor, and we’d pitched in together on her overdue payment, pretended it had come straight from her.

  I remember the three of us standing there, me and Desmond and Kalil. Kalil checked the invoice. He looked at the money. He eyed me and then Desmond and me again. He smiled that way he sometimes does.

  “Show you her scar?” he asked us.

  It was all he ever said about it. It was all he ever needed to say.

  This was different, we told ourselves. Then we told it to each other. We had plenty of money and a better sense of who exactly the shitheads were, so if we wanted to bail out a guy who’d sold off his washer to buy his girls a swing set for the yard, then that’s exactly what we’d do.

  Kalil knew somehow. He always knew. He studied Desmond’s money.

  “Well, all right” was all he told us and dropped the cash in his money drawer.

  We redeemed ourselves not a full week later by scuffing up four Lynches at once. Desmond started with the one who’d shouted though his locked door, “Fuck all y’all. Go on.”

  Then a trio of cousins had come rolling into the yard to get all mouthy with us, so we ended up with a full quartet of Lynches in a battered pile. They were still making threats against us, even semiconscious, which we felt gave us license to keep on kicking them until they shut the hell up.

  The initial Lynch owed on a TV. He owed on a PlayStation. He owed on a laptop. He owed on a side table. We hauled it all back into the shop and set it down in the middle of the sales floor.

  “Renting to a Lynch?” I asked Kalil.

  Kalil gave us both his gassy smile.

  “Well, all right,” Desmond told him, and we were even after that.

  * * *

  So me and Desmond could stop saying, “Taking time off,” when people asked us what we were up to. We got to be regular again. We got to go around unnoticed. We had somewhere to be on the way to. We had somewhere to be coming from.

  In fact, I was cutting across from a job when I met Tula Raintree’s cruiser. People in the Delta drive like fools, dead fast and all over the road. I was in my lane when I passed her, both hands firmly on the wheel, and if I was going over eighty it was only by a click or two.

  When I looked in my mirror and saw that cruiser whipping around in the road, I thought it was probably Kendell wanting to fill me in on something. So I pulled off and waited. I was leaning against the hood when that Grand Marquis pulled in behind me and stopped.

  We were alongside a massive soybean field down around Hollandale. The pivot irrigator had just started up, a monstrous, mechanized thing. It was hooked at one end to a wellhead in the field and rolled slowly in a circle watering scores of acres at once. The tires on it would fit a tractor. It was hundreds of yards long and probably thirty or forty feet high. The water shot out in majestic arcs and rained down iridescent on the beans.

  The sheer scale of agriculture in the Delta was a thing you could become blind to. The huge combines, and the crop dusters, and the satellite-guided tractors. The robust emerald green of the fields, the rich blackness of the earth. It was good to get out and just look at it sometimes instead of racing by with the radio loud and your head full of oth
er stuff.

  I had a question for Kendell about the wells they’d bored all over the place. What they drew. How deep they were. It was something I could stand to know, but before I could shout out to him (I heard him on the cindered shoulder), somebody else entirely told me, “Sir, let’s see your hands.”

  It was a woman’s voice. I swung my head around, and there she was. Her uniform crisp. Her hair drawn back. She had a hand resting on her Glock.

  “Let’s see them,” she said.

  I uncrossed my arms and showed her both my palms.

  “License and registration.”

  I was going to say, “You’re kidding,” but she clearly wasn’t kidding. Everything about her told me that. I checked the tag above her pocket flap. T. Raintree.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked her.

  “License,” she told me. “Registration.”

  I fished out my wallet. I was still driving on a Virginia license that hadn’t yet expired. I’d been in the Delta maybe eight or nine months by then. My tags were Mississippi, though, which was kind of a contradiction.

  She studied my license. She asked me of my Ranchero, “This thing yours?”

  I nodded and stepped around to the passenger door, reached into the glove box. I brought out the registration and gave her that as well.

  “Is this a current address?”

  My license had a central Virginia P.O. box number on it.

  I shook my head. “Been down here a little while now.”

  She gave me a little nod. I watched her. I couldn’t help but watch her. She’d gone to some effort to look stern and pinched and tough, but that couldn’t really hide the fact that she was exotic and lovely. Choctaw, I had to figure. Dark eyes. Raven hair. A café au lait burnish to her. I tried to look without her knowing I was looking.

  “You staying?”

  I shrugged like we were there just making small talk. I can’t say I knew exactly what she meant.

  “Do you intend to stay here,” she said, enunciating each word crisply.

  “Oh,” I told her. “Yeah. Maybe. I guess.”

  “Go to the DMV and get relicensed.”

  “Been meaning to.”

  “Do it.”

  “Right. First thing.”

  I figured that essentially wrapped up our business, so I moved on to the personal.

  “You know Kendell?” I asked her. “Kendell Fairley. He’s a sergeant or something.”

  She nodded. Not a dent otherwise. She still had my license and registration both.

  “I’ve got you at eighty-two in a fifty-five.”

  I’d been in the Delta long enough to know that the proper response was “So?” Instead I pressed my lips together and managed not to say it.

  “Any reason I shouldn’t write you up?” She glanced at my license. “Mr. Reid?”

  It wasn’t the sort of place where locals got tickets for eighty-two in a fifty-five, so that meant I had to go to the DMV to make myself a local. Until then, I was just some guy from Virginia who got cited for all grades of shit.

  “No, ma’am,” I told her. “Guess I’ve got it coming.”

  “Right,” she said and turned and headed back to her cruiser. I watched her all the way. If I was going to get a ticket, that was the least I could do for myself. Then I leaned back against the Ranchero hood and waited while a breeze worked through the soybean field and a bank of clouds closed off the sun.

  “T. Raintree,” I told myself and grunted like Desmond would.

  I heard her door slam, her shoes on the cinders. She gave me my license and my registration wrapped in my speeding ticket. She didn’t bother with any warnings and cautions about how I ought to drive.

  “You can pay it at the courthouse in Greenville or mail a check.”

  “Convenient.”

  “We aim to please.” She didn’t smile exactly, but something changed in her eyes.

  “Looks like rain,” I said and glanced toward the clouds to the west.

  She glanced, too, and told me, “Not really.”

  Then she was on her way back to her cruiser, and I was standing there watching her go.

  * * *

  “Tula,” Kendell said.

  Desmond asked him, “Buddy’s girl?”

  He nodded, looked my way. “How do you know her?”

  I had the ticket in my pocket. I unfolded it and offered it to Kendell. He wiped the biscuit grease off his fingers and looked it over. “Probably ought to slow down.”

  “Middle of no damn where.”

  “She’s kind of a stickler,” Kendell told me.

  Arnette came by with the coffeepot, but Kendell covered up his cup. He sugared and creamed his coffee with the precision of a chemist. He was not the sort of gentleman to tolerate a splash, and there he was calling somebody else a stickler.

  We got together for breakfast a couple of times a week at a place in Indianola that was either called Hank’s or the Chit Chat, depending on how old you were. Hank had passed away in ’78 when the “new” people had taken over, a guy they called Suet and his bride with big hair, but that was three wives and a string of girlfriends ago. Now the place was run by Suet and his various children mostly, but women he’d been involved with would often drop by for a quarrel.

  Suet’s specialty was an omelet with every damn thing in it and biscuits made with just enough flour to keep the lard in place. Kendell always went for the Cream of Wheat. He was disciplined that way. Desmond was partial to the fried bologna, which came for some reason with sausage and bacon. The coffee always tasted like they’d drained it through a tube sock the previous week. But the place was convenient, and we had a regular table where people knew not to sit.

  I let Kendell get his Cream of Wheat ready, butter his biscuit, adjust his flatware, sip his water. When he looked settled, I said to him, “Tell me about her.”

  “Why?”

  I shrugged like I was curious but in an indifferent sort of way, just equipped with an innocent eagerness to know about my neighbors.

  “Bony,” Desmond volunteered. That was hard talk coming from him. Shawnica was bony, and look what she’d gotten up to.

  “Choctaw?” I asked Kendell.

  “Daddy was. Mother’s blacker than me. Buddy had a welding shop out by Metcalfe. Went up to Memphis for some kind of operation. Five, six years ago. Didn’t ever come back.”

  “And her?”

  “What about her?” Kendell asked me. He spooned Cream of Wheat on half a biscuit and smiled.

  “She’s a pretty girl, all right? It’s not like this place is infested with them.”

  “Got a kid,” Desmond offered. “Boy?”

  Kendell nodded.

  “Husband?” I asked them.

  “Marine,” Kendell said. “Killed over in Iraq.”

  “When?”

  “A while ago,” Kendell told me. “Long enough, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “You hire her?”

  “Would have. Captain brought her in. She was down in Baton Rouge or somewhere. Wanted to come home.”

  “You like her?” That was for both of them.

  “Hate to see her end up with you,” Kendell told me. He sipped his coffee. Somehow, he neglected to smile.

  Desmond thought for a second. He took his time nodding his approval. “But bony,” he said and went back to his bologna. “Bony,” he muttered at his plate.

  We were on our way to call on the Duponts when Desmond rode me by her house. He didn’t tell me that’s what he was doing until we were well back off the highway. I thought he knew some shortcut that I wasn’t acquainted with. She was north of Leland, off of Clear Creek at a place called Nepanee. Or it had been a place once, anyway, given the half block of tumbledown ruins. Now it was mostly plowed under with some civic wreckage and a sign.

  “Right there,” Desmond said as he slowed before a small frame house in a pecan grove.

  “What?”

  “Tula,” he said and stepped on the ga
s. “Just saved you half a day.”

  The Duponts we visited lived up in Shaw. They liked to claim kinship to the Delaware DuPonts, but their brand of raging shiftlessness sort of gave the lie to that. We’d all at one time or another begged Kalil to put them on his no-go list. He kept a separate book for people he simply wouldn’t do business with, and you can imagine how far beyond the pale those customers had to be.

  More than a few of them were fugitives. They were gambling addicts and alcoholics. People so filthy you’d rather rent furniture to an incontinent cat. Even then, they needed to have offended Kalil’s sense of proper commerce usually three or four times before he’d finally put them in the book.

  The Duponts were on their way there. They were sorry as far as it went. Got behind on payments. Tore up stuff. They’d even sold off a TV or two. Once they spent the money on a tractor mower even though none of them had a lawn. They were dirt and thicket people, long-term composters—trash piled up everywhere. They’d have all the garden soil they’d need right around Judgment Day.

  Even all that wouldn’t have been enough to turn Kalil against them. Tidy, upstanding citizens rarely rent a couch. The trouble with the Duponts was that the whole pack of them smelled like feet. I don’t know if it had to do with their diet or general hygienic neglect, but every one of them (even the Dupont children) had a penetrating reek about them. It got all over everything they came around or touched, so you couldn’t really repossess from a Dupont to any decent effect.

  They knew they smelled. They knew you’d have to toss out what you took. So what the rest of us might have thought of as a liability, the Duponts took for leverage.

  “I went in last time,” I told Desmond as he pulled up in front of the Duponts’ house. Their dogs boiled out from under the place to menace us and bark. They all smelled like feet as well, and carrion a little.

  “Uh-uh,” Desmond informed me. He tapped his chest. “Refrigerator.”

  “When?”

  “Me and Ronnie. Year ago maybe. You were over in Jackson or somewhere.”

  “Like hell.”

  Desmond grunted. Desmond nodded and shoved open his door.