Ranchero (6 page)

On one forearm this guy had the face of a woman named Rita who looked a little like Thomas Jefferson but maybe half as pretty, and on the other he had what I guessed was an alligator, though it could have been a collie with scales.

I took a spot at the bar and waited for him to ask me what I wanted, and he finally did after a fashion. He glared at me, anyway, and said, “What?”

“Iron City if you’ve got it.”

He huffed and slouched, acted like I’d asked him to paint my house.

“Four dollars,” he said, and smacked the bottle down so hard before me that foam boiled out of the neck and beer pooled all over the place.

I drank the first one in silence, sat there looking closed off and morose, which was hardly much of a stretch with an Iron City to polish off. I had to wonder if Tootie had ever tasted an actual potable beer or had just gone through his jowly life drinking this skunky Pittsburgh lager.

The guy who’d last been dancing with the fat, bald woman came lurching up to the bar. His dungarees were greasy and his shirt was half-unbuttoned. He dug around in his pockets and came up with about eighty cents in change. He spilled it out on the bar top and ordered a Budweiser.

The bartender glanced at Tootie, who moved his head from side to side.

“Nope,” Popeye said, and that customer snorted and growled like a mucousy bear.

Every time he moved, his stink hit me. It was a blend of body funk and dank earth with a hint of tractor diesel.

“Hey,” he said, and I didn’t need to see him to know he was talking to me. I showed Popeye my empty Iron City bottle by way of ordering another.

“HEY!” There was a useful touch of menace to it now.

I swung my head around to take him in. “What?”

“Buy me a cold one.” He was thick-tongued and his eyes were wandering. He was missing most of his left ear. From the shape of what remained, it looked like somebody had gnawed it off.

He watched me, in as much as he could focus on anything, and drifted a little like he was fighting a wind.

Popeye slammed my Iron City down, and I closed my lips around the neck to soak up the nasty foam.

“HEY!”

This time I didn’t even bother to glance.

“Buy me a damn beer,” he said.

Most of the other patrons had taken an interest by now, including the bony, hatchet-faced girl who was plainly hoping for a brawl.

The dancing had stopped. The carousing had ebbed a little, and everybody in Tootie’s was waiting to find out how pliable I might be. As they saw it, if things went their way, I could be setting up rounds all night. They’d just have to bore in with their bonhomie grins and threaten me a little.

So I had the audience I wanted and a fellow I thought I could manage by tapping him with a bar stool if it went as far as that.

Once I could feel him leaning my way and drawing breath to speak, I squared my shoulders to him and said, “Fuck off.”

Then I shot him a quick, knuckly jab to the throat like I’d been taught at the academy. That boy sputtered and wheezed, coughed and stumbled. He was suddenly having so much trouble simply drawing breath that he could only manage to lean on the bar while he gurgled and stank.

I didn’t say a thing to him, didn’t really need to. Everybody in the place was watching him, but I just went back to my beer.

It was Desmond’s full Shawnica treatment repurposed for drunken cracker louts.

He recovered after a few minutes and somebody else bought him a beer. I made a point of not really giving a happy shit who.

The whole business got Popeye’s attention. He parked himself in front of me and asked me, “Do I know you?”

I thought he might ask me about my cuts and bruises, but he was kind of scuffed up himself. It seemed to be a state of nature with a class of people in the Delta.

I shook my head and told him, “Passing through,” and I went all glum and heavy hearted and spilled out a story that would have made Merle Haggard proud.

I told him I was driving down from Wheeling, had come out of the mine to go fetch Momma in Houston, where they’d said they couldn’t do a thing else with her at the cancer ward.

“She wants to be home with her people when she goes. Got a spot for her next to Daddy.” Then I polished off my Iron City backwash, which helped with the wincing quite a lot.

Popeye, as it turned out, had a dead momma, and he got all misty about her. We trafficked between us in momma-centric platitudes for a time until I found an agreeable spot to complain about my back. It was damaged from the coal seam, but the drive down wasn’t helping, and I’d gone and left my pain pills on the dresser at the house.

I let it go at that, didn’t want to push it with Popeye. I shifted onto the goddamn federal government and all their goddamn shit.

It turned out I’d done enough. Popeye wandered down the bar and said a thing close and private to Tootie. He glanced at me and saw that I was a fool for Iron City just like him.

Tootie turned his jowly head and fairly barked out, “Luther.”

Popeye came back to tell me, “This boy here’ll help you out.”

Luther Dubois materialized out of a gloomy back corner of the bar room. He was definitively seedy. Wiry and hard. Shifty and pestilential. He had about three days of growth on his chin but stank of aftershave.

I don’t think I’d ever seen Sansabelt pants on a man so flabless and skinny. His polo shirt was linty and aquamarine. He was wearing cowboy boots with silver toe caps and rococo needlework on what looked to be fake-lizard hide. He was dressed like the sort of fellow you might come across on the public links in a circle of hell, or maybe Oklahoma.

“What you hunting?” Luther asked me, and grinned. The plaque on his teeth was so uninterrupted, it looked a little like piping.

I told him about my back. My momma. The ride down from Wheeling. Luther said he might have just the thing.

He invited me into his office. He said it with all the relish of a ’70s TV hoodlum, and I followed him to a table back by the toilet door. For décor, Luther had a couple of Rolling Rock bottles and an overflowing ashtray.

“Oxy or Perk?” he asked me.

I shrugged. “Oxy, I guess.”

“Codone or Contin?”

“I don’t much care. Just need something to get me to Texas and back.”

Luther stepped into the bathroom. He came out with a little plastic bag of tablets in is hand. “Buck and a half a milligram. I’ve got forties and eighties.”

I’d been around the stuff enough up in Virginia to know Luther’s was a bullshit price. You’d pay a dollar and a half a milligram if you were buying OxyContin at Le Cirque. An even dollar was on the high end of the going urban rate. In the uplands, depending on supply and factoring in desperation, a forty-milligram tablet of Oxy usually went for about thirty bucks.

“Seems high,” I said.

Luther gave me a shrug, but I just stayed right where I was and waited. He lit a cigarette, a generic one that smelled like smoldering leaf litter, and took a leisurely pull on his Rolling Rock.

“For a friend of Tootie’s I can maybe go one and a quarter.”

“I’ll give you sixty cents a mil,” I said, and Luther had a bit of a cackling fit.

He got up and stalked around in a display of amused exasperation. This was drug dealing as opera for yokels.

“Sixty!? Shit! You hear that, Tootie?”

I think Tootie told him, “Uh-huh.” I couldn’t make him out over the music, but I saw a distinct jiggle in the folds in the back of his neck.

“A dollar ten,” Luther countered. “You buy three eighties, I’ll go an even buck.”

“Take a check?”

Luther went on another prance around the roadhouse. He was laughing and hooting, but I could tell he was mostly showing off his boots. Luther would stop every now and again and buff the tops of them on his pant legs.

For a guy peddling pharmaceuticals out of the back of a bar, Luther didn’t practice terribly much discretion. He yelled a fresh price at me from thirty feet away. You’d have thought we were transacting cattle on the hoof.

“Two forties at seventy cents,” I told him. “That’s all I’ve got to spend.”

From the way Luther squinted, I could see he was trying to do some powerful calculating in his head.

“All right, then,” he told me at last. “Forty-eight even. Cash money.”

That must have qualified as higher math for a Delta cracker since he was off by a full eight dollars.

I dug around in my pockets. I didn’t have forty-eight. I needed dimes and nickels to even make forty-five. I showed it to Luther, and he looked like he might go on a circuit again, but it turned out he was one of those people weak in the face of legal tender.

I had cash in my hand. I was offering it to him, and he couldn’t help but take it. It didn’t matter what he was asking. He was built to get what he got.

My two pills were a little grimy, which seemed to suit the circumstances. Popeye reached over the bar and shook my hand as I was leaving. It’s a wonder sometimes what the love of even a fictional momma can do.

In my absence, Desmond had backed deeper into the weedy patch, and was hidden from view behind a junked dump truck. I panicked a little when I didn’t see him at first. Then he blinked his headlights at me. Blinked, anyway, the one that still worked.

“He’s in there,” I told him, and showed Desmond my pair of pills.

He held his hand out, palm up, and had me drop them in it. “Momma’s got pain,” he said.

What was I going to tell him? “All right.”

Desmond pointed out a greasy cable laid up on the Metro dash. “Coil wire,” Desmond told me. “Took it off Luther’s car.”

“You knew he was in there?”

“Stood to reason.”

“So this is kind of about Luther and kind of about Momma’s pain?”

Desmond nodded. Desmond told me, “Kind of.”

It grew dark as we sat there, and finally somebody came reeling out of Tootie’s. It was the boy who’d demanded a beer. We watched him lurch across the lot, fling open the door of his pickup, and blunder under the wheel. It took him about a quarter hour to get the key in the ignition. He started the engine, revved it to screaming, and dropped the transmission into gear.

I was about to tell Desmond, “Uh-oh,” when that boy roared out of the lot. He shot straight across the road and into a soybean field. He just kept going for as long as he could until the truck sank in and mired up to the axles.

He tried to rock loose, but his transmission seized and his engine stalled out dead. We could hear his radio a little. He blew his horn a couple of times and swore quite a lot. Then, instead of climbing out and walking back to Tootie’s for help, he went (as best as we could tell) to sleep.

SEVEN

I was beginning to think Luther would never come out when Tootie’s door finally swung open and cast a shaft of light in the lot that Luther came prancing into. He unzipped his pants and hosed off Tootie’s front wall while simultaneously lighting a cigarette. Then he closed his trousers, polished his boot tops, and headed off to his car.

His was some variation on Desmond’s vehicle. Puny. Boxy. Kind of a city junker in the middle of nowhere much. Aside from pickups and tricked-out Escalades, that’s about all you’d ever see on the roads down here. They’re cheap to own and cheap to run, almost disposable, really, so it’s never terribly surprising when one of them won’t start.

Luther’s included. He cranked the engine for three or four minutes. We could hear the squeak of the throttle as he pumped the gas. The thing just ground away and didn’t threaten to catch.

We watched him climb out of his coupe and lift the hood. Luther surveyed the engine, not like a man who knew a thing about internal combustion but more like one who knew where the engine was. He poked around a little. He pulled something off and put it back on, jiggled a wire or two. Then he glanced around the parking lot, almost on the sly. Instead of looking for help, he appeared to be sizing up something to drive away.

“Why don’t you give him a hand,” Desmond suggested.

I’d have been suspicious to see me, but Luther didn’t blink when I wandered over to ask him what his trouble might be. I’d left Tootie’s two hours ahead of him and was still out in the lot.

“Catching some winks,” I said by way of explanation, but Luther didn’t care. I guess with his clientele, most any damn thing was normal.

“She won’t go,” he told me, and gave his car a theatrical sort of kick that showed his gaudy boots to best effect.

“Try it again,” I said, and Luther climbed in and turned the engine over while, shielded by the hood, I stood there doing nothing to help him along. “How about now?” Luther turned the key again.

He’d just joined me at the front grille when Desmond came up out of nowhere. That was one of Desmond’s leading skills. He was crafty and quiet and, once he slipped up on you, bigger than you could hope to do much of anything about.

Desmond eased up behind Luther, and Luther appeared to sense him. He got a look on his face like he was about to throw an aneurysm.

When he wheeled and saw Desmond, he said, “You told me to stick you! Remember?”

Desmond clapped his hands together with Luther’s head between his palms, and Luther went entirely senseless straightaway.

“You told him to stick you?”

Desmond ignored me. “Get his feet,” he said.

We carried Luther toward Desmond’s car, but I couldn’t figure what we were up to.

“Where are we going to put him?” I asked Desmond.

“In the back,” he said.

“What back?”

Come to find out, you can get a grown man in the back of a Metro. He just has to be unconscious so you can bend him and stuff him behind the passenger seat.

“We’ll take him somewhere and chat him up,” Desmond offered as a plan.

We’d forced Luther into the way back by shoving him down headfirst, which left his legs and feet sticking up in the air. So his gaudy boots were handy for Desmond to pull off.

He wedged one in front of each rear tire and ran over them a couple of times before we pulled out of Tootie’s lot and chugged off into the Mississippi night.

We had regrets on the road, of course, due to the stink of Luther’s feet.