Ranchero Read online

  The Delta had its own rules, its own peculiar customs. There were people in the Delta who’d help you out for no conceivable reason and people who’d extract your vital organs for sport. I’d hardly begun to understand the whys and wherefores of the place, which made Desmond indispensable to me. He was my guide to all things Mississippi flatland. I had need of Delta insight and Delta education, and Desmond was my personal lyceum.

  He never played the radio when he was behind the wheel of his Geo. Instead he whistled through his teeth and drifted all over the road. Steering never seemed to hold much lasting interest for Desmond. He preferred pointing out silos and telling tales of various farms he’d worked on back when he could fit in a tractor seat.

  There were squashed armadillos all over the place putrefying in the sun, and given the way we wandered we rarely failed to hit a carcass. Consequently, the ride out to Highway 7 was perfumed with rancid meat and what I’d grown to think of as eau de W. R. Grace—a tangy chemical nosebleed aroma that was the signature scent of the place.

  We found Kendell backed in a slot between two cypress trees. I’d met him on a repo that had soured on me on a couple of months before. I was trying to get payment from a covey of Klinnards when the whole thing had gone sideways.

  They’d fallen to fighting each other—the entire crew—and we were in their trailer at the time. They were all Delta fat, about Desmond’s size but too full of beer to be lively, so they’d just laid on each other and described the thrashings they’d inflict if they could.

  One of them got squashed so thoroughly that he passed out in the doorway and so trapped me and the rest of his clan inside. That’s when I put in the 9-1-1 that Kendell responded to.

  I watched him out a window as he exited his cruiser and pepper-sprayed all the mongrels that came snarling up to meet him. Kendell lay against that trailer door while I pulled it from inside, and we made a gap that Kendell could slip in through.

  He wasn’t hungry for particulars. Kendell just drew out his lacquered nightstick and went about tapping Klinnard bony parts. It earned him undivided Klinnard attention.

  Kendell was from Tchula and knew his Delta crackers inside out. Duboises would have ganged up on him and fought him to the death. They’re pretty much the Gurkhas of the region, but Klinnards are more like the Vichy French and don’t have any steel to speak of.

  “You going to pay this man?” Kendell asked, and all those Klinnards pledged they would.

  Two of them made the mistake of swearing on their mother’s grave, their mother who Kendell knew to be sitting in jail in Alabama, so he swatted those boys once further in righteous exasperation before advising them all to scratch up the cash due on their TV.

  They came within thirteen dollars of everything they owed, and I was quick to let it go at that so I could follow Kendell out.

  I squeezed behind him through the door gap and down the rickety cinder-block steps into the landfill that passed with those Klinnards for a yard. The dogs all shied and cowered as Kendell made way to his cruiser with me trailing close and prattling out of nerves and gratitude.

  When I finally shut up, Kendell volunteered one thing alone. “These goddamn people,” he told me, “make me tired.”

  Out on 7, Desmond parked by a sorghum patch on the far side of the cruiser.

  He called out to Kendell, “Hey here.” He told him, “I guess you’ll be wanting Dale’s gun.”

  Kendell said, “I suppose.” He looked a little weary to see us.

  Kendell had heard all about us on the scanner. Desmond told him, “Wasn’t nothing we planned.”

  “Hell, boys, I hope not,” Kendell said as he climbed out of his cruiser.

  Kendell was, if anything, blacker than Desmond and hard everywhere Desmond was soft. We all leaned on the cruiser fender while Kendell told us what he’d heard. That Dale was at the hospital getting his head sewn up. That me and Desmond were the ones behind it. That there were proper warrants sworn out but no push much to enforce them since nobody—except Patty—gave a happy goddamn about Dale.

  “The gun’ll help,” Kendell allowed, and then studied me a little. “What the hell,” he finally asked me, “happened to you.”

  “A Dubois beat me with a shovel.”

  Kendell snorted by way of suggesting I was rigorously full of shit. “A Dubois would have put you in the ground.”

  I unfolded K-Lo’s pink invoice and handed it to Kendell. I knew he knew it was as reliable as an affidavit given K-Lo’s anal approach to his clientele. K-Lo’s customers may have been lowlives, but he made it his special business to know precisely which lowlives they were.

  “Hmm,” Kendell said as he studied the thing. “Percy Dwayne Dubois.” Then he gazed toward the tree line—over the Metro and out past the sorghum patch—while he ran through his mental catalog of Duboises he’d run up on until he’d settled on a candidate or three.

  “Drives a Wrangler?”

  I shook my head, and Desmond added helpfully, “Weren’t but a fireplace shovel.”

  Kendell surveyed me once further. “Pacer. Back left fender rusted through.”

  “That’s him,” I said.

  Kendell ran a finger of one hand across the knuckles of the other. “Tats?” he said. “Little fellow? Blond?”

  I nodded.

  With that he laid his hand out maybe four feet off the ground. “About this tall?” Kendell winked at Desmond and then smiled at me as if to suggest my Dubois had been a gay dwarf hanger-on.

  “The shovel might have been small, but the Dubois wasn’t. I’ll be happy to tap you with it?”

  “Should have seen what it did to Dale,” Desmond said, and Kendell allowed he wished he had.

  He’d pulled that Dubois and his wife over a few times for a variety of infractions. Or rather he’d stopped them for speeding and then had piled on the citations afterward. Driving once without a hood. Once with three stolen car seats and a pair of plundered strollers. Once with that baby of theirs on the dashboard to make room for his daddy’s bong.

  “Caught them doing eighty riding through here on two donuts. She was driving and didn’t stop until we’d blocked the road at Holcombe. He’s bad,” Kendell said, “but that wife of his, she’ll do any damn thing.”

  I caught myself wondering how close I’d come to getting chopped up into bits.

  Kendell told us she was a Vardaman, which prompted Desmond to groan. The only Vardaman I’d ever heard of was the Mississippi senator who’d called Teddy Roosevelt a coon-flavored miscegenationist to his face.

  “One of that brood,” Kendell assured me, “from over in the hills by Okolona.”

  Then Desmond and Kendell threw in together to make me understand there were people about in the Delta who’d migrated to the place because the folks back where they’d come from weren’t malicious enough to suit them.

  The Delta was home still to pockets of ignorant misfits and temperamental throwbacks, Confederates to the marrow fueled by white-hot resentments and sustained by bigotry. It seemed that Dubois’s wife had come to the Delta to be among her own the way some people move to Berkeley or to Paris.

  “Where do you think they’d go?” I asked Kendell.

  “Give them a week or two. They’ll turn up.”

  That’s when I acquainted Kendell with the calypso coral Ranchero that was keeping me from sitting by and waiting for them to surface again.

  “I swore,” I told him, “I’d bring it back just like I drove it off.”

  Kendell, to his credit, just said, “All right,” and then turned and informed Desmond, “I stopped him two or three weeks ago with Luther in the car.”

  Desmond’s hand moved automatically to the scar on his left shoulder.

  “You might find him and that wife of his down around Yazoo,” Kendell said. “Even those two might have the sense to stay off the roads in a pink Ranchero.”

  The whole time we’d been standing there talking, the drivers up on Highway 7 had been trying to slow from
ninety to sixty immediately and at once. The sight of the cruiser was all it took, as a general rule, anyway, until a boy in a beat-up Dodge pickup shot by us without braking.

  Kendell tended to take that sort of behavior as a provocation, so he told me and Desmond, “Watch out,” and jumped into his car. He went sailing up onto the pavement with his grille lights strobing and raced out of sight.

  “New Sonic down at Yazoo,” Desmond told me. “Haven’t tried it yet.”

  “Aren’t they all the same?”

  Desmond glared at me like the pope himself might stare down Satan’s minion.

  We waited for Kendell to come back because it seemed the courteous thing to do, but we were a good half hour standing around before he eased down off of the roadway.

  “These damn people,” Kendell said once he’d backed into his slot.

  He climbed out of his cruiser and circled around to open his trunk. Kendell lifted out a feed sack and set it on the ground. It was so alive with movement that me and Desmond were retreating before Kendell had even begun to unknot the neck.

  “Taking them to his ex-wife’s boyfriend’s house. Going to put them in his bathtub or somewhere.”

  With that, Kendell dumped probably eight or ten writhing cottonmouths onto the ground. Somehow Desmond levitated onto the cruiser hood, and his bulk transformed an upswept contour into a sizable divot. I perched on the quarter panel and lifted my feet off of the ground.

  I don’t care for snakes as a rule, but moccasins are particularly unnerving because there’s no sign of the Lord’s work about them to admire. They’re silt-colored and unpatterned, plump and short; seem like ungainly, venomous miscalculations.

  Desmond’s objections were more in the vein that they were simply loose reptiles. The panicked noises he made while scaling the windshield were like nothing I’d ever heard from a human.

  Kendell tried everything short of pulling his service revolver to get us down and ended up having to ferry us to a patch of snakeless hardpan, where I hopped off the fender while Desmond lingered near the roof.

  “They’re just snakes,” Kendell told us, which might as well have been, “Hell, boys, it’s only plutonium,” for all the good it did us to hear it said.

  Even once we’d lured him down on the hardpan, Desmond couldn’t keep from watching the ground, which prompted Kendell to ask us both, with a touch of wonderment, “So you two are going after a Dubois?”

  Then Desmond tapped me on the arm and pointed at his Geo, down between the sorghum patch and Kendell’s cyprus trees, where the grass was ripe with reptiles and about knee deep.

  “Key’s in it,” he told me.

  FIVE

  I’d not yet made it down to Yazoo City, so this was a fresh trip for me, but it tracked pretty close to all of my other excursions in the Delta. Lots of crops, a few shacks and trailers, the occasional brick villa in a pasture, and every now and again an authentic plantation left from olden days.

  There wasn’t much cotton under cultivation. Desmond said there was a glut and the price was ungodly low, but we passed almost no end of soybeans and staggering fields of corn.

  Desmond told me the ears went to Arkansas cattle and the stalks to biofuel. Then he pointed at a silo back off the road on a farm he’d worked before he’d gotten husky. When Desmond talked about his bulk, that was the word he always used.

  I had to pivot around to even find him in that Geo. He’d made a kind of fainting couch out of the driver’s seat, had shoved it well back off the rails and was all but reclining with his feet on the pedals and his head in the rear window well. It was like he was a row behind me at the cineplex.

  “Tell me about Luther,” I said, but Desmond pointed instead to a grain bin and went on at some length about a combine driver he’d known.

  I don’t think Desmond missed farming so much as he missed being tractor-seat sized. I doubt it was all hot dogs that did him in. Desmond was doomed to be gigantic, and once the fieldwork had dried up, there wasn’t much for him to do but sit around and swell.

  His sister was huge. His father had been massive, and Desmond’s mother was so doughy and weak on her pins that she hardly ever left her bed. I’d met her once. Her tiny head had been sticking out of a heap of blankets in her stifling bedroom. She was wearing some kind of elaborate wig with bangs and braided bits, and she must have tossed it on to receive me because the thing was a little cockeyed.

  “And Luther?” I asked Desmond when the combine talk was done, but before he could speak his phone rang. Well, it didn’t ring exactly. It played a snatch of Barry White’s “Satin Soul” and then played it three or four times more before Desmond could dig the thing out of his shirt pocket and look to see who was calling.

  He tossed his phone my way. “It’s you,” he told me.

  It was, in fact, my Motorola ringing Desmond up. I didn’t quite know what to say when I answered, so I said just, “Yel-low.”

  “Who’s this?” that Dubois asked me.

  “Who you looking for?”

  “I got him,” that Dubois fairly howled in the direction, I guess, of his wife. Then he came back my way and said, “We’ve been calling all your numbers. Nobody gives a shit about you.”

  “I’m coming for you, asshole.”

  He went half to pieces laughing. “Where you coming?”

  “I’ll find you,” I told him. “Don’t you worry about that.”

  “Then I guess you’re wanting your truck thing back? It’s a hell of a pretty ride, but I can be convinced to hand it over.”

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “Going to cost you five thousand,” that Dubois told me. “Did I tell you it’s a hell of a pretty ride?”

  “I think you did.”

  I didn’t say anything for about a half minute, which Percy Dwayne didn’t much care for.

  “So?” he said, and when I still didn’t say anything, he said it again. “So?”

  “That’s a lot of money.”

  “Not for this beauty.”

  “Let’s say I pay it. How’s this going to happen?”

  “Twenties,” he said, and instructed me to drop the cash the following day at noon at an address up in Webb. “Put it in the mail slot,” he told me.

  “Five thousand in twenties? That won’t fit in any damn mail slot.”

  “Then put it in a bag on the porch,” he said. “Just put it some damn where.”

  “What about the car?”

  “You’ll get it,” he told me, “once I have the money.”

  Desmond was drifting so that he hit an armadillo in the middle of the oncoming lane. It was ripe and greasy, and I feared for a second we’d spin into the ditch. Even Desmond stopped whistling and cut loose with a “Shit howdy.”

  “I don’t know,” I told Percy Dwayne. “This world’s full of cars.”

  “Well,” he said, “you’ll pay me or you won’t.”

  “Can’t argue with you there.”

  “Figure it out and call me in an hour.” And with that he started rattling off his number.

  “It’s my number, moron. I know it already.”

  Percy Dwayne swore a little further and hung up.

  “They all this dumb?” I asked Desmond.

  He nodded. “It’s the mean mixed in that’s the problem.”

  Desmond didn’t care for the Yazoo City Sonic. The burger I ate tasted like all the burgers I’d ever had at a Sonic, and Desmond’s Coney Islands looked true to form. But Desmond found the chili slightly thin and under-seasoned, and he thought the Yazoo Sonic was poorly situated as Sonics go.

  Given that the natural Sonic habitat is peripheral retail clottage, an unscenic Sonic is bound to be a relative kind of thing. Desmond’s trouble was he couldn’t find a parking space to suit him. The Yazoo Sonic was set back off the road and boasted an unobstructed view of the backside of the neighboring shopping plaza, so all we had to look at were overflowing Dumpsters and steel security doors.

  “A fence would
n’t hurt,” Desmond said, and added beyond it, “Salt neither.”

  Desmond claimed to know where Luther Dubois lived. He told me he guessed he ought to since he’d been standing in Luther’s front room when Luther stabbed him with a hunting knife.

  “A repo way down here?” I asked him.

  And Desmond told me, “Naw,” but he didn’t offer to explain exactly what he’d been about, so I waited on him to decide he’d probably have to.

  “Getting something for Momma,” he told me at last.

  We then passed a minute in silence watching a boy flattening boxes behind the Kroger. He jumped up and down while smoking a butt and drinking a 7UP. He wasn’t terribly thorough or noticeably industrious.

  “She needs medicine sometimes,” Desmond said. “Momma’s got regular pain.”

  “Oh,” I told him, and tried to make it sound tossed off and inconsequential, but in my mind I was laying that crooked wig to Oxy or Percocet.

  “He cut you over money?” I asked him.

  Desmond shook his head. “Just stabbed me.”

  “Why?”

  “Can’t really say. New knife maybe.”

  Desmond was folding and assembling his Sonic trash by then. By habit, Desmond bundled his wrappers and napkins and various spent condiment packets in a helpless display of anal compulsion that would have made NASA proud.

  “Probably wanted to try it out.”

  I marked this down as another life-in-the-Delta lesson where a man might plunge a knife in a fellow just to see if he could.

  “What did you do?” I asked Desmond.

  “Bled all over everywhere. Luther drove me to the clinic. I’ll give him that.”

  “How did you leave it with him?”

  “I think I swore I’d kill him.”

  I pointed toward the floorboard as a means of asking Desmond if he meant to kill him now, today.

  Desmond shook his head. “Might scuff him up a little, if that’s all right.”

  We were soon back on the main artery into Yazoo City. It was pushing four o’clock as we headed toward downtown proper, which was two miles out a crapped-up four-lane where you couldn’t get much worth having—discount shoes and mufflers, live bait and day-old bread.