Ranchero Read online

  “Noonish, right?”

  And it sounded like Percy Dwayne was trying to correct me on the time when he went all garbled and the connection died.

  “He didn’t sound too good,” I said to Desmond. “Didn’t sound good at all.”

  Dale was still sitting up the road by the time Luther was dressed and ready to go, so me and Desmond really didn’t have any choice but to trust Luther.

  “You get the car, drive it down past Dale’s cruiser, and get out on the truck route. Lose him but good. We’ll cut through the back and meet you over by the Sunflower Market, far side near the dumpster.”

  “Keys?”

  Desmond was having difficulty digging them out of his pocket. It was more of a mental than a motor skill sort of thing. He’d already been forced to surrender his Escalade to Shawnica, and now here I was asking him to hand the key to his Metro to a Dubois.

  For a decent sort like Desmond, that was bound to be a bit of a hurdle. I talked him through it like I was his 12-step sponsor, and he finally handed his key ring to Luther with no comment beyond a grunt.

  Luther tossed the ring in the air, all jaunty and delighted. He was like a shut-in on an outing. Every little thing he did in the fresh air was just fine with him.

  Desmond grunted again, and we made our apologies to Pearl for the imposition, but she treated us like she was sending her boys off to school. She’d even bagged lunches for us and gave each of us a sack.

  “What did you get?” Luther wanted to know before we were out of the house entirely.

  I glanced in my sack. “Some kind of sandwich.”

  Luther poked me with his elbow. “I got a cupcake, too.”

  He headed down the driveway, fairly skipping, while me and Desmond made our way toward the back of the lot.

  “Did you get a cupcake?” I asked Desmond.

  He shook his head and exhaled hard. “Carrot sticks,” he said.

  The neighbor off the back had some kind of short-haired dog with three legs and one eye and a sour disposition. He looked like a veteran of the Great War. I knew him a little. His name was Rusty. I’d made his acquaintance a few months back when he’d spent about thirty-six straight hours barking at a stump. I think Rusty’s remaining eye was clouded with cataracts, and just generally Rusty had lost all interest in caring what was what.

  So he barked at stumps, would howl at nothing much in the middle of the day, and he didn’t bother to squat anymore when he evacuated but would just lumber around shitting on everything.

  He was a harmless canine geriatric, but Desmond was still scared of him and refused to pass through the gate between Pearl’s lot and Rusty’s yard. That meant I had to go in first and drive Rusty out of the way.

  Since he was interested in my bag lunch, I went ahead and lured Rusty with it, tempting him away from the gate and across the yard. Desmond crossed and cleared the property while I was busy feeding the dog, pinching off bits of the sandwich Pearl had made.

  She’d used pickle-pimento loaf, even though it was green around the edges, and the bread was slathered with mayonnaise Pearl had probably had for years. It was greasy translucent and what struck me as a toxic shade of yellow. The chips in their separate Baggie at the bottom of the sack were casserole rejects and largely salt and crumbs.

  “He’s going to be there, right?” Desmond asked me once I’d caught up with him.

  I’d been wondering the same thing myself. We’d as good as kidnapped Luther and knocked him around a little, had hauled him up Delta, and gotten him compensated with Gil’s clothes. But he was still a Dubois, and now he had a car. Who was to say he wouldn’t head south toward Yazoo and disappear?

  “He’ll be there,” I assured Desmond, but I didn’t quite believe it.

  We stuck to people’s lawns and dodged between magnolia trees, keeping as best we could an eye out for Dale and his friends. When we got to the truck route, we hung around the Sunoco for a few minutes until a gap in the traffic provided us ample clearance to cross the road, and we passed through the lot at Fred’s Pharmacy and approached the Sunflower Market. Then we stood for a solid half hour alongside the rank dumpster with no sign of Desmond’s Metro anywhere.

  “How stupid are we?” Desmond asked me just before Luther whipped into the lot. It wasn’t all joy and relief, however, because he crossed the apron at such speed as to make sparks off Desmond’s undercarriage.

  “I’ll undo anything he’s done when this is all over,” I told Desmond.

  Desmond gave me a “Hmm.” He added beyond it, “When’s that going to be?”

  It turned out Luther had stopped by the Krystal and bought himself a Scrambler, which was eggs and pancakes and sausage all shoved in a Styrofoam cup. Not the sort of meal you could hope to eat behind the wheel of a Metro, but Luther had given it a vigorous go nonetheless.

  So he had a fair bit of syrup and sausage grease on his Creamsicle shirt and scattershot Scrambler detritus on his lap and down on the floorboard. It looked a little like he’d taken fire in the form of a breakfast grenade.

  “Look at this,” Desmond said, disgusted at the mess.

  Luther paid him no mind at all, but just stood by the dumpster eating his Scrambler with the spork he’d been provided, which appeared to work about half as well as a genuine fork or spoon.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him as I helped Desmond pick up and tidy his car.

  “They ain’t like us,” he said, and glanced at Luther, who, standing right beside a dumpster, finished his breakfast and dropped his Styrofoam cup onto the ground.

  “Pick that up,” I told him.

  “I was aiming to do that,” Luther said.

  Luther picked up his Scrambler cup and his napkin and his spork and just stood there with them in his hand until I’d pointed out the dumpster right beside him. He dropped them in with an air of rank experimentation like he’d never contemplated such a thing before.

  Luther complained bitterly about riding in the back. His coat would get all wrinkled and he had less room than before because now he was sharing his cramped space with a shotgun and a box of shells.

  Desmond asked me if he could stop by his house and check in on his momma, by which I figured he meant he wanted to see after her pain. He had Luther’s grimy tablets in his shirt pocket with his phone, and they weren’t doing his mother awfully much good there.

  Desmond had grown up and lived on the banks of the Big Sunflower River, out in the country north of Indianola between Dwyer and Pentecost.

  Desmond’s father had owned what, anywhere else, would have been a nice parcel of farmland. A couple of hundred acres of Big Sunflower River bottom that he’d even farmed for a decade or two before his neighbor bought him out. His neighbor was a multinational conglomerate operating out of Denmark. His neighbor had eighty thousand acres of Delta under plow.

  The house Desmond now shared with his mother was like a wealth of houses in the Delta. It was located snug by the street where the rows would have ended, anyway, so it could be graciously tolerated for now, agriculturally speaking. It got crop dusted probably half the year, and when the fields were burned in the fall, Desmond stayed home with his mother just in case the wind backed on them. It was the sort of house indifference and poor luck would probably sweep away in a few years.

  Desmond’s father had built it, and like I said, Desmond’s father was a farmer, so it looked like a house a farmer had built on those occasions the crops allowed. Frame. Asbestos shingles. Metal roof with tires to hold it down. An addition out back that still had more house wrap exposed than siding. An outhouse that saw use when the plumbing froze or happened to get cocked up.

  “Want to come in?” Desmond asked me, but I’d been in once before and didn’t think Desmond needed me there just now.

  “We’ll stay out here. Give my best to your mom.”

  Me and Luther just stood in the yard. A May breeze was driving the bugs away, and high clouds were drifting in from Arkansas. The Big Sunflower was flowing on
the far side of the road. It was silty and slow and about as far as a river can get from majestic. There was a black kid shin-deep on the far side fishing, I guess, for carp.

  Luther took a long look upstream and then downstream for a while, and, when he turned to me to speak, I thought for a second he might say something profound. Well, not profound in the usual sense but relative to Dubois standards. I hoped some cracker Delta insight might just spill out of his mouth.

  Instead, gazing at the Big Sunflower had brought him to this: “Now I’ve got to take a piss.”

  “Outhouse around back,” I told him.

  “Snakes love them damn things,” he said. So I pointed him toward the sandy lot up the road from Desmond’s house where his Danish conglomerate neighbors stored their implements under a shed, a shed about the size of a shopping plaza.

  Luther peed on a six-foot harrow blade and seemed delighted for the chance.

  Standing alone in Desmond’s yard, I was aware of a brand of sensation that I’d known a time or two in the Delta before. Big sky overhead. Shabby little house. Muddy implacable river. Soybeans stretching to the horizon. A line of power poles was the tallest thing around, and the soil beneath them had been plowed so much that they were all pitched and tilted.

  The fields were massive. The tractors were huge. The scale was so off in the Delta that people seemed smaller than life.

  Standing there in Desmond’s yard, I got a whiff of fruitlessness. I was touched by the passing conviction that a niggling sort like me would never make anything happen quite the way I wanted to. I was left to wonder what sense it possibly made to try. That view of the world is as much of the Delta as the black loam and the mosquitoes. I felt it only briefly, the way a transplant would, but it made me appreciate Desmond more for staying upright and decent, and it helped explain why a creature like Luther was bound to be who he was.

  When people toss off how the Delta is damned, they’re just talking shorthand. The Delta’s less a place than a boot on your neck. The Delta keeps you down.

  ELEVEN

  To get to Webb, we went north to Parchman to cut east on 32. But for the main penitentiary gate, the prison looks like an airbase. Like everything else in the Delta, Parchman’s a farm as well, and the convicts who aren’t working the land are often out tidying roadsides. They wear striped fatigues. Green and white, broad stripes like a barbershop awning. The guards carry shotguns and are always in campaign hats against the sun.

  “Ever been inside?” I asked Desmond, but before he could tell me, Luther set about listing all the friends he had in Parchman, a few of them he wasn’t even related to.

  “You go see them?”

  Luther’s mouth fell open, and he looked at me like I was daft. “In there?” He pointed as we turned right at the imposing main prison gate. “What if I couldn’t get back out?”

  “I don’t think that’s how it works.”

  “Does down here,” Luther insisted, and Desmond grunted as if to say he’d found a thing he could finally agree with a Dubois about.

  Route 32 covered about eight miles of what looked like solid wheat with a shack or three to serve as crop-duster targets. It dead-ended into what is officially known as the Emmett Till Highway, but K-Lo was the only person I’d ever heard call it that. He’d hit his bobcat on the Emmett Till Highway, somewhere near Glendora, so it figured in the story he liked to tell about that night, which was colorful and thorough but for the part about his car. Like most everybody else in the Delta, K-Lo didn’t know who Emmett Till was.

  The courthouse still stands up in Sumner, where the men who murdered that child were acquitted. I can hardly ever drive past a bayou without thinking of that poor boy’s body sunk in the mud barbwired to a cotton gin fan.

  Webb was hardly a mile up his road, and we eased in from the south on a back way Desmond was acquainted with. I had to think Desmond had probably bought some medicine in Webb at one time or another. From the looks of the place, that was the leading brand of commerce about.

  I don’t know if Webb had ever been much, but it sure was nothing now. There was a kind of shack suburb on the low end of town, and we passed directly through it. Dirt yards and clothes hanging out to dry on bushes and fence rails mostly. I had to get out to physically roust a dog from the middle of the street.

  “Is our house around here?” I asked Desmond.

  “Naw,” he said dismissively as if the place we were going to, still a Delta drug den, was in a far nicer neighborhood than the one we were rolling through.

  “Damned if I know how people live like this.” That was Luther from the back.

  I told him we’d been to his house on Longstreet Street, and it wasn’t exactly palatial.

  “Got a new place,” Luther told me. “Up near Norway. Grass in the yard and everything. Nothing like this here.”

  And it was a stricken sort of place as Delta neighborhoods go. Blighted and tumbledown with the occasional over-accessorized car. Then we passed through downtown Webb, which was hardly any better. It had the layout and look of a lot of Delta towns I’d seen. A couple of blocks of brick storefronts, maybe a feed-and-seed still open, and usually a Mexican grocery store somewhere in the mix, but otherwise just dusty plate glass and desolation.

  Webb was uncommon, though, in the volume of people just loitering about. Black men primarily, though a few toddlers and infants, too, and some women mixed in doing just as little as the men. That was the thing. They weren’t talking or eating or drinking. They weren’t doing anything but looking at us as they parted to let us pass.

  “I guess everybody knows we’re here,” I said.

  “That boy back there in the dashiki,” Desmond told me. It was brown and orange and yellow. I couldn’t help but see him myself. “It’s his house we’re going to. Everything that comes to Webb goes right through him.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Calvin.”

  “Calvin? Doesn’t he have a badass, dope-slinging name? I mean … Calvin?”

  “Got some Swahili bullshit name nobody’ll call him.”

  “Is he the boy that cut off that guy’s thumb?” Luther asked. He turned full around to study Calvin in his autumn-shade dashiki.

  “That’s him,” Desmond said.

  “Who’s thumb?”

  “Guy from Helena, right?” Luther said.

  “Uh-huh,” Desmond told him.

  “In a fight?”

  “Naw,” Desmond told me. “I hear he was asleep. Think somebody bet him he wouldn’t.”

  “Damn. People around here and their knives,” I said, and looked as directly at Luther as I could manage.

  “I ain’t never stuck nobody but him,” Luther said, “and he flat told me to.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You were bad back then,” Luther told Desmond. “Don’t guess I was much better.”

  “But we’re all fine now,” I offered, “which is how we ended up here.”

  Desmond pointed out a house, a little square thing with purple siding and wooden goose wind vane driven on a stake into the yard. He kept going and swung around the corner, did a four-point road turn, and parked.

  “Where did he want it?”

  “Porch was all he said. Front one, I guess. What time is it?”

  “About ten of twelve,” Desmond told me.

  “I’ll carry it over. Think we’re all right here?”

  Desmond wasn’t so sure. He sized up the houses in the vicinity and selected one with gladiolus in the yard and a rocker on the porch.

  Desmond climbed out of the Geo, went up and knocked on the door. A tiny, gray-haired, nut-colored lady showed up behind the screen. I watched Desmond gain her permission to back his Geo into her drive. He gave her three dollars and told her we worked for the CIA.

  Once we’d backed in and were set where we could see down the road through her shrubbery, she brought us out ice water and told us about her brother’s wife, who was cleaning out her brother’s bank account and making her brother�
��s life a torment. She wondered what the CIA might have to say about that.

  At ten after noon precisely, I left the car and walked over to Calvin’s. Unlike on Main Street in downtown Webb, there wasn’t anybody about. A cat crossed the road ahead of me, and a dog barked at me from a window. I don’t suspect I’ll ever feel so lily white again.

  There wasn’t any Calvin around. Wasn’t any Dubois. Just me and my sack of newsprint cut up to look like dollar bills.

  I climbed Calvin’s steps and listened at the door. The house sounded empty to me. I set my bag on the porch decking, opened the neck, and arranged all the twenties to show. Then I rolled the sack shut, left Calvin’s porch, and returned to Desmond’s car.

  “Now what?” Luther wanted to know.

  “We wait for Percy Dwayne or … somebody.”

  “Then what?”

  “I get Pearl’s car back. Beat up your uncle a little. You go back to your office. Me and him go back to work.”

  “Nobody goes to jail?”

  “I can’t see how that would help.”

  “Well, you’re all right then,” Luther told me, “for somebody from somewhere else.”

  A good half hour passed before we saw anybody.

  “Right there,” Desmond said, and he pointed at a lanky kid walking up the street.

  The guy was glancing all over while trying to seem to be looking at nothing much. He stopped in front of Calvin’s house and made the worst fake phone call I ever hope to see a human make. It was somewhere between Vicksburg dinner theater and a middle-school Thanksgiving play.

  He laughed and hooted and looked one last time up and down the road before he dashed up onto Calvin’s porch, nabbed the sack, and dashed back off it.

  He unrolled the neck and took a long, hard look inside. I held my breath a little until he’d rolled the neck back shut and set out down the street. From the constipated way he moved, he appeared to have been instructed that he damn well better not do anything to draw attention to himself.

  He was walking away toward the head of the road, and we just watched him there at first until he left the pavement and climbed a hill through a patch of scrub and saplings. Only then did Desmond wheel out into the street and roll up to the end of the block where he let me out of the car.