by Rick Gavin
“Look in the shed,” I told Luther and pointed at what appeared to be a glorified pile of lumber with a rusty corrugated roof. “See if there’s any grease in there. Maybe a shovel.”
Luther came out with an ancient pint of some manner of machine grease and a garden shovel with the handle busted three quarters of the way up. I spread a little of the grease on that hound’s raw skin, which she seemed to like a lot less than the swamp bath I’d been giving her. She swung her head around to lick my hand and gnaw on it a little too.
“Let’s bury the rest of them,” I said.
Dale told us all, “Shit. Let the gators do it. I’m going back to the car.”
That’s exactly what he did, swatting bugs as he went, which left us little choice but to talk about him.
“Why’s he with us again?” Luther asked me.
“Because that Boudrot wants to cut him up.”
“Yeah,” Luther said. “And?”
I looked to Desmond for support, but he just pointed at Luther. “I’m kind of with him anymore.”
“We’ll use him for bait if we have to.”
Desmond snorted. He picked up the shovel and started digging a hole.
The deeper the hole got, the more it filled up with iridescent bayou seepage. The whole business began to feel less like burial and more like makeshift disposal. I had to guess Dale had a point about the bayou wilderness taking care of its own.
We buried those shot dogs anyway. Me and Desmond took turns digging while Luther comforted the surviving hound. Comforted her in his fashion anyway. He didn’t touch her or anything. His clothes were clean, and he didn’t want to get any swamp dog on them. So he just told that hound, “Hey, you,” every now and again and made clicking noises with his tongue.
I asked Desmond to say something Pentecostal over the dog grave when we’d finished. He didn’t want to at first. He quoted me a nugget about the beasts in the fields. But I kept at him, told him anyway, “For fuck’s sake,” a time or two. Either Desmond thought better of his misgivings or got tired of hearing from me because he finally mumbled a strain of doxology over that muddy ground.
Then he turned right around and pointed at the surviving hound over by Luther.
“Don’t want no grease on my upholstery,” Desmond announced. “Wrap her up or something.”
That job fell to me, and I climbed up to the platform Eugene’s house was perched on, pulled open the screen door, and went into a place that looked like it had tornado damage.
I stuck my head back outside to ask Luther, “This looks normal to you?”
He shrugged. He nodded. “Eugene ain’t so tidy.”
I called down to Desmond, “Place is busted all to hell.”
Inside I was surrounded by the residue of that Boudrot’s rage. He was hard on end tables and knickknacks. That stuff all looked like it had been through a chipper or some industrial pulverizer. The pitch of anger required to destroy household furnishing as thoroughly as that Boudrot did had to approach primeval.
The fuckstick had left a few of the heavy pieces pretty much where they’d been, but he’d been thorough about demolishing everything else. I didn’t see any trace of human carnage, just filth and squalor mostly. I went poking around in the back of the house, looking for any trace of Eugene. That took me into his bedroom. I wouldn’t have wrapped the body of Satan in Eugene’s filthy sheets. The place smelled of socks and mildew, but at least there was no sign that blood had been spilled.
I had a heck of a time finding something clean enough to even wrap a coonhound in. I finally located a Barbara Mandrell T-shirt in the back of one of Eugene’s drawers. It didn’t look like it had ever been worn, though it was half rotted through at the seams. It looked pretty sporty once I’d finally gotten it on the hound.
“I’d do her,” Luther informed me. I hoped he was speaking of Ms. Mandrell.
I had to carry the dog. She wasn’t too feeble to walk, but she gave every sort of sign that she’d never worn a T-shirt before. Left on her own, she’d drop to the ground and bite at the thing and whimper.
Dale wasn’t in Desmond’s Escalade by the time we got back to it.
“Don’t guess we can leave him,” Desmond said, though he looked ripe to be contradicted.
“Blow the horn,” I suggested.
Desmond did and Dale yelled at us from off in the viney scrub.
He was having a sit-down, as it turned out. Dale had helped himself to the stack of spare Sonic napkins in Desmond’s console and had scrounged up a copy of JET from underneath Desmond’s passenger seat.
“Let’s go!” Luther shouted.
“Hold on.” Dale was still fastening his trousers by the time he lurched into view.
He’d used all of Desmond’s napkins, which Desmond wasn’t pleased about. Then he tossed the copy of JET at Desmond and told him, “You goddamn people.” Right after that, he told me, “I ain’t riding with no damn dog.”
I had to suspect a successful evacuation, even out in the woods, had a psychological effect on Dale. Made him confident and pluckier than he had any cause to be.
Desmond turned his head my way. He was leaving it to me.
“Aw, go on,” I told him.
Desmond wheeled and swung on Dale. He caught him on the jaw Dale had scuffed already, and Desmond knocked the fool clean out.
“Now we’ve got to pick him up.”
Desmond grunted and grabbed Dale’s feet.
“Come help,” I told Luther.
“I got a thing,” he said and pointed at his back.
I put the hound down, and she collapsed immediately.
“She had like sisters and shit, didn’t she?” Luther asked. “On TV and everywhere? One of them played like the banjo or something. And one of them played the piano.”
The hound whimpered some more and gnawed at her shirt.
“Yeah,” Luther told us, “I guess I’d do them.”
As we tumbled Dale in the way back, Desmond shot me a look at the tailgate.
“Oh, all right,” I told him. “You can’t hit Luther too if you want.”
EIGHT
By the time we got out of the forest, we were all pretty sorry we’d come. I finally had a cell phone signal again. Three missed calls from Kendell and two messages from Tula. Desmond stopped at a service station over by Big Eddy. Him and Luther went in to get something to eat while I stayed out with Barbara and Dale. There was so much groaning from the way back and whimpering from the hound that I had to leave the Escalade and wander the lot before I could hope to hear Tula.
In her messages, she just said, “Call me,” so I did.
“Where the hell have you been?” She had that tone about her she got sometimes when me or her son or some man somewhere was on her last nerve.
“Down near Yazoo. Looking for a guy. Phone won’t pick up much down here.”
“Why’s Kendell all over me about going to Baton Rouge?”
I knew where the pique was coming from now. It wasn’t anxiety about my safety. She was steamed that I had meddled.
“Do what?” That was my typical stall, and Tula was close enough to me to know it.
“What did you say to him?”
“Now wait a second.”
“What did you say?” She’d gone all low and determined, talked like she was gnawing on her phone.
“That Boudrot’s running wild,” I told her. “We just buried some dogs he killed. I don’t know how I’d live with myself if he ever got his hands on C.J.”
“Wouldn’t be a problem,” Tula assured me. “I’d fucking cut your heart out.”
I didn’t really know what to tell her back beyond, “Okay. Yeah. Well.”
“Here’s how it’s going to be,” she said. “I’m going to take him to his aunt’s, but I’m coming straight back, and you don’t get to say shit about it.”
“Take the dog too,” I told her. It was a beagle mix we shared. I’d ended up with him when his owner had screwed his plane into the
ground.
That failed to strike Tula as meddling. She said, “All right.”
“Going today?”
“Right after school. I’ll be back tonight.”
“Tomorrow would probably be—”
“Tonight.” She was gnawing her phone again.
“Okay. Fine. Tonight. But check in, will you?”
She made a noise like she might.
We settled out and got back to normal after that. She and Kendell were doing what cops usually do, which is waiting for some fresh enormity to happen. This wasn’t much of a whodunnit. That Boudrot had killed a guy, had stolen a car, had trashed a few of houses, and now he’d wandered out of their jurisdiction and mowed down a half-dozen dogs. They’d put out their bulletins and raised their alarms and were waiting for him to get nabbed on the roadways or pop up doing additional mischief. Otherwise, they were keeping to their routines as if that Boudrot was just another thug.
That’s the law enforcement way. Short of an outright manhunt—the kind with federal agents and troopers and guardsmen and helicopters—cops just do their usual stuff and wait for criminals to be stupid. It’s a solid bet on their part, but that Boudrot would need to be stupid fast. He was amped up on rage and vindictiveness and doing such accelerated harm that a day in his life would be like a week for any other miscreant.
Just as Tula signed off, Desmond and Luther came out of the service station with something chicken fried on biscuits.
Luther jabbed a thumb toward the storefront. “Guy in there knows Eugene,” he said.
“In jail in Arkansas,” Desmond told me. “Couldn’t remember if he stole something or maybe just burned something down.”
“In for a stretch?”
They both shrugged.
“Where in Arkansas?”
“Eudora. Just across the river.”
“We going?” I asked Desmond.
It was Luther who spoke. “A man heading home to that kind of mess needs to know what he’s going to find.”
I probably stared at Luther like he’d just dropped down from the heavens. Desmond gave him a hard once-over too. We weren’t accustomed to Luther suggesting we do the decent thing or even knowing exactly what the decent thing might me.
“What?” he asked us.
“Eudora,” I told him. “How do we get there?” I asked Desmond.
He pointed north and grunted. That was the trouble with being backed up to the river. It was always a hike to the nearest bridge.
Dale was awake by the time we all climbed into the Escalade while Barbara the coonhound was asleep stretched full across the backseat.
“She’s getting grease on shit,” Luther announced.
Desmond gurgled back in his throat.
“I’ll get it all cleaned,” I told him.
“You right.” He started the engine and eased into the road.
“Where are we going?” Dale asked from the way back. He hadn’t sat up or anything. He was still stretched out where we’d tossed him after Desmond had laid him low.
Luther, who’d shifted Barbara enough to clear him a spot by the passenger door, laid an arm along the seat back and said to Dale, “Eudora, Arkansas.”
Dale was quiet for about a half mile. When he spoke again, he said, “Why?”
I think Dale must have dozed off shortly after that because he didn’t seem to hunger for an answer. We were on the bridge just south of Greenville when the concrete seams woke him up. He sat up enough to look out the rear window and see we were over the river. Then he laid back down and asked in a general way, “We ever eating or what?”
There’s not much to see in Arkansas. There’s a delta on that side of the river too, but the well water on the Arkansas side runs to spoiled and brackish somehow. They grow peanuts and keep cows. They’ve got nothing like the scale of farming that’s routine on the eastern side. There are trees and goats and pastureland and not the first speck of soybeans or cotton.
Barbara got antsy near Eudora, so we stopped in the gravel lot of some business that looked to be a combination propane works and café. You could bring in your tanks and get them filled on the north side of the structure. Judging by the scent from the range hood, you could get gastric distress down south.
That café had a big weathered menu attached to the front siding, a sheet of plywood on which somebody had painted a catfish (as it turned out) and a half rack of ribs in a puddle of sauce. There was something called angel slaw available as a side, in addition to EVERY DAMN KIND OF FRITTER! and WHITE BREAD IF YOU WANT IT.
The aroma was enough to bring Dale entirely out of the way back.
“Lord, look,” he said as he studied the menu. “Who’s going to front me some cash?”
It ended up being me. Luther didn’t let out money as a rule, and Desmond hated Dale, so Dale knew to wander my way. I was standing over by a weedy patch where Barbara was making her business.
I fished two fives out of my billfold and shoved them Dale’s way.
Desmond was still digesting his chicken-fried thing, but Luther guessed he could eat again, so him and Dale went into the café. They were gone for maybe two minutes before Dale came back out trailed by a man he was planning to fight in the lot.
I was still over with Barbara. She was feeling fragile, I guess. Not confident enough anyway to just squat and get things over with. She was circling and sniffing and shivering a little. She’d look up at me every now and again and whine. Desmond was on the phone to his Pentecostal girlfriend. He was trying to explain what he was up to without actually telling her anything. So we weren’t in any position to intervene on Dale’s behalf, and Luther hadn’t even bothered to come outside.
Dale and the fellow who’d followed him out had some words there in the lot.
Dale said, “The hell I did.”
That fellow told him, “Shit.”
Dale had something else on his mind and was casting around for the appropriate inflammatory language when the gentleman who had followed him out knocked Dale down with a punch. It wasn’t a cinematic punch or even a bottom-of-the-ticket bloated heavyweight haymaker. The guy just lurched at Dale and hit him. I guess most anywhere would have hurt given that Dale had been beaten fairly thoroughly just the night before.
He went down like his bones had all dissolved at once. The guy who’d punched him said, “Shit,” again and spat. His buddy was just coming out the door to see the fight by the time it was over.
He glanced at Dale. He asked his pal, “You want dark meat, right?”
The guy who’d punched Dale told him, “I guess,” and the two of them went back inside.
Desmond had missed the whole thing. His back was to the action, and he was comprehensively preoccupied trying to explain to his Pentecostal girlfriend what exactly had carried him all the way to Arkansas.
I caught Desmond’s eye and pointed. He turned around to see Dale piled up in the lot. The last Desmond knew Dale had gone in to buy a bag full of greasy lunch, and there he was tipped over and semiconscious out in the parking lot.
“Got to go,” Desmond told his Pentecostal girlfriend. He listened to her for half a minute and then added, “Yes, praise Him.”
He shoved his phone in his pocket and looked to me for an explanation, which is to say Desmond showed me his upturned palms as he said my way just, “Huh?”
“I hate to call it a fight.”
“He just went in, didn’t he?”
I nodded. Barbara whimpered. Dale snorted up a puff of gravel dust.
“Guy punched him once.”
“How do you piss off anybody that quick?” Desmond asked me.
I’d known Dale too long by the then to be qualified to say since he’d been a source of low-level antagonism for me for years. I couldn’t remember if he’d chafed me the moment I’d met him or just very shortly thereafter.
Luther soon came out and explained it all to us. He was eating a catfish sandwich, which was shredded cabbage and about a half pound of fried fish be
tween two slices of Texas toast. He took a bite. He chewed. He walked over to Dale and poked him with the toe of his snake-skinned boot.
“How the hell did he do it?” I asked Luther.
Luther jabbed his thumb toward the café-propane place. “Razorback fan,” he told us. “Dale had a thing to say.”
“You get him some lunch?” I asked him.
That was the sort of thoughtful gesture that didn’t occur to Luther naturally. He looked at me like I’d asked him if he’d laundered Dale’s undershorts.
“I’ll go,” I told Desmond. “Otherwise, he’ll just start pissing and moaning again.”
Desmond grunted and nodded. He instructed Luther to help him drag Dale to the car. Luther aired an objection or two about it before Desmond caught him on the cowlick with his open hand.
So I stepped inside the café on a mission just to get Dale some ribs, and without any provocation on my part, that Razorback fan got wolfy with me.
“Guess you want some too,” was the first thing I heard.
Like Dale, he’d probably been muscular once but had fallen down on the upkeep. He was wearing a sky-blue dress shirt that he’d cut the sleeves off of, better to show off his Chevy tattoo on his left biceps and the scar from his polio vaccination (I guess) on his right.
“Some what?” I asked him.
He had a chuckle with his buddies. There were two of them sitting with him at a picnic table.
“Yeah, sugar,” the lady behind the counter said. She was caramel-colored and had her hair all up and wrapped in a rag. I had to think she passed her life stinking of week-old fry grease and resenting the slights she must have suffered from the clientele.
“Ribs, I guess,” I told her. “And all the trimmings.”
“Half a rack?”
I nodded.
“You know what,” the guy with no shirtsleeves said. “Asshole.”
I don’t mind getting called an asshole once I’ve actually been one. If I go into a house to repo a washer or take a sofa out from under Grandma and the family wants to vent about it, they can call me whatever they please. I’m not proud of that work, and I’m convinced this world’s increasingly stacked against decent industrious people of low pedigree. So when “asshole” or “fuckwad” comes my way, I consider it the price of doing business.