Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (20 page)

I was actually considering trying to buy my way out of mischief with a twenty when Dale closed off that avenue for me by telling those two boys, “We ain’t giving you shit.”

“Want me?” Desmond asked.

I shook my head. Those boys looked like loggers or something on that order. They were rough and dirty and tapped out and probably getting low on beer. I imagined they’d driven over to the ATM half thinking they’d bust it open, and then we’d rolled up and they’d decided to strong arm me instead.

I doubt they were evil. Just stupid and thirsty with sawdust in their pockets instead of folding money. A twenty probably would have done it for them right up until Dale chimed in. The second one who’d wandered over reached to his belt and unsheathed his knife.

It was one of those tactical items with a flat black finish. It was all angles and facets and oddly placed serrations. It looked like it had been forged by a Romulan three hundred years from now.

“Might just want all of it anymore,” the one without the knife informed me.

“Back in the car, Dale.”

“Uh-uh,” Dale said.

“We don’t have time to get you sewn up.”

Dale plunged his finger into his mouth to lay the tip of it on one of his nubs. He told me around his knuckle. “I’m good right here.”

“Hold what you got,” I said to those boys, particularly the one with the knife.

I stepped over to Dale and grabbed him by the nearest piece that was handy, which turned out to be his left ear. I kicked him in the backside and then shoved him toward the Escalade.

“Get back out and I’ll kill you.”

Dale was long enough acquainted with me to know when I’d quit fucking around.

“You can still leave,” I told those boys as I turned my attention back to them.

“Let’s have it,” the one with the knife said and did some flashy thing with the blade. He spun it around and was right in the middle of tossing the thing from one hand to the other when I closed hard on him and punched him in the throat.

That knife hit the pavement, and I kicked it under the Escalade. Those last two boys came piling out of the trucks.

“Need me?” Desmond asked again.

That first yokel charged at me. He bored straight in but punched well wide. I caught him a hard, sharp blow directly in the nuts. There were no rules of order when it came to a Mississippi parking lot fight.

He made a feeble noise in the back of his throat as he toppled onto the ground.

“Think I’ve got it,” I told Desmond.

He helped me anyway. He rolled hard forward and knocked the other two boys over with the car. I only had to kick one of them to persuade them both to stay down.

Luther shouted over the seat back toward me, “See what they’ve got.”

Another sensible Dubois idea. While those boys didn’t have anything worth taking on their actual persons—just empty wallets chained to their belt loops and multitools and knives—they had a fine little twenty-gauge shotgun under the seat of one of the trucks and a .25 caliber pistol held together with tape in the glove box. I got it halfway back to the Escalade before the slide broke loose and fell off.

I kept the shotgun. Handed the thing to Luther over the seat back.

“Chicken place is just off Twenty,” Dale informed us all, as if stopping at that CashPoint had gone off exactly as we’d hoped.

“You good?” Desmond asked me as I buckled in.

“This world’s making me a little tired,” I told him.

Desmond had a snort for that.

*   *   *

The chicken place was an ancient dump. Less the result of neglect than the wages of thirty years worth of fryolating. But the chicken was exceptional and the joint was hopping. By the time we got there, it was closing on midnight, and half the crowd was rolling in drunk, the other half coming off work.

They fried gizzards. They fried livers. They fried everything but beaks. We sat for a half hour at a picnic table on a slab down by the ditch waiting for our chicken to get cooked and our number to be called. Even without a dog in a T-shirt, we would have looked like refugees. We sure smelled like a boatload of month-old socks.

“We going to stop somewhere or something?” Eugene asked us.

Desmond shook his massive head. I was right there with him on that.

“Two hours or so from Columbus?” I said.

Desmond nodded. “About,” he told me.

“We head over there. Wait for morning. Go see Kendell’s guy and get some guns.”

That sat well enough with Desmond, but Eugene didn’t like it much.

“I was kind of hoping to wash up a little.”

“Didn’t take you for the particular sort.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Eugene asked me.

“You live in the swamp,” I told him.

“Been in jail!” Eugene reminded me. “In goddamn Arkansas. Washed in a creek with lye soap. Stuff’s still burning like hell.”

I guess that was enough to make even a swamp rat crave a bath.

“Why don’t we do this: We’ll stop up by Columbus and get a room somewhere for a couple of hours. We can all clean up. Better than sitting in the car.”

“We finish this thing tomorrow,” Desmond informed us all. Then he turned to Dale and raised a finger to shake at him for effect. “When we tell you to stay in the goddamn car, you stay in the goddamn car.”

Dale was feeling his nubs. He nodded and said, “Arlwpp.”

We decided to eat our chicken right where we were, went at it at the picnic table. It was glorious stuff. The iced tea was treacly sweet, and the potatoes were drowning in white gravy. The biscuits seemed to be about equal parts flour and lard.

“They got pudding,” Luther announced when he was still on his first piece of chicken. Culinary strategic thinking was the only strategic thinking Luther did.

We’d ordered enough chicken to take some with us, but we ended up eating it all at the table. Barbara ate hers twice. It went down. It came up, and she gobbled it down again. By the time we’d gathered at the Escalade, we were all speckled with grease from biscuit crumbs and chicken bits, and we smelled like yesterday’s Crisco. We were so rank as a group that none of us climbed in the car with any zeal.

“Let’s stop at the Walmart,” I told Desmond. “Bound to be one around here somewhere.”

Two exits over we found one, and it was open all night. We were well on the wrong side of midnight by then, but the parking lot was still half full. Third shifters and insomniacs were populating the store, and I went in and bought each of us a pair of coveralls. Got a couple of packages of undershorts as well. I even bought Barbara a fresh T-shirt. It was between Kyle Petty and Miley Cyrus. I thought Kyle was more in the theme of things, and the red and blue looked patriotic. Most especially with the head of a coonhound sticking out of the collar.

We argued about which route to take over to Columbus. I was all for heading up 55 and cutting over at Winona, while Dale took his finger out long enough to suggest we head east to Meridian instead and then north on the four-lane through Scooba and Macon and over to Columbus. The rest of the boys in the back were all for a cross-county jaunt on a goddamn mule track that the state of Mississippi calls Route 25.

That was all Desmond needed to hear. He hates a proper highway. So we headed up the interstate one entire exit and then struck out on that wretched blacktop through the Mississippi wild.

Living even in a modest-sized town like Indianola, you can forget how monumentally empty the state of Mississippi is. The Delta is chiefly farmland, but the Delta has always been chiefly farmland with cities and towns around the edges for housing the workers and shipping the crops. The rest of the state is mixed-use countryside. Scattered communities and the odd modest town with vast stretches of nobody much but cows.

Route 25 was
that
Mississippi but in two in the morning darkness. Nobody anywhere. No traffic to meet. The odd mercury light way off at a house or hard by a tractor shed. We’d hit two possums and six armadillos before we’d gone twenty miles.

“Don’t know whether to trade this car in,” Desmond said, “or barbecue it.”

Everything was shut, of course. Aside from twenty-four-hour Walmarts, casinos on the river, and the odd gas station on the interstate, there’s not much in Mississippi that stays open after nine. And boy was it dark. It was like driving across the bottom of the ocean. We went north of Carthage and south of Kosciusko. We didn’t hit anywhere flush, so it was just the odd light pole and stray grocery mart and occasionally the sickening crunch of a creature under wheel.

Desmond was steering with one finger, which I asked him not to do.

“What’s your trouble?” he wanted to know.

“Say you run in the ditch or hit a deer—there’s no help for us out here.”

As a big black man in among cracker pinheads, I guess Desmond was accustomed to the idea of no help anywhere.

“What’s your point?” he asked me.

“Just go easy,” I said. “Look sharp and all.”

He had a double-barreled snort for that.

Percy Dwayne came up over the seat back to ask me, “You scared of the dark or something?”

“More people where I come from,” I told him. “Not used to all this nothing.”

“Where do you come from?”

“Virginia.”

“I robbed a boy from Virginia once. Went to some college up there. Was trying to find New Orleans.”

“Where did he run into you?” I asked him.

“Shit. Way the hell over by Rosedale. Wasn’t going to get to New Orleans from there.”

“Beat him?” I asked.

“I ain’t like you,” Percy Dwayne told me, insulted. “I got me some finesse.”

“You ever had a proper job?” I asked Percy Dwayne.

“Depends.”

“Ever drawn a check? Like that?”

Percy Dwayne was giving the question a spot of serious consideration when Luther joined him on the seat back to say, “Fuck no.”

“Icehouse. Remember?”

“You didn’t last a day.”

“Drove that lady to dialysis.”

“That was more like a ‘got to,’ wasn’t it?”

Percy Dwayne sighed and nodded by way of concession. “I was kind of plugging her,” he confessed.

“You?” I asked Luther.

“Aw, hell yeah,” Luther said. “I used to farm.”

That got Desmond interested. Back when he was tractor-seat size, he did quite a lot of plowing and planting all over the Delta.

“Whereabouts?” he asked Luther.

Luther named three or four plantations.

“Sharkey County, aren’t they?”

“Most of them.”

“I worked down there.”

Then we passed a half hour listening to Luther and Desmond talk about tractors they’d driven. Harrows and seeders they’d had good use from. Harrows and seeders they hadn’t.

“Sweet Jesus,” Eugene finally shouted at them from the way back. “Ain’t that enough of that shit for a while?”

Dale seemed to be of the same mind. He told all of us, “Uhlerp.”

“Why do you keep pawing?” I finally asked him. “Those nubs hurting you?”

He did me the courtesy of withdrawing his slobbered-up hand. “Naw,” Dale said. “Ought to be though.” Then he filled his mouth again.

The good thing about driving in the middle of the night in the wilds of Mississippi is that you can just stop in the road and get out and pee. There’s not a damn soul to see you, if you don’t count armadillos. Me and Percy Dwayne were standing just about on the center line, when an armadillo came shooting up out of the roadcut and scuttled across to the far ditch.

“I hear they give you the mumps,” he told me. “Or maybe chickenpox.”

“How does it feel to know nothing?”

Percy Dwayne spat. He shook and zipped. He shrugged a little and finally said, “All right.”

TWENTY

At about four in the morning we pulled in at a motor lodge near Columbus. It was one of those places where some people live for months and others just pass through. I had to wake up the desk clerk by ringing a bell. From the pitch of the grumbling that earned me, it sounded like I woke up some guests as well.

Eugene didn’t help things any.

“Cigarette machine?” he shouted at me from the car.

“Pipe down,” I told him.

He couldn’t hear me because I was trying to whisper at him back.

“What!?”

“He said shut the fuck up.” Luther didn’t have any volume control to speak of.

Somebody yelled, “Jesus!” from one of the rooms.

“Cigarette machine?” Eugene shouted at me another time from the car.

I nodded and pointed nowhere much, but the damage was done by then. The whole place was awake, the owner included. He came out of a room off the shabby lobby still fastening his pants.

“Quiet, Mr. Sir,” he told me once he’d unlatched the door.

He was Pakistani, I think. He was slight, brown, and irate but still passably polite about it.

“The guests are sleeping,” he said. He country pointed. “It is dark.”

“Sorry.”

I was surprised and gratified he’d thrown back the bolt and let me in. I got a glimpse of myself in the mirrored wall on the far side of the lobby, and I looked like a guy who might have dropped by to remove the clerk’s head with an ax. And that was without even factoring in the smell. The man stink from the Escalade and the food stink from all over. I was in such rough condition, I would have given a sheet rocker pause.

That clerk barely paid any notice to me. He had his ledger to swivel around my way, his computer to wake up.

“A room?”

“Yeah.”

“Week, month, night?”

“Just for a couple of hours,” I told him.

“Same rate,” he said and tapped a laminated card taped to the countertop.

I looked over the menu of charges. The nightly rate was sixty-nine dollars. Swanky Alabama prices there on the Mississippi border.

“I’ll give you forty.”

He made a show of shutting his ledger.

“We’ll be out by eight.”

“We who?”

Now I country pointed.

That gentleman peered around me, through the glass and into the lot. Dale was leaning against a fender with his hand in his mouth up to the knuckles. Percy Dwayne was explaining something to him with far more volume than four in the morning called for. Eugene was standing by scratching his nutsack with Barbara at his side.