Beluga

by Rick Gavin

  Then I pointed the shotgun. He chuckled and winked.

  “You first,” I told him.

  Instead he just sank out of sight.

  “What is it?” That was Tula. She’d come out at the sound of my voice. She was all T-shirt and legs.

  “Some guy.” I was up by then and on my way to the window. I looked out into the bushes. “What are you doing,” I said to the fellow crouching there.

  “Didn’t much want to get blasted,” he told me.

  “Dickie?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” that gentleman told Tula.

  She joined me at the casing.

  “Saw your window was out,” Dickie told us, fighting his way back upright. He was hobbled with arthritis and was either seventy or two hundred years old. I couldn’t tell which.

  “Dickie lives down there.” Tula pointed. I just saw soybeans and a hedgerow. “He doesn’t miss much.”

  “See the boys who did this?” I asked him.

  “Chevy,” he told me and spat. “Didn’t have no lights.”

  Tula said, “Shit,” and picked up her foot. She was bleeding, barefoot, punctured.

  I lifted her off the floor and carried her over to the couch. I plucked out the splinter of glass she’d picked up. Cleaned her up with a little spit. “Shoes,” I told her. “Maybe pants. A guy needs to keep his mind on business.”

  She gave me the look without the snort. “Did you make coffee?”

  “I’m barely up.”

  “Po-po.” That was Dickie out in the bushes.

  I heard the sound of tires on the driveway. Kendell got out of his cruiser and opened the door to let Dale out of the back.

  “Did you call him?” I asked Tula.

  She shook her head and continued into the kitchen.

  “You know Kendell,” she shouted my way. “He’s a Jedi or something.”

  Then they were all in the bushes looking at me, their heads just over the windowsill.

  Kendell gave me a hard once-over. “Figures” was all he said.

  “Guy with a brick,” I told him. I picked up the paver and showed it to him.

  “What guy?”

  “Some scholar. Impala, right,” I said to Dickie.

  He nodded and spat, told me and Kendell, “Uh-huh.”

  “We’ve got to straighten this fool mess out,” Kendell said.

  They all came in, even Dickie. Dale was quiet and meek, looked a little embarrassed. He stuck out a hand for me to shake it.

  “That’s right,” Kendell told Dale. “Apologize at him for a while.”

  Dale was deeply and profoundly sorry and had to tell me all about it. He got mousy when he was sorry about something, which didn’t happen with Dale terribly much, but it was happening just then. He crowded me and told me with next to no volume how full of regret he happened to be for everything he’d lately done.

  “Those TVs,” Dale said and shook his head. “I can’t even remember what I was thinking.”

  “What TVs?” Dickie asked Dale.

  “Tell him about it,” I suggested, and Dale crowded Dickie and drew him aside.

  “Were you here?” Kendell asked me as he sized up the empty window casing.

  I nodded and pointed toward the kitchen.

  “What time?”

  “Ten maybe. Not sure. We were in there talking.”

  “But you saw a car?”

  “In Greenville. They must have followed us out.”

  “You ready to tell me what all went on?”

  I pointed at the floor like he might mean right there. Kendell raised his index finger and spiraled it around. He meant everything and he meant all over.

  “Might as well.” I turned toward the kitchen. “Had coffee?”

  “Am I coming in on anything?”

  “Brick kind of spoiled the mood.”

  Tula served us all breakfast about like she’d served me pizza the night before. She set a box of Cocoa Puffs on the counter and said, “Bowls are over there.”

  Only Dale had cereal. He ended up finishing the box. Then Kendell sent Dickie and Dale out to measure the casing for a new window glass once Tula had fished her tape out of her tool drawer.

  “Get it right,” he told them. “Clean out that channel good.”

  Dickie looked at his wrist like he had a watch on it. “My show’s coming on.”

  “Be back on tomorrow,” Kendell said.

  If he’d not been inside, Dickie would have spat.

  They were hardly out of the kitchen before Kendell told me, “Let’s hear it.” Kendell refilled his cup, Tula’s as well. He showed me the empty pot.

  “Guess I’m fine.”

  I laid it all out, everything we hadn’t told him the day before after the beat-up boy in the catfish pond, which should have been incentive enough to talk.

  “Shawnica,” I told Kendell by way of explaining why we’d been discreet. He still had a bandage on his cheek and instinctively reached up to touch it.

  “Two in the hospital. One in the morgue. I’ve got to pick somebody up.”

  “Larry?” I asked him.

  “I guess.”

  “That girl’s probably still out at Shambrough’s.”

  “Let’s get Larry talking first. I’ll get to Shambrough when I have to. That’s going to raise a stink around here.”

  “Why is everybody so damn scared of him?”

  “Scared? That’s not quite it,” Kendell told me. “There are enough decent Shambroughs left, mostly up around Clarksdale and Cleveland, to make picking up the bad ones a little delicate. They close ranks. Hire lawyers. Call governors. That sort of thing. You’ve got to be squared away before you go after a Shambrough.”

  “And if she’s out there under his roof?”

  “We’ll get there,” Kendell told me, “but Larry first. We wouldn’t be sitting here talking about this but for him and … who was it?”

  “Skeeter.”

  “You on today?” Kendell asked Tula.

  “Noon,” she told him.

  “I was going to give you…” He jabbed his thumb toward the front room and Dale. “Figured you could drive him over to Indianola.”

  “How’s this?” I said. “I’ll take Dale. Him and Kalil can work something out. And then I’ll bring you Larry and Skeeter, and you can hear it all straight from them.”

  Kendell thought the way he usually did, with an expression of vague gastrointestinal upset. He finally gave me a nod.

  “And you’ll make sure she gets a window,” I told him.

  “She,” Tula informed us both, “can handle that herself.”

  I stood and said to Tula, “I’m sorry about all this.”

  I did that thing with my hand again. I reached toward her without any idea of exactly what I was up to. Especially there in front of Kendell. His gaze was like a laser sight. So my hand went into my pocket, which earned me the smile and the snort together from Tula.

  I slinked straight out of the kitchen, collected Dale, and left the house.

  Dale apologized to me all the way to Indianola. Whatever is five miles beyond profuse, that’s where he ended up.

  “Are you working?” I finally asked him as we were rolling into Indianola.

  “My program?”

  “No, like a job.”

  He shook his head.

  “What are you living on?”

  “Army money. Some disability.”

  “Disability?” I eyed him for effect. Dale might have been an idiot, but he was a specimen, too.

  “Back trouble,” he told me. “Sometimes.”

  “Want to work?” I asked him. “I mean, like, when your back’ll let you.”

  Dale nodded. Sarcasm meant nothing to him. He was reliably tin-eared that way.

  “Think you can stay straight?”

  “When I’m working my program,” Dale told me.

  “Your program’s clearly shit,” I suggested.

  “That’s what Momma says, too.”

  “Wise
woman,” I told him as we pulled into K-Lo’s lot. “I can probably get you on here, but you’ve got to show up and work.”

  Dale exhaled like he was approaching a five-hundred-pound dead lift. He nodded grimly and told me at last, “All right.”

  “You know how Kalil is,” I said as I slipped out from under the wheel.

  Dale nodded. “Talks a lot of shit.”

  “You ready for that?”

  He exhaled again. He nodded.

  As broken windows go, Kalil’s was appreciably worse than Tula’s. There’d been so much more of it to go to pieces, and by the look of the damage Dale had used his car instead of a brick.

  “The Geo?” I asked him as we crossed the lot.

  “I guess. I’m kind of fuzzy.”

  “Where is it now?”

  Dale didn’t know. “Hope it’s not with the TVs,” he said.

  Kalil greeted Dale about like I’d thought he might. “Motherfucker,” he said. “Happy?” Kalil gestured toward his busted storefront.

  A couple of glaziers were rebuilding the framing and cleaning up all the busted glass. They’d come all the way from Grenada with new sheet glass on their truck. They looked happy to see us. Anything to get Kalil off of them.

  “He’s real sorry,” I told K-Lo.

  K-Lo was standing out in front of the empty storefront that used to be the Hair Den. That’s where he always ended up when he needed to smoke and fume, and he was right in the middle of doing both as me and Dale closed on him.

  “He wasn’t in his proper mind.”

  K-Lo spat, but not in that utilitarian country way that was common in the Delta. K-Lo always spat like he was punctuating a curse.

  “But he’s ready to make it right.”

  Dale was just standing there nodding instead of being helpfully profuse with apologies.

  “Now,” I told him, “would be a good time for some more apologizing.”

  That was all Dale needed to set him off, and he went straight up to K-Lo and told him every apologetic thing he’d told me ten times already. He closed so hard and flush that K-Lo had no room to spit, barely had enough space to bring his Merit Light up to his lips.

  Desmond pulled in before I could call him. I was hoping he’d have a full car and so save me the trouble of collecting Beluga LaMonte and Skeeter. That way I could just swap him Dale for the pair and get back on the road heading west. But it was only Desmond, looking unrested and a Coney Island or two short of a load.

  “Everything all right?” I asked him.

  “I think they’d watch TV all the time if there was a way to do it.”

  “Oh, there’s a way to do it,” I told him. “Ask my ex. Are they parked there now?”

  Desmond nodded.

  “Shawnica?”

  “Went to work,” Desmond said. “I don’t worry about her, but those other two…” He just shook his head.

  “How’s Pearl getting on?”

  “Company’s company. She just keeps feeding them that mess she makes, and damned if they don’t shovel it in.”

  “Kendell wants them,” I told Desmond, and I explained what I’d been up to ever since I’d left him back at Pearl’s.

  “Lot of broken glass between then and now.”

  We both watched Kalil and Dale as Dale stood there all hangdog and Kalil unloaded on him. It was prime K-Lo—corrosive profanity delivered while he jabbed a finger at Dale’s shirtfront. Those were the occasions when Kalil was most alive.

  I left Desmond to wrangle Dale and Kalil and help them straighten out their mess. For my part, I headed to Pearl’s to pick up the boys. Her Buick was gone from the driveway, but Pearl was out watering her hydrangeas. If there were such a thing as a Bible study cocktail party, Pearl would have been dressed for that.

  “There you are,” she said to me. It’s what she always said.

  “You look nice,” I told her. That’s what I always said.

  “Thirsty,” she said of her hydrangeas.

  “Don’t see your car.”

  “Boys took it,” she said. “You would not believe how Gil’s clothes fit the both of them to a T.”

  “Know where they went?” I asked her.

  “Beluga told me,” Pearl started in, and I confess I went a little weak. Larry had finally found somebody who would actually call him Beluga. “They had some shopping to do and some errands to run. They said I shouldn’t hold lunch.”

  “Any idea where they were headed?”

  “No, sweetie,” Pearl said. “Would you?” She gave me the hose so I could coil it for her.

  I called Desmond, but he didn’t know about any shopping or errands.

  “They were watching that damn show about the butler when I left.”

  I figured I could go out trolling for them, but Pearl’s car was a gray Buick Regal. Somebody must have bought a fleet of them and sold them to all the canasta-playing Presbyterians, because whenever Pearl was hosting cards and the ladies all rolled in, it tended to look like a gathering of the clan.

  The only chance I had was Pearl’s cell phone. I’d bought her one for when she drove, and she’d gotten to the point where she never took it out of her cup holder. It was plugged into her lighter. I’d tried to teach her how to use it, but she’d never quite gotten the idea of the CALL button down. So she’d punch in the number she wanted and quit. She’d say, “Hello!” into the phone, wouldn’t hear anything back, and would clap it shut and put it back in her cup holder.

  I knew if I called Larry and Skeeter on Pearl’s phone, they’d see who it was and surely wouldn’t answer, but I also knew whose call they wouldn’t dodge.

  Shawnica wasn’t delighted to see me. She was never delighted to see me, but on this day she was more conspicuously less delighted to see me than usual.

  I’d swung by the veterinary clinic where she worked. The place had a CAT door on the east end of the building and a DOG door on the west end, but they both dumped the customers out into the very same waiting room, and I walked in on a kind of cross-species bedlam. There was an ancient ill-humored spaniel that was barking and snapping in a general way, and a mongrel puppy was peeing on the linoleum. Four cats in carriers were hissing and yowling, and some kind of miniature goat was raising a fuss.

  The man with the miniature goat was just the type he had to be. He was a miniature goat promoter by nature, wanted everybody to have one. He was intent on proving how civilized a miniature goat could be. To that end, he kept setting his down on the floor so it might show off its manners. All it did, though, was slip on the floor tiles, get terrorized by the puppy and driven into the vicinity of the snapping spaniel or the hissing cats.

  “Hold on to him or wait in the lot” were the first words I heard as I entered.

  Shawnica had gotten up out of her seat and was pointing a glitter-nailed finger at the miniature goat guy, who just wanted a chance to bring her around to the charms of miniature goats.

  “Right now!” Shawnica told him.

  He snatched up his goat. What else could he do? He seemed to want to tell her how sweet the thing was and how it served as a comfort to him. Maybe how it had saved him from buying a mower or finding another wife. Shawnica made him think better of all of it. He held his tiny goat under his arm and parked in one of the plastic chairs.

  That freed Shawnica to look at me, sneer, and tell me, “Uh-huh.”

  I explained what I was up to. I’d written Pearl’s number on a scrap of paper, and I tried to keep the whole enterprise as simple as I possibly could.

  “I ain’t,” Shawnica told me. That was usually her opening bid.

  “You know where they went?”

  “Do I look like I know where they went?”

  She looked like she wanted me deboned with violence.

  “Kendell wants them,” I told her, “and he’s going to get them one way or another. Might be better if me and Desmond take them in.”

  Shawnica leaned forward so she could whisper at me. Her whispering tended to carry
as well as her regular shrieking did. “First some crazy bitch is going to kill us all, and now they going to jail.”

  She sounded profoundly skeptical about my whole afternoon’s worth of plans.

  “It’s kind of a mess. I’ll give you that. But it’s Larry’s mess, and it’s Skeeter’s mess, and they’ve got to explain it to Kendell. You know how he is.”

  She did. We all did. Kendell was like God. You always had to atone in the end.

  “Uh-huh,” Shawnica told me.

  I offered her my scrap of paper again. She reached out with her glittery fingers and snatched it from me.

  “Just find out where they are, and don’t tell them I’m coming for them. Probably better I should explain it all face-to-face.”

  “What did I say?” Shawnica was talking past me to the gentleman with the miniature goat. He couldn’t give up on selling the other customers on its virtues, so it was slipping again on the floor tiles and getting a rise out of the spaniel, causing the puppy to pee again on the floor.

  When that fellow started making goat justification noises, Shawnica went over and held the door open for him. She pointed to a shady spot in the far corner of the lot. There wasn’t a thing in this world he could do but go.

  We followed him out. Shawnica called Pearl’s cell number from the front clinic landing. She didn’t get an answer—I imagined Skeeter examining the phone—so she called back and raised the pair of them.

  “Where are you?” She listened, pointed toward the truck route. “Then where?” More listening and pointing. “All right.” She ended the call. “RadioShack. Then the Walmart. Over in Greenwood.”

  “Thanks,” I told her.

  I got a Shawnica “Uh-huh.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Greenwood was a good half hour east from where I was. Living in the Delta is all about driving to hell and back in a regular way, so I just switched on the radio to the Valley State gospel station, worked my way over to 82, and went.

  At least the Walmart was on the near end of town. The RadioShack was, too. It was one of the few going businesses left in a sprawling shopping plaza where the department store had folded and the Shoe Show had given up. There’d been a pharmacy there for a bit as well, but the Walmart had done them in. So now there was the RadioShack, one of those edible florist shops, and a big junky fell-off-the-truck store that didn’t even have a sign out front. There was also enough parking for a municipal airport or two.