Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (23 page)

Luther grabbed for the magazine and studied her some. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe. If I could use your dick.”

Dale made his aw-fuck-I’m-going-to-hit-you noise, so I reached around and grabbed his ear again. He squealed at such a pitch that he stirred up Barbara in the way back. She warbled and harmonized with him.

“Swallow your knuckles,” I told Dale. “And you,” I said to Luther, “pipe down.”

“Could you get wood with that in the room?” Luther asked as he showed me that oily creature. From the collarbones up, she looked like Johnny Mathis in a wig.

“Think we’re here,” Desmond told us all and pointed up a track.

The roadway was lined with yellow pines, but the territory on either side had been logged and picked over to a fare-thee-well.

“You sure?”

Desmond nodded and turned in. “Used to be woods. Threw me a little.”

Percy Dwayne had drawn up to the seat back. “Sure looks like a shit hole now.”

That was impossible to argue with. The surrounding landscape had that ruined postapocalyptic feel to it. It was all dead limbs and red clay gullies, stumps and viney thickets. The standing trees along the roadway made the scene seem odder still, like somebody had hoped we wouldn’t notice the devastation beyond them.

“Who’s this guy?” Percy Dwayne asked Desmond.

Desmond groaned and shifted. He said, “Lance.”

Up until then I thought I knew everybody Desmond knew.

“Lance?” I asked him.

Desmond winced and nodded. Whenever he did that I could be sure I was about to meet a stone-cold freak.

“Worse than Manny?”

I could see the house by then, a ramshackle federalist heap that hadn’t been painted in several decades. The tin roof was rusted and two of the portico columns were holding each other up.

Desmond winced. Desmond shrugged. Desmond knew Manny from some Pine Bluff roadhouse back when Desmond was courting his ex, Shawnica, who hailed from Arkansas. We ran into him in Memphis once where Desmond was forced to introduce us. Manny talked and twitched like a tweaker, was tattooed from his cowlick down, and wore a cap with a leathery thing attached to the brim. A dried pig’s vulva, he informed us.

Manny told us about a guy he’d killed and a woman friend he’d maimed. He laughed all the while, showed us his nasty broken teeth. Desmond had to give him money to get him to leave us alone.

“Colorful,” I told Desmond once we were finally free of Manny.

Desmond said, “Shawnica,” in a mournful sort of way.

Lance, as it turned out, was colorful too. We didn’t have to wake him up after all. He hadn’t gone to bed yet. He answered the door when Desmond knocked like he was expecting somebody else.

I wasn’t quite ready for the spectacle of Lance since I was still soaking in the carnival’s worth of crap in Lance’s yard. Two ice cream trucks. A life-sized camel made from brown shag carpet. A row of theater seats—still bolted together. A hot-air balloon basket. A World War II–vintage antiaircraft gun. The sort of boat Robinson Crusoe might have made if he’d had no end of epoxy. A DeLorean, I think (the weeds were kind of high). One of those painted canvas sideshow banners you see at the county fair. It wasn’t entirely unfurled, and I could just make out the face of a man with snake scales down his neck.

Our crew was wandering the property like they were walking the streets of heaven. They moved from item to item, marveling at each in turn and saying with wonderment, “Shit!”

Consequently, they were preoccupied when Lance threw open the door. I was on the front porch with Desmond still half dazzled by the yard crap but focused enough to keep myself away from the holes in the porch planking.

Lance was Mick Jagger skinny. Not an ounce of fat on him and a mohawk for a do. He was wearing what turned out to be a tangerine crepe tube top and a pair of tartan Bermuda shorts. Black watch, I have to think.

At the sight of Desmond, Lance shouted, “Honey!” and threw open the screen door. Kicked it open actually since it was swollen stuck in the jamb. There was no harm to be done. It was just a warped frame with no screenwire in it. Lance burst across the threshold and all but leapt into Desmond’s arms.

That got the crew’s attention. Percy Dwayne said, “What the fuck…?” Now the wonderment was tempered with disgust.

Lance was wearing leopard flip-flops. The toenails on one foot were painted blue, and the nails on the other were pinkish red.

“Cherry blossom,” he told me later.

Lance gave Desmond a prodigious kiss on the cheek. Desmond proved to have a snort for that. He then uncoupled himself from Lance as delicately as he could manage. Desmond didn’t fracture Lance’s bones anyway as he took his arms off his neck.

“Sorry to just roll up,” Desmond said.

“I thought you were Jason.” Lance slapped Desmond’s chest fondly as he spoke. “His medicine day. Ought to be here shortly.”

“Jason from Meridian?”

“Don’t you know it!”

Desmond jabbed his thumb my way. “Nick,” he said.

“Well now.” Lance laid his hands to his hips and treated me to an exhaustive once-over. He said, “Hmmmm,” as he gave me a hard scour down and a hard scour up.

I wasn’t offended or uneasy. Lance seemed mostly otherworldly. Unless, of course, you were Percy Dwayne, Luther, Eugene, or Dale. I could hear them all breathing past their adenoids at the base of the porch stairs. Lance must have heard them too. Once he finished with me, he stepped over to the lip of the porch floor and gave our colleagues the once-over.

“What are you looking at, Betty?” Percy Dwayne asked him.

“Splain!” Lance said to no one much, but Desmond knew he was talking to him.

“We’re in kind of a fix,” Desmond told Lance.

“Yes, and…”

“We’re chasing a boy. They’re helping us. Need a few things.”

“Want to go way up? Want to go way down?”

“Guns,” Desmond explained. “Holding maybe five hundred, but we’re good for whatever it takes.”

“Then come on.” Lance waved us toward his front door. “You boys too if you want,” he shouted down to Luther and Percy Dwayne, Dale and Eugene. He’d turned full around to do it, and Barbara, naturally, caught his eye. “Hey, sugar,” he told her, and then he said to me and Desmond, “I’ve got a better shirt for your dog.”

Lance collected antlers and tusks along with brown mottled Charles Chips cans, the big tin canisters they used to deliver to customers straight out of trucks. He had deer antlers and moose antlers and what looked to me like ram horns. They were mounted on the walls. Laying on the tables. Piled up on the floor. There were two elephant tusks standing up in a corner and what I had to guess was a hippopotamus tooth on the mantelpiece. Lance also had a stuffed and lacquered python on his hearth. It was diamond patterned and pale pink underneath.

Dale saw it first. He pulled his hand from his mouth and alerted the rest of the crew with, “Fucking hell.”

That parlor was like the front yard only better.

“Ain’t for sale or nothing is it?” Eugene wanted to know of the python. He was a bit of a reptile buff himself.

“No, sweetie,” Lance said.

Eugene shivered involuntarily. He’d probably never been called sweetie, even by a woman.

“Park yourselves,” Lance told our crew. “Nibble.” He pointed at an open Charles Chips canister on the coffee table. It was half full of pale, mishapen cookies. The table itself was a slab of glass held up by a thicket of ibex antlers or something. Not deer anyway. They were black and ribbed and curled all over the place.

“Jack in the Box,” Percy Dwayne said and patted his dodgy stomach. Then he reached straight down, plucked up a cookie, and popped it in his mouth.

“Back here,” Lance told me and Desmond and led us through his kitchen. There were three empty half-gallon vodka bottles on the dinette table and a heap of sheet pans and pots and mixing bowls in the sink.

Lance caught me gawking at the mess. “Got a woman who comes in,” he told me.

“To do what?”

He wagged his finger my way. “Don’t get sassy.”

There was a narrow back hallway off the kitchen, so tight Desmond could barely fit through it. Lance tugged on the light cord for the fixture overhead, but the socket was empty, so nothing came on, and we stood there in the dark.

I heard Lance pawing for a key. He knocked it off the door ledge and then scrabbled around for it on the floor. When he grabbed the doorknob to steady himself, the door proved to be unlocked, and the thing swung open.

“Isn’t this a fine how-do-you-do,” Lance said.

The place looked tossed to me, but disheveled and upended seemed to be standard Lance décor.

Lance parked himself in the middle of the room. He planted his hands on his hips and whistled through his teeth.

“Problem?” Desmond asked him.

“Look!” he told us.

We did. It was just another messy room in a house full of them.

“Something missing?”

Lance rolled his eyes at Desmond. “Ain’t sweet fuckall left.”

There were no antlers or tusks anywhere, but I couldn’t imagine that was the problem.

Lance stalked over to the lone closet door—he was quite a spectacle in a snit—and yanked the door open. Lance glanced inside and said, “Hmmm.”

“What?” Desmond asked him.

He pointed at a naked bit of floorboard. “Took all my weed.” He pointed again. “Had four AKs and an M1. All the shoulder-fired shit’s gone.” Lance kicked a pile of paper grocery sacks aside. “Pistols too.”

“Who?” I asked him.

“Boys last night. Had to be. Curtis brought them.”

“Tupelo Curtis?”

Once Lance nodded, Desmond groaned. He turned my way to fill me in. “Piece of shit,” he explained.

“So no guns?” I said.

“We’ll get them,” Lance assured me.

Then he went sifting through a pile of clothes under a window on the floor. He came away with a T-shirt. It was brown-and-white spotted like a Guernsey cow. Lance held it up so we could read the back. Just two words:
MOO, GODDAMMIT.

“For your dog,” he said.

We thanked him. What else were we going to do?

“Get him out of that NASCAR shit. What’s his name anyway?”

“Barbara,” Desmond told Lance.

“I had a coonhound once,” Lance said. He crossed the room and lingered for a pensive moment in the doorway. He tugged at his tube top. He scratched his nose. “Rusty or something,” he told us. Then he was out in the narrow back hallway and gone.

Desmond actually let me glare at him hard before he told me, “Don’t say it.”

“I’m not going back to Columbus. I’ll go in the Walmart and buy us another a shotgun.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

That’s when Lance yelled, “Hey! You ought to come see this.”

So it was back up the hallway for me and Desmond, across the kitchen, and into the front room. Our gang was piled up on the sofa in a semi-conscious, lethargic heap. All but Luther. He was stretched full out on the nasty rug. The cookie tin was empty. Barbara was chewing on an antler.

“What the hell happened?” Desmond wanted to know.

“Honduran hash,” Lance told us. “Probably should have said.”

I poked Luther with my foot. He giggled.

“Yeah,” I told Lance. “Probably.

Desmond grabbed Dale’s arm and pulled his hand out of his mouth. He was well past feeling his nub, had swallowed his hand up to his wrist.

Drool dripped off his chin as Dale grinned and told Desmond’s left leg, “Hey.”

Eugene and Percy Dwayne and Luther all cackled. Barbara gnawed on her antler.

“Truth is,” Desmond informed Lance, “they weren’t too much good straight.”

TWENTY-THREE

Fortunately, Tupelo Curtis didn’t live in Tupelo anymore. He’d migrated to Alabama and rented a trailer at the head of a gully, a convenience for Curtis whenever he wanted to pitch out an appliance or trash.

We left the crew at the house, and me and Desmond rode with Lance over to visit Curtis in Lance’s Hummer. We had between us the sawed-off shotgun I’d taken off those CashPoint boys.

“Never fired it,” I told Lance. “Might not work.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that.” Lance drove all casual, with his left foot on the armrest. “We’ll probably just beat him with it.”

“You sure it was him?” Desmond wanted to know.

Lance nodded. “When he came over with those guys last night, he was acting like a goddamn hostage. I can see it all now.” Lance shook a finger at us. “I was full of cookies yesterday myself.”

“How did he know about your guns?” I asked him.

“How did you know about them?” was all Lance needed to say.

That’s about when Lance reached a gravel pullout off the hard top. He pointed across the hilly terrain at a trailer perched on the rim of a gully. Just like at Lance’s house, the trees had all been harvested, and the scrubby vines had grown in where the limbs were littering the ground.

“What’s with all the timbering?” I asked Lance.

“Times get hard, the pines go to the mill.”

“Looks like hell.”

“Does,” he told me. “Wouldn’t you be high?”

We rolled right up in Lance’s Hummer on Curtis’s shabby trailer.

“Don’t want to slip up on him?” Desmond asked.

“Aw, honey. He’s asleep.”

He was too. So asleep, in fact, that we needed a solid quarter hour just to wake him up. But for a bed and a loveseat, Curtis didn’t have any furniture. He must not have had any bedclothes either because he was stretched out on a naked mattress under a sleeping bag.

“Hey,” Lance told him while tugging on one of Curtis’s filthy big toes.

Curtis considered us all with one eye open and then went back under for a bit.

He didn’t much look like the sort of hick who’d live in a trashy trailer at the head of a gully in nowhere Alabama. He had a square jaw and handsome features, what looked to me like a professional haircut. He had no tattoos that I could see—not anyway of the ill-considered, disqualifying sort. The amateur kind on his neck or his hands, the sort of ink that screams out, “I give up!”

He looked fit and clean as far as it went and reminded me of an actor.

“Who?” Lance and Desmond both asked me.