Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (26 page)

Lance had crawled into the Hummer way back where every now and again he’d let go with a pitiful, “Shit.”

Of course, Lucy and Curtis were anxious to find out what Lance had in mind for them, but Lance was too fuzzy and upset about it to know what he might do.

Lucy kept saying, “I’ll get fired and all.”

Curtis would occasionally point toward the Hummer headliner and say something on the order of, “Got this thing I ought to do.”

But they couldn’t seem to make much headway with Lance. He was too tacky and disgusted to fix on anything but getting clean and proper.

“Think the hose’ll do it?” Lance asked me.

I was all gritted up as well. That roadhouse floor had been covered in beer and bourbon, both reduced to a syrup. Most of mine was on my coveralls. It felt like molasses. I told Lance, “Nope.”

“Can’t get these no more,” Lance told us while plucking at his tangerine tube top.

I tried to look sad as I shrugged Lance’s way.

Lucy told him, “I’ll get fired and all.”

“I ain’t done with you,” Lance informed her. “Take them to the house,” he told Desmond.

Dale and Eugene and Percy Dwayne and Luther were all parked on the roof of a horse trailer out in Lance’s yard. It was dented and unusable. Its tandem tires were rotted and flat. Barbara was sitting by the near wheel well in her
MOO, GODDAMMIT
T-shirt warbling at the boys up on the roof. I had to guess she’d had some cookies too.

“What are you doing up there?” I asked them as I climbed out of the hummer.

They all looked at me like I’d washed in with the tide and was the last thing they’d expected see.

“Hey,” Luther told me. He gave Percy Dwayne the elbow.

“Hey,” Percy Dwayne told me too.

“What are you doing up there?” I asked them again.

“Snake in the house,” Eugene told me.

“Where?” Desmond had planted one foot on the weedy ground. He hated reptiles in a helpless, spastic sort of way. He drew his leg back up and shut the Hummer door.

“Cobra,” Dale said and pointed toward nowhere much.

Lance and Lucy and Curtis were all out of the Hummer by then. Lance pointed at a rusty glider in the yard. It had a sack full of Romex wire and junctions boxes on it. “Sit,” he told them. “I’ll get to you.”

“Cobra?” I said to Lance.

He nodded as he hooked up the hose to his spigot. “Stuffed python,” he said. He gave me the nozzle. “Go on and squirt me,” he said.

So there I was somewhere in Alabama hosing down a guy in a tube top. He wriggled when the cold water hit him and fairly squealed, “Lordy!” a few times.

The roadhouse floor syrup and cat hair appeared to be impervious to wet. I would have needed a power washer to do any good against them and might have had to take off a layer of skin.

The boys on the trailer roof found the whole spectacle hypnotic. When Desmond tried to get out of the Hummer again, Dale and Luther both told him, “Snake.”

“It’s stuffed,” I shouted.

Desmond wasn’t taking chances. He decided to stay in the driver’s seat until his options improved.

“Get the 409,” Lance told Curtis. “It’s in the kitchen somewhere.”

Dale started going on about the cobra in the house. Dale high was a lot like Dale drunk, only his tongue still seemed to work. He held forth about cobras. He’d seen a show on cobras once. Apparently, he’d seen a show on sloths once too because he kept getting them all mixed.

“And it’ll come out of its tree about once a month,” Dale told us all, “just to take a dump.”

“Had an uncle like that,” Eugene announced, and Luther and Percy Dwayne hooted and hollered so I feared they might pitch to the ground.

“And bring that damn snake,” Lance told Curtis.

Lucy stood up to say, “I’ll get fired and all.”

“Squirt her,” Lance instructed me. I did.

The 409 did the job on Lance. He stripped naked in the yard and scrubbed himself clean with the back of a kitchen sponge. I made a halfhearted attempt to wash the filth off my coveralls.

“Leave it,” Lance said. “I got clothes for you.”

Curtis stood and watched us with Lance’s lacquered python in hand. It was worse than just stuffed. It was ratty and broken and covered in a quarter inch of dust.

“Cobra!” Dale shouted from the trailer roof.

“How much pot was in those cookies?” I asked Lance.

He stood there naked and dripping. He shook like a spaniel. Lance eyed our crew on the trailer roof. “Too damn much.”

When they wouldn’t come down, I pitched the python up there with them. The way they bailed, you would have thought that trailer was on fire.

The only clothes Lance had around that would fit me was a full set of navy whites. Not dress whites but the Village People kind with the jumper and the baggy pants.

“Had a … friend once,” Lance told me by way of explanation. He eyed me in a way I found unsettling. It didn’t take much. Lance was wearing paisley boxer shorts and a jet-black sports bra by then. “The shit we got up to,” Lance added and leered.

“Yeah, well,” I told him. “I’ll bring them back.”

Lance shook his head and shot me a sour smile. “Ended funny,” he said, and I tried not to imagine what that could possibly mean.

If our crew hadn’t been stoned to the gills, they would have given me no end of shit on my outfit. Instead they’d piled in Lance’s Hummer because that’s where Desmond was.

When I came out of the house onto the porch in my navy whites, only Lucy ventured to make a remark.

“I’ll get fired and all,” she told me.

“Let’s go,” I shouted at my crew.

Desmond got out of the Hummer and made his way to the Escalade. Snake fear wasn’t a rational thing with him, so there wasn’t much point in talking to him about it. He just glided to his car as quick as he could and buckled up under the wheel. The rest of gang didn’t seem much interested in going anywhere. The hash had made them chatty and a lot more cordial than they were in straight life.

“Come on,” I said, but they stayed where they were and continued their round table on catfish they had caught and ways they preferred to cook it, all variations on “fried.”

“Buttermilk, ya’ll,” Percy Dwayne said ten times if he said it once.

He was going on about cornmeal when I yelled at them all one time further. They hardly seemed to hear me, though Barbara looked my way and barked.

I went over the horse trailer and picked up Lance’s ratty stuffed python with the flaky hide and the punctured tail. I pitched it into the Hummer, and that did the trick straightway. All of those boys came boiling out, but they scattered all over the place.

I tried to get Curtis to help me herd them. He pointed and said, “Got this thing.”

I finally picked up a tomato stake and drove those boys into the Escalade and climbed right in behind them.

“Go,” I told Desmond.

He did, and we were down at the end of Lance’s dirt track before me and Desmond realized we’d not picked up any guns.

“Go back,” I said.

He did that too. Desmond pulled up by the Hummer. Lance had brought out a tennis racket from somewhere and was chasing Lucy around the yard.

“What are you looking at?” he said to me as I circled around toward the Hummer.

I pointed at the yellow tailgate. “Forgot something,” was all I said.

I took the TEC-9, a .308, and a Sig with tape on the handle like it had done duty in a gangland hit and gotten down to Dixie somehow.

“How much?” I asked Lance.

“Go on, honey,” he told me.

So I climbed back into the Cadillac and we set out again.

I checked the time on Desmond phone in the cup holder. It was already past eleven.

“You missed two calls.”

“Who?” Desmond asked me.

“Kendell, looks like. Both.”

“Call him.”

I did. He picked up on the first ring and demanded to know where we’d been and what the hell we’d been up to and where exactly we happened to find ourselves at this very moment right now.

“Kind of complicated,” was all I could come up with.

“You can believe I’m going to tell Tula to have a good rethink about you.”

“Talk to her again?” I asked him.

“Yeah,” Kendell told me. “About an hour ago.”

“She tell you where we ought to go?”

“You to Tuscaloosa yet?”

“Nearly.”

“When you cross the river, you call this number.” He gave it to me. I repeated it back. “For godsakes, write it down.”

I found a receipt and a gnawed-on ballpoint deep in Desmond’s console.

“Two-oh-five what?”

Kendell gave me the number again.

“The law doesn’t know we’re coming, right?”

“Not from me,” Kendell said. “But it’s not like I can say what you got up to between here and there.”

“Nothing much,” I told him.

“He means to kill you. You know that don’t you?”

“Kind of counting on it,” I said.

“Why don’t you call me if he doesn’t?”

“All right,” I told him, and then he was off the line and gone.

Kendell might have been a devoted Christian, but he wasn’t sentimental.

“Remind me to call him if we’re not dead.”

Desmond said, “I’ll do it.”

After twenty minutes of countryside, we finally rolled into a string of shopping plazas and traffic lights.

“Northport,” Desmond announced. “About there.”

“Where exactly?” Luther asked.

I shifted around to find out just how high our gang still was.

“You good?” I asked them in a general way.

They nodded, and then they giggled.

“Just me and you,” I told Desmond, but then it was usually just me and him.

Desmond shrugged like he’d never expected anything else all along.

“Here we go,” he said as we cleared the last light, passed one final CVS and an adjacent Taco Casa. We rolled onto a bridge high above the Black Warrior River and soon gained the south bank that put us in Tuscaloosa proper.

“Where are we heading?” Desmond asked me.

“Let’s get down the road a little and park.”

By then we were passing under University Avenue at what looked like a corner of the campus, and we’d arrived down around a major commercial intersection when everything went to shit. Not for us so much but for Tuscaloosa generally. There were stunted trees and blank cement slabs where stores and service stations had been. Right in the middle everything was a towering steel pillar that looked to have once held a billboard. It was twisted and bent and sheered off at the top.

“Big tornado,” Desmond reminded me.

“That was like a year ago, wasn’t it?”

He nodded.

“You’d think it’d all be tidied up by now.”

It wasn’t even close to tidied up. That town was scarred straight through the middle. Aside from the scoured concrete, there were still houses with their roofs half off and churches reduced to piles of brick.

“What the hell are they waiting for?” I asked Desmond.

He couldn’t say and shook his head.

“This place ain’t much to look at,” Dale announced, and those boys in the back all giggled again.

I’d seen the videos. Who hadn’t? A big honking tornado tearing straight through Tuscaloosa. It came in at the southwest corner and went out at the northeast. It chewed up everything in a mile-wide track directly through the city. Since it missed the football stadium and the hospital, everybody felt a little spared.

Desmond turned right off McFarland and onto Fifteenth Street. The twister had passed squarely through that intersection. Aside from tidying up the rubble and building a brand-new Church’s Chicken, everything had been left as it was. All of it swept clean.

Desmond eased off into what had once been a service station but was now only asphalt, bare pump islands, and cement.

“Call him,” Desmond told me.

I punched in the number Kendell had given me. I got eight or ten rings, and then a recorded phone company lady came on instead of a personal message. I hung up and was in the middle of telling Desmond that I’d shortly try again when “Satin Soul” started in. It was Tula’s phone calling me back.

“Where you been, scooter?” that Boudrot asked me. “Don’t like just hanging around.”

“Long way over here,” I told him. “And we had to pick up your money and shit.”

He didn’t even bother to pretend like he believed me. This wasn’t about money we’d stolen from him. It was far more primitive than that. That Boudrot paused to take a drag on something. Knowing him, he was smoking crack or meth just to get himself amped up.

“So?” I said.

That Boudrot coughed. He moved the phone away from his mouth. I heard him tell somebody, “Give me that.”

I waited.

“You there?” that Boudrot asked me.

“Yeah. Let me talk to Tula,” I said.

“Not here,” he told me.

“Where is she?”

“Around,” he said.

“Nothing happens until I talk to her.”

“Listen at you,” he told me. Then he laughed, all phlegmy and wheezy.

I’d been thinking he might survive the day until I got him on the phone. Something about the sound of his voice, the pitch of his human indifference, caused me to know if he ended up in a gristly puddle, that’d be all right with me.

I waited. He toked. I could hear the coal of whatever he was smoking crackle by the phone.

“I could eat a rib.” Dale had come around enough to talk out loud.

“Who’s that?” that Boudrot asked me.

“Nobody.”

“Got that big nigger with you?”

I glanced at Desmond. “Yeah.”

“Just you and him. None of that cracker trash you brought around last time.”

He meant Luther. He meant Percy Dwayne. Probably Eugene a little as well.

“Tula first.”

That Boudrot toked and wheezed. “Where are you?”

I looked around. “Some four-lane road. In the middle of a bunch of tornado shit.”

“Kicker,” he told me. “Around Tenth. By the railroad tracks. Half an hour.” Then he was talking to somebody else again as he hung up on me.

“Did you hear me?” Dale said. “I could eat a rib.”

Eugene made some racket in the way back to let us know he could eat a rib too.

“All right,” I said and then told Desmond, “It’s just you and me. Let’s drop them off somewhere.”