Ranchero (12 page)

Calvin had to pee the whole way and complained bitterly about it. He went on at length about how it didn’t much help his bladder to have a cracker sitting right on top of him. That just prompted Luther to poke and antagonize Calvin all the more.

Of course, Luther was naturally curious about Calvin’s taste in clothes since a dashiki seemed to him the sort of thing you’d wear around the house. Luther couldn’t imagine throwing one on and going out for lunch. Even in Webb.

Calvin thought Luther was just having some white trash fun at his expense, but Luther’s interest seemed genuine and strictly sartorial. It didn’t help that Luther was eating ribs pretty much on top of Calvin and that Luther didn’t appear to care where the grease ran or the sauce happened to drip.

The Cottonlandia Museum is directly across the truck route from the Greenwood Sonic. Desmond pulled into the lot there and probably gave the staff a thrill. How many visitors can a museum devoted to cotton picking get? But we didn’t climb out, just sat and surveyed the cars lined up for service at the Sonic. Luther allowed Calvin to sit full upright and look out the Metro windshield.

“That one,” he said, and pointed to a battered blue sedan. It was dinged all over, rusted at the fenders, and about as filthy as a car could be.

“You’re getting two thousand for that?” Desmond asked.

And Calvin got all shirty. “For a fellow with no money and no credit at all, two thousand ain’t too damn bad.”

“Let’s go over there.” I pointed out a spot near the Sonic building proper where Desmond never parked because of the greasy cooktop exhaust.

He shot me a look to remind me about it.

“Just for a minute,” I told him. “We’ll swap out Calvin for Percy Dwayne, and then head out into the country to chat him up.”

“How am I supposed to get home?” Calvin wanted to know.

“In your car,” I told him, and pointed.

“It’s stole!” he reminded me.

“Drive the limit. You’ll be fine.”

Desmond made a trial run by the Sonic to see if there were any any police about on the lookout for his Metro. Pinhead friends of Dale’s hoping to settle the score. There was a county cruiser parked up at the end of the car hop bays, but once we were satisfied it was only Kendell, Desmond pulled on in, like I’d suggested, beneath the cooktop vent.

“He’s all mine,” I said. I grabbed the fireplace shovel off the floorboard, climbed out of the Geo, and eased behind the cars between us and Percy Dwayne. The girl was just bringing Percy Dwayne’s order as I was closing on him, so I lingered behind a panel truck until she’d fixed the tray to his door.

He’d gone heavy. A holster of popcorn chicken. A corn dog. A double order of chili cheese Tater Tots. A gigantic blue coconut slush to wash it down. It was a hell of a lunch, but I doubted anything could impede my swing.

I let him start in. He popped a tot and a couple of chicken nuggets. He had the corn dog in his mouth when I stepped up alongside him.

His eyes got big, and he looked like he was primed to start explaining, but a mouth full of corn dog prevented him from it. That and a shovel blow to the forehead.

I swung through his lunch. Björn Borg again. Percy Dwayne’s gigantic coconut blue slush particularly went flying. Chili cheese Tater Tots scattered to the hinterlands as well. He spat a little corn dog coating my way and then slumped against the wheel.

I lifted the tray from his door and chucked the whole thing into a trash barrel, waved Desmond over, and he rolled up just behind that Dubois’s car. Desmond and Luther and Calvin all piled out of the Metro, and we hoisted Percy Dwayne and delivered him to the Geo floorboard. Then Calvin set in to complaining about the mess I’d made in his stolen coupe that he was going to have to drive clear back to Webb. There was chili and coconut blue slush all over the place but for a little ass-shaped spot where Percy Dwayne had been sitting.

“Stay right there,” I said to Calvin. “You’ll be fine.”

He sneered my way as he slipped in under the wheel. Calvin hardly let Desmond pull clear before he backed out and roared off.

I glanced over and saw that Kendell was drinking a cup of Sonic coffee and watching every little thing we did. I felt like I owed him an explanation, him being reliable police and all, so I started toward his cruiser with that fireplace shovel still in hand.

“Don’t want to know,” Kendell told me as I approached his open window. “Going to see the chiropractor. Don’t have time to arrest all you today.”

Desmond blew the horn of his Geo. I told Kendell so long, went back to the car, and climbed in the front seat. We rolled on out of the Sonic. It seemed the sensible thing to do. I’m sure that was the first time Desmond had ever left a Sonic unfed.

We carried Percy Dwayne to the sea of cotton warehouses just south of Greenwood on the old Yazoo City road. Once we’d parked back among them where nobody was likely to stumble across us, we pulled that Dubois from the car and laid him out on the pea gravel, stood around, and waited for him to wake up.

“Why’s he all blue?” Luther wanted to know.

“Coconut slush,” Desmond told him. “That ain’t no drink for a man.”

The warehouses all around us were packed to the rafters with unsold bales of cotton, and the doors were all flung open to keep them dry and sound. According to Desmond, the price was so low that it would have been foolish to sell, so all the cotton in the Delta was just piling up until the stuff became more dear.

I went over and fiddled with a bale, pulled out a tuft, and worked it in my hands. Cotton makes sense when you see it like that. All ginned and soft and fluffy. It’s the stuff in the fields that’s hateful.

When I first saw cotton in season, I pulled off the road by a patch of it and waded out to pick a little, just a bole or three. That was all it took to bring me to a fresh opinion of Delta slavery.

It hadn’t been just farm work in diabolical heat. It was harvesting this evil stuff, with spikes on the boles to prick your fingers and the plant growing precisely low enough to make you sorry you had a spine. Cotton is agriculture as punishment, and now they couldn’t even sell it, which seemed fitting if only a hundred and fifty years too late.

That fireplace shovel had raised a purple welt smack in the middle of Percy Dwayne’s forehead. Sprawled on the ground there he looked like a white trash unicorn at rest. He stayed out for about a quarter hour, and while we waited for him to come around, Desmond reminded me every way possible that he was just at a Sonic and hadn’t gotten the chance to eat.

“We’ll take care of that,” I kept telling him, but he was kind of in shock. Parked at a Sonic without so much as a bite of a Coney Island.

“I was right there,” Desmond told me.

“I know,” I said. “We’ll fix it.”

Percy Dwayne finally stirred and woke. He groaned and looked up at us. Me and Desmond didn’t interest him much, but Luther snared his attention.

“I’ll kill you,” were the first words Percy Dwayne bothered to say.

“He don’t mean it,” Luther told us.

“If you say so.” Then I gave Percy Dwayne a poke in the ribs. “Remember me?”

He favored me with a look of high theatrical bemusement. “Uh-uh,” he said, so I tapped him with the shovel just like he’d done me the day before.

“All right, all right. It’s all coming back.”

“Get up.”

He made five minutes of groaning labor out of just standing from the ground. Then the fool tried to bolt, and Desmond put a shoulder in him and knocked him back over. I tapped him again with the shovel, just because.

“Where’s my car?” I asked him.

“Where’s my money?” he wanted to know.

“Explain to him,” I said to Luther, “I’ll make his brains leak out of his ears.”

And Luther turned toward Percy Dwayne and opened his mouth to speak, but Percy Dwayne headed him off by reminding Luther, “I’ll kill you.”

“Where’s my car?”

Percy Dwayne indulged in what I believed to be stalling, which I decided to take as provocation for further shovel blows.

“Where is it?”

That’s when he told me about the worst thing I could hear. “I don’t know,” Percy Dwayne said.

“Hold this,” I told Desmond, and gave him the shovel.

I grabbed Percy Dwayne by his damp blue shirtfront and helped him up off the ground so I could pitch him into the corrugated warehouse siding.

“Where is it?” I asked him.

He wouldn’t talk, just shook his head and dithered, so I smacked him once across the jaw with the back of my open hand.

“Did you sell it?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Then where is it?”

“I kind of gave it to a guy.”

“That doesn’t sound like you. Does that sound like him?”

Luther told me it didn’t sound like Percy Dwayne at all.

“What guy?”

He stalled again, and I cocked my fist but didn’t hit him.

“Bad guy,” Percy Dwayne told me.

“You gave it to him or he took it?”

Percy Dwayne nodded, which I found unhelpful, so I did in fact hit him again.

“Couldn’t we be doing all this over at the Sonic?” Desmond wanted to know.

Desmond wouldn’t settle for anything less than the Indianola Sonic, and Percy Dwayne rode over folded up between Luther and Desmond’s shoulder. He whined most of the way over, told us how the world was stacked against him. Percy Dwayne had a thing for going around wounded all the time. Everybody owed him something. We’d all made out but him. There’s no telling what heights he could have scaled if the world didn’t have it in for him.

I didn’t have to hit him once he’d started with that crap. Desmond knocked him silly before he could even get moaning good. Desmond was a 350-pound black man in the Mississippi Delta. If the world was stacked against somebody, it was more than likely him.

Percy Dwayne had the gall to ask me to replace his lunch. Luther, in the way of a peace offering, bought his uncle another corn dog, but chili cheese Tater Tots didn’t strike Luther as food any sane man would eat. That chafed Percy Dwayne, who was hardly hoping for dietary advice from Luther, and they got into a family spat all piled up in the Geo’s backseat.

Desmond’s preferred space was down at the end of the car hop line facing back toward the corner of the redwood fence that separated the Sonic from the duplex shared by the Long John Silver and the Taco Bell. This was Desmond’s Zen garden. Three Coney Islands and a sunny day and Desmond was about as close to heaven on earth as he might get.

He wasn’t inclined to tolerate squabbling, preferred no speaking at all, and he certainly wouldn’t take his lunch with chatter from Duboises, which Desmond conveyed to both of them together with the meaty palm of his hand.

“Shit, buddy!” Desmond had caught Percy Dwayne entirely by surprise. “Is knocking people around all you guys know?”

“That’s rich,” I told him, “coming from you.”

“I needed my TV,” Percy Dwayne said, almost by way of apology.

“All you had to do was pay on it.”

“Things been tight,” he whined.

I had to divide my attention between Percy Dwayne and keeping an eye out for Dale or his pinheaded colleagues on the Indianola PD.

“Now then,” I said to Percy Dwayne once our food had come and Desmond was fully occupied with his condiment packets. “Where’s my Ranchero?”

“I knew,” Percy Dwayne said, “I should have stayed clear of that son of a bitch.”

“Start at the beginning,” I told Percy Dwayne, but it soon became plain he wasn’t sure where the beginning might be.

“I know this guy down by Spanish Fort. Name’s Eugene.”

“I know him,” Luther said. “Comes around selling shit sometimes,” he told me. “You know—stole shit mostly.”

“Stickiest goddamn fingers you ever seen,” Percy Dwayne said. “So I’m down there around Rolling Fork getting some gas…” And here Percy Dwayne winked at me and grew vehicularly chummy. “That damn thing flat burns it,” he said.

It hardly seemed worth the effort to smack him again.

“So I’m filling it up,” Percy Dwayne told me, “and here comes Eugene in that piece-of-shit thing he drives. It’s like four different trucks slapped together, and he hauls all his stole shit in it. Anyway, he sees that truck thing of yours.”

“Ranchero,” I told him.

“Yeah, that. And he gets all worked up about it because he says he knows this fellow that’d go flat to pieces for it. I can tell this is some guy Eugene’s looking to get in with. So I ask him, ‘Who is he?’ But he won’t say. Just tells me this guy’d probably give me real money for the thing.”

“So you sold it?” Percy Dwayne was making me tired.

“I fucking wish. Went kind of crooked after that.”

Percy Dwayne went back to his corn dog and gnawed on it with commitment until I snatched it from him and flung it out the window.

Then Desmond studied me in such a way as to make me understand he couldn’t begin to countenance that sort of behavior at a Sonic.

So I got out of the Geo, picked up that corn dog, and laid it on the tray. Percy Dwayne was picking grit off it by the time I’d settled back into the car.

“Crooked how?” I asked him.

“Eugene wants me to follow him back to his place. I don’t want to go there, and Sissy sure as shit ain’t hoping to pay him a visit.”

“Sissy?”

“The missus,” Luther said.

“Eugene says this guy he knows’ll pay real money for that Ranchero, and I don’t want it really because—I’ll tell you something—it ain’t too awful good for much. Can’t haul nothing. Carry maybe what? A quarter cord of wood? Ain’t no kind of truck and too tight inside for a car. It’s no wonder they don’t make them anymore.”

Eugene, as it turned out, lived in a house down on the False River that runs through the Delta National Forest. He was one of those mud cats with a place in the swamp, up on stilts and more or less out of the way of the alligators. Him or his people had been there a while with rights and claims and privileges, and as the national forest had grown and spread, it had just filled in around them.

“So you went to Eugene’s place after all?” I asked Percy Dwayne.

He nodded and then managed an expression of considered regret, which I’d have to say is fairly rare for Delta cracker trash.