by Rick Gavin
That was the leading trouble with Luther’s ilk. They were all criminal shitheads with standards, and you’d tie up with them if you accused them of something lower than they’d do. Of course, it was always hard to know exactly what they’d consider lower.
“He take you in or just wail on you?” Desmond wanted to know.
“Both!” Luther told him. He was still indignant about it.
Dale was on the loading dock when we got back to K-Lo’s, and he was looking awfully rough, even by Dale’s standards. He had a black eye and a puffy lip. He was showing a colleague his stitches as me and Desmond came out the back door with K-Lo and into the loading bay. Luther was back in the Escalade trying to track down Percy Dwayne.
“Come here,” K-Lo told Dale. He pointed at us. “Listen to them.”
The new Dale was a slight improvement over the old juiced-up, weight-lifting Dale, but not enough of an improvement to make Dale sensible and savory. Back when he was fit and musclebound, at least we could covet Dale’s physique, but now he was just a pile of flab, and we had some of that already.
“What?” Dale asked us.
“That Boudrot’s on the warpath,” I told him. “Looking for you.”
“Fine by me,” Dale said, but when he tried to grin, he winced. The inside of his bottom lip was all black and brambly with stitches.
“What happened to you?” Desmond asked him.
“Got in it with a boy.” Dale shrugged the way he always did, like getting beat to a bloody pulp was a manly sort of thing to do.
“Talk to Patty?” I asked him.
“Naw.”
“That Boudrot went to her place first.”
Dale didn’t get alarmed exactly, but he finally displayed some genuine human interest. “Didn’t hurt her, did he?”
I shook my head.
“She hid in the freezer,” Desmond told him. “He tore up every damn thing in the house.”
“Then that’s one fucker that’s done for.” Dale pulled a face and winced again.
“Come on with us,” I told him. “We’re going to hunt him down.”
Dale shouted across the way to K-Lo, “Boss man?” He pointed at me and Desmond.
K-Lo shrugged by way of excusing Dale for the day, and then K-Lo spat. That was about as close to a “Yeah, go ahead,” as you’d ever get from K-Lo.
Naturally, Dale wasn’t pleased to see Luther in the Escalade.
“Shit,” Dale said when he laid eyes on him. “Ain’t got no use for this dirtbag.”
“We need him,” Desmond told Dale in the low, rumbling declarative way that Desmond had of ending debate before it ever started.
“Shotgun,” Dale said.
I’d expected as much. I shrugged and said, “Go on.”
So I rode in the back with Luther as we headed south toward Yazoo. The plan was to locate Tommy and Eugene back in the swamp in the national forest. They’d given that Boudrot up when we were hunting him down before, and it stood to reason he probably knew it somehow.
“You might call Patty,” I suggested to Dale.
He got all shirty at the suggestion. He turned half around to tell me he guessed he knew who he ought to call when.
That must have been the first good look that Luther got of Dale, because that’s when he chose to ask him, “Who beat the living shit out of you?”
Dale’s initial impulse was to reach over the seat back and take a swipe at Luther. Luther dodged and Dale hit me. I would have popped him back, but the swipe itself had pulled a few of his stitches, so he was hurt already without any help from me.
Tommy and Eugene had a place they sort of shared in the national forest, which was chiefly massive cypress bog and reptile habitat. They had a house up on stilts made out of most anything that had come to hand. Lots of road signs for siding and bits of sheet metal from sheds they’d taken apart. Actual ownership of the lodge, as they called it, was disputed and unsettled. That worked well enough as long as they were both sober or both drunk. When just one of them got loaded, the other one always tried to steal the place. They had some kind of deed they kept shut up in a cupboard, and the sober one would trot it out to try to make the drunk one sign.
We left the highway at Silver City and went down through Midnight and Louise, got gas at Spanish Fort, and then headed straight into the forest. Desmond tensed up behind the wheel. Luther got a little antsy as well. Delta boys weren’t used to standing trees in any concentration. The national forest was all that was left of what the entire Delta had once been. A heavily wooded thicket, swampy and marshy by turns. The Delta had mostly been cleared for farming, canals cut and swamps drained. There was nowhere much to find leafy canopy overhead. You had to come clear to the national forest just to go into the woods.
“Dark in here,” Luther said.
Desmond made a neck noise.
Dale was from Little Rock and wasn’t generally the sort to much care where he was.
“I might ought to been there. I don’t know.” He was still thinking about Patty and how if he hadn’t cheated on her with a string of tramps from Memphis to Meridian, then the two of them might have been sharing a roof, and he could have locked horns with that Boudrot.
Nobody cared, particularly Desmond and Luther who’d moved on to how little they liked being in the woods.
We passed the big sheltered corkboard with the map of the forest on it and the specimen cypress just down from it surrounded by rail fencing.
“You know where you’re going?” Dale asked Desmond.
Desmond told Dale a form of “Yeah.” It came out sounding like “Shut the fuck up.”
“There’s the pipeline.” I pointed.
Desmond and Luther nodded. We all remembered that thing as a landmark from before.
“There it is.” Luther pointed to a track off to the left.
Desmond turned in. He did it gingerly and at a crawl. “Ain’t got no four-wheel drive,” he told us. “Switch went out or something.”
I couldn’t blame Desmond for leaving that particular repair undone, given his love for hard roads and civilization.
“Muddy up there.” I pointed. “This is probably far enough.”
We climbed out and the bugs descended on us. The chemicals kept them at bay in the open, but back in the woods they were thick in the air and hungry. Gnats and flies and mosquitoes—we were all wearing a layer of them straightway.
We did what most sane people would do. We got back in the Escalade.
“Don’t usually need nothing,” Desmond said as he rooted through his console after something with Deet in it. He turned up four tubes of Cruex and a roll of antacids.
“Try this,” Luther told us. He stuck his hand down his shirt. He swabbed his armpits for some stink and then rubbed his fingers across his face. That was enough to convince us we’d rather be carried off by the mosquitoes, so we bailed back out of the Escalade and into the buggy woods.
Eugene’s place was maybe a quarter mile ahead. Dale charged along the track, and me and Desmond and Luther followed at enough of a distance to guarantee that any snake Dale stepped on would have just him to bite. Dale reached the clearing and was waiting there swatting flies while I was still slogging out way up through the woods.
“I don’t hear any dogs,” I said. Ordinarily, Eugene kept a half-dozen hounds. He was a fanatic coon hunter and didn’t think anything of tromping through the big woods in the middle of the night.
“You been out here lately?” Luther asked me.
“Been three years probably.”
“Maybe he moved.”
“Or died,” Desmond said.
It was hard to tell at the corner of his yard if the place was abandoned or not. The thorny thicket that bordered Eugene’s yard was as full of snagged shopping bags and impaled pouch chew boxes as it had been the first time me and Desmond had dropped in on Eugene. The same junked cars were still clotting up the lot along with a muddy Nova that looked like it hadn’t seen the highway lately. No ta
gs. No stickers. No nothing. And two of the tires were flat.
There was a paper sack full of paper sacks floating at the edge of the bayou that lapped at the pylons holding up Eugene’s house, but no fresh garbage that we could see. Nothing in the yard or in the swamp that looked the least bit recent.
Desmond pointed at the soft ground to the right of where we were standing. Tire tracks, and they looked like fresh ones.
“Might just be off running around,” Desmond said.
“Maybe. Who’s going up?” I asked.
Dale told me, “Hell, I will.”
Eugene’s place was so slapdash and rickety that we all couldn’t go up at once. One guy on the swamp-rotted stairs at a time and one on the jackleg cantilevered walkway. The house would probably hold us safely enough, but there wasn’t any chance of us getting up there in numbers all of a sudden.
“Hold on,” I told Dale and shouted out for Eugene.
Luther chimed in behind me with a “Hey here, buddy.”
I thought I heard some kind of whimper but laid it off to the swamp and woods. There were all kinds of creatures around us making every variety of noise.
“Go on,” I said to Dale.
Dale bent over with a chorus of grunts and groans and made of show of producing a .38 he carried in an ankle holster. He spun the barrel to check his load and then tried to spit in a manly way, but his stitches confounded him, and Dale ended up just dribbling down his shirt.
“Just shout down what you find,” Desmond told him.
Dale nodded and dribbled again.
Then he climbed to the landing, paused for breath, and headed up to Eugene’s deck proper.
“Probably off in Arkansas stealing shit.” That was Luther’s suggestion, and I stood there hoping to hell he was right and fearing that he wasn’t.
I’m not much of a believer in things being too quiet or feeling somehow all wrong. I like to go by what I see, but something definitely felt off at Eugene’s. The place was too damn quiet.
Eugene’s door was standing open to judge from the way Dale peered in through the screen.
“Hey,” he said. When he heard nothing back, Dale turned our way and shrugged. He knocked on the door rail and said, “Hey” again. Another shrug. Dale checked his .38 load again. “Going in,” he told us.
From inside, and almost immediately, we heard from Dale, “Sweet Lord!” The screen door swung open violently, and Dale came lurching out and laid hard against the deck rail. It’s a wonder it didn’t give way and drop him at our feet.
“What?” I asked him.
“A human lives here?”
“Any sign of Eugene?” Desmond shouted up.
Dale shook his head. “Just all his shit.”
“Busted up?” I asked him.
“Hell,” Dale said, “who can tell?”
Luther had set out toward the stairs by then. “I’ll go.” He was wiry and light, and the whole place only vibrated some as he climbed.
Luther pushed his way past Dale and drew the screen door open. “You coming?”
Dale nodded. He dribbled again and followed Luther inside.
Me and Desmond could hear just the noise of Luther and Dale talking back and forth. Not the words, only the racket. Desmond pointed toward the swamp.
“What’s that?”
There was sure enough something floating. I couldn’t quite make out what it was, not from down where we were. I was about to call for Luther when he came out of the house on his own.
“I don’t know,” he shouted down. “Looks like shit, but it always did.”
“What’s out in the water?” I asked him and pointed.
Luther followed the deck around the side of the house and over toward the bayou. He was fifteen feet above us and so could see what we couldn’t see.
“Dog,” was all he said.
SEVEN
Dale moved around to join Luther. He was holding on to the railing. The whole platform was shaking now. Dale and Luther looked like they were riding a swamp rat parade float down the street.
“Yep,” Dale told us, by way of confirmation. “Dog all right.”
“What kind?” I asked them.
Luther turned our way and shook his head. “Coonhound.”
Me and Desmond said together, “Shit.”
Desmond followed me across the yard. Around the thickets anyway and hummocks of fescue, and past the junked overgrown Ford station wagon and the partly disassembled state-body truck. The dog pen was still and quiet. I stopped short once I could see it. Desmond came up beside me.
“He didn’t, did he?” I said. “Shit, man, they’re just hounds.”
“Once you’d kill a guy for a Plymouth,” Desmond told me, “I guess you’ll do about anything.”
We went over together. Being Eugene’s, it wasn’t a proper pen. The kennel was made from roofing tin and road signs. The “fencing” was mostly pallets on end. The dogs were white and liver colored. I don’t know how many Eugene had, but there were six or seven of them in a pile. Shotgunned, from the looks of them.
“That fucker,” Desmond said.
We were out to get that Boudrot already for what he had done and was doing to people, but things took a turn once we’d gone back there and found that pile of dogs. People did wretched things to other people all the time, but a guy who’d shoot down a bunch of hounds—a guy who’d killed a goat already—had surrendered any claim on mercy. Unlike with humans, a dog never quite knew what he’d signed on for in this life. I can’t imagine a hound ever woke up thinking, I guess I’ve got it coming.
“He’s a dead man,” I told Desmond.
“Reading my mind,” he said.
Just then that pile of dead dogs quivered and shook. Me and Desmond fairly levitated. I circled around to what passed for a gate and let myself into the pen. I whistled. I called. Nothing.
“Say something,” I said.
“What?” Desmond asked me, and the pile quivered again. Desmond stepped back. “Damn,” and I heard a distinct whimper from the heap.
“Got a live one, and it’s hearing just you.”
“What do you mean?”
That raised another quiver. I didn’t see that I had much choice but just to dive on in and start sifting. They were big hounds and bloody. I dragged the top two off to the side by their back feet. Pulled another one away and was reaching for a fourth when the leg that I grabbed on to twitched and quivered. The pup let out a yelp.
“What are you doing?” Luther wanted to know. Him and Dale were up on the end deck looking down on us at the dog pen.
“He shot them,” I said. “Probably with the shotgun he took from K-Lo’s.”
Luther, to his credit, got indignant straightaway. He might have been a roadhouse oxy dealer and lifelong Delta cracker, but he’d about as soon shoot his mama as a hound.
“That son of a bitch,” he shouted to us. “I guess we’re chewing him all to hell now.”
Dale didn’t get it. He’d probably been one of those kids who just killed stuff for sport. Frogs and lizards. Ants by the thousands. A kitten if he could lay his hands on one.
“What’s the deal?” Dale asked.
“He shot the damn dogs,” Luther told Dale. He said it in the spirit of explanation and instruction, like he harbored hope that Dale had misunderstood the circumstances and would get properly enraged once he’d come to grips with things.
Dale just said, “Yeah.” The “So?” was implied.
Luther looked our way and pointed at Dale.
“We know already,” Desmond told him.
I reached back into the dog pile and brought out the survivor. She was a runt and bloody all over, but little of it turned out to be hers. She’d gotten skinned by a few shotgun pellets across the ridge of her back, but she must have been shielded by the rest of the pack as they took fire and fell onto her. I couldn’t help but picture that Boudrot standing at the makeshift fence, leaning in over one of the pallets firing point-blank at those d
ogs.
I handed the live one out to Desmond who took her but held her at arm’s length. Desmond didn’t have much use for dogs. It wasn’t Dale’s strain of indifference but rather a healthy fear of the creatures by having more a few turned loose on him.
“Why don’t you rinse her off. See where she’s hurt?”
Desmond looked at me like I’d asked him to make me a pair of shoes.
“Just dip her in the water,” I told him and pointed at the bayou. So there I was trying to marry Desmond’s natural fear of canines with his thoroughgoing distaste for swamps.
I attempted to get Luther to come down, but he didn’t want to mess up his clothes. Dale, for his part, couldn’t figure why we didn’t finish the job, just kill the live dog and leave them all to the gators and coyotes.
“They’ll pick them clean,” he told us. Then he started making noises about lunch.
I was going to explain to Dale that it was only half past ten, but I decided instead to go with, “Shut the fuck up.”
“Just keep her there,” I said to Desmond. “I want to make sure she’s the only one.”
I shifted the rest of the dogs around. There were eight of them altogether, including the lone hound that had lived. I left the pen and took that creature from Desmond, carried her down to the edge of the swamp, and rinsed her off in the brown water. She was complaining all the while.
Luther and Dale came down from the house to stand by the swamp and watch me.
“What are you going to do with it?” Luther asked me.
I hadn’t quite decided, but I knew one thing. “Can’t leave her here,” I said.
Luther surprised me by making noises like he could stand to have a dog, a companion to sit in his truck and wait for him while he was doing business at Lurleen’s—hardly a fit pastime for a hound but maybe better than Eugene’s pen. As Luther was talking, that wounded creature licked me on the wrist. A long, slow lick that she undertook as she rolled her eyes up at me. If a dog could ever tell me, “Thank you, brother,” that hound was doing it then.
She was as clean by then as the swamp was going to make her, and I could see that she’d gotten away just skinned raw along her spine. There was a spot on her back where the shot took the fur off, and it was seeping a bit.
