Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (10 page)

“Where was he calling from?” I asked Luther.

Luther pulled up his missed calls. “Three three five,” he told us.

“That’s Greenville,” Desmond said.

“Try it,” Dale instructed Luther. Me and Desmond nodded.

Luther called back the number Percy Dwayne had called in from.

The guy who answered just said, “Grady’s.”

Luther got out, “Grady’s what?”

The guy was talking to somebody else already by the time he hung up the phone.

“Grady’s?” I asked Desmond and Dale.

They both just shook their heads.

Eugene was out of the Escalade and standing ten yards off in the lot. It was a voluntary courtesy. We’d moaned enough to cause Eugene to come around to the opinion that he stank.

“Grady’s?” I asked him.

Eugene squinted as a sign that he was thinking, and he still hadn’t decided what he knew when a fellow came out of the AutoZone. He had on a filthy Delta State Fighting Okras cap and a Remington T-shirt that the collar had rotted off of. He fished a cigarette from behind his ear and lit it. He gave us the hard eye. We gave it right back.

“Grady’s?” I said to him.

He pointed in the general direction of Alpha Centauri. “Mile or two. Just past the crossroads.”

“What the hell is it?” Luther asked him.

He drew on his cigarette and blew smoke out his nose while he considered Luther from cowlick to boot heel.

“You looking for it,” that fellow told Luther. “Guess you ought to know.”

Ordinarily, his logic would have been unassailable, which Luther probably should have explained. Instead just Luther went with, “What the hell is it?” with a bit more volume than the first time around and appreciably more passion.

That fellow just laughed and spat. He drew his cigarette clean down to the filter, pulled on it so hard that sparks flew. He flicked the leavings into the lot and then squared up toward Luther and glared at him.

That was just the way in the Delta. You ask a guy a simple question, and you end up in a fight.

While it would have been no trouble much to draw back and slug the guy, I opted for the ambassadorial approach. We were in Tula and Kendell’s territory after all, and I knew they had their hands full.

“His uncle,” I said and jabbed a thumb Luther’s way. “Wandered off. Kind of gone in the head. We heard he was at some place called Grady’s.”

Like all men who have to crawl down from a quarrel, he went about it slowly.

“Just worried. That’s all,” I told him in a bid to explain Luther.

Then I looked hard enough at Luther to cause him to throw in with a “Yeah.”

“Body shop,” that boy told us. “Turn left at the fruit stand. If you get to that silo with the creepers all over it, you went too damn far.”

“We appreciate it, don’t we?”

Luther passed a quarter minute working up another “Yeah.”

“Where do you eat around here?” Dale asked that guy before he could get away.

He pointed again. Nowhere helpful. “Fruit stand’s got tamales.”

“Well all right, then,” Dale said. He reached down and grabbed up a fistful of Barbara Mandrell. “Come on, dog.”

My phone rang just then. It was Tula. “Pulling out of the driveway,” she told me. “Happy?”

“Might get there later,” I said back. “Just keep calling along the way.”

“Right,” was all I got back before she dropped the call.

We all piled out again at the fruit stand. A whiskery old black woman was running the thing. She didn’t have much in the way of fruit. A few brown bananas. Some tired looking beans. Bright yellow hoop cheese. Chunks of smoked hog. She did have a stew pot full of tamales. They were submerged in greasy red juice as thin as water. She kept telling us it was gravy. She sold the things six to a bundle, and she was prepared to declare them whatever meat we wanted them to be.

Luther asked for beef. Dale requested venison. Eugene had a taste for chicken. That woman just dug the things out willy-nilly from the pot and dropped them all in coffee cans she’d laid in for that purpose. They came with packets of Russian dressing and saltines.

“What about you?” I asked Desmond.

We both watched that woman spoon iridescent “gravy” into a can.

“Coney Island,” Desmond told me and shook his head.

I opted for a brown banana while Desmond informed Dale and Luther and Eugene, “Don’t take them damn cans anywhere near my truck.”

Those three went over and perched on a rusty fuel-oil tank while me and Desmond chatted up that whiskery old black woman. She asked us where we were from. We told her, and she informed us she’d been to Indianola once.

“Nineteen sixty-seven,” she said. “Bought a crown. For Easter.”

“Haven’t been back?” I asked her.

She told me, “Nome,” her version of “uh-uh.”

“Smell him?” Desmond asked her. He pointed at Eugene across the way.

“Couldn’t much help it.”

“Toad,” I told her. “What can we do about it?”

“This here,” she said and fished out from somewhere a chunk of something wrapped in wax paper. In addition to her tamales and her brown bananas and tired beans, she turned out to have a milk crate full of mixed goods sitting by her feet.

“Lye soap,” she said. Then she acquainted us with how exactly Eugene ought to scour himself. “Dishrag,” she told us. She had one of those too. It even looked very nearly new. Eugene was to scrub from his armpits to his fingertips. “Two times,” she said. “A quarter hour apart. Then rinse him in a branch.” She pointed. “One over there in them rushes.” After that Eugene had to personally bury the dishrag under a rock.

“Any particularly kind of rock?” I asked her.

She looked at me like I was simple. She turned to wink at Desmond and then swung back my way to tell me, “Nome.”

“Not going to burn him, is it?” Desmond asked her.

“Rinse him in the branch,” she said and pointed at the rushes again.

She wanted six dollars for the soap and rag.

“I’m about out of money,” I told Desmond.

“Tell me when you’re full out. How’s that banana?”

“Rotten.”

I gave her a ten. She didn’t have any change.

“Then how about some information?” I said. “You know Grady’s?”

She said, “Lord, them boys.”

She motioned me to her with one of her leathery fingers. I brought my face down close to hers. She sure had whiskers in odd places. At either edge of her upper lip and in tufts along her jawline. She smelled like snuff and applejack. She said in a whisper, “Rascals.”

“How many?” Desmond wanted to know.

“Four or five of them today. Come through here this morning. Bought up all my biscuits and pickles.”

“What are they up to exactly?” I asked.

“
Rascals,
” she said more emphatically this time around.

“What exactly do rascals do?” I asked her.

“Any damn thing they like.”

Eugene turned out to be reluctant to get scrubbed down with homemade lye soap, especially after we’d explained who’d sold it to us and what we’d been instructed to do.

“I don’t smell nothing,” he kept saying. Then he said a hard thing about black folk, which Desmond objected to with a blow to the back of Eugene’s head.

“Right,” he said to Desmond, rubbing his cowlick. “You black, ain’t you?”

That was the thing about Eugene in particular and Delta swamp rats generally. They had racial reflexes like everybody else had allergies or red hair. Eugene knew better than to run black folk down. It just came out of him like a sneeze.

“I wouldn’t use that shit,” Luther told us and made a show of glaring at that whiskery old black woman.

Dale didn’t seem to have an opinion. He was drinking tamale juice from his can.

“Want to keep smelling him?” I asked Luther.

He told me, “Well” and “No.”

So we escorted Eugene down to the branch, gave him his washcloth and his lye soap and suffered Eugene to strip down to his nasty underwear. They’d been tidy whities once but now the elastic was exhausted and the fabric looked like it had been steeped in tea.

“They didn’t give you underpants?” Desmond asked him.

“Naw.”

Luther groaned and shook his head like this world was a disappointment to him. He gazed off toward the horizon and said just, “Arkansas.”

Eugene was a spectacle in his briefs. He was scarred all over, hairy in strange spots, and selectively discolored. He had more knife wounds and bullet holes and surgical incisions than most of us have fingers and toes.

“Lord,” I said to him. I couldn’t really help it. “What all happened to you?”

So there we all stood by that branch south of Greenville watching Eugene in his nasty underwear as he supplied us with his personal history of conflict and miscalculation. He’d point to a knife wound and tell us, “Some fucker down in Yazoo,” or at a scar on his shin and say, “Goddamn mower went to pieces.”

It went on like that for a quarter hour. We almost had to fight some boys. They came by in about the dirtiest pickup truck I’d ever seen. It looked like they’d parked it in a mud hole for a year. When they saw Eugene, they stopped in the road. The passenger cocked his head back to cackle and so showed us all fourteen of his teeth.

“Look at them faggots,” he decided to say before him or his buddy either one noticed Dale closing in from the opposite side.

Sometimes Dale’s useful. This was one of those occasions. He had about a third of a coffee can of tamale juice left, and he shot it all over those boys, just doused them with it. That stuff was red and greasy from the cayenne and the chili powder.

It wasn’t coming out, not even with lye soap, and the driver got all shirty. But he turned out to be the sort of boy who was leery even of Dale. Big blubbery Dale who told him, “Come on,” and flung the empty can at him.

Those boys didn’t quite have the nerve to pile out of that truck and tangle. They had instead a mutual swearing fit as they shot on down the road.

We didn’t any of us say anything. That sort of passing confrontation was all too commonplace in the Delta. After a quarter minute, Eugene piped in again. He laid his finger to a scar on his lower abdomen. “Appendix blew all to shit.”

We finally prevailed upon Eugene to slip down into the branch. There was an eddy right below us where the water curled and pooled. He stood shin-deep in the stream, glanced down at his briefs, and asked in a general way, “Who’s going to hold my underpants?”

It was so quiet you could hear that fruit stand lady dribbling snuff juice into her cup.

“Why don’t you start over,” Desmond suggested. “We’ll get you some new ones down the road here.”

“Throw them out?” Eugene said. The wastefulness of such a thing appeared to offend him greatly.

“What with the toad and all,” I told him.

“Well,” he said. “All right.”

So Eugene came out of his underwear. He had a ring around his waist where the band of briefs had laid, the sort of ring you might get in a bathtub if you washed a couple of donkeys. Eugene wasn’t uneasy or embarrassed at all to be standing in a branch out in the open naked to the world. If anything, he was the opposite of uneasy and embarrassed, and rattled on for a little while about the prowess of his member and the sort of effect it had on “gals,” as he called them.

“Makes them flat yell.”

It was close to having the same effect on me.

“I might have to kick that Boudrot to death,” Desmond informed me. “Wouldn’t be seeing a thing I’m seeing but for him.”

The worst part was the lye soap didn’t rout the stink entirely. It sure made Eugene pink all over. He finally sat down in the branch, lathered up and rolled around to rinse himself off. The man had no modesty and kept showing us his bits and pieces before we could look away. By the time he was zipping back up into his sky blue coveralls, me and Desmond and Luther were all fully primed to make stew meat out of that Boudrot. It turned out there were some things even a guy like Luther couldn’t unsee.

“This ain’t the day I’d hoped for,” he told us.

We didn’t have much quarrel with that. Me and Desmond closed on Eugene so we could sniff him a little.

I sampled an elbow. Eugene smelled a bit like a river carp that had been power washed in Clorox.

ELEVEN

Grady’s was about what me and Desmond expected it would be. It was a dump. A Quonset hut. A big galvanized tube sitting flush on the ground. They’re common in the Delta. Farmers used to use them for tractor and equipment sheds before tractors and equipment got so oversized no Quonset hut could hold them. So the things got sold off and hauled away and used for other stuff. Like at Grady’s where his Quonset hut appeared to be a cracker magnet.

There was white trash lounging every damn where. The surrounding lot was littered with cars. No few of them disassembled along with no end of stray cast-off parts. That included bucket and bench seats, so there were plenty of places to sit, and there’s little trash likes more than lying around and jawing.

Luther, for his part, perked up like we’d finally reached the ocean after months of bouncing on a buckboard across the fruited plain.

“Well, shit howdy,” he said a little too brightly for Dale to tolerate with grace.

“Which one’s your daddy?” Dale asked him.

Luther pointed to a couple of boys. “Him, and maybe him.”

Luther yipped as he piled out of the car. He got a fair amount of yodeling back.

“Goddamn reunion,” Dale informed us.

“I’m on fire back here,” Eugene said.

He showed me and Desmond his forearms. They were scarlet from the lye.

“Probably got some Gojo or something in there,” I told him and pointed at that Quonset hut. “Wash them down with that.”

Eugene rolled on out. Being a swamp rat, he was a natural link in the cracker chain as well and got welcomed like a brother. It would be a little different for me and Desmond and Dale.

“We’re going to end up hitting somebody, aren’t we?”

I was talking only to Desmond, but Dale couldn’t help but pipe in with, “That’s right.”

I turned around to find him crawling over the seat back and angling for the door Eugene had left open.