by Gerald Duff
“Not to put too fine a point on it,” J.W. said. “I got you. So Perry got in with the Batboys For Freedom up in Memphis, once he’d reached escape velocity from Panola County.”
“He did, and up yonder they tell me, he got too damn enthusiastic with his 32 ounce bat and killed some colored kid outright.”
“Major Dalbey tells me it was Perry Lester’s first at bat, Jimmy. It was his initiation run he was on when he knocked that boy in the head. Perry had something to prove to the assholes he was working to join up with.”
“I reckon so,” Sheriff Seay said. “He was sure easy to find, I tell you that much, after we got the call from y’all up there in Homicide that Perry was likely to be here in Panola County. Soon as I heard his last name, I piled in the car with one of the deputies and we run out there to Drew to pick him up.”
“Didn’t put up much of a fight, Perry didn’t, huh?” J.W. said. “Saw the game was up and threw his hands up in the air.”
“It wasn’t even that much to it, J.W. We got to the house, the old Vance place it is, you remember, and Perry was asleep in one of the backrooms. Denned up in there with old clothes and rags and cardboard boxes and busted video game sets and empty cans and junk throwed everywhere. Time he woke up, the deputy had the cuffs on him, and I was holding the muzzle of my .44 in his ear.”
“You still carrying that .44, Jimmy? That ain’t regulation, not even here in Panola County, is it?”
“No, I imagine it don’t meet the specs, but a man who’s looking in the end of that barrel tends to just get real quiet and stand there waiting to be told what to do next.”
“I know I would,” J.W. said. “But tell me something. What’s Perry Lester got against black folks that’d cause him to join up with the Batboys once he got to Memphis? Did black kids whip his ass regular when he was little or something?”
“When does a Lester need a reason for anything, J.W.?” Sheriff Seay said. “Perry doesn’t know why he does a single damn thing he does do, and if you was to ask him why he did something, it’d just piss him off.”
“You know something? Here entering my declining years, I have just lost all patience with that kind of shit. I got plumb sick of that behavior.”
“I go along with that, J.W.,” Sheriff Seay said. “Makes me want to pick up my own baseball bat is what it does. You ready to meet Perry?”
“Yeah,” J.W. said. “I got him a nice little seat fixed up in my Buick. Let’s go get the young man situated.”
When Perry Lester arrived from where he was being housed in the Panola County jail, he was led by a deputy holding a thick leather belt ringed with chains attached to the inmate’s wrists. He was also fastened at the ankles with shackles and a chain leading upward to the belt, causing him to shuffle along the hall and keep his eyes focused on where he was stepping.
“Hey, Perry,” J.W. said. “You sound like one of Santa Claus’s reindeer trotting along with those chains on you. I bet you just stay in a holiday mood, listening to your jingle bells working out.”
Perry Lester lifted his gaze at that statement and stared at the man before him, his eyes as dead as he could make them and his face as blank as a slab of sheetrock wall board.
“Not too perky this morning, I see,” J.W. said. “Well, that’s understandable, a man of your substance having to be led on a leash by a little bitty woman in a uniform. Damn, that must be embarrassing.”
“I don’t know you,” Perry Lester said, “and she ain’t no woman. She’s a nigger whore.”
“Lord, you talk rough and mean,” J.W. said, then turning his attention to the deputy with the prisoner in tow, “I reckon Perry here has got you about scared half to death.”
“He don’t scare me none, Sergeant,” the deputy said. “Perry is just as sweet as he can be once you get to know him. He just act nasty.”
“My goodness,” J.W. said. “Ain’t that nice, Sheriff? Who would’ve thought that?”
“Why Janelle says that is because she caught old Perry crying yesterday in his cell,” Sheriff Seay said, “when he thought nobody’d catch him at it. Just boohooing, wasn’t he, Janelle?”
“Yeah, he’s just a big old fat teddy bear wanting his mama, Perry is,” the deputy said. “Don’t let his rough outside fool you none.”
“Well, I’m so glad to hear that,” J.W. said. “Maybe on the way to Memphis, Perry and me can share our feelings with one another. Get, you know, connected as one human being to another one, like it says all the time on TV.”
“Just don’t let Perry come back down here to Panola County no more, Sergeant Ragsdale, “ the sheriff said. “We don’t appreciate the air pollution he takes with him everywhere he goes.”
“All right, Perry,” J.W. said, taking the handle on the restraint belt from the deputy and beginning to move toward the door. “Come on, Slick, time to go to the big old jail in Memphis, see can we introduce you to some nice roommates.”
On the way out of Batesville, Perry Lester fastened to the D ring welded to the Buick’s frame, J.W. pointed out what he considered interesting sights and landmarks of the town in which he’d grown up, noting in particular what wasn’t there any more.
“See that store where you can rent videos and computer games and shit, Perry? That used to be a pool hall. Yonder across the street, that was an ice cream place, there where it’s empty. I ain’t talking about soft-serve now. I mean the old fashioned dip ice cream, hard as a rock when it’s froze up good.”
Pery said nothing, staring straight before him and now and then moving his head in a tight circle as though to work out a crick in his neck.
“What’s wrong, Perry?” J.W. said. “Here we are, two white men riding along in Panola County, Mississippi, and you ain’t said a word to me. Are you just going to sit there and stink all the way to Memphis? Don’t you know this is probably your last time ever to be by yourself with just one white man in the car with you? Why, son, Memphis is a majority African-American city now. Has been for I don’t know how long. You just going to be right in among black folks from now on out everywhere you look.”
“Majority?” Perry said.
“Yeah, you know what that word means? Run across it in your extensive reading? It means more than half, majority does.”
“I know what majority means,” Perry Lester said. “I know my words.”
“Why that makes me proud of the educational system of my home county to hear you say that, Perry. And I bet it didn’t take long for you to learn all your words, did it? When did you get all that schooling could give you? Third or fourth grade?”
“I went to high school,” Perry said.
“Why, hell, I went to France one time,” J.W. said. “But that don’t mean I’m a Frenchman. Let me ask you another word. Do you know the word barbecue?”
“Yeah.”
“You want some?”
“I could eat me a sandwich,” Perry said. “Yeah, I could.”
“I’m going to do you a favor then,” J.W. said. “Give you a present, one white man to another before the state of Tennessee puts you in that room with the lifetime lease. I’m going to buy you the best barbecue sandwich to be had in Mississippi, and of course that means the whole wide world. I’m taking you to Big Daddy’s Dreamland, out yonder where Sunflower Road crosses Bumblebee.”
“I heard of that,” Perry Lester said, shifting in his seat until his chains rattled. “It’s a nigger place, ain’t it?”
“Son, you ain’t been listening to me,” J.W. said. “What all I been trying to tell you. Get focused now. From now on out for you, everything you see and everywhere you go is going to be a nigger place.”
***
“I got your voice mail on my cell phone,” J.W. Ragsdale said to Tyrone Walker back in the Midtown station. “And I believe we ought to go pay a little visit to this here Jimbo Reynolds, preacher man. See who’s staying with him.”
“You just now concluding that, J.W.?” Tyrone said. “You’re slowing in your reflexes. I lef
t that message for you three or four hours ago, and you’re just answering it now.”
“Well,” J.W. said, looking down at the pile of pink slips of paper left on his desk for call backs, “I just now listened to what you said.”
“You didn’t know how to retrieve your messages, did you, until somebody showed you the way to do it?”
“What it was, Tyrone, was that there wasn’t a ten-year old kid around in Panola County to do it for me, so I had to wait until I got back to Memphis to find me a nerd to take care of it. I drove here fast as I could.”
“On that model you just punch the button marked…” Tyrone started to say and then stopped. “I ain’t got time to do a seminar right now, J.W. Let’s just go see the Major and tell him what we’re fixing to do.”
“That’ll work. Major Dalbey will light up like a Christmas tree when he hears we might be getting Ovetta Bichette off his back.”
“At least for a while,” Tyrone said. “Until some other member of the councilwoman’s constituency’s got something that needs doing by the poh-lice force.”
On the way to Major Dalbey’s office, Tyrone asked if J.W. had gotten his Batboy delivered to the Shelby County Hilton for Criminals, as many of the taxpayers of Memphis called the justice complex located downtown near the river.
“Oh, yeah,” J.W. said, beginning to laugh, “I wanted to swing by here to introduce Perry Lester to you before I deposited his sorry ass, but I was running late. My fellow Panola Countian has a thing about African-American citizens of this great nation, and I wanted to show you to him. Here’s a sample of your perfect bunkmate, I was going to tell him. I hope you got you a lifetime supply of lubricant, Batboy.”
“You are a nasty-talking white man, J.W.,” Tyrone said. “All you do is deal in stereotypes. I expect this Lester fellow is going to meet the love of his life any day now, and then you’ll be sorry you jumped to all these perverted conclusions.”
“How you think we ought to handle picking up this Randall Eugene McNeill kid?” J.W. said. “Just the two of us, right?”
“Yeah, let’s low-profile it. And let’s not give the Major time to think about it. He does, and he’s likely to want to put on a show for Ovetta. Get word out to the TV people and call in the SWAT assholes and all that bunch, just to pick up one little murdering shitass.”
“Right,” J.W. said. “You tell him we ain’t got time to get nothing organized but a quick little in and out. Say Lo Lo Tedrick gave you the word this kid’s fixing to go somewhere with the preacher’s show or something.”
“I’ll tell Dalbey if we don’t do it quick, it’ll look real bad when the kid ain’t there by the time we show up. I’ll say response time a lot.”
“That’ll do it,” J.W. said. “The Major does hate it when somebody promises him some candy and then takes it back.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Colorado and Ricky Nelson
Two of them were rummaging around in the secure room, the Indian and the most intelligent looking of the white men, the one they called Bob, and Jimbo Reynolds sat back in one of the leather chairs in the ante-room, considering how dumb and smug he’d been to let conditions favor and allow this kind of bullshit robbery to take place.
It was always a balancing act, trying to come up with an optimum plan for any contingency. A man was fucked if he did, and he was fucked if he didn’t. It would have been easy enough to hire enough muscle to hang around the house heavily armed, eating up every damn thing in the kitchen, half-drunk most of the time and high as a kite on enough dope to stock a drugstore the rest of the day. You can find those moral retards all over Memphis.
That was the problem, of course, Jimbo knew, and he had made a conscious and informed decision not to take that option. Best case scenario, if you went with that choice, they’d be steadily stealing all they could lay their damn hands on, forcing you to spend half the time worrying about how to maintain a decent share of the inventory for yourself. You’d have to be thinking about that every minute of the day, worse than a mama cat having to move the kittens every two hours to keep the coons from eating them.
Worst scenario would be having that much trash all together all the time, watching what was coming in the door until finally one of the dummies would come up with the genius idea of taking all of it and offing the boss in the process.
So Jimbo had opted to be daring, to take the road less traveled, to do it all himself with a good strong safe room and a foolproof electronic monitoring system and only one or two harmless nuts crazy enough to buy into the Cowboy Jesus concept and see themselves as servant-leaders to the Range Foreman and the big Boss in the sky.
Shit and motherfuck, Jimbo thought to himself, fastened to his leather chair by handcuffs and looking from one of the conscienceless misfits before him to the other as he listened to a full fiscal quarter’s worth of counted and boxed cash being scooped up by the two others in his safe room. Shit and motherfuck, it has come to this.
And it’s my fault because I made a wrong decision, let myself be swayed by greed, thought I could eat the whole goddamn pie myself. I have got to learn to share, he told himself as he looked across the room to the colored kid all dressed up in his cowboy suit. Any business has got to allow for shrinkage and be content not to keep it all. That is the lesson to be learned from the event, and should I get to the other side of it at the end of the day, I swear I will hire me an army of protection and let them feed as they will, and I will take my regular fucking like a man.
Two questions I need answered, he announced to himself. How did this collection of inbred and evil-minded, thieving sons of bitches get onto what I’ve got here and to the flaws in the system? Who in my employ gave them the word?
Second question, and the big one, for me and the darky cowboy over yonder in the corner looking as goggle-eyed as a goose knocked in the head, but fuck him, I got myself to worry about, why are these people calling each other openly by name and why have they made no attempt to disguise their looks? Not a mask, not a beard, not a hat pulled low over an eye among them.
Bottom line, are they going to leave my brains splattered all over the wall of this ante-room when they take off with every damn cent of this quarter’s worth of my money?
“Friend,” Jimbo said to the one sitting in the chair closest to him, the rangy narrow-headed one studying the weapon in his hand as though it was a D cup full of titty, “we’re all businessmen here, don’t you think?”
“You talking to me, preacher?” the man said, Earl as Jimbo remembered him being called by the Indian-looking one. “The fuck you mean by saying that?”
“I just mean we all suffer gains and losses as we’re trying to make a living,” Jimbo said. “Just a thing I’ve noticed about how we have to make a go of it. It’s nothing personal about any of it, is it? I may make a good payday today, I don’t tomorrow. People buy what I’m selling sometimes. Sometimes I can’t give it away. I win a little here. I lose a lot there. And you know what?”
Let him answer that, Jimbo prayed deep inside his head where nobody but him ever reached, let him talk back some, please, let him give a shit, Lord God.
“What?” the man called Earl said, shifting his attention from the automatic to Jimbo’s face.
“I just forget about it the next day. Win or lose, make money or lose money, get there or get lost looking, I just put all that behind me, and go on with my life. What comes next is what interests me. It’s got to. You can’t change what’s happened. I know you believe that way, too, from just sitting here looking at you.”
“Huh,” the retard said. “I don’t know what I believe about that, what you just said. I don’t give a shit about none of it.”
“You got that right,” Jimbo Reynolds said, leaning forward in his chair until the handcuffs bit his wrist, “that’s exactly the way I see it. I don’t give a shit about what’s happened. Hell, that’s over and done with. Done with, I tell you. I’m just thinking about tomorrow. You know what I mean?”
&nbs
p; “Tomorrow is that Elvis day doings, ain’t it?” Earl said. “That ‘mama’ business, right?”
“I do believe that’s right,” Jimbo said. “A global moment in time, I hear they’re calling it. You an Elvis fan, sir?”
“Me? Naw, I don’t listen to music on the radio none. Not no more.”
“A man grows up, his musical tastes change,” Jimbo said. “I know what you mean. I purely do. There was a time I might’ve listened to a few of Elvis’s records, back when there was records, but not anymore, no unh uh. I’m just like you on that subject.”
“The one thing I did like about Elvis,” Earl Winston said, “was he didn’t sing this rap shit the niggers is all into now. When he was singing something, you could tell it was a song.”
“Amen,” Jimbo Reynolds said. “I heard that.”
“Another thing,” Earl Winston said, laying the .45 down on the floor by his chair, “I always respected about Elvis Presley. He liked his pussy, no matter how much he dressed like a queer sometimes.”
“He did,” Jimbo Reynolds said, nodding his head in affirmation and praying for further psychic connection with this tattooed retard reared back in one of Jimbo’s Moroccan leather chairs. “You got to give the man credit and just due for that. He would get after that tail, from all accounts I’ve heard.”
“Yeah, a old boy I run into in California one time got to talking to me about me being from Mississippi and all, and he told me he had worked on the sets of some of them pictures Elvis made in Hollywood.”
“No kidding?”
“He said Elvis would have them young girls brought in by the carload so he could hem them up in a corner and pick out one to fuck. Prime stuff.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah, that’s what he claimed, this old boy, and he didn’t have no reason to lie about it. I wasn’t asking him nothing.”
“Well, that’s good to hear, and I’m proud of Elvis for that. Them was the good old days, back when a man that had a chance at good-looking young pussy would take advantage of it. Not just, you know, do like they do these days, just play around the edges of it.”