Ranchero Page 4

  The town itself was a lot less junky, but it didn’t appear to be catching on. Downtown Yazoo was Greenville on a more modest scale.

  The lampposts were baroque and limply hung with crimson YAZOO!! banners. The brick crosswalks had been laid in a herringbone pattern, and there were signs and awnings left from boutiquey stores that had opened and closed. About all you could get downtown was a haircut or a parking ticket.

  In the spirit of revitalization, several roads had been rerouted into roundabouts that nobody seemed to know how to navigate. Right-of-way in downtown Yazoo City was speculative at best, and the planners had made the very most out of light to moderate traffic by confusing everybody to a crawl.

  Desmond’s steering style worked well for us. He sort of knew where he was going, but that hardly prevented our Geo from drifting all over the place, and Yazooites seemed to find it prudent to ease to the curb and let us pass.

  Desmond hadn’t been to Yazoo City in a pretty considerable while, so we toured the commercial desolation while he got his bearings. A couple of landmarks he had counted on had been torn entirely down, and one of them—an old rail depot—had been dressed up and transformed into a buffet restaurant in Ye Olde Bavarian style.

  It had failed, of course, and the train platform had been heaped and piled with fencing to the extent that all we could see of the place was its Black Forest chalet roof. Desmond needed three passes to decide there was a depot underneath.

  Neither one of us said a thing at all about the wretched state of the town, which was a sign to me that I was truly becoming acclimated. The Yazoo City we’d found was essentially the one we’d both expected.

  Once Desmond had identified the depot, he knew where he wanted to go, and we finally left a roundabout for the road that he’d been after. It took us down by an old ice house, a couple of storefront churches, and then along a creek and into the countryside.

  Quite suddenly, there weren’t any buildings to speak of, mostly pines and scrub and kudzu, and once we’d passed the sheet-metal government warehouse where folks picked up their butter and cheese, we came to a couple of muddy feedlots packed with filthy cattle. Then we rolled up on the shabbiest housing development I’d ever seen.

  The sign announcing the place on the road going in was no longer properly standing. CREEKSIDE ESTATES had been written on a square of plywood in spray paint. The signposts had rotted through and the whole thing had toppled over, but some industrious resident had propped it up with what was left of a lawn chair frame.

  The creek in question was a ditch by the state road. The water in it was stagnant and standing.

  The avenue into Creekside Estates was asphalt for about twenty yards, and where the county’s obligation ended, the pocked and potted dirt road began. Desmond’s straying hardly mattered since the surface was just a patchwork of craters, the deeper ones full of oily iridescent liquid, the sort that might have drained from a garbage truck.

  There was stuff all along the margins of the road, some of it merely litter, but clothes as well and busted toys, furniture and plumbing fixtures, old microwaves, electric ranges, recliners and settees. It was hard to say if people had thought better of the crap they were hauling home or if that stretch of rough road was where they all decided they were close enough to the dump.

  While Desmond looked for Luther’s house, I scanned for the Ranchero. Aside from the color, it probably wouldn’t have stood out all that much. The automobiles about were fine, probably worth more than the houses given that the predominant local roof treatment was royal blue plastic tarp. What money there was went for spinners and chrome running boards and Turtle Wax.

  The roads were all named for Confederate generals, and Desmond recalled that Luther’s house was at the end of Longstreet Street. We had to stop at about every corner to find out where we were because most of the signs had been knocked over or pulled down.

  “We got a plan?” I asked.

  “Planning on throwing Luther around a little.”

  “Won’t Luther have a gun or something? A knife he wants to break in?”

  “We’re ready for him,” Desmond told me, and gave my fireplace shovel a glance.

  I wasn’t quite prepared to think a fireplace shovel a plan.

  “There it is.” Desmond eased to a stop.

  It was a rickety dump of a place with plastic on the windows and shutters on the ground. There was a kid on the porch. He looked four or five, too old for the diaper he was wearing and far too human for the nasty T-shirt he had on.

  He also appeared more than a little Mexican to me, so I asked Desmond, “You sure this is Luther’s place?”

  He merely touched his scar and nodded.

  We walked up and knocked. Desmond tried to convince me the child belonged to some customer of Luther’s, but it turned out he was the son of the woman who answered the door.

  Desmond asked her where Luther was, and she mounted an elaborate response, all of it rapid-fire and almost none of it in English. Except for nope and meester, she’d yet to pick up the local parlance.

  “Donde Luther?” he asked this time around, and that woman told us all of it again.

  She then advised her son, in a passionate aside, that he’d roast in hades if he kept picking his nose. It was conveyed in a blend of dumbshow and wishful theology. Beyond that, I couldn’t decipher much of anything she said.

  “I guess he moved,” I told Desmond, who preferred that option to his nagging fear Luther was dead, which meant Desmond would never know the chance to kill him.

  A neighbor across the road had come out by then to give us both the eyeball, and he cleared a few things up for us on several fronts at once.

  He let us know niggers weren’t welcome in Creekside Estates except, of course, for “yard work and shit.” Then he told us he’d never so much as heard of a Luther Dubois and didn’t know a thing about him bugging out because of the goddamn state police.

  “Here’s an idea,” I said to Desmond. “Scuff him up instead.” And Desmond was suddenly all sunshine and puppies.

  That neighbor became a Constitutional scholar once we’d stepped into his yard. He was giving full voice to a rights and privileges catechism when Desmond supplied us all with a lesson in creative scuffing up. Desmond helped that gentleman visit far-flung precincts of his property through a combination of punching and tossing with a little stomping for garnish.

  Desmond’s style was uniquely his own, a kind of grappling with a difference, and that neighbor might as well have been Shawnica for all the effect he had on Desmond. He landed a blow or two up around Desmond’s shoulders, but Desmond didn’t appear to care. He’d just grab that neighbor by whatever was handy and launch him across the yard.

  Some buddy of the neighbor’s came rolling up the street and leapt out of his Camaro to help him. He took a run at Desmond, but went bouncing off and got set down pretty quick. He then came limping over my way to catch his breath and showed me the gun in his back pocket, a puny .22 automatic that might have held five rounds.

  He made me to understand that since Desmond was black and not doing yard work and shit, he was probably the sort of nigger that needed shooting. I got to hear this from him, of course, because I was standing there being white.

  My time in police departments all over the mid-South had taught me two keystone principles I’d embraced and carried with me: Never tangle with an irate teenage girl if you can help it at all; and thumbs might be opposable, but they weren’t meant to get bent back.

  It was this second one I made use of on the gentleman with the pistol. I got a grip on his thumb and subdued him with a blend of torque and leverage. And by subdued, I mean he acted like I’d jerked his skeleton out.

  He collapsed to the ground, whined and whimpered as I took his gun. Then he told me which shoe his money was in case I wanted that, too.

  Across the street at Luther’s old house, that toddler had shed his diaper and was having himself a rather majestic dump on his front walk. He
watched Desmond while he picked his nose and got perused by a gangly hound that had come out from under the porch to see who exactly was using his toilet.

  “You seeing this?” I asked Desmond.

  Desmond eyed the toddler and nodded. “Maybe Dale’s onto something after all.”

  Again my cracker offered up the money in his shoe. “There’s not enough cash in the whole damn county,” I told him, “to make me touch anything that’s been next to your feet.”

  Then I twisted his thumb in a spirited, recreational sort of way and asked him, “Where did Luther Dubois get off to?”

  “Tootie’s,” he told me, and said it straightaway. “Works out of there. Got anything you want.”

  I let him go, and he curled up whimpering on the ground like one of those children who pouts and mopes as opposed to the sort who flings off his diaper and shits on his own sidewalk.

  I released the clip from that fellow’s pistol and threw it over the house. I flung the gun itself into a kudzu patch at the end of Longstreet Street.

  “Hey,” I said to Desmond, “you know a place called Tootie’s?”

  Desmond nodded as “Satin Soul” struck up in his pocket. He fished his cell phone out. “You again,” he told me, and tossed the phone my way.

  Then he went back to scuffing up the neighbor, who, truth be told, was already about as scuffed as he needed to get.

  “I thought I was supposed to call you,” I said by way of hello.

  “Wrinkle,” Percy Dwayne told me. “Make it about twelve thirty.”

  “I haven’t decided if I’m going to make it at all.”

  Then Percy Dwayne got earnest. You can always tell when a cracker has gone all grim and sincere because they start by way of preamble with some version of “Listen, buddy” and say it almost like an intimate whisper to make you pay attention.

  My Dubois’s choice was “Hey here, sport,” and I fell silent as a courtesy while he told me everything I’d do and why.

  Five thousand in twenties in a sack on the front porch of some shit hole up in Webb, where they tend to specialize in shit holes. I doubted money in a sack on a porch up there would linger for very long.

  Percy Dwayne was still a lot less particular about what I’d get in return. Gil’s Ranchero. Somewhere. Sometime or another.

  “All right,” I told him. “Around twelve thirty.”

  “You’re doing it then?” he asked me.

  “I guess. You’ve got me by the short and curlies, don’t you?”

  “Damn straight,” Percy Dwayne told me.

  “I’ll get to the bank in the morning. Half past twelve in Webb.”

  Percy Dwayne hooted with cracker delight. He dropped the connection hard like he’d bounced my Motorola off a wall.

  Desmond tossed his fellow my way. He landed cringing at my feet. He looked a lot like I’d looked a little earlier in the day.

  Desmond got us lost briefly in the bowels of Creekside Estates. We got turned around coming off Longstreet Street, took bad turns at Stuart and Hooker, and ended up on Lee Boulevard, the grand drag of the place.

  I was reminded of Richmond’s Monument Avenue. That appeared to be the model, anyway, but instead of statues of Confederate luminaries on horseback, Creekside Estates had live oaks down the middle of the road, and about every other one was rigged with a block and tackle and had a car engine dangling from it.

  “Like Christmas,” Desmond said.

  “Or end times,” I suggested.

  SIX

  Tootie’s was about what you’d expect a Tootie’s to be, particularly out in the countryside in Mississippi. It was an unpainted cinder-block roadhouse with—at only a little past six—a parking lot full of muddy pickup trucks.

  There was no sign I could see, which caused me to ask Desmond, “You sure this is the place?”

  “Oh yeah. Tootie’ll be sitting at the end of the bar drinking an Iron City and smoking one of those stinking cherry cigars.”

  “Think Luther’s in there?”

  Desmond shrugged.

  “How are we going to do this?”

  “No we to it. You’re going to do it. I’m too black to go in Tootie’s. Not much chance I’d come out of there alive.”

  “Really?”

  Desmond nodded. Desmond told me, “Cracker squared.”

  “What’ll they do to me?”

  “Sell you a beer for four dollars and, if Luther’s around, about anything else you might need.”

  “What do I need?”

  “Get some Oxy. Dicker with him. Luther loves that.”

  Desmond parked about as far away as he could get and still be on the property, well over where the lot ended and a weedy patch of stray junked cars began.

  I’ve never been one of those guys who moves with ease through the human stratosphere, don’t have a knack for talking to a farmer like a farmer or a mechanic like a mechanic. It doesn’t matter who I get thrown in with, I’m always just my middling self. Sometimes that’ll do, but every now and then it won’t.

  I could tell by the hooting and the shouting before I ever reached the door that Tootie’s was full of lubricated Mississippi rednecks, and the worst thing I could do was try to pass as one of them. I decided, like usual, to be just me, only with a better story.

  I doubt people smoke anywhere like people smoke in the South. And it’s not the volume so much as the hunger they go at their cigarettes with, smoking each one like they’ll never have another. Tootie’s was full of people like that, men primarily along with a couple of creatures passing for women.

  One of them was as big as Desmond, with hair so thin she almost looked bald. The other was as bony as a refugee and hatchet-faced to boot.

  It didn’t matter. The men were lined up several deep to two-step with them, and the place was so blue with cigarette smoke that they all looked like they were dancing at the bottom of the sea.

  Tootie’s had a jukebox that played country crap of the Eddie Rabbit variety. A pool table with the felt in tatters. Some kind of dinging arcade game. The bar was a jackleg production made out of whatever had come to hand, and sure enough a fellow who had to be Tootie was parked at the far end. By bulk, he was probably carrying thirty pounds of neck and jowls.

  He fixed on me once I’d stepped fully inside. They all did at least in passing, but Tootie was concentrated and altogether keen about it. Desmond had pegged him. He was drinking an Iron City straight out of the bottle and smoking a Swisher. I could smell it by the door.

  The bartender, but for his extraordinary gut, looked remarkably like Popeye. He had a blond pompadour and a deficiency of teeth that made his chin jut out. He was inked, of course. Everybody’s inked anymore from schoolgirls to navy admirals, but for some reason crackers seem disinclined to buy their tattoos retail.

  On one forearm this guy had the face of a woman named Rita who looked a little like Thomas Jefferson but maybe half as pretty, and on the other he had what I guessed was an alligator, though it could have been a collie with scales.

  I took a spot at the bar and waited for him to ask me what I wanted, and he finally did after a fashion. He glared at me, anyway, and said, “What?”

  “Iron City if you’ve got it.”

  He huffed and slouched, acted like I’d asked him to paint my house.

  “Four dollars,” he said, and smacked the bottle down so hard before me that foam boiled out of the neck and beer pooled all over the place.

  I drank the first one in silence, sat there looking closed off and morose, which was hardly much of a stretch with an Iron City to polish off. I had to wonder if Tootie had ever tasted an actual potable beer or had just gone through his jowly life drinking this skunky Pittsburgh lager.

  The guy who’d last been dancing with the fat, bald woman came lurching up to the bar. His dungarees were greasy and his shirt was half-unbuttoned. He dug around in his pockets and came up with about eighty cents in change. He spilled it out on the bar top and ordered a Budweiser.

&nb
sp; The bartender glanced at Tootie, who moved his head from side to side.

  “Nope,” Popeye said, and that customer snorted and growled like a mucousy bear.

  Every time he moved, his stink hit me. It was a blend of body funk and dank earth with a hint of tractor diesel.

  “Hey,” he said, and I didn’t need to see him to know he was talking to me. I showed Popeye my empty Iron City bottle by way of ordering another.

  “HEY!” There was a useful touch of menace to it now.

  I swung my head around to take him in. “What?”

  “Buy me a cold one.” He was thick-tongued and his eyes were wandering. He was missing most of his left ear. From the shape of what remained, it looked like somebody had gnawed it off.

  He watched me, in as much as he could focus on anything, and drifted a little like he was fighting a wind.

  Popeye slammed my Iron City down, and I closed my lips around the neck to soak up the nasty foam.

  “HEY!”

  This time I didn’t even bother to glance.

  “Buy me a damn beer,” he said.

  Most of the other patrons had taken an interest by now, including the bony, hatchet-faced girl who was plainly hoping for a brawl.

  The dancing had stopped. The carousing had ebbed a little, and everybody in Tootie’s was waiting to find out how pliable I might be. As they saw it, if things went their way, I could be setting up rounds all night. They’d just have to bore in with their bonhomie grins and threaten me a little.

  So I had the audience I wanted and a fellow I thought I could manage by tapping him with a bar stool if it went as far as that.

  Once I could feel him leaning my way and drawing breath to speak, I squared my shoulders to him and said, “Fuck off.”

  Then I shot him a quick, knuckly jab to the throat like I’d been taught at the academy. That boy sputtered and wheezed, coughed and stumbled. He was suddenly having so much trouble simply drawing breath that he could only manage to lean on the bar while he gurgled and stank.