Beluga (2 page)

“We're thinking a hundred.”

“Think seventy-five and get puckered to take fifty,” I told him.

Larry pointed at me again.

“A hundred's steep,” Desmond informed him, and then he informed Shawnica too.

“Might go eighty,” Larry allowed.

“The shit's hot, genius. The trick is to move it.”

This time he only looked at me, couldn't be bothered to point.

“I don't know,” Desmond said. “Sounds all right to me.”

“For fifty thousand?” I'm sure my tone had more of an edge to it than I'd intended. We'd taken three hundred grand off our Acadian fuck stick, so we had fifty to spare, but I just couldn't see the sense of giving it to Larry.

Desmond grunted. “I might can see about forty from here.”

“Where the hell you looking?”

“Maybe,” Desmond said and paused to swallow, “Beluga … you ought to tell us about your expenses.”

“Got to pay the truck guy. Got to grease a couple of boys in West Memphis, the ones that put us onto this shit in the first place. Need to pay some rent to the boy in Belzoni with the tractor shed. Then me and Skeeter'll be needing to get around all over the place. Ain't got no car between us. Got to have some money for that.”

“What do you figure on driving?” Desmond asked him.

Larry described a Jaguar or something. He'd seen it on a lot over in Jackson. He veered into something close to raptures about the faceted chrome wheels.

I let him finish before I told Desmond, “I can see maybe fifteen from here.”

“Hold on now,” Larry told us both. “I'm going to double your damn money. You want that magic on fifteen or you wanting it on fifty?”

“Five hundred tires?”

Larry nodded at me.

“Fifty apiece?”

“Says you.”

“That's two hundred and twenty-five thousand. You double our fifty and give it back, that's a big bite out of that. Ought to whittle the expenses down. Bare bone it.”

“Might listen to the man,” Shawnica told him. I hadn't expected that.

“Forty, then,” Larry suggested.

“I might can see twenty,” I told him.

Desmond slapped his massive thighs with both his massive hands. “Thirty,” he told us all and got up out of his Barcalounger, which was kind of a process given how much of Desmond there was to lift.

“Six months to turn it?” I asked Desmond once he was fully upright. He nodded.

“I hear you,” Larry told us. He reached for the afghan to wipe his popcorn grease away and then offered his hand to Desmond, who swallowed hard and took it. He shook it once and grunted. He let Beluga have it back.

 

TWO

In Desmond's Escalade on the way to my place, I laid out my misgivings. Larry was preeminent among them, but I would like to have known who he was stealing from as well.

Desmond was in a grunting mood. Family will do that to you, so it was me talking mostly, with Desmond content to grumble behind the wheel.

“If Larry's right and this guy stole a load straight from the Michelin factory and has the stones to park it downtown, even in West Memphis, you got to figure he's connected somehow. One end or the other. Got people at the factory. Got people in West Memphis. Might be hooked up at both ends. You hearing me?”

Desmond turned onto my street off the main Indianola drag. It was a beautiful April evening with the rich Delta scent of flowers in the air.

“Yeah,” he said. “Larry's problem. I'm sure we won't be messing with them.”

“That's optimistic,” I told him, and Desmond gave me a Desmond look that let me know we were finished talking about it.

“I'm taking it all out of your box,” I told him as he wheeled into the drive.

Desmond grunted. Desmond said, “I would.”

My landlady, Pearl, was out in the driveway looking for a cat. She had one of her late husband Gil's old flashlights with batteries he'd probably put in it. She would have been just as well off with a couple of birthday candles.

“Fergus!” She shouted it toward the neighbor's house, toward the back of her lot, toward me and Desmond rolling to a stop in her driveway.

Desmond looked at me.

“Cat,” I told him. “Been AWOL for a week.”

“Didn't know Pearl had a cat.”

I flung my door open. “Doesn't.”

That was about as near to a spat as me and Desmond ever got. I went in for door flinging. Desmond preferred neck noises. He made one and climbed on out.

“What are you looking for, Miss Pearl?”

Pearl was a proper Delta belle through and through. She might have been a fading flower and more down at heel than she'd ever imagined she'd get, but she still had that Delta debutante way of talking down to the coloreds. It wasn't a choice with people like Pearl. It was like being blond or having teeth.

“Aw, honey,” she said and laid her tiny white hand on Desmond's shoulder. “My cat's run off. Told a friend I'd keep him for her. Don't know what I'm going to do.”

That was typical Pearl. She couldn't keep anything straight in her head anymore. One of Pearl's friends had passed away. Not a Presbyterian friend but a canasta friend. Pearl had once explained the difference. It had nothing to do with the Lord. Canasta friends, as I understood it, were casual and fair-weather. If one of them got sick or had trouble in her life, she'd just get set aside and somebody else would take her seat. Presbyterian friends were different. You had to pretend to care about them.

So a canasta friend had passed away, a woman named Ailene. I'd actually been kind of fond of Ailene. She carried a pint of apple brandy in her handbag and was loud and vulgar, chain-smoked Salems, and played cards like a pirate. I could always hear Ailene laughing when Pearl had the game at her house.

She'd died a couple of weeks back in the beauty shop under the dryer. The girls thought she'd just dropped off to sleep and had a heroically high threshold for heat. Pearl ended up over at Ailene's house picking through her closets since Ailene didn't have any children, just second cousins down in Destin. When Pearl and her other canasta friends came away with what they wanted, Ailene's cat must have sensed that the jig was up and slipped into Pearl's car.

I remember the afternoon she came home from Ailene's because of all the screaming. I was changing my oil in the car shed and came out to check on Pearl. She was sitting in her Buick with the driver's door open. She was quivering and close to tears.

“You all right?”

She shook her head. “Went right across my lap.”

I looked around. I didn't see anything. “What?”

“Possum, I think.”

“Coming in? Going out?”

She pointed toward the side yard, more specifically toward a Nuttall oak that her Gil had planted and nursed. It came with a story like most everything around Pearl's house, and she launched into it automatically. That was the way with Pearl and her stories. Of course, I'd heard about Gil's Nuttall oak by then. How he'd dug it up down by Yazoo in a spur of the national forest and had brought it home wrapped in a towel and little more than a twig. Then he'd fenced it in to keep the squirrels away, had raised it to a sapling, had very nearly lost it in the '77 drought. But he'd watered it every night in direct opposition to city ordinance, and there it was—a glorious Nuttall oak right in Pearl's side yard.

It was south of glorious, truth be told, because the power company tree trimmer had been through a few years back while Pearl was off in Birmingham. He'd butchered the thing quite thoroughly. Those boys have a talent for that. So it was a glorious Nuttall oak up to where it turned to power line topiary.

Pearl was carrying on about that tree, the way she seemed obliged to, while I looked for the possum that had run across her lap. I checked under the car. I checked in the backseat where Pearl had laid a pile of Ailene's Salem-stinking clothes. Then I walked over to Gil's Nuttall oak and looked up in the stunted canopy. There was a tuxedo cat on a limb up there about the size of a beagle.

“Where have you been?” I asked Pearl.

“Ailene's.”

“She have a cat?”

Pearl nodded. “Fergus.”

“Black and white?”

Pearl nodded.

I pointed him out, and Pearl said, “Oh.”

She'd tried to feed and tame him during the time that had passed since then, but Fergus was on the feral side and wouldn't be domesticated.

With Desmond out on the driveway, Pearl could give him both the Fergus story and the saga of Gil's transplanted Nuttall oak. He was a trapped man and knew it. For my part, I veered off toward the basement.

“Checking on something,” I called to them both once I was halfway across the yard.

Pearl never locked her basement, so we were taking a chance keeping money down there, but the place was such a cluttered mess—almost everything in it was broken—that you could look inside and see there wasn't anything to take. Since there weren't any stairs up into the house, it was just its own junky thing and didn't even lead to a place that might be better. A fellow would have to be sorry and industrious both to wade into that thicket, and those are traits you rarely find paired together in a man.

Our cash was all in a big plastic toolbox on a low shelf in a back spidery corner. There were lawn chairs leaned up against the cabinet in case the spiders weren't enough. Even Desmond wouldn't mess with the thing. He'd linger in the basement stairwell and have me go get money out whenever he needed some.

I moved the chairs. I opened the box. We had maybe two hundred and forty thousand left from the three and change we'd started with. As I counted out Larry's money, I was already writing it off.

I might even have dwelled a bit on Larry and grown sullen in the basement if Fergus hadn't scared me half to death. He didn't leap out or anything. He had too much bulk for that. Fergus was just sitting on a patio table, an old wooden one with a couple of splintered slats. He was watching me with his yellow eyes until he got a sudden urge to bathe. When he went to lick a paw, I vaulted and nearly hit a rafter.

“How'd you get down here?”

Fergus yawned.

“She's looking for you,” I told him.

Fergus got an urge to lick his belly, indulged it, and then studied me the way cats will. If he could have talked, he probably would have said, “You still here, asswipe?”

I'd been around cats enough to know how to pick a strange one up, but I couldn't be sure that Fergus's neck scruff would support Fergus's tonnage. He burbled some when I hoisted him. For my part, I swore quite a lot and then went running up the steps and across the yard, desperate to set him back down.

“Look here,” I shouted, and Pearl turned her wan light beam upon us.

“Oh, baby!” Pearl made me give him to her against my better judgement, and he stayed in her arms for a nanosecond before clearing out for Gil's oak. Fergus scrabbled up the trunk and perched on a limb. Pearl turned her flashlight on him.

“Kind of big for a cat,” Desmond said.

“Kind of big for a pony,” I told him.

*   *   *

I let Desmond handle Beluga. I'd done my bit by showing up and listening to Larry's spiel. It seemed certain somebody would make some money. I just wasn't convinced it was us.

“You going to give it to him all at once?” was the only thing I asked Desmond.

“To her,” he told me, and that was about the best thing he could do.

Then four or five weeks went by. I didn't think much about it except for when the twinges hit. I'd imagine Larry in new sneakers we'd underwritten. Larry in Gucci glasses. Larry riding around in a Range Rover with a gold-plated Rolls-Royce grille. I kept it all to myself since I knew that Desmond was just doing for an in-law, by which I mean I didn't come right out and complain, but me and Desmond did chafe for a bit.

We work together. That's how we met. For a couple of months there, after we'd taken all that meth kingpin's money, me and Desmond were men of leisure, up to nothing in the middle of the day. It was all right for the first few weeks, but it wore poorly after a while. We were like kids out of school for the summer, hating the classroom but bored half to death.

So we started showing up back at the shop where we'd worked and getting in the way. Kalil, who runs the place, tolerated us for a bit. It's a rent-to-own store, and he let me and Desmond hang around the showroom and harass all the guys who were actually working until a call came in one day, probably about a year ago now. Kalil had sent Ferris out to repo a stove, just him alone with his ratty Ford Ranger and a hand truck. We didn't like Ferris. Nobody liked Ferris. His girlfriend would even come by to belittle him two or three times a week. He was a bony, tattooed fellow with his eyeteeth missing and no experience with a bathtub or a comb.

Every time he introduced himself he said, “Like the wheel, goddammit.” It didn't matter the circumstances. He would have said it to the pope.

“Got him in a closet,” Kalil told us and handed Desmond a scrap of paper with an address scribbled on it.

“Who's got him?” I asked.

Desmond studied the address. “Down below Moorhead?”

Kalil nodded. “Lawtons.”

“Which Lawtons?” I asked him, and Kalil just flattened his lips and shook his head.

“They'll feed him to their pigs,” Desmond said.

It was a real possibility with those Lawtons. The good side of the family wasn't prosperous exactly, but they were decent and reliable. When they got behind on payments, you knew there was nothing else they could do. The bad Lawtons were mean and sorry and didn't care who found it out. They were all cousins or something—the good and the bad—and spent holidays together. There would reliably be a picnic ham and most usually an assault.

Desmond waved the scrap of notepaper. “Who?”