Ranchero Page 6

  With that, Desmond cut west in the direction of Indianola, took some back road by Centralia, and came up from the south, just in case Dale had some buddies laying for us on the truck route.

  We rolled by Pearl’s a couple of times. It was a little past nine by then. She had lights she rarely switched on burning all over the house.

  “Why’s that?” Desmond asked, but I couldn’t truly say, so we decided that was the sort of thing Luther could find out for us, Luther who claimed to be awfully goddamn tired of finding himself knocked out.

  “Fair enough,” I told him. “You do for us, and we’ll stop beating on you.”

  “I’ll be needing a little folding money as well.”

  “Let’s see how it goes,” I said. “You help us with Percy Dwayne, help us get my car back, and I’ll try to make you whole.”

  We stopped at the head of Pearl’s block, and I pointed Pearl’s house out to Luther.

  “There’s a car shed in the back. Apartment up top. Go unlock it and turn the lights on. Then look around and see if anybody’s about.” I pulled the key off my ring and gave it to him.

  “Who are you expecting?” Luther asked me.

  I shrugged. “Nobody really.”

  “And if it’s somebody, what do I tell him?”

  “Tell him you’re feeding the cat.”

  “What’s the cat’s name?”

  “Isn’t a cat.”

  Luther got all over me for not observing his primary rule of espionage: Only lie when you have to.

  “I’m going to tell him I’m watering your plants instead.” Then he tapped his temple with his finger as a sign of how shrewd he was.

  I let him out of the Geo and stood there looking out over the roof as Luther walked up the street in his socks and turned into Pearl’s driveway.

  “Got any plants?” Desmond asked me.

  “No,” I said.

  Desmond kept the motor running and the car in gear, and I climbed back in so we’d be ready to go. I think we half expected to see Dale or one of his musclehead cracker colleagues come charging out of Pearl’s house armed like SWAT and firing grenades and such. But nothing happened and nothing continued to happen for longer than we’d hoped.

  Then we got uneasy and feared that Luther might be ransacking the place or going cross-country out to the truck stop in hopes of flagging down a cruiser. Luther was just one to figure there’d be some reward for him in turning us in.

  So we climbed out of the Geo and hovered by it for a time.

  “What do you think?” Desmond kept asking me, and I kept not exactly knowing, until Luther finally strolled down the driveway. We could hear the click of his shoes, and he looked to be wearing a seersucker sports coat as well.

  “Looks to me,” I said to Desmond, “Luther got insisted at.”

  “Pearl’s looking for you,” Luther told me. Then he opened his jacket to show us the sateen lining. “Just like new.”

  The shoes were fine black leather oxfords, though a little wingtippy and tooled half to death, but that was just in Luther’s line. Better still they had taps on the heels.

  “It seems that husband of hers,” he told us, “used to be quite the dancer.” Luther wheeled around so we could better take him in.

  “Come on,” he told us. “Pearl’s got supper waiting.”

  EIGHT

  Pearl, as it turned out, was in insisting heaven. Luther was naturally primed to steal everything she had, and Pearl was possessed of a burning need to hand all of it over. So they were enjoying a natural sync you don’t usually find with humans. The two of them were cackling over some private joke on the steps of Pearl’s back porch by the time me and Desmond had made it up the drive.

  Desmond had been by a time or two before, and Pearl had visited some fudge on him that had turned out to be a little blue and fuzzy in the middle, so Desmond was a lot more guarded than Luther about getting insisted at.

  I was a little done in, and I was trying to figure some way out of supper until a woman came out of Pearl’s house and joined Pearl on the steps.

  She was lovely and stylish, tall and fit. She looked out of place in the Delta. I was afraid for a moment she’d open her mouth and spoil it all with her chatter, but she didn’t talk like one of those syrupy Delta princesses who seem intent on saying nothing without end and all the time. She was pleasant and warm and seemed happy to meet us, which is more than I would have been if I’d been her and we’d rolled up with Luther in the dark.

  She was Pearl’s only sister’s child, Angela Marie, who Pearl talked about so much I’d long since tuned her out. I knew she worked in a Memphis hospital, and I’d just figured she was a nurse and had pictured a homely, dumpy girl wandering the wards in her whites. It turned out, though, she ran the place, and she insisted we call her Angie.

  “My,” she said once she’d seen my welts and bruises in the porch light.

  “Wrong end of a shovel,” I told her.

  “Why don’t you come in here.”

  She sat me down in Pearl’s kitchen under Pearl’s green-tinged fluorescents, which had the effect of making us all look a little mortuarial. Me more than Angie, who kept looking lovely if only a little too wan.

  She cupped my chin in her hand and tilted my face up where she could see it best.

  “Are you a doctor?” I asked her.

  “Never practiced,” she said. “Anybody seen you yet?”

  “No.”

  Angie sent Pearl off for peroxide and cotton. “Headache?” she asked me.

  “Not anymore.”

  “Your nose is broken.”

  “I figured.”

  “I can probably straighten it up.”

  I was about to tell her not to bother when she reached up and jerked the cartilage back where it had started out the morning. I think I screamed like a teenage girl at a slumber party.

  “There,” she said, and took the bottle from Pearl so she could have the further pleasure of dashing peroxide on my wounds.

  As meetings go, it wasn’t terribly auspicious from my end, but Pearl’s niece seemed to enjoy the chance to practice without a license, and it was a pleasant surprise to have an age-appropriate woman touch me for the first time in a while. Pearl had made supper enough for about a dozen people while Angie, I guess, had been roaming around turning all the lights on in the house.

  The main entrée was a casserole. This one was capped with a layer of crumbled potato chips and alarmingly orange cheese. It took main force for Pearl to even pass a serving spoon through the crust. There was chicken and peas and carrots and milky gravy underneath.

  Luther went into raptures. Now that he had his seersucker jacket on, he looked like he was ready for a night at the country club buffet.

  It turned out Luther was truly slick with a compliment. Pearl would insist without encouragement, but Luther wasn’t taking any chances and handed out high purple kudos on every damn thing he could think of. The casserole itself. The place settings. The napkin rings. The glorious drop-leaf table. The sachet in the bowl on the sideboard. The silk ivy centerpiece. He went down the list of everything he could call by name and congratulated Pearl on having had the sterling taste to buy it.

  It was a little hard for me to reconcile the Luther at Pearl’s with the one I’d met at Tootie’s, and I was half tempted to reconsider my low opinion of him until I saw Luther slip a fork into his pocket.

  “So you’re the Nick Reid I’ve been hearing so much about,” Angie said. “Pearl tells me you’re in electronics.”

  “Mostly,” I told her. “Me and Desmond work together. We’re sort of into anything people stop payment on. Probably electronics primarily these days.”

  “And you used to be a policeman?” she asked me, which came as an appreciable shock to Luther, whose interest in Pearl’s décor quite suddenly drained away.

  I nodded. “Up in Virginia.”

  “That must have been interesting.”

  “Wears on you after a while. You
don’t see people at their best.”

  Luther handed Pearl plates to help her serve and sang the praises of his jacket. He told her me and Desmond had been quick to admire his shoes. That delighted Pearl, who never got awfully much feedback on her insisting. People usually took stuff from her to shut her up. Me, I mean. I don’t think anybody else much bothered with her.

  Pearl made us hold hands and say grace. I peeked around while we were in the middle of giving thanks. It was the oddest sort of dinner party I ever hope to attend and got stranger once Angie had begun to quiz Luther on the details of his career.

  Luther claimed to be an entrepreneur, a facilitator, and gadget mogul. Luther, it seems, had invented a pecan cracker that worked with a carriage bolt and a rubber band.

  I’ve got to hand it to him, Luther could just about pass for decent and proper and seemly. He gave the impression of being civilized there at the dining table until he pulled out his pack of generic cigarettes and shook one out for Pearl.

  “Take it outside,” I told him, and he looked at me stricken and shocked that there could be a place where a fellow couldn’t light up at the table and then crush his butt out on the dab of casserole he’d left.

  “Out,” I said.

  Luther decided instead he’d be better off helping Pearl clear.

  Pearl and Luther eventually went back to pilfering through Gil’s wardrobe while me and Desmond and Angie stayed at the table and drank weak coffee.

  “Did Pearl tell you about Gil’s car?” I asked.

  “What car?”

  We all walked outside to the car shed, and I opened the doors on the empty bay. Angie looked a little shocked to see the state of it. Not that it was empty but that it was tidy and all but antiseptic.

  “Wow,” she said. “I don’t guess Pearl was ever in here.”

  “Gil had a Ranchero,” I told her. That was news to Angie. “Must have been his baby. It was all buttoned up in here.”

  “Where’d it go?”

  I told her the whole story. I didn’t polish it up, and I just laid it out like it happened, even the parts that made me look foolish and irredeemably rash.

  The nut of it was that I’d made a binding pledge to Pearl to bring Gil’s Ranchero back just like I’d driven it away, and I explained to Angie how it didn’t matter if Pearl wanted it back or not and if it ever left the car shed bay again. The point was I’d sworn an oath, and I intended to fulfill it.

  Angie turned to Desmond and asked him, “Is he always like this?”

  Desmond nodded, told her, “Pretty much.”

  “Might take a few days,” I told her.

  “Okay,” was all she said.

  Just then Luther popped out of the house in a pair of Gil’s immaculate coveralls, which he was wearing under a double-breasted suit coat. The shoes he had on now had taps on the toes as well as the heels.

  “Gil tapped?” I asked Angie.

  Angie shrugged. “Didn’t know that, either.”

  Pearl followed Luther out. She looked about as pleased as I’d ever seen her. Luther’s enthusiasm at getting something for nothing was serving as an elixir for Pearl. Of course I couldn’t help but wonder how Gil was making out in the churchyard by now, if he was only rotating or had achieved full Mach 2 spin.

  “Did you tell him about the officer?” Pearl asked her niece.

  “The one you hit,” Angie said to me. “Dale?”

  I nodded.

  “He came by a couple of hours ago looking for you.”

  “Just him?”

  She nodded.

  “How was he?”

  “His head was all wrapped up. Otherwise, just big and dumb.”

  Luther had gotten busy putting on his own spontaneous fashion show. He was twirling around in the driveway, raising clatter with his taps. He kept inviting us to admire his suit coat and the way it draped and hung.

  “Tell you the truth,” Luther said while picking a speck of lint off of his sleeve, “I wouldn’t ordinarily much like getting snatched and hauled up here. Where the hell are we, anyway?”

  “Indianola,” Pearl informed him.

  “But I’ve got to say,” Luther went on, “this thing is sort of working out.”

  NINE

  I can’t say I had a legitimate plan, but I did have an idea. Pearl dug up a couple of pairs of scissors, and I left Desmond and Luther in her kitchen cutting dollar-bill-sized sheets out of her accumulated newspapers. Luther had gotten into Gil’s dress hats by then and was wearing a Dobbs fedora, the kind with the jaunty feather in the band that made the work seem festive and gay.

  For my part, I conscripted Angie to drive me to the shopping plaza in her car, just in case Dale and his buddies were out there laying for the Geo. I had her park up between the dollar store and the KFC and wait for me while I walked down to K-Lo’s and slipped up from the rear.

  Everybody who worked for K-Lo knew how to get in the store without the responsibility and bother of a key. K-Lo had gone cheap on his back metal door, so if you knew just where to pry it, there was play enough to ease the bolt entirely from the keeper.

  The thieves K-Lo was plagued with of late didn’t bother with the back. They usually drove up on the sidewalk and rammed the front doors in.

  I figured K-Lo would be drunk and out on the sales floor somewhere. I had a reasonable fear that K-Lo might have gotten his shotgun loaded before he went about the business of loading himself. That wouldn’t have taken long because K-Lo couldn’t hold his liquor. He drank almost every night. Always Armagnac and Coke in a Solo cup on ice, and he’d get stewed straightaway and all at once.

  I thought maybe he was playing the radio at first, but it turned out he was singing, and he was doing a fairly remarkable imitation of der Bingle’s “Swinging on a Star.”

  I was just about stunned, to be honest, because K-Lo didn’t fraternize. We got to see him fight with his wife, but that was incidental. K-Lo didn’t ever confide in us, wasn’t the sort to tell us a thing. He was just the guy who gave us scraps of paper and sent us out into the Delta, railed at us with devastating surgical skill whenever we made him unhappy, paid us once every two weeks without fail, and stayed behind when we went home.

  I only knew for certain that K-Lo loved a dollar and refused to eat Chinese. I hadn’t really imagined the man could sing.

  My job was to take his shotgun before K-Lo noticed me. He was parked out on a settee, the one he couldn’t sell or lease because it was uglier even than the worst sort of Delta trailer trash could stand for. It had skirting and tufts and buttons, and the fabric was hideous plaid, all married in a way to make for universal homeliness.

  I came up slowly, silently, picked my way through the store, and the closer I drew to K-Lo, the better his Bing Crosby got. He had the croon and the burble down cold, and his timing was damn good, too, for a hotheaded Lebanese American living on a bayou in Leland.

  “You could be better than you are.”

  He’d left his shotgun leaning on the sofa back, stock wedged behind a cushion and barrel to the ceiling.

  I grabbed the barrel and drew the thing to me.

  “You could be swinging on a … SHIT!”

  K-Lo saw me, leapt to his feet, and went scrabbling for his gun, but he wasn’t even looking where he’d left it, just scratching around any old where as he blistered me with abuse.

  “Calm down,” I said. “It’s just me.”

  K-Lo studied me for a moment and then recalibrated so he could lace me for a solid minute with a personalized tirade. Ronnie the tattooed felon might have wept, but I’d already had a character-building day.

  K-Lo dropped down hard on the ugly settee, and I circled around and sat beside him. Neither one of us said anything for about a half a minute until I broke the ice with, “Mean Bing.”

  K-Lo nodded. “He had pipes.”

  “How’s Dale?”

  K-Lo shrugged. “Some stitches. He’ll be okay.”

  “And Patty?”

  K-Lo shoo
k his head. “Pissed,” was all he told me.

  K-Lo took a draw on his Armangac and Coke. “Found my TV yet?”

  I shook my head. “But we’re on it.”

  Just then a ghetto-fabulous Mazda pulled into the shopping plaza. The aftermarket grille alone was worth more than an engine rebuild, and I could have spent two weeks in Cancún on the price of the free-spinning wheels. The driver turned off his headlights, and that coupe cruised through the lot.

  The shopping plaza was empty. Half the storefronts were vacant due to ongoing Delta retail strife, and the ones that were still occupied had long since closed for the night. That Mazda rolled into a corner, deep in shadow, and everybody got out. Three at least. Maybe four. Over from Greenville, I figured, where the lowlives there had probably run out of places to rob.

  K-Lo hadn’t been hit in nearly three months. That was almost an unprecedented stretch.

  “Come on,” I told him. I led K-Lo back toward his office as I checked the shotgun load. K-Lo had slammed in six rounds of rubber buckshot—good for driving off bears or anarchists. I ejected one to look it over. RIOT READY, the casing read.

  “When did you get these?”

  “Week or so ago. I’d just as soon make them sorry as dead.”

  “Hmm,” I said in just the way that Desmond would have said it. Riot Ready rubber buckshot felt to me at the moment like a means of high-velocity therapy.

  I left K-Lo in his office and went out the back door. I circled around to the retail side of the place. There were three big, strapping black kids and one wiry older guy whose job apparently was to wonder why nobody was doing what he’d asked them to do. They had a wonder bar and a hacksaw. A come-along, a pair of bolt cutters.

  K-Lo had long since sprung for a titanium plate on the door gap, so there wasn’t anything to pry or saw, nothing to draw or cut. Those boys might as well have brought a sugar spoon.

  The trouble was with the wiry guy. He loved his Mazda too much. The tried-and-true way into K-Lo’s was to just drive through the front glass. Then you grabbed what you could, rolled your car out, and headed back to Greenville. Nobody ever got away with more than about a thousand dollars of goods, but they kept just making the same Godawful mess.