Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels)

by Rick Gavin

  Desmond nodded.

  This wasn’t your standard Civil War battlefield park, like Shiloh or Antietam, with treeless stretches of farmland that troops might have charged across. This was all close and wooded on a bluff above the river.

  “Got to pee,” Luther informed us all, and then the pack of them got out.

  Even Barbara came out of the way back, and she followed the boys over to a handsome rock wall where they all drained their bladders. Then they came wandering back to where me and Desmond stood by the Escalade, all of them but for Dale who had a bashful bladder problem. He was still over against the wall when the headlight beams played in the trees.

  “Purdys?” I asked Desmond, like he would know somehow.

  Whatever car it was had stopped down at the gatehouse and was sitting. We could hear both the ticking of the engine and the racket of a couple of crackers in agitated conversation. The place where we were parked, a half-moon loop called Pemberton Circle, was the first pull out off the main loop if they decided to come in.

  I said to Desmond, “So?”

  “Could be a couple of boys out drinking.”

  “And if it’s not?”

  “They might stay right there,” Desmond told me, “this being history and all.”

  I knew just what he meant. Those Purdys had passed their entire lives in and around Vicksburg, and you could about be sure not a one of them had ever set foot in the battlefield park. Exposure to actual history off plaques and brochures and from scale-built dioramas wasn’t a thing they needed when they could just sit drinking forties and being dumb.

  So I could imagine the sort of debate those boys were having at the gate. In the few minutes since they’d shown up another car had pulled up behind them. That second guy was playing his radio—some sort of twangy yokel bullshit. They all had to shout over it to be heard.

  That helped us there at Pemberton Circle once we’d prevailed upon Dale to be quiet. He’d started in with his molar and the tenderness of his stub. I was going to suggest that he shut the fuck up when Desmond hit him in the stomach. Same result but with moist wheezing instead of the whining I would have earned.

  “We can take them,” Luther informed us. “Why don’t you bust out some of your guns.”

  “Want to just mow them down?” I asked him.

  There in the twilight I watched Luther and Percy Dwayne consult with glances. Then they both turned my way and nodded.

  Percy Dwayne asked me, “Why the hell not?”

  “You’d go to Parchman for these shitheads?”

  “Ain’t like we’d ever get found out.”

  I hadn’t passed much quality time with Percy Dwayne and Luther’s ilk since back when we’d first tangled with that Boudrot over my Ranchero. So I had pretty much forgotten about the inner workings of their cracker minds. The stew of self-pity and rationalization that passes with their sort for thought.

  Here Percy Dwayne and Luther had been chased into a Civil War park by a bunch of guys they hadn’t personally done a damn thing to provoke. So if they shot them all down and left them, they’d be well within their rights. Better still, nobody would think to look for them because they weren’t down Delta creatures. They were Sunflower County Duboises after all. To their way of thinking, even Purdys should have known they weren’t the sort to tolerate getting chased.

  “We’re not shooting anybody,” I told them, “unless there’s no help for it.”

  “Might ought to go ahead and give us a gun,” Percy Dwayne suggested.

  Desmond took over. He pointed at Dale who was sitting on the asphalt holding his stomach and laboring to breathe.

  “Want some of that?” Desmond asked.

  “Guess we’ll shut the fuck up,” Luther told him.

  You could educate a Dubois in the short term. The trouble was that it never seemed to take.

  It sounded to me like those boys at the gate had fallen into confounded silence. There was an outside chance that one of them was on the phone to Purdy reinforcements. Then they’d just sit there and wait until a whole flotilla of Purdys could swamp the place. More likely, though, they were mulling what a foray into the park might mean.

  Desmond was surely correct in assuming they didn’t know the territory. The chances were high that at least one of those boys had an outstanding warrant on him, so he wouldn’t be at risk for trespass alone but probably some felony too.

  “Wait them out?” I asked Desmond.

  He appeared set to nod just as Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra chimed in from the Escalade cup holder. Desmond’s ringtone had long been a snatch of “Satin Soul,” long enough probably for a Purdy to have heard it a time or two before.

  “Shit,” Desmond said.

  The Escalade windows weren’t just all down. The doors were all standing open. We saw the headlights shift in the treetops as whatever Purdys had gotten out of their cars got back in them. Those tiny engines revved and whine. Barry White seemed to have provoked them. They were coming on in after us, fighting through both their fear of Desmond and their distaste for American history.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “I ain’t running from them.” It was Dale on the ground talking bold.

  Me and Desmond found we lacked the patience to quarrel with Dale at all.

  “Fine,” I said. “Be sure and tell them about your tooth.”

  “I just might.” Dale had gone all pouty. There wasn’t a thing for us to do but leave him where he was.

  The rest of us charged toward the Escalade.

  “Go on,” Dale said. He’d gone pitiful. Once Dale had made up his mind to do a thing—no matter how ill-considered—it was sort of like a vault door slamming shut. You could only undo his thinking with appreciable time and effort, and we didn’t have enough of either to hope to sway him at all.

  “They’ll pound him,” Eugene informed us all.

  “Hell,” Luther said, “wouldn’t you?”

  A bend in the loop road served to mask our escape. We pulled out of the north end of Pemberton Circle as those Purdys were pulling in from the south. They came in harder than they should have. A speed bump caught the muffler on one of their coups. Desmond stopped just a little ways up Confederate Avenue, and we sat and listened to what sounded like a Purdy conniption.

  One of them set to clucking: “Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.”

  We could hear at least two other Purdys laughing at that boy’s distress.

  “Touching, isn’t it?” Desmond said. “Pack of shitbags,” he added.

  Then they turned their wholesale attention to Dale and blamed him for the mess they were in.

  “Sounds like what? Four?” I asked.

  Desmond nodded.

  “Five?” Percy Dwayne said. “Listen.”

  We did.

  “Four regular. And that one that sounds like somebody’s squeezing his balls.”

  “You might be right.” That was something I’d never said before to Percy Dwayne.

  “Am,” he told me. “Five of us too. Six with him.” He country pointed with his nose in the general galactic direction of Dale.

  “What the hell we doing back here?” Eugene asked.

  I shifted around to take them all in—Luther and Percy Dwayne, Eugene and Barbara. It was hard to conceive of those boys as musketeers. Particularly where it came to Dale. He didn’t inspire that kind of feeling in anybody who knew him even a little.

  “You want to go back?” I asked them

  “We can swarm on in and take those boys,” Luther told me. Then he glanced at Eugene and Percy Dwayne and both of them gave me the dumb show version of “Fuck yeah.”

  “They’re liable to kill him,” Percy Dwayne said as if he thought that were a bad thing.

  “Been in this damn car all day,” Luther said.

  I was about to tell Desmond to back on up when we heard the gunshot.

  “Hmm,” Desmond told me. “I’d feel kind of bad if they killed him.”

  “Sure hop
e that Purdy girl was worth it.”

  Desmond thought about her for a moment before he told me, “Naw.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Instead of backing up, Desmond blew his horn. We could hear those Purdys scrambling.

  “They coming,” Desmond said.

  One of them even squealed his tires a little through the lot.

  “Was she as dumb as them?” I asked Desmond.

  He nodded. “But built,” he told me. “Torpedos.”

  “I guess you were taking a break from the Lord.”

  Desmond nodded. “Stray from the path, and see where it gets me.”

  “Me too, apparently.”

  We had to wait for those Purdys to finally come out on the north end of Pemberton Circle. I don’t know where white trash finds the shit they drive. You’ve got to do some powerful looking to turn up a Fiat in Mississippi, but damned if the lead car wasn’t a Lada Riva. So not even fine Italian craftsmanship but Soviet handiwork instead.

  The thing was screaming our way. The duct tape on it caught the light of the rising moon. There was a Fiesta right behind it with its entire exhaust system dragging the ground. Sparks were shooting out like the tail of a comment. We were all a little mesmerized.

  “Probably should go,” I finally managed to tell Desmond.

  He dropped the Escalade into gear and raced ahead about fifty yards.

  “Don’t lose them,” Eugene shouted from the way back.

  And there was genuine danger of leaving those Purdys struggling well behind. They had bald tires and tiny engines and busted muffler hangers. If Desmond went faster than thirty-five, he pulled away like they were dead stopped.

  It wasn’t much of a chase as far as velocity went, but it had its compensations. One of those Purdys kept firing a pistol at us. Some kind of nickel-plated revolver. We would have been more upset about it if he’d gone to the trouble to aim. Instead he just shoved his arm out the passenger window of the Lada Riva and kind of shot in the air like he was celebrating a West Bank holy day.

  “Drunk?” I asked Desmond.

  “Usually,” he told me.

  “All of them?”

  Desmond nodded. “Didn’t see them much, but I never saw them sober.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?” Percy Dwayne asked. “Let’s kick the shit out of them.”

  That sounded sensible enough to Desmond to prompt him to say, “I’ll pull off up here somewhere.”

  We were looking for a stretch of open ground where we could take full advantage of our sobriety and enthusiasm, but the territory was so wooded and tight along Confederate Avenue that Desmond had cut east to the Union side. He made his way all the way up to the Illinois monument. It looked like a miniature version of the Jefferson Memorial and was perched on the grassy knob of a hill.

  “This ought to work,” Desmond said.

  He’d been careful not to lose our Purdys, so it had taken us a good quarter hour just to get where we’d ended up. If Luther and Percy Dwayne and Eugene had been spoiling for a fight before, they were desperate to lay into some Purdys by the time we all piled out of the Escalade.

  “Let’s wait in there,” I told them and pointed at the building itself.

  It had a domed roof, a few columns out front, and an open doorway. I had to think the names of the Illinois dead were etched on the walls inside.

  “What’s wrong with right here?” Percy Dwayne wanted to know.

  “In case they’ve got more than just the one pistol, a little cover might be nice,” I told him.

  “So where’s our guns?” Luther asked me.

  “Let’s take the bag,” Desmond said.

  That’s just what we did. We hauled that duffel up the hill to that chapel proper. That’s how I started to think of it anyway once Eugene had told us, “I ain’t going in that church.”

  “Ain’t a church,” Percy Dwayne and Luther said back both at once.

  “Probably haints and shit all in there,” Eugene said and than glanced down at his coonhound and asked, “Right?”

  Barbara didn’t appear to have an opinion. She just scratched at her T-shirt as if she’d grown weary of it.

  Then the Fiat came rattling down the road with the Fiesta hard behind it. Those Purdys fairly hurtled into the parking lot, scraping off more undercarriage as they came. The boy who’d fired was the crazy Purdy with the eye patch. He tumbled out of the Lada Riva, took a little aim, and squeezed off another round. He hit the near granite wall of the monument, and the bullet ricocheted. We all crouched and ducked and puckered and then raced up the steps and in through the doorway.

  The second round singing off granite caused Eugene to reconsider his fear of haints. He passed us on the landing and ran as far inside as he could go with Barbara right beside him.

  That idiot fired off another round. It sounded like it hit a column, and I guess the fluting and facets served to turn that bullet back around. It zinged halfway across the parking lot and broke out Desmond’s back passenger window.

  “Well shit!” Desmond said, and he fished the TEC-9 out of our weapons duffel. Desmond slapped in a freighted banana clip and stepped full out on the landing. He fired a burst in the air. “Get on back,” he told those Purdys, but they weren’t the sort to take instruction. Especially from a boy who, to their way of thinking, had put their kin to such poor use.

  So they just stood there while Desmond, because he could shoot, demolished their vehicles around them. That Fiat went to pieces. The near door fell off while Desmond was still riddling the fender. Two of those Purdys spread flat on the ground. The other three ran and regrouped and ran again.

  Desmond emptied his clip into those two cars. The racket that gun made was deafening. He broke out all the windows and caused the Ford coupe to catch fire. At first I couldn’t hear anything but a muffled roar. Then I could hear Barbara barking. I finally got to where I could hear Luther and Percy Dwayne and Eugene all screaming about how they couldn’t hear.

  “I guess you showed them,” I said to Desmond.

  He cleared his breach. He asked me, “What?”

  Those Purdys were all infuriated now. Or they seemed to think anyway that they had ample cause to be infuriated, and the five of them came running at us, yodeling and shrieking all the way. The one with the pistol fired his last round in the air. He led the charge up the granite staircase toward the landing. It was just me and Desmond there to meet them. Our colleagues were inside carping about being deaf.

  “What the hell you doing back here?” the lead Purdy asked just as he gained the landing.

  I thought Desmond might tell him it was a free country and he could go any damn where he pleased. But I have to think Desmond had long since decided he was finished talking to Purdys. He grabbed this one at the throat and crotch, raised him over his head and threw him. That boy hit his brothers and cousins as they closed on the landing themselves, and they all went down together, toppling backward to the ground.

  Falling down stairs is painful enough when it’s wooden risers. Going ass over elbows down a granite stairway with a pile of kin proved enough to take the remaining starch out of that pack of Purdys. They ended up in a canna lily bed remonstrating with each other, which with Purdys took the form of saying “Jesus” and “Fuck” in equal parts and in turn.

  Percy Dwayne joined us on the landing. He was reaming an ear out with his finger and working his jaw. He caught sight of the Purdys piled up on the ground. They were moving enough to seem alive but hardly enough to seem a danger.

  “What happened to them?”

  “Slipped,” I told him.

  “We going to stomp them or something?”

  “Naw,” Desmond said.

  And that’s about when the Fiesta blew up. It was feeble and half-assed as explosions go. You can be sure they only had about two gallons of gas in the thing. But the blast proved loud and gaudy enough to serve as a useful beacon to the other crew that was already looking for us in the park.

  They
came roaring up in proper four-by-fours. Two Park Service Chevys, a state police cruiser, a Warren County patrol car, and two Vicksburg city units.

  “Ain’t this some shit.” Luther announced. “Got arrested once already today.”

  “Yesterday,” I told him. It seemed like a year ago when I’d gone in and pulled Luther out of the Greenville lockup.

  “I ain’t going back in.” That was Eugene. His Arkansas experience had clearly shaken him up. I guess if you’d gotten pitched in a cell in an Arkansas shopping plaza, you might decide you’d rather not be arrested again.

  “Let’s just tell them what happened,” Percy Dwayne said. “It’s all these boys’ fault.”

  I heard Desmond sigh. We both a knew a life that depended on Percy Dwayne Dubois talking you out of trouble wasn’t really a life worth leading on this earth.

  Those cops and rangers and troopers all crouched behind their doors and pointed every manner of firearm at us—pistols and shotguns and rifles.

  “Hands,” one of them barked out. “Let’s see ’em.”

  I heard the TEC-9 clatter onto the landing.

  They didn’t have enough handcuffs to go around, so we got zip-tied and all parked in a line on a length of curbing down where the sidewalk met the lot.

  One of the county cops passed his time telling us all to keep our mouths shut while the trooper asked us what we were up to in the park at night.

  “That boy right there,” one of the Purdys said—the fat whiskery one with a snake tattoo on his neck—“had his way with our Denise.”

  “Who’s Denise?” the trooper wanted to know.

  “His sister,” a Purdy said and country pointed with his nose at nobody much.

  “Had his way? What do you mean?”

  “Hell, you know.” The Purdy with the eye patch was the one who chimed in now.

  “Tell me.”

  The Purdy’s couldn’t settle on a fit description of what they meant. Consequently, they fell to arguing and got told by the county cop, “Shut up.”

  Then one of the city cops found our weapons duffel, and they didn’t care about Denise after that.

  “Any of those legal?” I asked Desmond.

  I owned a couple of guns I’d bought outright, but I believed they were back at home. The duffel was mostly full of stuff we’d taken off people. Criminals primarily and drunken lowlifes who’d threatened to do us harm. We had a policy of claiming firearms once they were pointed at us, but we had no way of knowing what those guns had been up to before we came along.