Ranchero (16 page)

He started yelling. Not for help, but more in the way a wild pig might squeal. It was as if, in his puny swamp-rat brain, he couldn’t think what else to do. So I retaped him, pulled the tarp back over them both, and tied it off.

I went to the front door of the rental store so K-Lo could see me come up. I looked for him on the ugly sofa, but he didn’t appear to be about. I peered in through the glass doors, and when I couldn’t find him, I knocked. He came out of the back with his little plastic lunch container in hand, the one he brought in every morning full of rice and eggplant and chicken and carried home rinsed out every night.

K-Lo unlocked the door and pushed it open. I was planning on going in, but he came out and bolted the thing behind him.

“Where are you going?” I asked him.

“Home,” he said. “I can’t sit around here. I’m still shook up about last night.”

“You’re not even drunk,” I told him.

“I’m drunk a little,” he said, “but I don’t want to die in this place on that ugly sofa.”

“So you’re just locking up and going on home?”

K-Lo nodded.

“Good for you,” I told him. “Why don’t you take this with you.”

I stepped clear of the bobcat, which had been sitting behind me on the sidewalk all the while.

K-Lo gasped. He flat sucked air. He reminded me of those people who used to show up on TV and get reunited with long-lost siblings, old army buddies, former loves. They’d gasp like that. It was a way of saying with just air and spasm, “For the love of Christ, I thought you were dead.”

K-Lo didn’t move at first, appeared as if he couldn’t, as if the sight of his bobcat had to be some sort of galling mirage.

He said, “But…” a time or two while he stayed just where he was. I picked that cat up to prove it was real and put it in his hands.

I was sure for a second there Kalil the hothead was going to up and cry, and not the usual tears of bitterness and disappointment, but genuine tears of joy and of relief. He didn’t, though. He remembered himself.

“Did I ever tell you how I killed him?”

I shook my head. I told him, “Not that I recall.”

“I was driving home one night, almost to Leland. I seem to recall I hit him with my car.”

“Never heard you recall that part before.”

K-Lo shrugged. “Where did you find him?”

“Down Delta. A fellow had bought him somewhere. Gave him to me when I said it was yours.”

“Tell him I’m glad to have him back.”

“I’ll do that. Don’t leave him here. Somebody’ll just snatch him again.”

K-Lo nodded. K-Lo said, “All right.”

I watched as K-Lo loaded his bobcat in the backseat of his Honda. Then he pulled out on the truck route, marginally sober, and drove home to his wife and son.

I bought two buckets of chicken from a pimply kid at the KFC counter who appeared to have taken his corporate training to heart. He was polite and efficient, must have been new on the job. Everybody else in the place—the employees and the diners—looked to be wading through honey to get wherever they went.

Pearl intercepted us in the driveway, halfway to the car shed. She’d already eaten her supper, but she put on like she hadn’t. Luther made a fuss over her and introduced her to his uncle. Eugene and Tommy were more of a problem since their hands were taped behind their backs. They were properly dressed by now and not conspicuously nasty, but Tommy still had catalog pages up his nose.

“Say hello to Mrs. Jarvis,” I told them.

“Pearl,” she said, and invited the whole pack of us in.

She didn’t appear to let herself see that Tommy and Eugene were restrained. Pearl had a talent for selective obliviousness. It always applied to family, especially her worthless son, who Pearl could construe as loving and attentive, but she could extend it when she wanted to the rest of the world as well.

“I see you’ve got chicken,” Pearl said. It’s hard to miss those red and white buckets. “Come on in. I’ve got a big table we can all sit around and a bowl of potato salad I made this morning.”

I thought of Pearl’s mayonnaise that had gone more yellow than beige. I wondered if Rusty was dead.

Pearl and Luther and Percy Dwayne went on into the house while I lingered on the back porch with Tommy and Eugene.

“Where the hell is this?” Tommy wanted to know.

“Still Mississippi,” I told him. “I’ll cut you loose if you can behave.”

“I’m fucking starving,” Eugene said.

“Mouth,” I told him. “You treat that woman like your mother.”

Come to find out Tommy and Eugene never had much use for their mothers, and worse still, Eugene announced he’d like to turn Pearl upside down. Then him and Tommy started in on who had the tool and the prowess to make Pearl squeal like Dotty and Ailene.

I didn’t know what else to do but smack them each one time, which they curled their lips and got all peevish about.

“You’ve seen people on TV, right, people with table manners?”

They nodded. Each had a hand to ear I’d cuffed him on.

“Act like them for the next little while, and you’ll be all right. Otherwise I’m turning Luther loose with the Taser.”

The hell of it was, they were perfectly stellar company in the house. It was partly the threat of getting electrocuted, but it was mostly Pearl’s way of treating everybody the same. I can’t say how she came by it since it’s hardly the Southern way. Class lines down in Dixie rival those of the British peerage, but Pearl just didn’t see the world that way. She wanted company, so she made allowances, saw in people what she wanted to see, and her approach had a way of making guests more than they should have been.

Once Pearl had gotten out the silver and the tatted linen place mats, the crystal water glasses even though they were cracked and chipped, once she charged Tommy and Percy Dwayne to bring the china out, nobody was a lowlife or a swamp rat anymore.

Pearl put the chicken on a platter, brought out the poison potato salad, and chirped that we should all join hands for grace. Eugene, of all people, volunteered to say a prayer he knew, and he was going on about the Savior in heroic couplets when I peeked around the table like I had the night before.

“God help me,” I prayed to myself in silence, “if this gets ordinary.”

SEVENTEEN

“Gentle giant,” Pearl told me.

I was in the kitchen drying the dishes by then, and she’d been asking after Desmond, who Pearl had taken a real shine to.

“I like a man who’s neat,” she said. “Gil was neat.”

“I’m hoping,” I said to Pearl, “I’ll have Gil’s car back by tomorrow.”

“I know you’ll do what you can,” she told me. I’m sure that would have been enough for her whether it produced a Ranchero or not. The trouble for me was that doing and failing wouldn’t have been sufficient.

Then I got lost in a reverie over what I might meet with in Guy, since I’d come across lots of Delta trash since I’d moved to Mississippi. A ruthless Acadian fuck stick in charge of a genuine criminal concern was not the sort to rent a TV and have it reclaimed on him. I had to think Guy was entirely his own type of thing.

While I was standing drying dishes and ruminating, I lost track of my charges. I suddenly realized I couldn’t hear them in the dining room anymore. I asked Pearl if she knew where they’d gone.

She led me back to her guest room where they were all deep in Gil’s closet. Eugene was wearing a navy blue double-breasted blazer over his bib overalls. He didn’t look transformed exactly, but the swamp rat was largely submerged. Even Tommy, who’d found one of Gil’s impeccably clean jump suits, could have passed for a suburban husband with a Chevrolet to tinker on and lawn fertilizer to spread. Percy Dwayne had found a suit coat and, just like his nephew Luther, he looked like a minor Chicago thug from eighty years ago.

“You mind?” I asked Pearl.

“Lord no,” she told me. “Somebody should get use of those clothes.”

“How did he end up with so many?” Luther asked her.

She fingered Luther’s lapel with a sad, distracted smile. “I’d buy them. I doubt he ever put half of them on.”

On the way back to the kitchen, Pearl remembered a charge she’d been given. “That policeman came by,” she told me, and tapped her head. “The one with the bandage. He doubts you’re in Texas. Wanted me to give you this.”

Dale had written me a note on the back of a traffic ticket. He had the penmanship of a middle schooler. “The longer you hide,” he’d written, “the worse it’ll be.”

“I don’t care for him,” Pearl confided. “He’s got those beady eyes.”

I marked Dale down as one of the few humans Pearl wouldn’t give a sports coat to.

We bid Pearl good night and marched up the steps to my place over the car shed. I turned on my TV, and Tommy and Eugene sat down on my ratty settee. I tossed them the remote, and they went sailing through the channels all but hypnotized. It was like I’d given them a double dose of Benadryl, and I couldn’t help but think they’d be content there for a while.

“I’m going to go check on Desmond,” I told Luther and Percy Dwayne. “I need him,” I said of Eugene, “for tomorrow. It’d be a good thing to find him here when I get back.”

“I hear you, Chief,” Luther told me. He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out his school-bus yellow Taser.

“There’s beer in the fridge. Chips in the cabinet. I won’t be long.”

I went out the door and down the steps. I skulked around the yard for a bit, in the shadows out of reach of the vapor lights. There wasn’t a thing parked on the street but Eugene’s claptrap truck. I jogged down to it, climbed in, and drove away in a cloud of incinerated engine oil.

I got up to Sunflower before I stopped for gas. I was going to do Eugene a favor by filling up his tank, but I kept pumping and pumping and the damn thing wouldn’t finish. It turned out he had four or five gas tanks daisy-chained together. Filling that truck was like trying to fuel a passenger jet. I quit once I’d closed on sixty dollars, the far end of what my Visa would currently allow.

I drove past Desmond’s on 49 and then cut back down at Blaine. It didn’t seem sensible that Dale would be sitting on Desmond instead of me, but Dale wasn’t the sensible sort. I scoped out Desmond’s place up and back since Dale wouldn’t know the truck, and I finally pulled in once I was satisfied nobody was about.

I went around to the back door, and Desmond let me in. I could smell the Oxy as soon as I stepped inside.

“Momma had a bad day,” Desmond told me.

“Has a doctor seen her lately?”

Desmond shook his head the way people do in the Delta when, instead of “No,” they mean, “How am I going to pay for that?”

I went back to say hello to Desmond’s mother and walked into a thing I’d never expected to see. She was in the bed, under the covers from about the waist down. She was wearing a flannel house dress with daffodils all over it, and her wig was sitting pretty nearly straight upon her head.

She had one of the pills I’d bought from Luther on a square of Reynolds Wrap, a little piece about the size of an unfolded chewing gum wrapper. She held a lighter underneath and heated that pill until it was smoking and melting. Then she inhaled the vapor through a little piece of drinking straw.

It was the sort of thing you’d see every day on the outskirts of Lauderdale, where the storefront doctors write script for Oxy junkies, but in an old black lady’s bedroom in rural Mississippi? I’d thought she’d just break those pills into pieces, swallow one, and go to sleep. This felt a hell of a lot more desperate than that would have.

“Hey,” I said. “How we feeling?”

“No good,” she told me, and took another hit.

Then she set her works on the nightstand and lay back against the headboard. I watched her for a little while and then went back to the kitchen.

“How’d she get started on that stuff?” I asked Desmond, which was exactly the wrong thing to ask him because he was the one who’d gotten her going when her regular pain meds had run out.

“Right after Shawnica, I was in a bad way. Couldn’t take life straight anymore. Never had much stomach for liquor, but the Oxy worked all right.”

“How’d you get off?”

Desmond gave that one some thought. The easy answer was he got sick of bouncing along the bottom, but it’s always a little more complicated than that.

“You get fed up with nine-to-five, you start doing drugs. You get fed up with drug life, you go back to nine-to-five.”

“Did getting stabbed by Luther fit in there somewhere?”

“Maybe,” Desmond told me. “A little.”

“We’ve got to get your mother to a doctor somehow before she burns the goddamn house down.”

Desmond nodded, but he was just humoring me now.

We walked out the back door and into the yard. It was one of those beautiful Delta nights, but for the mosquitoes. Stars from horizon to horizon, just a smudge of light from Indianola down south.

“How are the swamp boys?” Desmond asked me.

“Watching
SportsCenter
. Seemed happy enough. Pearl’s got them all in jackets.”

Desmond laughed his muffled snort like a sneeze from the end of a pipe.

“What time tomorrow?” he asked me.

I shrugged. “Up and out early, I guess. You know you don’t have to come. I can probably handle Guy.”

“I’ll be there,” Desmond told me.

“I’ll get that Ranchero tomorrow or quit trying. Damned if I’ve ever gone to such fuss for a car.”

We walked around toward the front of the house where I’d parked Eugene’s truck.

“How’s that thing drive?” he asked me.

“Better than you’d think, but it gets the mileage of a motor grader.” I climbed up and in. “Take care of your mother,” I told Desmond.

“Can’t do nothing else.”

I drove down the Dwyer Road to Sunflower along the railroad track. There was moonlight shining on the cornstalks, across the soybeans and the wheat. The few houses I passed were still and unlit. I didn’t meet any traffic. The Delta at night can be like a trash pile under a few inches of fresh snow—beauty alone untouched by squalor and unleavened with desperation. I took my time driving back to Pearl’s and enjoyed myself a little too much.