by Rick Gavin
Desmond had sized up the situation from over in the Escalade. He wheeled the thing around between Percy Dwayne and that fellow and had Luther throw open the back door.
“Get in,” I told Percy Dwayne.
He fixed his mouth like he had an objection, so I punched him one time hard in the gut and then tossed Percy Dwayne into the car myself.
I climbed straight in, and off we went. We weren’t a quarter mile from the place when we passed three police cruisers, rolling full tilt. Desmond watched them in his rearview as they swung into the motor lodge lot.
“We might want to get on out of Columbus,” Desmond suggested to me. He said it that way that let me know he’d made his decision already.
“What about the guns?” I asked him.
“They got guns in Alabama.”
“They who?”
“I know a boy,” Desmond told me.
“Where?”
“Gordo,” he said. “It’s right on the way. Just this side of Tuscaloosa.”
“How about some waffles or something.” Dale had taken the nasty hand he’d wiped his ass with out of his mouth long enough to talk.
“Yeah,” Luther threw in. “Ought to be a Waffle House out here somewhere.”
It turned out there was one just off the truck route. We could see it from the road. The noise that crew made when Desmond failed to pull off approached caterwauling.
Luther laid up on the seat back. “What the hell’s up with you?” he said.
He meant mostly Desmond, since he had the wheel, but Desmond was in his getaway mode. Just trying to clear out to safety. He left me to explain things to Luther.
“Alabama first,” I said.
I knew all those boys—probably even Dale too—had a queer sense of police jurisdiction, so I played on that. I made out like we’d be like Nazis in Brazil once we’d hit the Alabama line and broke out of Mississippi.
* * *
It turned out to be about twenty miles or so to the Alabama state line. We finally hit a place called Reform. The town didn’t have much—a shabby grocery store, a lumber yard, a Fred’s, a Magic Wand, a Kangaroo gas station. On the far end of the clutter, when we’d just about given up hope, we rolled up on a Jack in the Box, and Desmond wheeled into the lot.
There was a state police car and two county four-by-fours already parked in a back corner. The sight of them gave me and Desmond pause, but the rest of those boys piled right out. We were in Alabama after all where none of their misdeeds had followed.
We watched them parade on into the place like they were untouchable.
“Don’t you wish sometimes you could be like them?”
Desmond turned full around to gaze upon me like I was daft.
They didn’t have waffles exactly. Didn’t have waffles at all but instead burritos and biscuits and something called the Hearty Breakfast Bowl. It looked like a meal a collie would make if a collie could half cook.
The boys were up at the counter ordering by the time we went into the place. They were getting the hard once-over from two deputies and a trooper who were sipping their coffee and munching their hash brown sticks in a far corner booth.
I heard Luther tell the girl at the register, “Yeah, this is all together.” Then he glanced my way and pointed. He told her, “Him.”
“You talk to Kendell?” I asked Desmond.
“You know I didn’t.”
“Want me to?”
“You know I do.”
I gave Desmond my wallet. “Just get me some coffee.” My chicken had gone in fine as well, but it was still right where I’d put it.
I went back out to the Escalade, fished Desmond’s phone out of the cup holder, and called up Kendell while I wandered around the Jack in the Box lot.
“Where you been?” he said instead of hello.
“It’s Nick. We’re in Alabama.”
“Alabama where?”
I looked around like that might help me. “Nearly to Tuscaloosa. Hour or so away.”
“You talk to her?”
“No. Did you?”
“Yeah,” Kendell told me. “Last night.”
“You talked to Tula directly?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How’d she sound?”
“Mostly pissed.”
“But she’s okay?”
“Define ‘okay’.”
“He hasn’t hurt her or … you know, messed with her.”
“I can’t see Tula standing for that. She said she was fine. I believed her. But she’s spent more time with that nut than any human ought to have to.”
“What else did she tell you?”
“Nothing much. Just proved she was alive. Then that Boudrot got on and yammered at me.”
“Where do you figure they are?” I asked him.
“Tech guy here says they’re in Tuscaloosa. South of the river, north of the interstate. That’s the best he can do.”
“That’ll work,” I told Kendell. Not that I’d ever been to Tuscaloosa and knew what we’d be up against between the river and the four-lane.
“Get you some firepower?” Kendell asked me.
“Wrinkle,” I told him.
Like his cousin Desmond, Kendell had an assortment of snorts as well. He deployed one my way.
“Wasn’t anybody’s fault.”
He had a snort for that too.
“Hold on.”
I opened the way back of the Escalade and let Barbara out to pee. Two guys came out of the Jack in the Box just as she hit the ground.
The one without the toothpick said, “Hey!” to me twice. He pointed at Barbara, who was squatting, while he informed me it took a goddamn faggot to think Kyle Petty was worth a shit.
“Nick … Nick!” Kendell was calling to me over the phone.
I raised the thing to my ear again. “Yeah.”
“You can’t fix Alabama,” Kendell told me. “Let it go. Maybe you can beat him up on the way back.”
I paused to salute those gentlemen as they pulled out of the lot in their camo pickup.
“Yeah. I’ll keep a good thought.”
Desmond came out of the Jack in the Box with my cup of coffee.
“Still getting armed, right?” Kendell asked me.
“Desmond says he knows a guy.”
“Not that fool over there in Gordo.”
“I’ll let him tell you.”
I tried to put Desmond on, but he wouldn’t take the phone. He just shook his head, said, “Uh-uh,” and stayed just out of reach.
That was Desmond’s way with Kendell, his usual technique with rectitude. If somebody was keen on him doing something he knew he ought to do, something there was no earthly chance of him doing, Desmond preferred to make himself unavailable to advice. His arms got short and his fingers useless. His ears became obstructed, and you couldn’t ever find his front side because he was always turning away.
“He’s doing that thing,” I said to Kendell, and it was all I needed to say.
“That Gordo boy?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Don’t eat anything he gives you.”
“What’s he going to give me?”
“You’ll see.” Kendell must have been at the Greenville station house already. I could hear somebody yelling about his rights and liberties. He sounded drunk or maybe only toothless. “Got to go.”
“All right.”
“Call me from Tuscaloosa. I might know a little more by then.”
“Pull your pants up, fool!” I heard Kendell shout. It made do for “good-bye.”
“That buddy of yours in Gordo,” I said to Desmond. “He some kind of chef or something?”
Desmond took his phone back from me. “He ain’t no buddy of mine,” he said.
TWENTY-TWO
It turned out we were less than half an hour out of Gordo, which was kind of someplace, unlike Reform that hadn’t been any place at all. Gordo had a water tower and four actual blocks of downtown. Two of them going east to west
and two of them north to south.
We stopped at the Marathon station so Percy Dwayne could use the bathroom. The Jack in the Box Jumbo Breakfast Platter wasn’t agreeing with him.
“Likely the bacon,” Luther explained to me. “Maybe the hash browns. Could be the pancakes. Eggs were a little greasy too.”
“That’s all on one plate?” I asked him.
Luther nodded. “Jumbo,” he explained.
Eugene bought some cigarettes. He smoked one and grew dizzy. He sat down on a curb stone over by the air hose. Barbara closed on him and laid her head in his lap.
“Used to settle me out,” Eugene told me, waving his pack of Merits.
“Jumbo Breakfast Platter?” I asked him.
He owned up in sadness. “Yeah.”
Desmond didn’t have a current number for his guy. He checked his phone for the time.
“Not but eight thirty,” he said. “He won’t be up for a while.”
“Can’t we get him up?”
Desmond grunted. Desmond nodded. “Probably going to have to.”
Dale had gone into the minimart and bought an Iron Man Magazine. Without intervention, I could see us spending our forenoon parked right there while Dale perched on the ring in the men’s room and did more monumental business.
“No sir,” I told Dale and pointed at the Escalade. “When Percy Dwayne comes out, we leave.”
“Ain’t like I can control it.”
“Try.”
I shut him in the backseat.
“Time to wake up your buddy,” I told Desmond. I shouted to Percy Dwayne, “Come on!”
He said something from the toilet. He sounded like a mouse behind a wall. I went over and kicked the door twice. Percy Dwayne came out pulling up his pants.
“It was that last hash brown.” Percy Dwayne had been doing some powerful analyzing. “I’ve seen cleaner Dumpsters,” he told me of the Marathon men’s room. “Got a good mind to write a letter.” We both knew he never would.
Desmond couldn’t precisely remember where his friend in Gordo lived. It was out in the Alabama wilds just north and east of Gordo proper. In Desmond’s defense, they looked to have logged half the county since he’d last been through there. A lot of bald red dirt and stumps and lap wood and ugly unchecked erosion.
“Who’d want to live here?” Luther asked us about every ninety seconds, right up until Dale distracted him with a picture of a woman from his magazine. A gatefold photo of an oily bemuscled creature holding up the front end of a truck.
“Is that even a girl?” Luther asked Dale.
That was enough to make Dale quarrel. “Hell, I’d do her,” he told Luther. It came out sounding like a challenge.
Luther grabbed for the magazine and studied her some. “Yeah,” he said. “Maybe. If I could use your dick.”
Dale made his aw-fuck-I’m-going-to-hit-you noise, so I reached around and grabbed his ear again. He squealed at such a pitch that he stirred up Barbara in the way back. She warbled and harmonized with him.
“Swallow your knuckles,” I told Dale. “And you,” I said to Luther, “pipe down.”
“Could you get wood with that in the room?” Luther asked as he showed me that oily creature. From the collarbones up, she looked like Johnny Mathis in a wig.
“Think we’re here,” Desmond told us all and pointed up a track.
The roadway was lined with yellow pines, but the territory on either side had been logged and picked over to a fare-thee-well.
“You sure?”
Desmond nodded and turned in. “Used to be woods. Threw me a little.”
Percy Dwayne had drawn up to the seat back. “Sure looks like a shit hole now.”
That was impossible to argue with. The surrounding landscape had that ruined postapocalyptic feel to it. It was all dead limbs and red clay gullies, stumps and viney thickets. The standing trees along the roadway made the scene seem odder still, like somebody had hoped we wouldn’t notice the devastation beyond them.
“Who’s this guy?” Percy Dwayne asked Desmond.
Desmond groaned and shifted. He said, “Lance.”
Up until then I thought I knew everybody Desmond knew.
“Lance?” I asked him.
Desmond winced and nodded. Whenever he did that I could be sure I was about to meet a stone-cold freak.
“Worse than Manny?”
I could see the house by then, a ramshackle federalist heap that hadn’t been painted in several decades. The tin roof was rusted and two of the portico columns were holding each other up.
Desmond winced. Desmond shrugged. Desmond knew Manny from some Pine Bluff roadhouse back when Desmond was courting his ex, Shawnica, who hailed from Arkansas. We ran into him in Memphis once where Desmond was forced to introduce us. Manny talked and twitched like a tweaker, was tattooed from his cowlick down, and wore a cap with a leathery thing attached to the brim. A dried pig’s vulva, he informed us.
Manny told us about a guy he’d killed and a woman friend he’d maimed. He laughed all the while, showed us his nasty broken teeth. Desmond had to give him money to get him to leave us alone.
“Colorful,” I told Desmond once we were finally free of Manny.
Desmond said, “Shawnica,” in a mournful sort of way.
Lance, as it turned out, was colorful too. We didn’t have to wake him up after all. He hadn’t gone to bed yet. He answered the door when Desmond knocked like he was expecting somebody else.
I wasn’t quite ready for the spectacle of Lance since I was still soaking in the carnival’s worth of crap in Lance’s yard. Two ice cream trucks. A life-sized camel made from brown shag carpet. A row of theater seats—still bolted together. A hot-air balloon basket. A World War II–vintage antiaircraft gun. The sort of boat Robinson Crusoe might have made if he’d had no end of epoxy. A DeLorean, I think (the weeds were kind of high). One of those painted canvas sideshow banners you see at the county fair. It wasn’t entirely unfurled, and I could just make out the face of a man with snake scales down his neck.
Our crew was wandering the property like they were walking the streets of heaven. They moved from item to item, marveling at each in turn and saying with wonderment, “Shit!”
Consequently, they were preoccupied when Lance threw open the door. I was on the front porch with Desmond still half dazzled by the yard crap but focused enough to keep myself away from the holes in the porch planking.
Lance was Mick Jagger skinny. Not an ounce of fat on him and a mohawk for a do. He was wearing what turned out to be a tangerine crepe tube top and a pair of tartan Bermuda shorts. Black watch, I have to think.
At the sight of Desmond, Lance shouted, “Honey!” and threw open the screen door. Kicked it open actually since it was swollen stuck in the jamb. There was no harm to be done. It was just a warped frame with no screenwire in it. Lance burst across the threshold and all but leapt into Desmond’s arms.
That got the crew’s attention. Percy Dwayne said, “What the fuck…?” Now the wonderment was tempered with disgust.
Lance was wearing leopard flip-flops. The toenails on one foot were painted blue, and the nails on the other were pinkish red.
“Cherry blossom,” he told me later.
Lance gave Desmond a prodigious kiss on the cheek. Desmond proved to have a snort for that. He then uncoupled himself from Lance as delicately as he could manage. Desmond didn’t fracture Lance’s bones anyway as he took his arms off his neck.
“Sorry to just roll up,” Desmond said.
“I thought you were Jason.” Lance slapped Desmond’s chest fondly as he spoke. “His medicine day. Ought to be here shortly.”
“Jason from Meridian?”
“Don’t you know it!”
Desmond jabbed his thumb my way. “Nick,” he said.
“Well now.” Lance laid his hands to his hips and treated me to an exhaustive once-over. He said, “Hmmmm,” as he gave me a hard scour down and a hard scour up.
I wasn’t offended or
uneasy. Lance seemed mostly otherworldly. Unless, of course, you were Percy Dwayne, Luther, Eugene, or Dale. I could hear them all breathing past their adenoids at the base of the porch stairs. Lance must have heard them too. Once he finished with me, he stepped over to the lip of the porch floor and gave our colleagues the once-over.
“What are you looking at, Betty?” Percy Dwayne asked him.
“Splain!” Lance said to no one much, but Desmond knew he was talking to him.
“We’re in kind of a fix,” Desmond told Lance.
“Yes, and…”
“We’re chasing a boy. They’re helping us. Need a few things.”
“Want to go way up? Want to go way down?”
“Guns,” Desmond explained. “Holding maybe five hundred, but we’re good for whatever it takes.”
“Then come on.” Lance waved us toward his front door. “You boys too if you want,” he shouted down to Luther and Percy Dwayne, Dale and Eugene. He’d turned full around to do it, and Barbara, naturally, caught his eye. “Hey, sugar,” he told her, and then he said to me and Desmond, “I’ve got a better shirt for your dog.”
Lance collected antlers and tusks along with brown mottled Charles Chips cans, the big tin canisters they used to deliver to customers straight out of trucks. He had deer antlers and moose antlers and what looked to me like ram horns. They were mounted on the walls. Laying on the tables. Piled up on the floor. There were two elephant tusks standing up in a corner and what I had to guess was a hippopotamus tooth on the mantelpiece. Lance also had a stuffed and lacquered python on his hearth. It was diamond patterned and pale pink underneath.
Dale saw it first. He pulled his hand from his mouth and alerted the rest of the crew with, “Fucking hell.”
That parlor was like the front yard only better.
“Ain’t for sale or nothing is it?” Eugene wanted to know of the python. He was a bit of a reptile buff himself.
“No, sweetie,” Lance said.
Eugene shivered involuntarily. He’d probably never been called sweetie, even by a woman.
“Park yourselves,” Lance told our crew. “Nibble.” He pointed at an open Charles Chips canister on the coffee table. It was half full of pale, mishapen cookies. The table itself was a slab of glass held up by a thicket of ibex antlers or something. Not deer anyway. They were black and ribbed and curled all over the place.