Ranchero (7 page)

We pulled in for gas at a Qwik Stop near Belzoni. I was standing at the pump island putting in ten dollars exactly for Desmond when a fellow pulled up on the other side to fill his muddy Ranger.

He saw Luther’s feet in the way back, laughed, and asked, “Who the fuck’s that?”

I didn’t have Desmond to supply me with the proper Delta answer. He’d gone into the shop for a hunk of monkey bread. It was the only food that would sustain him when a Coney Island wasn’t at hand.

In most places I would have just said Luther was drunk and had a laugh with that fellow at the gas pump, but nobody in the Delta ever let alcohol keep them from fighting or driving. You could be a Primitive Baptist—a sober subset of the place—or you could be a passably functioning alcoholic. You couldn’t be just passed out and shoved in the back of a Metro. That would qualify as suspicious in the Delta.

“His wife caught him with her sister. She like to beat him to death.” I reached in through the passenger window and pulled out my fireplace shovel, showed it to that fellow at the pump island as a narrative visual aid.

It turned out he’d had a thing with an in-law once and had gotten in a row about it. He took off his cap, parted his hair, and showed me a scar on the top of his head.

“Get it worked out?” I asked him.

“Had three babies since then.”

The average Delta romance—excluding the girls from the cotillion in Greenville—was less candlelight and champagne than antibiotics and midnight sutures.

Desmond came out with his mouth full as that fellow pulled away, and I suggested we might want to extract Luther and chat him up sooner than later.

Desmond agreed to the extent that he drove north another dozen miles or so before he turned off on a side road and pulled in behind a church. It was one of those frame black churches of the Temple-Mount-Nazarene-Zion-of-the-Lamb variety with a string of letters after the name like it had gone to dental school.

It had a cemetery with the graves sunk in and the markers tilted and pitched from the heaving ground. We parked around by the propane tank where there was a vapor light, hauled Luther out, and laid him on the hood. It turned out he’d been awake for a pretty good while, just pinned tight by the seat back and resting.

When he opened his mouth, he started in just where he’d left off. “Because I wouldn’t have stuck you unless you told me to.”

I had to reach in and stop Desmond from clapping Luther’s head between his hands again.

“Why would he tell you to stab him?” I asked Luther.

“He was all fucked up back then. Ask him.”

So I did. “Shawnica?”

Desmond and Luther nodded in unison.

Luther then asked us both together, “Where’d my boots get to?”

Desmond pointed south into the Mississippi night.

Luther looked tempted to set up an ugly fuss about his boots until Desmond rang his bell with a lone open hand to reprioritize him.

“A cousin of yours stole his car,” Desmond said. “You’re going to help us get it back.”

“What cousin?”

“Percy Dwayne.”

Luther groaned. “First place,” he told us, “he’s my uncle, not my cousin. Second, I can’t do nothing with him.”

“He’s a good ten years younger than you,” I said. “How’s he your uncle?”

Desmond and Luther looked at me like I’d asked them where mud comes from. I hadn’t thought it through, of course. There’s a whole class of people in the Delta who have strings of children the way Calcutta swells have polo ponies. I’d seen more than a few grandmotherly Dubois sorts with babies on their hips that they sure weren’t treating like grandchildren. A toddler could easily be an uncle to a grown man in these parts.

“How did he come to have your car?” Luther asked me.

I lifted my head so the vapor light showed off my cuts and my contusions.

“Oh,” Luther said. “I just figured some fellow beat you up.”

“Some fellow did,” I told him.

And Luther had a Kendell moment. “Percy Dwayne!?” he said, and stuck out a hand at gay, dwarf hanger-on height.

“Came up behind me with a shovel.”

I tried not to sound all whiny and defensive, but then Luther snorted and treated me to a sneer, so I clapped his head between my hands once hard.

I lack Desmond’s natural force and bulk and so failed to knock Luther out cold, but I rocked him enough to make him whimper a little.

“What the hell you need me for?” Luther wanted to know. “If you know what he took and know who took it, why don’t you call the law?”

Me and Desmond glanced at each other, lost for an explanation we’d be willing to share with Luther, but he provided us in the interval a workable one of his own. “Car stole before he stole it?” he asked us.

That seemed handy enough, so we nodded and told him, “Yep.”

“We might work something out,” Luther said in his come-into-my-office sort of way.

“It’s worked out,” Desmond told him. “You’re going to help us find him, and we’re going to make you wish you had every time you don’t.”

“I’ll need my boots.”

“They’re back at Tootie’s,” I told him. “We’ll get you something else.”

We let him ride upright this time or as upright as he could get in what passes in a Metro for a back seat.

What we learned on the way up 49 was that Luther couldn’t shut up. He told us every little thing he remembered about his uncle Percy Dwayne, most of it inflammatory and incriminating. Some of it so glancing and inconsequential that Luther would forget what he was going on about before he was halfway through.

Then Luther treated us to the ghastly intimate details of a fling he’d lately had with the fat, bald woman from Tootie’s. Though she looked like a Fred or a Dewey, her name was Tiffany, as it turned out. Luther described what they’d gotten up to with the arid precision of an electrical engineer detailing a wiring chart.

“Shut it!” I told him at last.

“You boys ain’t no fun,” Luther said. “Him particular.” He pointed at Desmond. “Went all straight and shit, didn’t you?”

Desmond made the sort of necknoise you might hear from a Kodiak bear if you got close enough to be eaten by one for dinner.

“Hey,” Luther said, and poked the back of Desmond’s shoulder. “Bet Momma ain’t on the high road with you.”

“Hit him,” Desmond told me. I was inclined that way already.

I had just enough room to work my arm like a piston, and I caught Luther flush between the eyes. His head bounced off the rear window glass, and Luther napped for a bit.

We were up near the crossroads at the truck route, and we both seemed to know where we were heading without having discussed it at all.

“What if Dale’s there?” I asked.

“We’ll send him in first,” Desmond told me. Luther was just beginning to stir by then. “Can’t ride around all night.”

With that, Desmond cut west in the direction of Indianola, took some back road by Centralia, and came up from the south, just in case Dale had some buddies laying for us on the truck route.

We rolled by Pearl’s a couple of times. It was a little past nine by then. She had lights she rarely switched on burning all over the house.

“Why’s that?” Desmond asked, but I couldn’t truly say, so we decided that was the sort of thing Luther could find out for us, Luther who claimed to be awfully goddamn tired of finding himself knocked out.

“Fair enough,” I told him. “You do for us, and we’ll stop beating on you.”

“I’ll be needing a little folding money as well.”

“Let’s see how it goes,” I said. “You help us with Percy Dwayne, help us get my car back, and I’ll try to make you whole.”

We stopped at the head of Pearl’s block, and I pointed Pearl’s house out to Luther.

“There’s a car shed in the back. Apartment up top. Go unlock it and turn the lights on. Then look around and see if anybody’s about.” I pulled the key off my ring and gave it to him.

“Who are you expecting?” Luther asked me.

I shrugged. “Nobody really.”

“And if it’s somebody, what do I tell him?”

“Tell him you’re feeding the cat.”

“What’s the cat’s name?”

“Isn’t a cat.”

Luther got all over me for not observing his primary rule of espionage: Only lie when you have to.

“I’m going to tell him I’m watering your plants instead.” Then he tapped his temple with his finger as a sign of how shrewd he was.

I let him out of the Geo and stood there looking out over the roof as Luther walked up the street in his socks and turned into Pearl’s driveway.

“Got any plants?” Desmond asked me.

“No,” I said.

Desmond kept the motor running and the car in gear, and I climbed back in so we’d be ready to go. I think we half expected to see Dale or one of his musclehead cracker colleagues come charging out of Pearl’s house armed like SWAT and firing grenades and such. But nothing happened and nothing continued to happen for longer than we’d hoped.

Then we got uneasy and feared that Luther might be ransacking the place or going cross-country out to the truck stop in hopes of flagging down a cruiser. Luther was just one to figure there’d be some reward for him in turning us in.

So we climbed out of the Geo and hovered by it for a time.

“What do you think?” Desmond kept asking me, and I kept not exactly knowing, until Luther finally strolled down the driveway. We could hear the click of his shoes, and he looked to be wearing a seersucker sports coat as well.

“Looks to me,” I said to Desmond, “Luther got insisted at.”

“Pearl’s looking for you,” Luther told me. Then he opened his jacket to show us the sateen lining. “Just like new.”

The shoes were fine black leather oxfords, though a little wingtippy and tooled half to death, but that was just in Luther’s line. Better still they had taps on the heels.

“It seems that husband of hers,” he told us, “used to be quite the dancer.” Luther wheeled around so we could better take him in.

“Come on,” he told us. “Pearl’s got supper waiting.”

EIGHT

Pearl, as it turned out, was in insisting heaven. Luther was naturally primed to steal everything she had, and Pearl was possessed of a burning need to hand all of it over. So they were enjoying a natural sync you don’t usually find with humans. The two of them were cackling over some private joke on the steps of Pearl’s back porch by the time me and Desmond had made it up the drive.

Desmond had been by a time or two before, and Pearl had visited some fudge on him that had turned out to be a little blue and fuzzy in the middle, so Desmond was a lot more guarded than Luther about getting insisted at.

I was a little done in, and I was trying to figure some way out of supper until a woman came out of Pearl’s house and joined Pearl on the steps.

She was lovely and stylish, tall and fit. She looked out of place in the Delta. I was afraid for a moment she’d open her mouth and spoil it all with her chatter, but she didn’t talk like one of those syrupy Delta princesses who seem intent on saying nothing without end and all the time. She was pleasant and warm and seemed happy to meet us, which is more than I would have been if I’d been her and we’d rolled up with Luther in the dark.

She was Pearl’s only sister’s child, Angela Marie, who Pearl talked about so much I’d long since tuned her out. I knew she worked in a Memphis hospital, and I’d just figured she was a nurse and had pictured a homely, dumpy girl wandering the wards in her whites. It turned out, though, she ran the place, and she insisted we call her Angie.

“My,” she said once she’d seen my welts and bruises in the porch light.

“Wrong end of a shovel,” I told her.

“Why don’t you come in here.”

She sat me down in Pearl’s kitchen under Pearl’s green-tinged fluorescents, which had the effect of making us all look a little mortuarial. Me more than Angie, who kept looking lovely if only a little too wan.

She cupped my chin in her hand and tilted my face up where she could see it best.

“Are you a doctor?” I asked her.

“Never practiced,” she said. “Anybody seen you yet?”

“No.”

Angie sent Pearl off for peroxide and cotton. “Headache?” she asked me.

“Not anymore.”

“Your nose is broken.”

“I figured.”

“I can probably straighten it up.”

I was about to tell her not to bother when she reached up and jerked the cartilage back where it had started out the morning. I think I screamed like a teenage girl at a slumber party.

“There,” she said, and took the bottle from Pearl so she could have the further pleasure of dashing peroxide on my wounds.

As meetings go, it wasn’t terribly auspicious from my end, but Pearl’s niece seemed to enjoy the chance to practice without a license, and it was a pleasant surprise to have an age-appropriate woman touch me for the first time in a while. Pearl had made supper enough for about a dozen people while Angie, I guess, had been roaming around turning all the lights on in the house.

The main entrée was a casserole. This one was capped with a layer of crumbled potato chips and alarmingly orange cheese. It took main force for Pearl to even pass a serving spoon through the crust. There was chicken and peas and carrots and milky gravy underneath.

Luther went into raptures. Now that he had his seersucker jacket on, he looked like he was ready for a night at the country club buffet.

It turned out Luther was truly slick with a compliment. Pearl would insist without encouragement, but Luther wasn’t taking any chances and handed out high purple kudos on every damn thing he could think of. The casserole itself. The place settings. The napkin rings. The glorious drop-leaf table. The sachet in the bowl on the sideboard. The silk ivy centerpiece. He went down the list of everything he could call by name and congratulated Pearl on having had the sterling taste to buy it.

It was a little hard for me to reconcile the Luther at Pearl’s with the one I’d met at Tootie’s, and I was half tempted to reconsider my low opinion of him until I saw Luther slip a fork into his pocket.

“So you’re the Nick Reid I’ve been hearing so much about,” Angie said. “Pearl tells me you’re in electronics.”