Ranchero (18 page)

He wasn’t actually married to the woman who wasn’t Percy Dwayne’s aunt but was just living with her strictly due to her merciful dispensation. In return she seemed to have seized the right to belittle and emasculate him in a casual and almost sporting sort of way.

Percy Dwayne called his uncle Doodle, but the woman who wasn’t Percy Dwayne’s aunt only ever referred to him as “this shitbag here.” For his part, Doodle just grinned and smoked, while Percy Dwayne was left to defend his uncle’s character.

In this case, the uncle was suitably older than Percy Dwayne, but the woman who wasn’t Percy Dwayne’s aunt kept telling us she was just thirty. As claims go, it seemed wishful based on the evidence at hand.

Her bare feet looked to be forty-five and her spider-veined legs about sixty. She had a lot more girth than her housedress had been built to handle, so she was leaking out of it where the seams were weak and everywhere else there was a hole. She had jowly underarms and fifteen or twenty necks, a meth addict’s smile (a lot more gum than enamel), and a shade of hair on the order of a groundhog in July.

If one of the things she owned was a vacuum cleaner, she must not have held it dear, because Eugenia (her name was) and Uncle Shitbag were parked right in the middle of domestic squalor on a monumental scale.

Eugenia and Uncle Shitbag were living among Banquet chicken boxes, hamburger wrappers, burrito sleeves, and empty malt liquor forties. Their dog companions were so fat and aged that they could barely walk. Worse still, they weren’t regular dachshunds. They were the long-haired miniature sort, which usually come with gastrointestinal defects and deplorable attitudes.

So while I was casting around for something redeeming about Percy Dwayne’s uncle and the woman who wasn’t his aunt, they were frustrating me at every turn with their prattle and shiftlessness. Eugenia mostly since Doodle made do as a whiskery affirmation. She’d announce some thought she was having about one thing or another, and he’d nod and say, “Lot of truth to that.”

Most of it was Fox News–related. They had their forty-two-inch plasma set tuned to the Fox late-morning news. Effervescent talk about jihadists and the liberal seditionist front.

Eugenia informed us in no uncertain terms that her and Uncle Shitbag hadn’t heard a peep out of Percy Dwayne’s wife, and she went on to wonder about a man who couldn’t control his woman.

“Don’t you?” she asked Percy Dwayne’s uncle, and in a sign of, I guess, affection she reached out and tugged on his ear like she was hoping to pull it off.

This time Uncle Doodle cackled and smoked and said back to Eugenia, “Angel’s pissing.”

One of the dachshunds was irrigating a Hardee’s bag on the floor. Eugenia threw Uncle Shitbag’s ashtray at it, which helped account for how the house had gotten the way it was.

Percy Dwayne’s uncle rose from the couch and picked his way toward the kitchen. He gave us a sort of wink as if to invite us to follow him there. We did to the extent the three of us could fit inside the kitchen, where they were making compost and penicillin together and at once.

Doodle nodded and whispered, “She called this morning. That one”—he said of Eugenia—“was on the crapper.”

“What did she say?” Percy Dwayne asked him.

“Couldn’t say much, I don’t guess. He was hanging around her. I could hear him. And that baby of yours was crying.”

“Was she looking for me?”

“Didn’t really get that far. She was looking to find somebody who wasn’t him.”

“Where is she?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Doodle told me.

“You know anything about Guy?”

Doodle glanced toward the front room. He motioned for us to follow him out the back kitchen door and onto the porch. It appeared to have been a screen porch once but was now a sort of dumpster where all the rubbish that wouldn’t fit in the house ended up.

“She had kind of a problem,” Doodle told us, by which he meant Eugenia, and he went on to give us some details about the people she’d run with, the narcotics she’d favored, the trouble she’d found, the redemption she’d finally won. “She’s a Christian woman now.”

That surprised me a little. She’d not impressed me as Christian but more as a petty, sneering, and self-deluded witch.

“She’s all cleaned up,” Doodle told us. I had to think malt liquor didn’t count. “She used to do some work for that son of a bitch.”

“Guy?”

Doddle nodded. “She seen him do shit to people. Treat them like dogs.”

“Did you know any of this?” I asked Percy Dwayne.

“I couldn’t stop her,” he told me, and shook his head. “Sissy’s always liked her men bad.”

“Mine too,” Doodle said of Eugenia. “But she’s off it anymore.”

“Know where we can find him?” I asked Doodle.

“He’s all over the damn place. I can tell you this, got a house over in Fitler near the river. One of the boys cooking that shit for him over there isn’t a goddamn Mexican. Fellow from up by Nitta Yuma. Good as put his daddy in the ground.”

“Who?” Percy Dwayne asked.

“That middle Hobart boy.”

“The one with the birthmark?” Percy Dwayne asked as he pressed his palm to his cheek.

Doddle nodded. “That shit got hold of him. You won’t even know who you’re looking at.”

“The one that played the fiddle?”

“Yeah, well,” Doodle told him. “He don’t play it no more.”

“We were already on our way there,” I said.

“What are you packing?” Doodle wanted to know.

Short of a shoulder-fired rocket, I don’t think I could have satisfied him.

“I’ll fix you up,” he said.

He went in a closet and brought out a gun wrapped in a towel. It was an authentic M4A1, the Colt model for Special Forces and an awful hell of a long way from Fort Bragg.

“Where did you get this?” I asked him.

“Got a buddy.”

“Is he the Secretary of Defense?”

I hadn’t held one in a few years, but got comfortable with it quick. I ejected the clip and checked the movement. Uncle Doodle’s had the pistol grip.

“Damn,” Percy Dwayne said.

“Damn’s right,” I told him. “You could cut Guy and all of his buddies right in half with this.”

There was a sweetgum tree in the backyard. It was framed by the porch doorway where there wasn’t anything but an unscreened panel anymore. I let go a burst into the trunk. The dachshunds started howling, followed close on by Eugenia. Desmond came around the house at full glide with his machine pistol in hand.

Uncle Doodle looked from me with his M4 to Desmond with his Steyr. “I think you boys’ll be all right,” he said.

Doodle supplied us with two full clips. I paused in the front room to take the blame for the gunfire and temporarily get Uncle Shitbag off the hook.

“That’s an awful nice TV,” I told Eugenia, and it looked a lot better sitting in Eugenia’s TV cabinet than it had on the floor of Percy Dwayne and Sissy’s house two days before.

“He gave it to us,” she said, and glared at Percy Dwayne. “I don’t know why.” She made it sound like an accusation.

Percy Dwayne was standing right beside me, not breathing at all. I’m sure he thought I was going to repo the thing. A day or two earlier, I might have, but I had other things than televisions on my mind just then.

“That’s a thoughtful gift,” I told Eugenia. “You and Doodle here enjoy it.”

Eugenia snorted and said, “Can’t imagine why I’d be needing you to tell me what to do.”

*   *   *

“That’s right. Hobart,” Eugene said when we repeated what Doodle had told us. “They call him Slim. He’s about as ruined as they come.”

“Maybe we can help him.”

“Yeah,” Eugene told me as he pointed at the M4. “Take that thing and shoot him in the head.”

“Sure you know what you’re doing?” Tommy asked me.

“Guy’s got you boys rattled,” I said.

“He ain’t like any of you,” Eugene told us. “He’ll do any damn thing to any damn body as easy as you breathe.”

“Evil bastard?”

Eugene and Tommy nodded vigorously.

I couldn’t help but think how much I preferred evil to shiftlessness. Evil has form and purpose. Evil has logic, even if it’s warped. Evil is unconflicted. It’s dependable and thorough. You never run across people who are only evil half the time.

Shiftlessness doesn’t have anything but a galling lack of pluck. It’s mindless and almost incidental. You can’t be shiftless and evil, just like you can’t be shiftless and decent. Think of the commitment, the troublesome responsibility. When you go up against evil people, they drive all your doubt away.

They followed us in the Geo, Luther and Desmond did, and I let Percy Dwayne get behind the wheel of the truck. Eugene was suffering through a moderate collapse of nerve, and he was contaminating Tommy with his runaway misgivings. It was like we were going to pay a call on Lucifer at home.

We took back roads down to Blanton and then the regular highway to Onward where Percy Dwayne turned west toward Fitler and the river on Route 1. By then, Eugene had worked himself into a certifiable state. He wondered who’d take care of his dogs and keep up his house when he was dead. Would they even find his body so they could put him in a grave?

“What did you see?” I finally asked him.

“Nothing,” he lied.

“Look at yourself. You’re giving us everything but the story.”

“I saw a man killed,” Eugene finally said.

And Percy Dwayne told him sneeringly, “Shit.”

Percy Dwayne added how he’d seen all sorts of people done away with. Drunk behind the wheel. Shot. Stabbed. Beat with bats and such.

“Where?” I asked Percy Dwayne.

“All over,” he told me. “The Delta’s a funny place.”

“This was different,” Eugene said.

“D-d-different,” Tommy added and nodded.

“Did you see it, too?” I asked him.

“Naw, but I heard about it once.”

“Can’t sit on it now,” I told Eugene.

He said he didn’t guess he could. “Shouldn’t even have been there. Having truck trouble. Couldn’t get no spark.”

“Where exactly?”

“One of Guy’s places. Down near Eagle Bend. Back on Steele Bayou in the scrub. He was having a problem with one of his slingers—some boy from over in Jackson. Skimming or something. I don’t know. It don’t take much with Guy.”

Then Eugene got busy directing Percy Dwayne off a perfectly good paved road. He sent him down a track in the middle of a soybean field toward a row of trees that looked ten miles away.

“Guy killed him?” I asked.

“After a while. Just started in cutting him up.”

The road was washed out from the field irrigation, and Percy Dwayne failed to slow down until we’d all been just about flung clear of the truck.

“Creep a little,” I told him.

Even he’d bounced off the cab roof by then and so thought I might be talking sense.

“Guy’s got this knife,” Eugene said. He held his hands a foot and a half apart. “Some Japanese thing he took off a fellow. He strops it to keep it sharp. It’s always around him somewhere, and he pulled it out of his car when him and that boy were having words. He just lopped that fellow’s arm off right there at the elbow, and suddenly Guy didn’t seem mad anymore.”

“Shit!” Percy Dwatne said. “Whacked a boy’s arm clean off?”

Eugene nodded. “Yes sir,” he said. “Right through gristle and bone, every damn thing. Like he was taking apart a fryer.”

Tommy nodded. Tommy said, “Yes sir,” too.

“Funny thing about Guy,” Eugene went on. “He can get as pissed off as anybody, but you and me would get stirred up and do harm
because
we were mad. Then we’d be sorry about it. That’s the way with people, isn’t it? People I know anyway. You chop a fellow’s arm off, the next thing you’re going to do is wish you hadn’t.”

“I hear you,” Percy Dwayne said. “You ain’t telling me a thing.”

“This wasn’t that,” Eugene insisted. “Two boys can get to fighting, and it can go bad. But this was something else. This was Guy’s sort of fun.”

Eugene said he was pulling spark plugs when that boy let out a shriek. He looked over just as Guy bent down and plucked that boy’s arm off the ground. They were standing just off the bayou, not ten yards from the water, and Eugene said Guy took that length of arm and tossed it right on in.

“His gator must have been there waiting. He had one he fed goats to, and the water started churning and boiling. Guy whipped around with knife of his and set to whacking at that boy again. He took off his other arm up near the shoulder.”

It was the laughing that got to Eugene. Guy was having a grand time, and the more that boy screamed and bled, the happier Guy seemed to get.

“I’d known Guy a little while by then. We’d played some poker together. He’d laugh at the table when you’d tell him a joke, and this was just like that. Fun,” Eugene told us. “Just something to do.”

“Jesus,” Percy Dwayne said, and it was easy enough to tell he was thinking of his wife and son. “Yesterday he seemed like anybody. But smooth, you know. A little slicker than regular people.”

“That’s the thing about Guy,” Eugene told us all. “He fits in until he don’t.”

Eugene couldn’t get his truck to turn over. “I half figured I was next. He was having a high time taking that boy to pieces and feeding him bit by bit to that stinking alligator. It looked like the fellow was a third in the swamp before he finally died. Guy all covered in blood and laughing like the devil’s own first cousin. And those boys of his, you know…” Eugene turned to Tommy.

“Big guys,” Tommy said. “Muscles all over.”

“They didn’t look like they were caring for it, either. But they didn’t try to stop Guy. No sir. Didn’t say a thing.”

Eugene said the worst of it was when Guy came over to him.

“Blood everywhere, all over him, but he didn’t seem to care. He’s got that knife in his hand, big shiny thing, I’m standing there on the bumper wondering if I’d even feel it when it passed through my neck.”

Eugene shook his head and gave a little quiver like he was having a chill. “‘What’s your trouble?’ Guy asked me.” Eugene laughed. “What’s my fucking trouble, and him standing there looking like he’d been dipped in guts. What’s my trouble? Shit.”