Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (11 page)

“That’s awful eager,” I told him, “for a guy who got put down hard in Arkansas.”

“Lucky punch,” Dale said.

That’s what Dale always said.

“I ain’t staying in the car,” he told us.

“Any trouble you make is yours,” Desmond said. “And don’t make any.”

Dale grinned and raised his hands like we had no cause to worry. Like he was in control of his bile and his agitation. Like there wasn’t a thing cracker trash could tell him that would serve to get him worked up.

Dale got out of the Escalade and made an exhibition of stretching, which included a spot of shadowboxing. Me and Desmond groaned in two-part harmony.

“I don’t see Percy Dwayne nowhere,” Desmond said.

I hadn’t spied him either.

“Look at him.” Desmond pointed.

There wasn’t anything a soul on earth could do to Dale to keep him from strutting like a cock. He’d gotten punched in a roadhouse the night before and knocked down outside a rib joint in the middle of nowhere Arkansas, and yet there he was swanning around at Grady’s like he was built to put fear in a man.

“I don’t even want to get out,” I said.

And Desmond told me, “Uh-oh.”

Dale was to blame for everything that happened, but we could only hold it against him in a general sort of way. A few years earlier, Dale had arrested some of those boys at Grady’s. Two of them when he was with the sheriff’s department and three more with the state police. Dale had treated them badly, of course. He’d roughed them up once they were cuffed, had talked to them like dogs, had hauled them around where everybody could see them. Toured the county with them in his cruiser. Walked them three or four blocks to the lockup. Dale liked to think he was teaching trash a lesson in humiliation, but the truth was he was only making them mad.

The thing about Delta cracker trash is that they never forget a slight but have short memories for a favor. A good turn is wasted on cracker trash, but an insult lasts forever. Sometimes it’s even handed down from one generation to the next. You could beat some fellow with a shovel in a fight you didn’t start, and twenty years later his grandson might show up to kick you to pieces or, if you’re not handy for it, any relation you have who’s within reach.

Out of the ten or twelve layabouts hanging around Grady’s, Dale had made enemies out of five, and three of them had relations lying around the place as well. So it turned out there were eight boys primed and ready to do Dale harm.

“Look who it is,” one of them said.

“I know you?” Dale asked him.

“Got your pistol?” I said to Desmond.

He fished it out of the console for me. I checked the clip. It would hold fifteen rounds, but Desmond had found it would jam if you loaded it full. It looked considerably less than not full to me. The thing looked damn near empty.

I showed him the clip. “What’s this?”

“Killed a snake. Wouldn’t hold still.”

There were only three rounds left.

“Who you going shoot?” Desmond asked me.

“Nobody much, I guess.”

Truth be told, I wasn’t hoping to shoot anybody at all, but Desmond’s pistol had a lot more heft to it when the clip was loaded. You could hit a hardhead like Dale with the thing and earn his full attention.

“What about you?”

Desmond kept a Browning under the seat. A twelve-gauge his uncle had sawed off years ago. Desmond reached down and pulled it out.

“Riot readies,” Desmond told me.

We’d fallen a little in love with a shell that was packed full of little rubber balls. If you didn’t want to do a boy lasting harm and still wanted to make an impression, you could let him have a riot-ready load from twenty or thirty yards out. It was like shooting a swarm of hornets at him, and you could usually have your way after that.

The only downside was that they bounced about anywhere they wanted.

“Don’t hit that damn Quonset hut,” I told him.

Me and Desmond had known enough ricochets to leave him thinking the same thing too.

Desmond slipped out of the Escalade and eased over to flank the place. I got out and stayed wide, found a spot where I doubted even a sawed-off could spray to hit me. From what I could see, Dale hadn’t tuned in at all to his peril. That was his style and his technique. He never seemed to quite know what was happening to him until it was too late to fix it.

Those boys were all reminding each other just who Dale was, but it turned out they didn’t need awfully much refreshing.

Dale spat. Dale said, “You boys ain’t ringing no bells.”

I think sometimes Dale just forgot that he’d stopped lifting weights. Back when he was a muscle head, Dale’s physique was a deterrent. He had enough sinews and bulges and oversized bits to persuade a man who didn’t know any better that Dale could take him apart. You could see his biceps well enough, but you couldn’t really make out his glass jaw or get much of a sense of Dale’s feeble, girlish way of throwing a punch. Now he was blubber mostly and usually winded and shiny with sweat. The sight of Dale might make you reconsider your diet, but that was about it.

All of those boys were smiling now. Grinning at Dale, shifting around to grin at each other. There was a beat-down in Dale’s future, and he still didn’t know it yet.

“Seen Percy Dwayne Dubois?” I shouted out.

The whole pack of them looked at me. It was just Dale and them out in front of the place. Eugene and Luther had gone inside the big bay door. Barbara the coonhound had climbed out of the car and had come over to stand at my side.

“What the hell’s that dog got on?” one of those layabouts asked me. He looked older than the rest. Probably a daddy to some there, an uncle to others. If anybody could keep this thing in check, it was surely him.

“T-shirt,” I told him. “Boy shot her.”

“What boy?” he wanted to know, more than a little peeved.

People might have been in favor of shooting each other every now and again, but only a lowdown snake of a man fired on a hound.

“Guy Boudrot,” I said.

He asked me back, “What the fuck kind of name is that?”

I was going to go with Acadian, but I went instead with, “French.”

“Shit.” He fairly spat it.

France and the bowels of hell are nearly identical for some people. This guy outside of Grady’s was clearly one of them. I decided to wander over to him, hoped to draw him into the sort of parley that might allow Dale to get scuffed up only a little.

The fellow was sitting in a bucket seat with ruptured vinyl upholstery. He had a Busch tallboy in one hand and a Case knife in the other. He was flipping the blade open and snapping it shut with his thumb.

Barbara followed me over. That fellow pointed at Eugene’s coonhound with his knife. “Goddamn Mandrells,” he told me. “I ain’t thought of them in a while.”

He took occasion to think of them as I stood there. He seemed gratified for the chance, judging by the way he reached down with his knife hand to work an adjustment on his member.

“I liked that little blond one,” he confessed.

I was not personally competent to distinguish between Mandrells, but one of those other layabouts proved to be some sort of Mandrell expert.

He shifted around. He told his elder colleague, “Irlene.”

“That’s the one.”

“Pretty girls,” I told him. I wasn’t about to play Mandrell favorites.

He sipped his beer. He fooled with his knife. He finally asked me, “What are you doing with him?”

We both studied Dale. He was standing over by a pile of battered car doors trying to look tougher than he was.

I didn’t have a simple answer, not an honest one anyway.

“We’re cousins,” I told him and shook my head. If there was one thing everybody in the Delta understood, it was that you couldn’t pick your kin.

That fellow pointed with the tip of his knife blade at a napping layabout. He was stretched out on the raw ground, was one of those twenty-something crackers who looked like he was maybe forty-five. Partly from the meth. Partly from neglect. Partly from the tattoos. His arms were covered in them. His neck. His ankles too.

“That boy,” the elder layabout told me and sighed. “Cousin of mine.” Even shiftless trash had standards a human could sink below.

I felt we had a bond now, so I tried to forge ahead.

“You seen a Dubois around here?”

My layabout pointed with his knife blade at Desmond. “What’s he up to over there?”

“Standoffish?” I told him.

“Damned if that don’t look like a sawed-off.”

“Goes where he does. I can’t break him of it.”

“You’d think,” that fellow told me and paused to finish off his beer, “being a gigantic nigger would be enough.”

Phony cordiality can only carry a fellow so far. I’d hoped I could grease the way enough to find out about Percy Dwayne, but then that elder cracker had to take a swipe at Desmond, and I could never quite swallow hard enough to make that sort of thing all right.

“Well, fuck it,” I said and turned toward Desmond. I raised a finger and twirled it. If Desmond had been driving a loader, he would have brought the bucket down. Instead he was packing a Remington and raised the sawed-off up.

“Can’t do nothing with them,” I told Desmond.

He leveled his gun. “Ain’t that the way.”

I found a pile of fenders to dive behind, caught up Barbara and took her with me. “Get down,” I shouted at Dale, but Dale wasn’t the sort to entertain orders. He just stayed where he was and gave me that look like
nobody
told him where to get.

Desmond squeezed off a riot-ready round, followed hard on by another, and the rubber pellets were straightaway on those boys like an Old Testament plague. Because Desmond didn’t have any barrel much, the shot went everywhere, and because he was firing rubber pellets, they ricocheted like nobody’s business. Those things were screaming all over that rubbishy lot and finding crackers where they sprawled.

That shot was about twice the size of BBs, and they’d leave you polka-dotted. Those boys couldn’t figure out what to do to get out of the way.

They all fished out their weapons, so I got a good look at the sort of arsenal we were up against. Since Desmond kept firing, they couldn’t take aim, were far too busy attempting to burrow. Everybody except for Dale, that is. He stayed where he was and got pissed.

“Hey!” he kept yelling Desmond’s way.

I heard Desmond tell him, “Hey, yourself.”

I think Desmond fired six shells altogether. He was loading up for another batch, when I called out to him, “Dog’s getting nervous.”

“All right,” Desmond said. “Guess I’m done.”

The elder cracker was trying to scrabble out from the crap he’d crawled up under when I mounted the pile, jumped up and down twice. That proved enough to raise a whimper.

“Percy Dwayne Dubois,” I told him.

When I got nothing back, I jumped again. Desmond had closed on us by then to keep an eye on the rest of the cracker trash. They were still in throes of wonderment, didn’t know what exactly had happened to them. They weren’t used to such a steep transition from shiftlessness to anguish, and they were peeved and stung and waving around their rusty pistols and sheath knives.

“Hell,” Dale said. “What the shit was all that?”

Dale looked like he had the measles. He’d done the thing he always does when trouble is coming at him. He’d turned around to see just what was headed his way.

“Should have ducked,” Desmond told him. “Like him.” Desmond jerked his head in my direction.

I jumped up and down on the pile again. “Percy Dwayne Dubois,” I said.

My cracker finally suggested, “Talk to Grady.”

“Why?”

“He got beef with Percy Dwayne. I don’t know shit about it.”

My cracker struck me as the sort who would make it a policy not to know shit about much. I got off his pile and told him, “I’d stay there if I was you. Mad gigantic nigger out this way.”

He made an I-hear-you-brother noise, so I jumped on his pile one time more.

I was just heading into the Quonset hut when Eugene showed up in the big bay door. There was a compressor running back in the bowels of the place, so he hadn’t heard a thing.

“Percy Dwayne problem,” he said. Then he caught sight of polka-dotted Dale and the speckled layabout who’d been fool enough to lounge around without his shirt. “What happened to them?”

“Riot ready,” I told him. We’d let one go in Eugene’s house a few years back, so he knew from high-velocity rubber pellets on the loose.

“How’s my hound?” he asked me.

Barbara had dropped to the ground a few yards behind me. She was trying to find her privates to lick underneath the hem of her shirt.

“She’s good. I had her. What’s the Percy Dwayne problem?”

“They hauled him off somewhere.”

“Who?”

“Some of them.” He jabbed his thumb back toward the garage.

“Why do folks think life out in the countryside’s so damn simple?” I asked Eugene as I stepped onto the slab garage floor and pointed down at Barbara. “Might want to stay here with her.”

I’m slow to exasperate anymore. It’s probably age and metabolism. I’m hardly the wanton hothead I used to be. Now I build to agitation, do it slowly and over time. Desmond is even more deliberate, and we talk about our upsets. Frequently at the Sonic. We’ll mull over our provocations and reason out what to do about them. So it’s less like rage and more like slow, considered retribution. But that’s all on our end. By the time we pop and swing on a guy, I’m sure he just feels like he’s getting punched all at once and suddenly.

When we arrived on the scene at Grady’s, I was hoping just to talk. I’ve got kind of a balky shoulder, and my hip goes twingy sometimes. So I was just looking for Percy Dwayne Dubois, wanted to clue him on that Boudrot. I wasn’t angling for trouble or hoping for a brawl. For his part, Desmond had gone semi-Pentecostal, but you can only give wall-to-wall crackers the sort of business they require.

So I was primed to a pitch as I mounted the slab and entered the body shop proper.

There at the first, I couldn’t see anything. They had fluorescents overhead, but the place was so greasy and dark and massive—tractor hangar size—that gazing into the depths of that garage was like looking at the night sky. A lot of black pricked here and there with stars.