Ranchero Read online

  Me and Desmond had once tried to convince K-Lo to leave a TV on the sidewalk. A kind of thug offering to help to keep his plate glass in tact. K-Lo hadn’t done it. He thought it wasn’t manly. K-Lo was big on manliness. He was Mexican that way.

  If I waited around for a crime scene, I feared I’d be there half the night since those fellows didn’t have among them the tools or apparently the smarts they needed to get in. For my part, I had Riot Ready loads and some frustration to work off, so I decided I wouldn’t wait for an actual crime. I decided this would be about me.

  “Fellows,” I said, and before any of them could draw out whatever thug-life pistols they were packing, I aimed that shotgun barrel just over their heads and squeezed off a load. Once they’d lit out for their Mazda coupe, I leveled that Beretta and fired again. I didn’t want to blind them after all.

  I was taking a lesson from Desmond. Rubber buckshot was just my way of scuffing those fellows up. From the fuss they raised, I could tell I was making capable work out of it.

  I kept firing until they’d all piled in the car and left the lot. I could hear those rubber pellets zipping and bouncing all over the place.

  It was purely exhilarating, and by the time they were out of range I was probably hearing about half as well as Dale. So I didn’t know Angie was racing up until she’d pulled into the lot.

  She’d heard the shots from over by the KFC and had driven right toward trouble instead of sitting or driving the other way. I knew if I owned an Acura and had a career, I’d be deaf to a lot of things. In particular gunfire at a deserted shopping plaza.

  I screamed at her I was fine. We walked together around to the back door, where K-Lo met us with a ball-peen hammer. Aside from his shotgun, it was all he had to ward off burglars with.

  I tried to introduce him to Angela Marie, but K-Lo was far too agitated for even marginal civil discourse, which left us to stand there in the stockroom and watch K-Lo be upset.

  “They won’t be back,” I told him.

  “More where they came from,” K-Lo said.

  He then retired to the sales floor to plop down on the homely plaid settee. We followed him. Angie insisted. This was her first exposure to K-Lo. I didn’t see him sad and drunk too often. I was accustomed to irate.

  He looked up at us. He was nearly in tears. “They took my cat,” he said.

  “His cat?” Angie asked me.

  “Bobcat,” I told her.

  “He had a bobcat?”

  “Stuffed.”

  K-Lo was weeping by now in a near-hysterical Middle Eastern sort of way.

  “Somebody broke in three months ago and stole it. Meant a lot to him.”

  K-Lo had started in on a kind of ululation. It was part der Bingle and part, I guess, atavistic Lebanese.

  “Let me ask you something,” I said to K-Lo. “Did I just drive those fellows a ways?”

  He nodded.

  “Did I just keep them from breaking in here and busting your place all up?”

  Another nod.

  “Now don’t you feel like you owe me a little something?”

  K-Lo just looked at me. Owing wasn’t really his game.

  I bulled on ahead. “Here’s what I need—three hundred dollars in twenties, and this shotgun for a day or two. Maybe all your Riot Ready shells.”

  K-Lo winced. He muttered to himself. After a great long while, he nodded. He left me and Angie on the sales floor while he went back to get the cash.

  K-Lo gave me all the twenties he could scare up in the petty-cash lockbox. Not quite three hundred dollars, but close enough. The shotgun shells he just pointed me to. Then he plopped down heavily in his chair like he was weary and spent from having been all saintly.

  “You need to go home,” I told him, and he tried to wave me off until I promised him I’d call his wife to see what she had to say about it.

  Me and Angie helped him to his Civic and got him situated behind the wheel. We pointed him right and sent him off like he was in the Soap Box Derby. He lurched up on the curbing as he left the shopping plaza.

  “Will he make it?” Angie asked me.

  “Always does,” I said.

  I locked up the store and circled around with Angie to her Acura in the lot.

  “Hell of a gun,” she told me along the way, and took the thing out of my hands. “Don’t see too many Berettas in these parts.” It was clear from the way she handled it that she knew what she was about.

  “You hunt?”

  “Used to. Just ducks. Me and Uncle Gil.”

  “Don’t know that I’d have figured him for a hunter. How many hobbies can one guy have?”

  “It was more about me than him. He didn’t like getting in the water. Didn’t like sitting in the blind. Didn’t want to shoot anything he’d have to pluck and gut.”

  “So what did he like?”

  “A day with his niece.”

  We didn’t say much beyond that until she’d pulled to the roadside in front of Pearl’s and I apologized for all the tumult and thanked her for her help.

  “This is fine with me,” she said. “Pearl’d usually be making me go through her closet.”

  Luther was back into leisurewear at the kitchen table, not his circle-of-hell golfing ensemble but something else of Gil’s he and Pearl had turned up. The slacks were pleated and peg-legged both, which made Luther look like some sort of mobster genie at play. His shirt was ivory knit with a gray and pinkish argyle vest on top.

  “How’s it going?” I asked generally.

  To hear it from Luther and Pearl, things were going splendidly well.

  Desmond, for his part, told me, “He ain’t much help.”

  I fished the twenties K-Lo had given me out of my pockets and laid them on the table.

  “You’re not going to tell them what happened?” Angie asked.

  “Had to drive off some boys trying to break in at K-Lo’s.”

  Pearl made out to be aghast, but Luther and Desmond couldn’t be bothered. Thievery had long since become as common in the Delta as blues tourists or biting flies.

  We all went straight back to the business at hand. It didn’t look at first like they’d cut enough paper to make the illusion work, but once we’d started stacking it up and making bundles from it, I was persuaded we could probably get by.

  Pearl supplied us with rubber bands, some of them even unrotted, and we laid a twenty on top of each stack before we bound it tight. We ended up with eight piles of what looked, at first glance, to be uninterrupted money.

  Luther launched into an explanation of how crackheads and Delta junkies and even his uncle that Dubois would think it was more cash than it was because they never saw money in actual piles.

  We laid the stacks in a paper sack with all the twenties showing, and we took turns lifting it off the table and being satisfied.

  “What’s this for?” Pearl finally asked me.

  I told her straight up that I’d be buying back Gil’s Ranchero from that fellow who had beat me with his fireplace shovel and driven it off.

  “When’s this?” Luther wanted to know.

  “Tomorrow. Around noon. Up in Webb,” I told him.

  “You need to go home?” I asked Desmond.

  “I need to go home,” Luther said.

  “Nobody’s talking to you.” I told him. “We’re not finished yet.”

  Desmond weighed his momma’s pain against the chance of running into Dale. He finally told me, “Think I’ll just stick here.”

  Even given the hour, Angela Marie was determined to drive back to Memphis. That was a three-hour trip no matter how you cut it.

  “Watch yourself,” I told her. “There are K-Lo’s all over the place.”

  She handed me one of her business cards. “Let me know how this turns out.”

  “All right.”

  “Maybe one day we can go duck hunting.”

  “I can sit in a blind and drink about as well as anybody.”

  I didn’t realize ho
w small and cramped my car shed apartment was until me and Desmond and Luther were all inside it. It was a little better than sleeping in the Geo, but not that much. I offered my bed to Desmond, but he preferred the floor. Not the floor dressed up for sleeping and made to pass for some kind of palette, but just the floor as it was—uncarpeted wood.

  Once Desmond got down on it, he lay on his back and went right to sleep.

  I tend toward insomnia and couldn’t help but resent him a little, all the more once Luther started to talk.

  He was stretched out on the sofa. I was across the room in the bed. Luther seemed primed to chat at me for a while. He had nothing specific in mind, but he was still giddy from all the swell shit Pearl had insisted on him, and he went through the list and described each item in turn.

  Then he told me there were fish that lived in trees. He said there was liquor made from cobras that he wouldn’t fucking drink and a beer he’d had once at a bar in Jackson that was brewed in outer space. He said he was married one time for about a day and a half. Had a foot fungus two years back he’d cured with Clorox. He wondered what Muslims were up to in a general sort of way. Then he just stopped talking because he was asleep.

  TEN

  As for me, I didn’t sleep at first. By at first I mean from midnight until about half past three. Desmond was snoring on the floor, and Luther was wheezing on the couch. He sounded like he was trying to bring up a hairball.

  Worse still, Luther had insisted on stripping down to his underwear alone. He’d flung back his blanket and was all uncovered and revealed. His underwear was alarmingly brief, what passes in Walmart for man-sexy.

  Luther, in keeping with the cracker tradition, was tatted up across his chest. He had a likeness of Dale Earnhardt over his left nipple and a flat-bottomed fishing boat just above his right. There was something coming up over his shoulder, either a dragon or Tammy Wynette. His midriff featured what appeared at first like a snatch of Latin in Gothic script. I got a closer look on the way to the toilet. It wasn’t Latin after all but Go Fuck Yourself all done up and ornate.

  I awoke gradually to crows having a spat in the neighboring live oak. The sun was well up, and the apartment was as fragrant as a stockyard. Desmond was still snoring, and I shifted around to find Luther alongside me in the bed. So I woke all the way up in an alarming hurry.

  Luther stretched and groaned. “Sofa didn’t cut it.” Then he told me, “Watch this,” arched his back, and broke loud, clammy wind.

  I was on my feet so fast that I was dizzy.

  As best I could tell, Desmond hadn’t moved so much as an inch. He looked like a chalk outline waiting to happen.

  “You in there?” I asked him.

  Desmond gave me a grunt by way of reply but just stayed where he was, laid out on the floor. No cover. No pillow. No nothing.

  “Not opening my eyes until Luther puts on his pants.”

  Luther’s morning ritual seemed to consist entirely of vaporish behavior. When he wasn’t making showy exhibitions of breaking wind, he was burping or preparing for a belch. I made him get dressed, and true to his word, Desmond didn’t meet the day until he had. Then Desmond took the quarter hour he needed to get up off the floor.

  Once upright, Desmond paced to get everything loose and in sync, and he wandered to the door in the course of his travels and peeked out through the door light.

  “Hmm,” Desmond said. “Dale’s down there talking to Pearl.”

  “Just Dale?” I eased over to join Desmond at the door.

  “Looks like it.”

  Pearl was trying to insist a plastic container of leftover casserole on him. She’d press it in Dale’s hand, and Dale would give it back. Dale pointed at the car shed as he spoke, and Pearl shook her head with some vigor before starting in on the casserole again.

  “Put on your suit coat,” I told Luther, and then motioned him over to the door. I pointed at Dale. “Make him think me and Desmond aren’t in Mississippi anymore.”

  In some ways, Duboises are about as can-do as people can possibly get. True enough, they’re usually can-do in a criminal direction, but it seemed worthwhile to try to harness that ingenuity for relative good.

  “Whatever you do, don’t let him come up here.”

  “I hear you, boss,” Luther told me. Then he flung open the door and went clattering down the steps.

  “Good morning, Miss Pearl!”

  Desmond and I watched Luther prance across the driveway.

  “He’s a little light in the tap shoes, wouldn’t you say? I mean,” Desmond added, “for a Dubois.”

  “Can a Dubois be gay and live to enjoy it?”

  Desmond paused to consider the strife and trouble a gay Dubois would meet with. He shook his head and told me firmly, “Naw.”

  We couldn’t hear Dale or Pearl, not enough to make out what they said, but Luther was so loud that everything he told them carried. His was a good story, as spontaneous bullshit goes. Me and Desmond had picked up and gone to Texas, and Luther had come into my lease. He was helping Pearl around the place and making himself useful for rent consideration and for clothes. At that point Luther showed Dale his sateen jacket lining.

  “Isn’t that Desmond’s car out front?” Dale asked Luther with some volume, like maybe he suspected we were listening to him up top.

  I looked around to see where we might go to if we had to. There was a knee wall back near the kitcheonette with a hole cut in it, access to an attic space covered with a plywood door. We could punch through the ceiling of Gil’s garage and conceivably get out through there.

  Desmond followed my gaze and told me, “Uh-uh.”

  “You’ll fit,” I said.

  “Ain’t about fitting. I don’t go in attics. I don’t go in basements. I don’t go in bayous. I don’t go in the woods.”

  “Doesn’t leave much.”

  “I go to work. I go to the Sonic. I go home. If he comes up here, we’ll just put him down again.”

  But the longer Dale stayed, the better Luther got. He’d come into Desmond’s Metro on account of money Desmond owed for medicine (Luther called it) that Luther had supplied him for his mother. Apparently Dale was acquainted with Desmond’s momma’s pain.

  “How did they go, then?” Dale wanted to know.

  “Took the Amtrak out of Greenwood. Had tickets clear down to McComb. Catching a bus from there.”

  “Where in Texas?” Dale asked him.

  Luther shrugged. “Big place,” he said.

  Dale couldn’t seem to quite decide who to be angry with since me and Desmond were Galveston way and no longer handy for it. Then Luther bailed him out by poking Dale’s bandage and asking him, “What’s that?”

  Dale picked Luther up by Gil’s lapels and whispered something in Luther’s ear. It was surely a threat against (knowing Dale) Luther’s testicles. That was usually the part of a man, Mexican or otherwise, Dale could be relied on to threaten first.

  “I’m watching you,” Dale told Luther, but Luther was smoothing his lapels by then and seemed the sort who’d welcome watching by anyone who’d care to do it.

  Pearl offered Dale the casserole again, and this time he took it and thanked her. So Dale would know a day of supplements and Skoal along with carrots and peas and chicken under a cheese potato chip crust.

  * * *

  When me and Desmond ride around together, we just climb in and go. There’s no hold up for the one of us while the other gets himself ready, and we don’t usually talk about where we’re going or how we’re going to get there. We just get in the car and figure it out en route.

  That morning the job was to get to Webb and find the house Percy Dwayne had in mind, long before he would expect us to have arrived. Then we could see what was what and maybe figure who was who and decide where we needed to be to keep the whole thing from going sour.

  Luther, however, was a Dubois and didn’t know recon from études. Worse still, he was a clothes horse with an entire wardrobe for the taking, and Desmo
nd and I were long since ready to roll while Luther was deciding what to wear.

  What, after all, does a Yazoo drug slinger wear to a crack house in Webb? Particularly if the visit isn’t attached to standard commerce but is more of a freelance SWATTY sort of thing. He just couldn’t settle on an outfit to suit him, and Pearl was delighted to help him dither because the longer Luther took, the more insisting she could do.

  We let them go on for a bit because Desmond and I had eased down into Pearl’s house and were watching Dale watching the Geo from a block and a half away.

  “Think we can wait him out?” Desmond wanted to know

  “I don’t know. He looks pretty comfortable.”

  Just then Barry White set in from Desmond’s front shirt pocket. “It’s you,” he told me, and handed me the phone.

  I hit the talk button. “Yeah,” was all I had occasion to say before Percy Dwayne, sounding a little rattled, barked out, “Where’s your goddamn charger?”

  “For the phone?”

  “Well, yeah,” he told me in a tone that left me itching to smack him, not that I wasn’t already consumed with those sorts of urges, anyway.

  “It’s here.”

  “That don’t help me, now does it?”

  “Can’t imagine what I was thinking, not leaving it in the car.”

  “How’s this?” Luther asked me from the doorway in his Sonny Crockett linen jacket and a Creamsicle undershirt. Yazoo City Vice.

  “Who’s that?” Percy Dwayne wanted to know.

  “Fellow at work,” I told him.

  “He the one bringing you over here?”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Good. You tell him to stay in the car and keep his goddamn mouth shut. And don’t bring that big nigger, that other repo boy.”

  “Why not?”

  Percy Dwayne went irate. “’Cause I said so!” he screamed at me.

  “You’re sounding a little jumpy.”

  “Just show up with the money. Don’t you worry about me.”

  “And my car?”

  “I’ll call you and tell you where to find it. So bring the charger, why don’t you. I’ve just got two fucking bars.”