Ranchero (23 page)

I think Neal electrified the marsh there for a second. Desmond has always insisted he saw sparks. All I know is Neal just kept on peeing for a while and then finally fell over and peed a little bit more. Me and Desmond eased out to drag him under before Guy came around on his circuit. It sounded like another plumber was explaining that yes, in fact, he had stood ankle-deep in shit before.

The landing party was me and Desmond with Percy Dwayne bringing up the rear. We eased up those back stairs while Guy yelled from the far end of the house. I sent Desmond around to the left, and I went the other way with Percy Dwayne and K-Lo’s Beretta behind me. Guy was bound to run from one of us right into the other’s sights.

Then something altogether too Mississippi happened. Guy’s second plumber hung up on him, and Guy said a few goddamns but fell silent right as me and Desmond were about to close and nab him. There was a lull while Guy tried (I guess) to figure who he ought to call and scream at next, and that’s when we all heard Eugene tell Tommy, “Was a goddamn spinner with Baitmate.”

Those two swamp rats were arguing lures again. It wasn’t much to hear, but it was enough.

I heard Guy say, “Shit!” followed by his rapid footfall on the decking.

Desmond must have heard him too because we both came charging from opposite sides of the house and caught a glimpse of Guy as he ducked in through a doorway.

“Aw hell,” I remember thinking, and then charged straight in behind him.

He was pawing on the couch for something, so I fired a burst over his head. I heard a woman scream from somewhere back down the hall and a baby cry, which was enough to put me off of gunplay.

Guy went dodging away empty handed as Desmond came in through the door behind me.

I could see now Guy wasn’t just in his underwear, but he was oily, too. So while I didn’t want to shoot him necessarily, I certainly didn’t want to tussle with him.

There wasn’t much danger of that, as it turned out, because he was a quick little son of a bitch. I blocked off the way to the outside door. Desmond closed off the back hallway, and we took turns trying to close in on him and maybe knock him down.

It was like chasing a squirrel barehanded, and then he fetched his knife from somewhere. That big shiny Japanese thing he’d been looking for all along. You could tell he loved that blade. It was oiled and honed and sang when he whipped it through the air.

So it was still like chasing a squirrel but now a squirrel with a machete. If we hadn’t much wanted to lay hands on him before, we really didn’t want to now.

Desmond was begging me to let him shoot Guy. “I ain’t even fired my gun.”

“Can you hit him in the leg?”

“If he’ll hold still a little.”

“I don’t see that happening.”

And all of this was transpiring while Guy was telling us how dead we were about to be and asking if we had any idea just who the fuck he was. He was laughing and wild-eyed and kept darting at us swinging that Japanese knife.

“You know who I am?” he’d say every time he made a lunge, and me and Desmond would take turns telling him he was a crazy Acadian fuck stick.

We were about decided we’d have to shoot him when he made a move toward the window. Guy sliced out the screen like Zorro would have, just made a swipe and it was gone. He had a little more to tell us about the shit storm we’d be seeing, and then took a run up and tried to dive outside head first.

He didn’t, as it turned out, go anywhere at all. It was a shocking thing to watch. Me and Desmond heard a sickening
thunk,
and then Guy fell back inside.

He dropped to the floor in a heap. That knife came clattering down on top of him without slicing, as luck would have it, anything important off. Guy’s head bounced off the planking. His breath departed him entirely. He was just about as precipitously senseless as a human will ever get.

It turned out Guy had run cranium first into the butt of K-Lo’s Beretta. Percy Dwayne had caught him a full thrusting blow flush on the top of his head.

Percy Dwayne peered in through the window. “SISSY!” was all he said.

He came scrabbling in over the sill, and we went searching around the house. Percy Dwayne’s wife and his boy were shut up together in a back bedroom. That child looked to be wearing the same diaper I’d met him in two days before. He was fragrant and unhappy, and Percy Dwayne took him from his wife and handed him to me. I’d almost rather have wrestled with Guy, Japanese knife or not.

“Give us a minute?” Percy Dwayne said, and me and Desmond and that smelly child retired into the front room while Percy Dwayne and his Vardaman wife had a bit of a chat. It was lively and loud. She claimed to have been there to steal money all along.

“I did it for us,” was her refrain throughout.

She said she’d packed some cash away in little PD’s diaper, and Percy Dwayne came into the front room to have a look. Sure enough there were four thousand dollars worth of twenties in his pants in wet bundles that looked, for all the world, like they had been chocolate frosted.

You could see Percy Dwayne change at the sight of that cash. It was like watching ice melt in an oven. In seconds he went from hurt and irritated all the way to proud. Desmond and me were both stuck at disgusted, chiefly on account of the stink and the frosted money.

“You were working him,” Percy Dwayne said to his wife with both wonderment and hunger.

She nodded and assured him, “I sure was.”

They fell together and went tonsil deep. Since Guy was still out cold, I sat the baby on the floor, and me and Desmond went exploring.

Guy didn’t have a money room exactly. He had a money closet. It was equipped with a bill counter and a box of bands, trunks to keep the cash in. And there was an awful lot of cash, five or six hundred thousand dollars, probably. We didn’t trouble ourselves to count it. We even left a little in the closet so they could find some after the fire.

By the time we got down on the ground with Guy, Eugene and Tommy had come out of the marsh and had joined Luther under the house. They were still quarreling a little about how big a sturgeon can actually get, but the sight of Guy unconscious and stretched out in his briefs undid them.

“I thought the fucker would kill you,” Eugene told me.

“He gave it a shot,” I said, and I handed Eugene the Japanese knife that I’d carried with me down the stairs.

“It’s nice and all,” he said, “but I hope this ain’t my cut.”

We shoved Neal into the Blazer and drove it out clear of the house. He would wake up and get away or not. It hardly mattered to us. We taped up Guy, wrapped him in a bedsheet, and put him in the bed of Gil’s calypso coral Ranchero. Proof that it could haul something after all.

Only then did we divide up the money, essentially by weight. Five shares. Eugene and Tommy got one to split. Percy Dwayne and his people got another. Me and Luther and Desmond each took a share for ourselves. I didn’t have to say anything about not spending it all at once and drawing unwelcome attention from precisely the wrong people. The Delta is as tight as Glasgow. They’d be squeezing those bills until they screamed.

“Want a truck?” I asked Percy Dwayne, and he loaded his family up in Guy’s Tundra. Luther crawled in, too, and they invited Eugene and Tommy into the bed so they could drop them where we’d parked up past the gate.

“Well,” Percy Dwayne said, and the rest of them added some variation on it. Then Percy Dwayne pulled away, and they were gone on up the drive. No fond good-byes. No brotherly hugs. Just a little spit out the side windows.

That’s what I like about Delta crackers—they’re only sentimental about their mommas. If anybody ever tells you different, it’s a lie.

Me and Desmond set the house ablaze and watched it burn for a little while. We’d seen enough houses on fire by then to be a little weary of it. We left once the place was going hard, and I dropped Desmond at his Metro. Guy had woken up and was stirring in the bed, wiggling under the sheet. I fetched the fireplace shovel off of Desmond’s floorboard. It only took one whack, and not even a firm one, to put Guy back to sleep.

I followed Desmond up 61. He went cross-country near Estill, and we passed into Sunflower County on the old Klinock Road. A few miles south of Indianola, a fellow had junked a spreader truck. Weeds had grown up all around it. It wasn’t ten feet from the ditch.

We put Guy in the cab, taped his hands to the steering wheel. He was coming around again by then. We set the duffel full of crystal meth on the truck seat right beside him.

“Call Dale,” I told Desmond. “Kendell, too. Tell them there’s some fellow with a bunch of drugs out here in a truck. Let’s see who gets here first.”

Guy woke up pissed, of course. He glanced around in the failing light at the gym bag alongside him. He seemed to have a fair sense of what we were about and where he’d probably end up.

He rocked and lurched and tried to pull loose, called us all sorts of things, which we couldn’t make out because of the tape on his pie hole.

“Vamos?” I asked Desmond.

Desmond nodded, and we both told Guy the Acadian fuck stick, “Adios, buddy.”

TWENTY-FOUR

I went straight to the Magic Wand and gave Gil’s Ranchero a bath. A half a bath really, because while I had a hundred odd thousand dollars, hardly any of it was in change. It looked good, though. That Ranchero was so simonized all over, it was virtually impervious to dirt. I drove it around for another half hour just to let it dry. That’s what I told myself I was up to, anyway. I don’t think I ever entirely lifted my hand from the walnut gearshift knob.

It was past eight by the time I pulled into Pearl’s driveway, and she came out expecting a party. I don’t believe she even noticed what I’d arrived in at first.

“Where are your friends?” she asked me.

“Back home,” I said. “Probably won’t be around for a bit.”

“Oh.” Pearl’s tone was ripe with disappointment.

“But look.” I was obliged to point out the Ranchero.

She told me just “Oh” again.

She was so crestfallen after two nights of spontaneous dinner parties that I would have packed her into Gil’s Ranchero and taken her out for a meal, but there wasn’t much of anywhere to go unless you were craving chicken nuggets or a fisherman’s platter that hadn’t seen salt water in a while.

“I could stand some scrambled eggs,” I told her.

“Well come on, then,” she said, lifted a little.

“You heat up a pan. I’m right behind you.”

I took my share of the money into Pearl’s basement, down her outside steps and through the back door. I packed it among the boxes and the cartons that had accumulated on the dry end of the cellar where the rain didn’t seep in and the water heater didn’t leak.

Pearl was at the stove melting aged, discolored oleo in a skillet by the time I arrived in the kitchen. She asked after Desmond and all of my cracker friends in turn, and I concocted details and circumstances like we were all upstanding people with regular lives and responsibilities and decent motives at heart. Then I managed to get a name from Pearl of a doctor for Desmond’s mom.

“Here’s the thing,” I told her once I was sitting at the dining room table pushing eggs around my plate with a scrap of moldy toast. “I’d like to buy Gil’s Ranchero. I’d love it like he did. I think it means more to me already than any car ever has.”

Pearl drove a silver Buick that she’d dinged up everywhere. She looked at me as if she found me ever so slightly demented. “Really?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“That’d make Gil happy,” she said.

I glanced at the snapshot of Gil over on Pearl’s sideboard. In his immaculate coveralls. Armor All-ing a tire. I doubted “happy” really figured in.

Pearl had come across one of Gil’s key fobs in a junky kitchen drawer. It was an old Ford logo stamped in metal in a mildewed leather frame. I fixed the Ranchero key to it straightaway, went up to my apartment over the car shed, threw open the windows to help get the unwashed and unlaundered man stink out, fell into bed, and passed out like I’d been beat with a shovel.

*   *   *

K-Lo didn’t know we were coming until me and Desmond just showed up. We’d laid out a few more days because we were weary and could afford to. The K-Lo we found wasn’t overhauled exactly, but he was certainly altered a little. Getting his bobcat back had sure helped things along. I can’t conceive that it’s in people for them to simply up and change, but K-Lo was hardly so sharp around the edges as he’d been. Mostly elbows still but not elbows entirely.

K-Lo made a show for the rest of the crew out on the sales floor. He berated me and Desmond for going AWOL on him, and we made an attempt to be suitably contrite. I brought K-Lo’s Beretta in through the back door and what was left of his box of shells, didn’t want anybody to get the impression that K-Lo would loan stuff out. I paid the money I’d borrowed, returning it in twenties with interest.

Back in his office, K-Lo showed us a fresh copy of the Sunflower County
Enterprise-Tocsin
with a photo of Dale and a table full of Baggies right there on the front page. Dale, it appeared, had raced out and gotten to that fuck stick first.

The article that went with the photo ran for a column on the front and finished on an inside back page between a tire ad and the weekly affirmation. It was largely fiction, particularly the parts that made Dale out to be capable and dogged and honest.

“You working or not?” K-Lo asked us.

We glanced at each other, me and Desmond. We hadn’t thought about it much. Hadn’t discussed it at all. That’s what happens to you when you come home with a box of money.

“A little, I guess,” I told K-Lo.

Desmond nodded and said, “Yep.”

“Go talk to these people about their TV,” K-Lo said. “See if you can make it all right.” He offered us a tissuey pink invoice.

I ended up helping Desmond carry his mother to the medical complex. She wasn’t hinged anymore in a fashion that would allow her to fit in the Geo. We got her in my Ranchero and I drove her across town.