Ranchero (3 page)

K-Lo pulled a tissuey pink invoice from a file in a desk drawer and then held to it so I had to snatch it from him.

“Hear that?” Desmond asked me.

It was an approaching siren on full
WA-WA,
Dale’s preference for getting cars the hell out of his way.

“Shit,” I said, and me and Desmond legged it through the store.

We reached the parking lot just as Dale came wheeling off the truck route. He passed breakneck through the gutter and nearly left his muffler there. I had to guess Patty had called him back more than a little frantic, and sure enough Dale had just thrown his Mexicans into the back of his car.

I didn’t have a clear idea of precisely what I’d do until Dale whipped in beside me and loomed up out of his cruiser. He laid one hand to the hilt of his Ruger and grabbed his toothpick with the other.

“What the shit’s going on?” Dale asked me at a volume fit for cattle drives. All I had was K-Lo’s pink tissuey invoice and that fireplace shovel.

I well knew there was no explaining anything to Dale. He’d not been designed and constructed for cogitation. I glanced at the woman and her three weeping children shut up in the squalid backseat where Dale usually hauled around meth heads and drunks whenever Mexicans weren’t handy.

A two-fisted backhand seemed called for, a looping Björn Borgish sort of thing. I caught Dale just above his right ear with the flat of that shovel pan. If his head had detached, it would have been heavy with topspin. The steel rang so loudly that those three Mexican children stopped crying at once.

All of us watched Dale teeter for about a quarter minute before his lower half decided it couldn’t support his upper bulk. He went down with stately deliberation, like a punctured ocean liner. I shoved a foot under his head to keep it from bouncing off of the pavement.

There was blood, of course, where Dale’s scalp had parted cleanly from the blow. It spouted and flowed so extravagantly that Patty went a little daft, and I had to take Dale’s pistol from her before she could shoot me with it. Then I flung open the back door of the cruiser and told Dale’s Mexicans,
“Adios.”
It did the job, judging by how they scrambled.

“Not quite the day I’d hoped for,” I said once I’d met Desmond at the Geo. “Sure you want to do this?”

Desmond told me, “Doing it already.”

FOUR

Of course, Desmond needed a Coney Island just to settle his nerves, but we both doubted he could Obi-Wan us out of this mess, so we passed up the Indianola Sonic for the branch on the outskirts of Greenville, twenty miles west, and backed up to the Mississippi River.

We got takeout and carried it over the levee to a weedy, trash-strewn park with a view of a flooded cottonwood grove and a derelict casino barge.

By then I’d studied K-Lo’s invoice and knew what we were up against. That boy wasn’t just a shithead with a shovel anymore. He was a Dubois, a name they couldn’t be bothered to Frenchify in the Delta.
Dew
-boys—front loaded and hick specific—was good enough for them.

Duboises were notorious unprincipled rubbish, and the region was filthy with them. That boy could have been an O’Malley in Dublin for all the sifting we’d have to do.

“Percy Dwayne,” I said, reading it out. “Know him?”

Desmond shook his head. He drew open his shirt at the collar to show me a leathery scar on his shoulder. “Luther Dubois, down by Yazoo.” Desmond said. “Him,” he told me, “I know.”

Desmond had a buddy, Kendell, who was reliable police. He’d worked all over the Delta, from Clarksdale clear to Vicksburg, and was always getting laid off and rehired as the books and the budgets permitted. The last Desmond had heard, he was doing traffic stops out in Leflore County.

There’s a spa hotel in Greenwood people come to for a treat, and the bulk of them get there on Route 7 off the interstate, through Leflore County. Like most Delta roads, it’s flat and straight, and you’ve hit ninety before you know it. A vindictive lawman can empty a summons book in an afternoon.

“Kendell’s got no use for Dale,” Desmond told me. “Might help us run that Dubois down.”

We were soon back in the Geo driving though downtown Greenville. It’s a hard place to be inconspicuous because there’s nobody much around, and Greenville’s a town that was grand once and sprawling and overrun with people. The boulevards are wide. The vacant buildings are ornate, Romanesque piles. When steamboats still called and cotton left the Delta on the river, Greenville had an opera house and a full-time chamber orchestra. It had hotels and restaurants and ladies’ boutiques, was invested with cachet and bustle, which had all drained away well past the point of exhaustion over the years.

Now Greenville had empty storefronts and intermittent renewal projects that never got beyond bricking the crosswalks and changing out the lampposts.

There were a couple of cars parked slant in at the diner near the levee, but otherwise the place was desolate except for me and Desmond. Anybody looking for two fellows in a Geo could have seen us from three hundred yards away.

Desmond chose to dodge the truck route on a back way out of Greenville that would loop through open farmland and bring us to Highway 7 after a while. The road we were on had been house-lined at first and then shack-plagued and hovel-dotted before we passed beyond people entirely into an unbroken sea of green.

We went from weeds and trash and leggy gardenia bushes and drowsy mongrels to luxurious jade green soybeans stretching as far as we could see. The transition was stark and instructive, a sort of Delta affirmation that the people could go to shit if they pleased, but the crops would go to market.

We’d rolled in an instant out of food stamps and into agribusiness. There might have been chicken fingers and government cheese for the two-legged fauna, but the flora would get no end of what it needed to survive. Bug spray and herbicide. Fertilizer and irrigation. Seed engineered to make the plants impervious to Mississippi.

There wasn’t much on this earth that could touch a modern Delta crop if the ag school in Starkville had decided it was better off unbothered.

The soybeans eventually yielded to rice. The rice gave way to wheat. The wheat was eclipsed at last by several thousand acres of corn, all of it over head-high and meticulously level. A red crop duster, an Ag Cat, was flying back and forth dousing that corn with something. It banked steeply over the road as we passed beneath it and doused us a little as well.

Time and ingenuity had drained the heartbreak out of Delta farming. It was primarily about money now. If you could buy the land, afford the seed, the tractors and the diesel, pay for the chemicals and the poly pipe, hire the dusters and the combines, you were all but sure to realize what the market would allow along with what the government would subsidize.

These days a man could run a ten-thousand-acre Delta spread with a handful of tractor drivers and the odd combine operator, which left most everybody else with little or nothing to do.

You could work in a catfish plant, but those jobs came and went with the price of feed. You might find some hourly clerking job in a box store on the truck route, catch on at the Long John Silver or repossess TVs, supplement your monthly government check with scattershot larceny. Or you could do what the bulk of people had done and simply pack up and leave.

As a guy who’s spent his share of time knocking around the South, I’ve never come across a place as empty as the Delta, and it’s double desolate because the towns are still standing but the people are mostly gone. The folks remaining either couldn’t afford to sell off and get out or were comfortable enough already so they could stay no matter what.

The place would probably be better off razed with every arable acre plowed under. The soil is black and loamy, tailor-made for agriculture, so it’d be smarter to let the people congregate around the edges and give John Deere and Allis-Chalmers the general run of the place.

Life in the Delta demands sweet-tea existentialism, a view of the world narcotic at bottom and sugared over with courtliness. Heat and mosquitoes in summer. Scouring wind in winter. Anemic prospects lingering through the year. People steal and drink. They work when they can, get along as best they’re able, and the mood of the place extends to the local police as well. Except for fools like Dale, no lawman in the Delta ever gets too terribly worked up. Such a wealth of civilians about are given to rampant shiftlessness that a cop with his gun out would find himself faced with too damn many people to shoot.

I was still new to the place, maybe eight months in, and hadn’t fully acclimated. I wasn’t yet used to driving an hour and a half to get anywhere I needed to be, hadn’t acquired a taste for Kool-Aid pickles or venison tamales, wasn’t entirely at ease as part of the puny white minority.

I was getting there, but I’d spent my last decade in the eastern Virginia uplands, working as Deputy Nick Reid in the middle of nowhere much. The hillbillies up there had come by their parsimony from Scotland, their marksmanship from Daddy and Daniel Boone, and their dunderheaded obliviousness from taking cousins for wives.

They didn’t have any manners, barely had language I could understand, and seemed to live for hunting out of season and beating each other up. I’d passed the bulk of my time sorting out the same couple of dozen people until their children came of age for proper charges when I got to sort them, too. I don’t think I did an ounce of good the whole time I was up there, and once the job had brought out the Dale in me, I’d had the sense to quit.

I’d lit in the Delta because I could tell it was something else altogether with terrain about as far from Virginia hillbilly hollows as I could get. Everything was slower and hotter, the local manners approached baroque, and racing down a Delta road with crop dusters on the horizon was like driving into 1952.

The Delta was otherworldly, even for folks in the rest of Mississippi who’d explain away outlandishness that transpired in the Delta by shrugging and saying, “It ain’t like nowhere else.”

The place had a reputation for the natives living a little too close to the ground. The black trash was trashier than in normal Mississippi. The Delta crackers were capable of almost any enormity sober and everything otherwise once they’d gotten drunk.

The Delta had its own rules, its own peculiar customs. There were people in the Delta who’d help you out for no conceivable reason and people who’d extract your vital organs for sport. I’d hardly begun to understand the whys and wherefores of the place, which made Desmond indispensable to me. He was my guide to all things Mississippi flatland. I had need of Delta insight and Delta education, and Desmond was my personal lyceum.

He never played the radio when he was behind the wheel of his Geo. Instead he whistled through his teeth and drifted all over the road. Steering never seemed to hold much lasting interest for Desmond. He preferred pointing out silos and telling tales of various farms he’d worked on back when he could fit in a tractor seat.

There were squashed armadillos all over the place putrefying in the sun, and given the way we wandered we rarely failed to hit a carcass. Consequently, the ride out to Highway 7 was perfumed with rancid meat and what I’d grown to think of as eau de W. R. Grace—a tangy chemical nosebleed aroma that was the signature scent of the place.

We found Kendell backed in a slot between two cypress trees. I’d met him on a repo that had soured on me on a couple of months before. I was trying to get payment from a covey of Klinnards when the whole thing had gone sideways.

They’d fallen to fighting each other—the entire crew—and we were in their trailer at the time. They were all Delta fat, about Desmond’s size but too full of beer to be lively, so they’d just laid on each other and described the thrashings they’d inflict if they could.

One of them got squashed so thoroughly that he passed out in the doorway and so trapped me and the rest of his clan inside. That’s when I put in the 9-1-1 that Kendell responded to.

I watched him out a window as he exited his cruiser and pepper-sprayed all the mongrels that came snarling up to meet him. Kendell lay against that trailer door while I pulled it from inside, and we made a gap that Kendell could slip in through.

He wasn’t hungry for particulars. Kendell just drew out his lacquered nightstick and went about tapping Klinnard bony parts. It earned him undivided Klinnard attention.

Kendell was from Tchula and knew his Delta crackers inside out. Duboises would have ganged up on him and fought him to the death. They’re pretty much the Gurkhas of the region, but Klinnards are more like the Vichy French and don’t have any steel to speak of.

“You going to pay this man?” Kendell asked, and all those Klinnards pledged they would.

Two of them made the mistake of swearing on their mother’s grave, their mother who Kendell knew to be sitting in jail in Alabama, so he swatted those boys once further in righteous exasperation before advising them all to scratch up the cash due on their TV.

They came within thirteen dollars of everything they owed, and I was quick to let it go at that so I could follow Kendell out.

I squeezed behind him through the door gap and down the rickety cinder-block steps into the landfill that passed with those Klinnards for a yard. The dogs all shied and cowered as Kendell made way to his cruiser with me trailing close and prattling out of nerves and gratitude.

When I finally shut up, Kendell volunteered one thing alone. “These goddamn people,” he told me, “make me tired.”

Out on 7, Desmond parked by a sorghum patch on the far side of the cruiser.

He called out to Kendell, “Hey here.” He told him, “I guess you’ll be wanting Dale’s gun.”

Kendell said, “I suppose.” He looked a little weary to see us.

Kendell had heard all about us on the scanner. Desmond told him, “Wasn’t nothing we planned.”

“Hell, boys, I hope not,” Kendell said as he climbed out of his cruiser.

Kendell was, if anything, blacker than Desmond and hard everywhere Desmond was soft. We all leaned on the cruiser fender while Kendell told us what he’d heard. That Dale was at the hospital getting his head sewn up. That me and Desmond were the ones behind it. That there were proper warrants sworn out but no push much to enforce them since nobody—except Patty—gave a happy goddamn about Dale.