Ranchero (13 page)

They’ll regret taking a hit at the casino blackjack tables, and they’ll sometimes regret being caught at a crime once they’re on their way to Parchman, but Delta crackers as a rule are forward-looking people if by
forward-looking
you mean a scant ten minutes ahead.

“Yeah,” Percy Dwayne said at last with something approaching rue. “We followed Eugene to his place.” Then he shook his head and grunted—kind of a triumph for a Dubois without a gun pointed at him.

“Give me the short version,” I suggested to Percy Dwayne.

“They got took,” he told me.

“Who?”

“Sissy and PD Jr. Your goddamn Ranchero.”

“Took?”

Percy Dwayne nodded.

“What exactly does that mean?”

“Eugene’s buddy … who ain’t Eugene’s buddy … swooped in and got them all.”

“Kidnapped?” I asked him.

“Ain’t that what
took
means!?”

Now Percy Dwayne was making Desmond and Luther tired as well.

“Didn’t I tell you,” Percy Dwayne reminded us, “the whole goddamn thing went crooked?”

THIRTEEN

“Gee,” he said. “You know, like Guy but Gee.”

“He’s French?” I asked Percy Dwayne.

He shook his head. “Some half-assed Acadian fuck stick.”

“Tell me you ain’t messing with
him!
” Luther was fairly shouting. As it turned out, he knew Percy Dwayne’s half-assed Acadian fuck stick by his purely diabolical reputation. “Not that guy!”

“Gee,” Percy Dwayne told him.

“Who is he?” By now I was more anxious to hear from Luther than his uncle. Luther at least knew how to tell a thing straight.

“Got run out of New Orleans. Feds or something. Set up down around Vicksburg. Been coming north ever since.”

“What’s his thing?’

“Meth mostly,” Luther told me, “but he’ll move whatever he can. Deep into hash and some kind of Ecstasy bullshit for a while. But he’s cooking meth all over these days. Illegals do it for him.”

“And he took my car?” I asked Percy Dwayne.

“And Sissy,” he told me, “PD Jr., too.”

“What the hell for? A meth dealer / kidnapper? Who has the fucking time?”

Percy Dwayne shrugged and then rubbed his fingers and thumb together. “Wants three thousand. And that’s just for them. He’s figuring on keeping the car.”

Percy Dwayne didn’t seem too bothered by the trouble his family was in.

“This guy ain’t no damn good,” Luther told me.

And Percy Dwayne said, “Gee.”

“Calvin said you were taking drugs instead of money.”

“Hoping to turn them around, make a little off the top.” He sounded like a man whose wife was home in the kitchen making dinner.

“Heard of this guy?” I asked Desmond.

“Gee,” Percy Dwayne said.

Desmond had finally gotten his Coney Islands dressed to suit him and decided to take a bite of it first and answer my question in time.

Desmond nodded. Desmond chewed. “Killed a boy I know.”

“Really?”

“Must have,” Desmond told me. “Nobody else needed him dead.”

“You supposed to deliver the cash?”

Percy Dwayne nodded.

“When?”

“That ain’t all worked out yet.”

“You don’t have the first fucking idea what you’re up to, do you?” I said to Percy Dwayne.

Of course he got defensive and pitiful all at the same time. He knew just what he was doing and the world was stacked against him.

“You know how to reach this Guy?” I asked him.

“Through Eugene,” he said.

“How are you going to reach Eugene?”

“I could call him, I guess, but your damn phone’s near dead and it don’t have none of my numbers in it.” He said it like it was all my fault.

“You hearing this?” I asked Desmond.

Desmond held up a hand to suggest that he was unavailable at the moment. That he wasn’t about to let any cracker fool spoil his Sonic lunch.

“We’re just going to be quiet for a minute and let Desmond eat.”

“My corn dog’s got shit on it,” Percy Dwayne told me, and showed me some corn dog grit.

“Shhhh,” I said, and put a finger to my lips.

While I was waiting for Desmond to eat his lunch, I used the leisure to piece together Percy Dwayne’s previous twenty-four hours, which had started off with me and him and that fireplace shovel. He’d then gone joyriding in a freshly stolen calypso coral Ranchero, had headed down to the southern Delta where Duboises were thick on the ground.

He’d then run by chance across Eugene at a Rolling Fork gas station, and Eugene had thrown him in with that evil Acadian fuck stick Guy, who’d taken his wife and his son and the car he’d originally stolen from me. Now he was hoping to buy them back or dope them up or something. I wasn’t entirely clear on what he meant to do or why.

That was one full day, but I had to figure me and Desmond could match it. I’d started out on the wrong end of Percy Dwayne’s late morning. We’d roughed up K-Lo, put Dale down, and let some Mexicans loose. Then we’d beat down a couple of fellows we didn’t even know on Longstreet Street in beautiful Creekside Estates just outside Yazoo.

That had led us to Tootie’s, where we’d packed Luther upside down on the back Geo floorboard. Then an evening featuring Angela Marie—and I dwelled on her for a moment—up in Memphis, in her office, being responsible and running things. K-Lo and his burglars seemed like it happened a year ago by now. A slumber party at my garage apartment, a trip to Webb. My new friend Calvin in his dashiki with an Austrian machine pistol underneath—about the last thing I expected to find in Webb.

And now me and Percy Dwayne had closed the circle—me without my TV payment and him without Gil’s car.

I couldn’t help but think how very different my twenty-four hours would have been if Percy Dwayne had just put down twenty dollars on his television or had even sat at his dinette with me and told me why he couldn’t. I wondered what we’d be up to if he’d just acted like a grown man. Certainly not sitting four-deep in a Geo thinking about a diabolical Acadian fuck stick who’d been driven from New Orleans by the Feds.

It was maddening to contemplate, really, much of it easily avoidable, so I tried to go philosophical and take it all in stride. I failed at it, of course. I usually do.

The plan we worked up was to go down Delta by way of Rolling Fork, stop somewhere there, and make another plan. I offered to drop Luther out anywhere along the way since we weren’t intending to travel down by Yazoo. Desmond was cutting south and west over toward 61.

“No sir,” Luther told me, and he made noises like we were all kind of in this thing together. Who the hell would he be, he seemed to want to suggest, if he let his uncle face his trials alone.

It rang hollow, of course. There was the chance of swag at Eugene’s, and Luther had a business stake in seeing us take the Acadian fuck stick down.

“I’ll just ride on, if that’s all right.” He almost made it sound noble.

Desmond was drifting and whistling and distracted about some farming he’d done back in his skinny past, which is why he missed his turn and ended up driving all the way to Highway 1. That road runs north and south over by the Mississippi, a part of the Delta that made me antsy even from the first.

Something got in my head about being backed against the river between the bridges up by Greenville and the one down Vicksburg way. I felt like cornered vermin anywhere west of Leland. If you found trouble back in those parts, you were well and royally stuck. About the only thing you could do was fight or drown.

Delta boys like Desmond, though, were used to being hemmed in. That was part of the general psyche of the place. So we rode down Highway 1, and I carried on like I was fine, but I was living for Desmond to cut back east, which he took his sweet time about. He finally turned at Grace and headed down past Otter Bayou to Lorenzen. Then he crossed the tracks and we came out hard by Rolling Fork.

Percy Dwayne remained indignant and pouty most of the way. He made the occasional pitiful noise about having his wife and his son snatched from him, accused me of worrying about nothing but a car.

He did his whole put-upon, victimized, it’s-so-hard-to-be-a-white-guy thing that nobody with bat sense could possibly put an ounce of actual stock in. If he’d been black, he would have been rotting in Angola or Parchman for years already. Even cracker trash in the Delta got a better shake than Desmond and his ilk.

We stopped at the very service station where Percy Dwayne had met Eugene because Percy Dwayne had figured he could remember how to get to Eugene’s from there. But Desmond and I together had soon noticed that something was off with Percy Dwayne. He wasn’t acting like a man who was burning to get his wife and baby back. He didn’t seem to have the drive you’d expect from a fellow in his shoes.

He went in the grocery mart after a soda and loitered for a while.

“What’s up with him?” I asked Desmond, and together we put the question to Luther.

“Don’t want to talk against him,” Luther told us by way of preamble before acquainting me and Desmond with a raft of Percy Dwayne’s failings as a Dubois, as a husband, as a man. “Could be Sissy just up and left him and ain’t hoping to get found. Could be Percy Dwayne was telling damn lies all along.”

“Then what’s really up?” I asked him.

Luther shrugged. “Who the hell knows?”

“Tell me,” I said to Luther, “about his wife.”

He shrugged in a what’s-to-tell sort of way. “He met her in Jackson. Some buddy of his threw them together. She comes from Vardamans over near Starkville.”

“What do
you
think of her?”

Luther’s face pinched up like he was smelling something unsavory. He shook his head a little. “She’ll do any damn thing.”

“Sort of girl to let herself get … kidnapped?”

“Can’t figure why anybody’d want to take her. She’d cut your liver out if you gave her half a chance.”

“What are you thinking?” Desmond asked me.

“The Ranchero needs saving,” I told him. “Sissy and that baby? I’m not so sure about them.”

“What difference does it make?” Luther wanted to know

“If the bullets start flying,” I said, “I want to know who they’re flying from.”

“What bullets!?” Luther asked me.

“Won’t come to that probably.”

I glanced at Desmond for reassurance, but Desmond looked like a man persuaded that everything comes to a gunfight in the end.

FOURTEEN

Percy Dwayne finally came out of the grocery mart and joined us. He’d been reading the trading post. He’d found an El Camino fixer-upper near Belzoni. He’d torn the page out so he could show me the ad.

“That won’t quite do,” I told Percy Dwayne, who hadn’t guessed it would.

“Where to?” Desmond asked him, but there were only a couple of choices. We could head south toward Vicksburg or east past Choctaw Landing in the direction of Holly Bluff.

Percy Dwayne directed us east through Delta wilderness, a whole nest of wildlife management areas. Scrubby, overgrown tax dodges for people too lazy to farm. Then we followed the road south toward the Delta National Forest—a primal, hellacious reminder of what the whole Delta used to be like. Before they’d cut down all the trees and plowed under all the thickets.

Once we got over to Holly Bluff and turned on the Spanish Fort road, Percy Dwayne couldn’t quite recall how he’d gotten down to Eugene’s.

“Sissy was driving,” he told us, “and we were just following his truck. I know he’s back in the woods somewhere. It’ll hit me when I see it.”

Desmond stopped and swallowed hard before he pulled into the national forest proper. There was just one road that bisected the place, and it was gravel and had snaky underbrush crowding it on either side.

“I know,” I said to Desmond, “no bayous and no woods. I just want to thank you for doing this for me.”

“I ain’t done it yet,” he told me, and we sat there for a while longer. But Desmond finally loosed a “Hmm” and gave the Geo gas.

The road followed some kind of pipeline. It was off in a ditch to one side. I can’t say what might be getting pumped through the Delta National Forest. Could be sewage from Yazoo City, for all I knew, sent west to get sluiced into the mighty muddy. But that pipeline made for just the sort of landmark Percy Dwayne would be likely to recall.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “That damn thing. The road’ll bend up here, and you’ll put that pipe behind you.”

That’s just what happened. The road turned right, and the pipeline kept straight through the scrub.

“It’s up here on the left somewhere.”

“What’s it look like?” I asked Percy Dwayne.

“Hunting lodge, up on posts. We come out of the woods and there it was.”

“Ain’t no end of marijuana in this goddamn place,” Luther piped in after having run silent for a while. “A man takes his life in his hands if he goes in there and thrashes around.”

“I don’t like the woods,” Desmond announced. He seemed to need to hear himself say it.

As national forests go, this one wasn’t easy to like. Bugs and bottomland. Scrub and hardwoods. Gators and vipers along with the biggest cypress trees I’d ever seen.

Luther wanted us to stop at every sign and pullout along the way. He seemed a little like a fellow on vacation.

“Don’t you live around here?” I asked him.

He nodded and pointed nowhere much. “Didn’t never hunt or nothing,” he said. “Got no call to be in this place.”

“You could come take a walk or something,” I suggested, and Luther and Percy Dwayne (and Desmond a little, too) looked at me like I’d proposed they build a rocket and fly to Saturn. They were ready to ride an hour to get a loaf of bread but wouldn’t have walked through the Delta National Forest without a blown head gasket or some sorry bastard making them do it with a gun.

I couldn’t really blame them. It was about as gloomy a place as I’ve ever seen. Even though it was mid afternoon, the canopy was choking off the daylight, and everything seemed a little creepy there in the forest. We stopped to look at a sign planted along the road. It showed the way to a half-dozen camp sights off in the underbrush.