Ranchero (2 page)

As a rule, deepest Dixie is black and white and Christian in a way the Lord and Savior could never have intended. Your basic Southern Baptist would willingly delay his personal ascent into heaven for the baser pleasure of hanging around to see you burn in hell. The Delta just supplies a regional wrinkle in the common tone.

K-Lo’s people might have been Muslim, but they’d evolved to the Southern veneer. They drank sweet tea, wore Walmart denim, and could rattle on about the weather, but they’d all retained their Middle Eastern volatility. It was an unrelenting tribal trait like being towheaded or chinless. I knew if I dialed up K-Lo, he’d effectively explode.

I decided instead to call Desmond, a far more temperate soul and the only one of my colleagues I liked. Unfortunately, I’d left my Motorola on the dash of the Ranchero and couldn’t locate anything but vacant phone jacks in the house, which sent me outside to waylay a boy on a bike down by the street. He didn’t see me until I was right beside him, when he all but levitated.

“Shit, mister!” he yelped, and retreated across the road in an awful hurry. It took a five-dollar bill to lure him back so I could rent his phone. He studied me while I dialed up Desmond to tell him where I was. Desmond didn’t ask questions, just agreed he’d come and fetch me.

“What happened to you?” the boy wanted to know once I’d handed his phone back to him.

“I got in a tussle,” I told him, and jabbed my thumb at the house I’d come out of. “Know him?”

He nodded. “Daddy says he stole our mower.” Then he added by way of friendly advice, “You might want to work on your tussling.”

TWO

While I waited for Desmond to roll up, I rooted through the house and found that fireplace shovel on the floor in the half bath. By way of tussling practice, I attacked the corner cupboard and pulverized every mismatched dish I could reach.

Given the heft of the pan, I had to think that if that boy had swatted me in earnest, I’d have been a candidate for the mortuary. I was lucky in the end he was the type to do everything half-assed.

My headache finally overcame me, and I fished some ice out of the freezer that I wrapped in a purple tube top the wife had left on the dinette. I parked out on the front steps and applied the thing to my welts and contusions while I waited for Desmond to work his way over to me from the Sonic.

He’d been eating a Coney Island when I reached him on the phone, and I well knew there wasn’t any chance of rushing him along.

Desmond was methodical and maddeningly meticulous, took a glacial approach to every little thing he did. He’d gotten shot once in a roadhouse fight and had driven himself to the hospital in Greenville, where he’d nearly bled to death while trying to park snug to the curb. But I knew I could depend on Desmond to show up even if only at length, and the Delta is a place where you can’t, as a rule, depend on anything much.

Desmond had gone through an ugly divorce about a year before I met him, ugly for him, anyway, but productive for his ex. She’d gotten their house in Ruleville along with Desmond’s Escalade, and while he might have been happy to be done with her, he’d mourned the loss of his Caddy.

Desmond had loved his Escalade and had spent a small fortune on rims. Now his ex went flying around in the thing and didn’t even wash it. Worse still, in the settlement Desmond had gotten his ex’s Geo Metro, which Desmond, given his size, was obliged to drive from the backseat.

I’d once been in Desmond’s company when we’d run across his ex out in the parking lot of the Pecan House. She was a wee thing—all stick-on nails and hair extensions and palpable bad faith. She was with a fellow she kept calling her “intended,” some lowlife from Chicago in a faux-silk shirt who wore a soul patch that would have embarrassed a goat.

Talk turned quickly to money Desmond’s ex had convinced herself he owed her, which her “intended” got right on the verge of volunteering a remark about. Then he noticed how Desmond and I were looking at him.

I could smell the outstanding warrants that had chased him from Illinois, and I knew Desmond was hoping to meet with cause to fling him to the pavement and kick him around the parking lot for a while.

Desmond’s ex, Shawnica, rattled off a litany of reasons why Desmond owed her two hundred and sixty-seven dollars. It had something to do with a power bill and a revolving department store charge, but Desmond was fixed on his Escalade sitting behind her and didn’t seem to hear.

The front end was bug-encrusted, and the windows were all greasy and smudged. A shroud of brake dust had dulled the elaborate faceted chrome of the rims.

As Shawnica nattered on about her needs and Desmond’s obligations, I could see that Desmond was working toward some manner of eruption. To the untrained eye, it wouldn’t have looked like anything at all. Desmond was a little too blubbered over for telltale signs of emotion, but I’d been around him enough by then to read him fairly well.

The slight squint, the snort, the way he closed and opened his monstrous hands as Shawnica aired her grievances and tallied up her charges. I had the sense to take a full step back.

Seconds thereafter, Desmond punched the intended in the sternum, and him and his soul patch went flying like they’d been fired from a circus canon. That boy landed on the trunk of a Camry in a sleazy, groaning pile while Desmond turned and lumbered toward his Geo.

Shawnica was just behind him in a comprehensive rage. He swung open the driver’s door and went about fitting himself inside while Shawnica screeched and slapped at Desmond with her open hands until all of her stick-on nails had broken loose and fallen off. They lay like so much glittering litter on the pavement.

Desmond hauled on his seat belt, adjusted his rearview mirror ever so slightly, and started his engine as he reached his elbow to lock his door. Shawnica couldn’t smack him hard enough to make him act like she was there.

“Come on, Nick,” he told me, so I climbed in and we rolled across the lot with Shawnica running beside us all the while.

She was simultaneously smacking Desmond and shrieking for the law. We were a good thirty yards up the truck route before we managed to leave her behind. Even then she pulled a shoe off and flung it at us.

Desmond drove directly to the Sonic for a couple of Coney Islands. If Desmond had a bat cave, the Indianola Sonic was it. A city cruiser came by while Desmond was busy marshaling condiments. It eased up beside us with a couple of cracker cops inside.

Just as the near one was asking us about the punched intended, Desmond shifted around and drew him up short with a glance.

Desmond could be menacing. He was huge and eggplant black and had a way of looking feral when he wanted. The chances must have seemed good, even to pinhead crackers with badges, that Desmond might be trouble to bring in. The cop who’d been talking simply shut up, and the one behind the wheel dropped the cruiser into gear and drove out of the Sonic just like he’d driven in.

“Damn, Obi-Wan,” I said in an admiring sort of way, and Desmond uncorked what passed with him for laughter. It sounded like somebody sneezing from the far end of a culvert. Then he punched me fondly in the arm, and I bounced off the passenger door.

After that day, Desmond would do for me and I would do for him, and we didn’t have to say a thing about it.

So I might have waited an hour, but I knew Desmond would show at last, and he finally rolled up and made a minor career out of parking curbside. I watched him from the porch steps with my fireplace shovel in hand as he fought his way out of his Geo like a man scrabbling out of a hole.

“Who done that?” he asked me.

I hadn’t suspected I’d look a fright from the street. I jabbed my thumb toward the house behind me. “Some boy. Can’t say who yet.”

“What with?” Desmond wanted to know.

I smacked the porch rail with that shovel. The steel pan rang out deep and pure.

“Lord, Nick,” Desmond told me. “You just might ought to be dead.”

THREE

Burglary is a going career in the Mississippi Delta, and K-Lo’s rental shop had been broken into a half dozen times or more. One of the last batches of thieves had carried off K-Lo’s stuffed catamount not two months back. It had been posed on a rock primed to pounce with its red lacquered tongue sticking out. Kalil had killed it himself, which he was usually pleased to mention in part. He routinely left out the bit about how he’d hit it with his Civic.

The theft of that cat had gotten entirely under Kalil’s skin, and he’d gone out in a righteous rage and bought himself a Beretta shotgun. His plan was to lay for the next thieving bastards and rain some vengeance on them.

Of course, a shotgun doesn’t pair so well with a hothead like Kalil, so we took it as our common duty to keep the thing unloaded. Kalil would get in a snit and shove shells in, and we’d slip around and eject them, for selfish reasons as much as anything else.

Even a calm, careful man who fires a shotgun in a store full of televisions is likely to take out a Panasonic or three. Kalil, we feared, might shoot us all straight into unemployment.

We figured he was better off yelling, and he could be brutal with a tirade. I saw K-Lo lay waste to a fellow maybe a week after he’d hired me, an ex-con named Ronnie who unboxed freight and drove a panel truck.

Ronnie had gone out on a delivery and caught his mirror on a light pole. He’d confessed as much to Kalil straightaway and had offered to pay for the damage, but Kalil had gone off on him nonetheless. He did a devastating job of poking Ronnie in his rawest places. Ronnie was a hapless fuckup, so there was plenty to exploit, and K-Lo managed in maybe ninety seconds to mount a scathing history of Ronnie’s abiding talent for benighted misadventure.

That was the first time I had ever seen a tattooed felon weep.

Happily, K-Lo’s wife would swing by the store a couple of times a week to lavish a little ungoverned abuse on K-Lo.

Their marriage had been arranged. K-Lo had carried the woman from Beirut to a Leland ranch house on a fly-blown bayou, so she’d given up the Paris of the Middle East for the ancestral home of Kermit the Frog. She seemed to resent it a little more bitterly with each passing day.

She liked to stop in and remind Kalil of all the Delta hardships she’d never have known if she’d just stayed back home in Lebanon. She seemed to prefer to do it at peak volume.

They’d rage at each other throughout the store, no matter who was about. K-Lo would dip into the stockroom, and his wife would follow him, shrieking. They’d have alfresco screaming matches on the slab by the loading ramp. The ordeal had a way of deflating Kalil, and he’d be spent for the balance of the day.

I happened to get beat with that fireplace shovel while K-Lo’s wife was away. She’d been up in Brooklyn for a week already visiting assorted cousins, so K-Lo had been raging unchecked for days and had gathered a vile head of steam. When me and Desmond pulled into the shopping plaza lot, he was out on the sidewalk smoking.

“Where’s my goddamn TV?” he barked my way, letting it serve as well for “you look like shit” and “hello.”

“They took it,” I said. “Hit me with this.” I held up my fireplace shovel.

K-Lo spat with disgust and drew his cigarette down to the filter in a spasm of rage. Then he flicked his butt and bounced it off my shirtfront. It exploded in sparks and fell to the pavement, where I ground it out with my boot.

“Hey!” K-Lo shouted, and his right hand, Patty, came scampering out of the store. “Get Dale,” he told her.

Dale was a raging psychopath and Patty’s husband both at once. He was a county policeman, a bigot, a misogynist, a xenophobe, and a musclehead who appeared to live on supplements and Skoal. Dale had developed so much veiny bulk in his years of hoisting dumbbells that it had reached the point where he could hardly fit in his uniform. He was all chiseled contours and looked like he’d walked straight out of a Marvel Comic.

K-Lo liked to call him in when customers defaulted because Dale was the sort of cop who lived to beat civilians up.

Patty ran into the store to phone him. Even from out in the parking lot we could hear every word she told Dale because he was a tireless plinker who thought earplugs were for faggots, so he’d made of himself a burly heterosexual who couldn’t hear shit.

Apparently he was over on the truck route making trouble for a pack of Mexicans. It seems Dale had pulled them for too damn much tread wear and was turning their car inside out. It should be said that Dale thought anybody who spoke Spanish was a Mexican, and it took only two of them together to constitute a pack.

So as far as anybody knew, Dale might have been hassling a dozen unpapered migrants or engineering an ugly forenoon for the king and queen of Spain. Either way, it was plain Dale thought he might be tied up for a bit, and I figured we might have twenty minutes to get what we needed from K-Lo. This was all my business, and I didn’t want the pair of them mucking it up—Dale with his blundering stupidity and K-Lo with his scattershot rage.

“I’ll want paper on that boy,” I told K-Lo, and he bolted straightaway, running headlong into the store like we wouldn’t know where to find him.

Desmond and I followed him back to his office. We gave him the chance to unbolt his door before Desmond bucked against it once and blew it off its hinges. The thing hit K-Lo and knocked the shotgun from his hands. I stood on the barrel to keep him from picking it up.

“Paper,” I said, and K-Lo looked like he might just vomit on me.

When it came to the details of his business, K-Lo was clinically unwell. He couldn’t bring himself to let anybody know anything at all. We never went out on repos with actual invoices in hand but just scraps from a pad where K-Lo’d written a physical address. He wouldn’t even give us the customers’ names because he lived in nagging fear we’d go all devious and entrepreneurial on him.

“PAPER,”
I insisted, and K-Lo stood there stricken and forlorn until Desmond bent him over his desk and applied sufficient tonnage to tempt K-Lo to reorder what he cared about and why. Breathing moved up to the top of the list and paperwork drifted well south.