by Rick Gavin
“And where the shit are we even going?” Desmond asked me. We were heading back east toward Leland and Indianola by then.
I couldn’t say, was largely waiting for Grady Greer to tell us, and Dale hadn’t hit him hard enough to tempt him to speak.
“Don’t be stupid,” I said to that Greer, but he pulled one of those Delta cracker faces that was meant to let me know he’d be as stupid as he pleased.
There wasn’t much help for it. “Hit him again,” I said, and Dale and Luther and Eugene all thought I was talking to them. I can’t be sure how that Greer clung to consciousness after the battering he took. They all hit him about simultaneously from three different directions. It sounded like somebody had thrown a bag of rice down the stairs.
That Greer took a second to collect himself before telling all of us, “Ow.”
“I half missed him,” Eugene said from the way back as he swung on that Greer again. He caught him flush on the cowlick this time.
“Shit, buddy!” That Greer raised a hand to his head.
“Fucker shot my dogs!” Eugene told him.
“Percy Dwayne?” he asked.
Desmond was already looking for a spot to pull over before I could suggest he ought to. We had too much explaining and coercing to do to undertake it over the seat back, so Desmond eased off the road by a catfish pond, rolled up the bank, and parked on the levee. The place stank of guano and floaters, a ripe variation on eau de Eugene.
“Get him out,” Desmond barked at Dale.
Dale looked like he was going bristle until Desmond pointed to a spot down the levee. “You can swing on him over there.”
Dale liked the sound of that and dragged that Greer out of the car by his collar. He tried to anyway, but that Greer had run up on Dale before. It turned out Dale had written Grady Greer a summons or two, had even pulled his sainted mother over up at Metcalfe, a woman who’d never driven above forty in her life. So that Greer had simmering resentment for Dale, which Dale failed to factor in.
We hadn’t bound him up or anything, given how thoroughly outnumbered he was, so that Greer let himself get fished out of the Escalade by his collar until he was upright on the levee, where he felled Dale with a blow.
“Hey!” Dale said to him.
He was sprawled on his ass in the dirt by then. The “Hey!” was mostly for us. Dale seemed to think we should have stopped that Greer from hauling off and slugging him or, at the very least, should have been beating him out of collegial indignation. Instead we were all just standing there wondering what might happen next.
“Don’t remember me, do you?” that Greer asked Dale.
“I don’t know you,” Dale told him. Dale gripped his chin and wiggled it some, just to see if all the parts and pieces were unfractured and connected. Dale did that like most people ream their ears or pick their noses given how often civilians wanted to hit him and how frequently they did.
“Ruleville,” that Greer said. “2008. October. And I’ll tell you now what I told you then. I wasn’t doing shit.”
“Ticket?” I asked him.
Grady Greer nodded. “Sixty goddamned dollars.”
That was enough of a scalding reminder to prompt him to kick Dale hard one time.
“Hey!” Dale was talking to us again.
“Get up,” Desmond told him.
That was no easy thing for Dale in ordinary circumstances, given how thick and lumpy he’d become. With an indignant Greer flailing at him, he was slower even than normal.
“If we stand here,” I said, “and don’t do a damn thing, are you going to give us Percy Dwayne?”
That was closer to the kind of bargain that Greer figured he could live with.
Dale, of course, just told all of us, “Hey!”
“Daddy’s got him. Him and Uncle Flo. You’ll need to work it out with them.”
“About money?” Desmond asked him.
“Ain’t it always?”
“You’ll take us?”
That Greer nodded my way.
“Well,” I said. “Go ahead.”
If Dale could have run, he would have. Instead he got knocked back down on the levee, and the fun was just beginning when my phone rang in my pocket. It was Kendell calling me this time. He usually got to me through Desmond.
“Yeah,” I said to him.
“Where are you?” Kendell asked me.
“Over toward Greenville. You heard from Tula?”
“About an hour ago. On her way back from Baton Rouge. Around Brookhaven. She said for me to tell you everything’s okay.”
“Good to hear,” I said to Kendell. “Anything new on Boudrot?”
“Nope, but there’s a thing you need to see.”
“We’re kind of in the middle of something.”
Dale said, “Hey!” He added, “Come on!” That Greer was laying on top of Dale and elbowing everything he could reach.
“Is that Dale?” Kendell asked me.
“Yeah. A guy’s beating the hell out of him.”
Kendell knew better than to be surprised by the news. “Once you’re done,” Kendell told me, “why don’t you come on home.”
“My home?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said. “What’s left of it.”
* * *
Lucky for us, Dale and that Greer were too old to fight for long. They snarled at each other and punched and rolled around on the levee for a bit. After maybe ten minutes, they were locked in what would have looked like a loving embrace in lamplight on a queen-sized bed.
That’s when Desmond kicked the heap and told them both, “Get up.”
Naturally, they brought a bunch of levee filth into Desmond’s Escalade, which Desmond reminded me about intermittently all the way to Indianola.
“What exactly did he say?” he finally asked me of Kendell.
“I got the feeling that Boudrot’s been by Pearl’s.”
Had he ever, as it turned out.
Kendell’s cruiser was parked in the road out front. Kendell was standing in the driveway between Pearl’s house and the car shed. There was in imperial blue Nissan parked (I’ll call it) in the backyard. The driver’s door was standing open. The lid of the trunk was raised like whoever had rolled up in it had bailed out and fetched his stuff.
I glanced at Pearl’s Buick in the pullout where she usually parked. Luther’s truck was still alongside. They both looked untouched. I couldn’t say the same about the side screen porch. All of the screen wire was slashed and ripped.
I was hardly out of the Escalade before I asked Kendell, “He bust in the house?”
“Busted in all over.”
Kendell pointed toward the car shed. The bay doors were standing open, and I got a sick feeling that told me everything I needed to know.
That car shed bay was the tidiest part of Pearl’s residential holdings. It had been her late husband’s workshop and refuge. She’d honored Gil’s memory by leaving it be. The cement was shiny. The tools were hung, ranked by size on Gil’s pegboard. Even the yellow jack stands looked like they’d been simonized. But there was a big vacant slot right there in the middle where my Ranchero should have been.
“Stole it?” Desmond shouted to me from back by the Escalade.
I nodded. I told him, “Again.”
That’s how I’d met that Boudrot the first time. He’d stolen Gil’s calypso coral Ranchero. Or rather Percy Dwayne Dubois had stolen it from me and that Boudrot had taken it from him. The trouble was, I’d just borrowed it because my Chevy was in the shop, so it wasn’t like it was up to me to let the thing stay stolen. I’d told Pearl I’d bring it back to her just like I’d driven it off, so I wasn’t about to rest until I got that Ranchero back.
Since then, I’d bought the thing from Pearl, gave her cash for the title. So I guess I could have decided that I didn’t need it back. I could have told Kendell, “It’s just a car.” I could have stood there before that empty bay and been philosophical about it. I could have reasoned that Boud
rot stealing my Ranchero yet another time was a sign that I was due for a fresh set of wheels.
I could have done all of that, but I did something else instead.
“Motherfuck,” I said, which earned me one of Kendell’s Baptist glares. “That’s a dead man.”
“I didn’t hear that,” Kendell told me.
“Want him in a box or a bag?” I asked him.
“Didn’t hear that either.”
Kendell pointed to the stairway that led up to my apartment.
“What did he do?” I asked.
Kendell shook his head. “Some kind of human tornado thing.”
That Boudrot had started with the door. I got up to the landing, thinking my apartment door was merely standing open, but it turned out the only thing left of it was some splintered wood on the hinges. He hadn’t been satisfied just to kick it in. That Boudrot had busted it all to bits. The panels had all fallen out once he broken the styles and rails, and he’d taken the time and the effort to bust them all up into kindling.
Most everything else in my puny apartment was simply obliterated. Human tornado was about the size of it. He’d made confetti out of all my stuff. I stood in the middle of the carnage and tried to be philosophical again.
I heard Kendell behind me as he mounted the landing and lingered at the threshold.
“Got to figure,” I told him, “that boy’s been keeping his energy bottled up.”
“Yeah,” Kendell said. “Pretty impressive.”
I’ll admit to being awestruck. That Boudrot had been about as thoroughly destructive as a human could hope to be.
“What do you figure he did it with?” I asked.
Kendell directed me to a mallet on the floor by the far wall. It must have been Gil’s and had one of those hard rubber heads that was full of shot.
“Knife too, I guess,” Kendell allowed as we considered together the sofa. Most of the stuffing that had been on the inside was on the outside now.
“Pearl’s house?” I asked him.
“Not so bad. Busted up her TV. It looks like he took some clothes.”
“You got a roadblock up or something?” I toed a heap of rubble with my boot. It turned out to be all my dinner plates and sandwich saucers gone to litter.
“They’re talking about it.”
“Who?”
Kendell shrugged. “Bosses.”
I heard Luther climbing the stairs. He had taps on the heels of his boots. He stepped inside my destroyed apartment, didn’t seem much phased by the mess.
“Grady’s raising a fuss,” he told me. “Got work and shit to do.”
“Who’s Grady?” Kendell asked him.
That’s when Luther finally tuned in to the wholesale destruction.
“Flat tore it up, didn’t he?” he said to Kendell.
“Who’s Grady?” Kendell asked me.
“A Greer,” I told him.
“The body shop guy?”
I nodded. “He’s got some quarrel with Percy Dwayne Dubois. We’re trying to sort it out.”
I followed Kendell onto the landing from where we could look down on the crew. Desmond had his tailgate dropped and was sweeping out his way back with the whisk broom that he carried to keep his vehicle neat. Eugene and Dale and Barbara were watching him. That Greer was leaning on the Escalade, looking glum and mouthing off. They made for a wretched sight as far as clutches of people go. Eugene was scarlet from the lye soap. Dale and that Greer were both splotchy and swollen from various punches they’d taken. Their clothes hadn’t been much improved by rolling around on the levee either.
Kendell looked on for a quarter minute. He said, “Hmm,” through his nose primarily. He adjusted his belt, laid his hand to the hilt of pistol. When he finally settled on what to ask me, it was, “Why’s that dog wearing a shirt?”
THIRTEEN
In Pearl’s house that Boudrot had busted whatever he could reach on his route through the place. He’d kicked in the den door off the back screened porch and had knocked Pearl’s TV onto the carpet. It looked like he’d broken the screen with Pearl’s floor lamp. He’d pitched her magazines all over the place and had blundered into the dining room where he’d shattered Pearl’s cake plate and both her pickle dishes. He’d broken the mirror on her sideboard and thrown her candlesticks into the kitchen. He’d even jerked her drapes onto the floor, had yanked the curtain rods out of the wall.
I had come inside with Desmond and Kendell to survey the destruction.
“What do you figure he has against curtains?” Desmond asked as he surveyed the damage.
We had to figure out how to lock up Pearl’s house, no easy thing with the back door kicked in, but we found enough plywood to plug the doorway up and then gathered on the driveway to work out how best to proceed.
I know now it was along about then when Tula met with trouble. She called me, and I eventually got her message, but my phone never rang in my pocket, one of those cellular hiccups that seem to happen all the damn time. When I finally heard her voicemail, a good three or four hours later, it was Tula calling to ask me, “What are you doing way down here?”
The Delta’s a fairly sizable place—a hundred miles long and seventy wide—but the people are all concentrated in pockets here and there. The humans are crowded around the edges to make room for the agriculture, to leave the arable land wide open for the crops to thrive and the planes to dust. So there are clumps of populated Delta like oases in the desert, and not so terribly many spots where people congregate.
On her way back up from Baton Rouge, where she’d dropped C.J. and the dog with her aunt, Tula had left the interstate at Jackson and headed north on 49. That took her straight up by Yazoo City and, as I understand it now, she was sitting at a light in the commercial clottage on the north side of town when she caught sight of my Ranchero in the lot of a shopping plaza. I knew the spot well enough myself. It was adjacent to the Yazoo Sonic, which me and Desmond had stopped at for lunch a few times in a pinch.
So I was acquainted with that shopping plaza. I’d sat and looked out on its lot. There was Kroger at the near end. A lady’s boutique in the middle. Some kind of cut-rate drugstore just beyond it, and a payday loan place down from that. As I understand it now, my Ranchero was parked catty-cornered in front of the loan shop, and the sight of it had tempted Tula off the road and into the lot.
There weren’t so terribly many calypso-coral Ranchero’s around. Maybe only mine. I’d seen a blue one once, but it was half beat to pieces. El Caminos were far more common, but nobody kept them up.
So there wasn’t much chance that Tula would fail to notice that Ranchero, and it was decidedly unlikely she’d doubt that it was mine. The way I heard it, she got out of her Honda and glanced in the cab of my Ranchero. Everything looked normal but for the bag of Cheez Doodles on the passenger seat and the skinny Red Bull can sitting on the console. Those weren’t part of my standard diet, but Tula was ready to file them both under the heading of The Shit Men’ll Do When They Think You’re Not Looking.
That’s just when that Boudrot came out of the payday loan store in one of Gil’s seersucker sport coats. That Boudrot wasn’t wearing the thing with any flare to speak of. It was just hanging on him like a cheap slipcover on a couch. He was carrying a freighted shopping bag in one hand and a pistol in the other. One of those thin white shopping bags with THANK YOU! printed on it. Tula noticed it was crammed full of loose cash money before she even saw the gun.
And there she was standing hard alongside that Boudrot’s getaway car. They were both accomplished enough in their fields for things to come to a head dead quick.
Tula told that Boudrot, “Police,” as she reached for the weapon she carried off duty. It was a .380 she kept in a snapped-down holster around in the small of her back.
So she needed to reach while that Boudrot had a revolver already at hand. My revolver as it turned out, a .38 I keep in my glove compartment. The way I heard it, he swung it on Tula and caught her flush on the si
de of the head. She toppled toward my Ranchero and fell half in the bed. That Boudrot popped her another time and tipped her in entirely. Then he tossed his bag of money in the cab, piled in behind it and took off. He stopped up the road somewhere. By then he’d found all the stuff that me and Desmond tend to use in the course of rough days on the job. I had a full roll of duct tape in the console along with a box of .38 rounds and a package of three-mil plastic sheeting. The kind you buy in the homewares store if you’re thinking of painting your bedroom. Or if you’re worried about some fool bleeding all over your area rug.
All Tula knew when she came around was that she was taped in place all over and wrapped up with a plastic drop cloth in the cargo bed of my Ranchero. That Boudrot seemed to be racing somewhere on an agonizingly bumpy road.
Back at Pearl’s, right at that very time, we were working on Grady Greer to see how we might free up Percy Dwayne. Desmond and Kendell were in agreement that Percy Dwayne was safer where he was than out with us in the Escalade riding the roads and looking for trouble.
“What about that wife of his and little P.D. Junior?” I asked them.
“She’s a Vardaman,” Luther and Desmond and even Kendell told me all at once. They said it like being a Vardaman was like being a Tyrannosaurus.
“I know she’s mean as hell,” I told them, “but she’s not bulletproof. And at the very least we need to let Percy Dwayne know that Boudrot’s running free.”
I finally convinced them the decent thing to do was locate Percy Dwayne, tell him that Boudrot was loose from Parchman, and let him do what he wanted after that.
Even Luther, Percy Dwayne’s nephew, decided that was fair enough to suit him, and he immediately closed on Grady and said, “All right, then. Where’s he at?”
“I told you. Daddy’s got him. Him and Uncle Flo.”
“Where?” Kendell asked.
That Greer country pointed nowhere much. “Farm,” he said.
“Why?” Kendell asked him.
“They didn’t go into it much. Sounds like that Dubois beat them out of some cash.”