by Rick Gavin
But in a café in Arkansas when I’m only putting in an order and haven’t been up to the first little thing to get called an asshole about, somebody’s going to have to do a bit of explaining.
“Did I hear you right?” I said to that fellow.
He tightened up as best he could underneath his Chevy tattoo. He shifted his toothpick and grinned. “Asshole,” he said. He nodded.
“You sucker punch a sack of shit, and you think you’re Sonny Liston?”
He was grinning now. He set his toothpick on the napkin dispenser.
“How long on that order?” I asked the woman behind the counter.
“Five minutes.”
I told that boy, “Let’s go.”
So out we came into the lot. All four of us. Desmond was leaning against his front grill enduring prattle from Luther who very nearly stopped talking when he saw us step into the lot. He still had a few points to make with Desmond about proper catfish-frying technique, but he turned his attention to me and my posse while he said what he had to say.
Dale was out of sight in the Escalade by then, and Barbara’s head was hanging out the window.
“They ought to blow up all these goddamn bridges,” the fellow with the Chevy tattoo told me. “Keep you Mississippi trash over where you belong.”
He’d squared up on me by then and was making and unmaking his fists. He appeared to be looking for the chance to catch me with one of his lunging punches. I guess he thought, being Dale’s friend, I’d probably fight like Dale. That was hardly the case given my long-held fighting philosophy of always being first and never taking pity. I’d learned the hard way that going easy on a guy out of some tender human feeling was almost sure to cost you in the end.
So I went ahead and made my move. I waited for him to smirk at his buddies, and once he’d turned his head just slightly, I kicked him in the crotch. Hard and with full follow-through, like I was punting from the end zone. He tooted through his nose and bent forward. I swung on him with a right. Caught him flush and put him down.
One of his buddies said, “Fucker,” so I laid into him as well.
The third one held up his hands and showed me his palms. He smiled my way. He told me, “Hey.”
I very nearly eased off and relaxed, but then he went reaching for something, so I charged him and butted him over. I kicked him like hell once he was down. He had a pistol in his back jeans pocket, a little .25 caliber semi. It only held four rounds. You might kill a house cat with it if it was in your lap and you took dead aim.
I held the thing up and showed it to Desmond.
We liked our guns large and our calibers considerable. Desmond shook his head and told me, “People’ll buy any damn thing.”
Those boys were all twitching and groaning in the gravel at my feet. I pointed at the café and told Desmond and Luther, “Got to get Dale’s ribs.”
Luther shouted my way, “Can I kick them?”
Those boys were surely about to wish those bridges had all been blown to bits. I shrugged, reached for the screen door pull. “Do what you want,” he said.
Luther yipped and yodeled with cracker joy. “I like Arkansas after all.”
NINE
The Eudora, Arkansas, jailhouse had been a Big Lots once. It was off in a corner of what used to be a sizable shopping plaza. That store had been broken up into office space and modest shop fronts, and about half of them looked like they’d gone the way of the mother ship. Law enforcement, however, always loves a recession. There were new Crown Vic cruisers all over the place. People who’ve given over thieving for honest employment in boom times often find themselves laid off when things get tough and get back in the game.
If Eudora was much like Indianola—and it looked the same sort of spot, just smaller—the cops usually had an idea of who to pick up before even the choice goods got fenced. In terms of rank criminality, Eugene qualified as a sort of Eudora local. He’d shared with me and Desmond his crackpot theory of who had jurisdiction over what, and we’d been unable to shake Eugene from his abiding conviction that Mississippi was a sanctuary for thieving lowlifes like him.
Eugene primarily robbed Arkansas churches. “Shit, man,” he’d explained to us once, “they almost all unlocked.”
He’d started out stealing the bright brass liturgical bric-a-brac, but he’d soon discovered there wasn’t much of a going market for it. So he’d shifted his focus to pews and chairs and altar tables and pulpits. At least he could tear that stuff down into lumber if he couldn’t unload it whole.
Eugene drove a big junky truck he’d welded together from three or four other vehicles. During our first run-in with that Boudrot, me and Desmond and Luther had ridden around enough in Eugene’s truck to recognize it straightway over at the far end of the parking lot. It had been left in what passed for the Eudora PD’s impound yard, which was a weedy patch of shattered asphalt with two tractors and a backhoe in it along with Eugene’s jackleg state body truck. The bed was piled with stainless-steel tables.
“Looks like Eugene found a kitchen somewhere,” I said as we rolled up on the thing.
Desmond and Luther and Dale all told me together, “Methodists.”
“Surely not around here. Look at that stuff.” Desmond had stopped beside Eugene’s truck, and I was sizing up the load.
Eugene had a Hobart mixer and what appeared to be a pizza oven. A commercial refrigerator. It almost looked like Eugene had thrown in the tables because they were handy and could be had.
“Pine Bluff maybe,” Desmond suggested.
“Shit,” Luther told us and pointed at some sort of fancy cooktop. “Little Rock probably.”
Dale threw in with, “I doubt they’re letting him out.”
That was my opinion too from sizing up the swag. Eugene appeared to have stolen enough to qualify for genuine trouble.
“Who’s going in?” I asked them.
They all pointed. They all said, “You.”
I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t walking into a problem for myself. There I’d just been out in the open beating down some local pinheads. Somebody in that café-propane place could have called the trouble in. Consequently, I made a kind of foray, went in through the station house door like I was looking for directions.
“Some propane outfit around here somewhere?” I asked the woman at the front desk.
She had on a uniform, but it looked like the kind a housekeeper would wear.
She told me, “Yeah.” She pointed. She said, “Take 65. It’s three or four miles.”
“Open today?”
“It’s Tuesday, sugar.” She looked at me like I was dead simple and nodded.
If there’d been a call from the propane café, she sure didn’t know a thing about it, and she was the only one I could see who was answering a phone.
The thing rang just then. “Hold on,” she told me. “Po-lice,” she said and listened to what sounded like somebody frantic on the line. “Uh-huh,” she said every now and again—low and exasperated like Desmond was often given to saying. “Uh-huh.” Then there came a gap in the chatter, and that receptionist announced, “I ain’t sending nobody. You keep the lid on that septic tank of yours, and a cat isn’t going to fall in.”
A beefy deputy came wandering up out of the back of the place just then. He stopped in front of me, gave me a full and deliberate once-over.
“Help you?”
“Yeah, maybe. You got a guy in here named Eugene?”
“Where the hell you been?”
He motioned for me to follow him, and we headed into the bowels of the place. It was all unfinished wallboard and cubicles and smelly industrial berber carpet. We passed one cop playing hearts on his computer and another guy, a sergeant, who had the coffee machine apart. It was one of those double-eyed commercial things, and he’d taken it entirely to pieces.
“This him?” he said brightly to the guy I was following, hoping for the Bunn man.
“Swamp rat,” my deputy told him.
&
nbsp; Him and the guy playing hearts both clapped.
“I’m not his lawyer or anything,” I told my deputy.
“Got twenty dollars?” he asked me.
I nodded.
“Then he’s going with you,” he said, “because he sure as shit ain’t staying here.”
“And that stuff in his truck?” I asked him.
“Said he traded for it. We’ll sort that out later.”
“You believe him?”
“Friend,” that deputy told me, “right now I’ll swallow whatever gets him gone.”
With that he pulled open a big metal door and gestured for me to precede him into what proved to be the lockup. They had two cells—just cages in a big empty room—and Eugene was sitting on what looked to me like a shower chair in one of them. He had on a sky-blue county jumpsuit and a pair of laceless sneakers. His hair was combed. His face was shaved. He was so scrubbed his skin was pink. I’d never seen Eugene anything approaching that spruced up, and yet he stank like a barrel of black snakes. It was an intensely musty reptile reek. An aquarium odor but concentrated and hard beside intolerable.
I must have made a disgusted noise. A human couldn’t help but grunt when met with an odor like that.
“See?” that deputy said. “And we flat scrubbed the son of a bitch. He’s sweating it out or something. Maybe gator in the woodpile.”
Eugene had stood up by then and had stepped to the front of the cage to gawk my way. There was wafting involved, and the swampy stink of the place got even worse for a time.
Eugene said, “Hey.”
I hadn’t seen him in probably a year or two.
“So what happens here?” I asked the deputy.
“You give me twenty dollars. I let him out, and he goes with you.”
“His truck?”
“We keep it and all his shit until we get this sorted.” He turned to Eugene after that to say to him directly, “Wouldn’t surprise me much if he don’t come back.”
Eugene got immediately pitiful there with his arms hanging between the bars. “My truck?”
“Let it go,” I told him.
He whimpered some more and said, “But I ain’t done nothing.”
I ventured over as close as I dared to Eugene and said, “Let’s me and you get out of here.”
He sighed and shook his head like this world was a trial and ordeal for him. “All right,” Eugene told me. “I guess.”
I turned and nodded at the deputy. He held out his hand, and I dug up a twenty and laid it on his palm.
“Paperwork?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “And he’s going out the back.”
He handed me the cell key and made me unlock the door.
Eugene stepped out where me and the deputy were. The wafting was tough to take.
“What about all the stuff from my pockets and shit?”
“Burned it,” the deputy told him.
Eugene sighed again. He said to me, “Had all my numbers in there.”
“We’ll figure something out,” I said.
The deputy pointed at a back door. “Straight through and out,” he said.
“And he’s clear?” I wanted to make sure.
That deputy nodded. He pointed at the door again.
“Let’s go,” I said, and I got in front of Eugene in a bid to avoid the wafting, but he gave off stink the way a bonfire gives off heat. It went all over.
“Thanks,” I told the deputy.
He wouldn’t hear of it. “No, thank you.”
We came out on what had been once the Big Lots loading dock. It had six abandoned bays, and two of them were full of trash. Smelly trash. Rotting trash. But it couldn’t compete with Eugene.
“What are you even doing here?” he asked me as I pointed to direct him toward the near corner of the building.
“Fuckstick’s loose,” I told him.
“Boudrot?”
I nodded.
“Turned out or busted out?”
“Busted. And on the warpath.”
“Where are we going?”
“To find him.”
“Hell. Why?”
“If it helps at all, I was hoping to leave you in jail. They wouldn’t really let me.”
“I don’t know what their problem was. Kept washing me and shit.”
“You’ve got kind of a funk,” I informed him.
Eugene appeared surprised to hear it. “Naw.”
We rounded the corner of the building. Desmond’s Escalade was out of sight, parked down beyond the backhoe and the tractors and Eugene’s truck.
“You do,” I said. “Smelling snaky to me.”
Eugene raised a forearm and sniffed it. He shrugged.
“What exactly have you been up to?”
“Selling skins.”
“From what?”
He shrugged again. “Gators mostly. Snakes. Tried a few bullfrogs, but they don’t work.”
“Don’t work how?” asked him.
We were closing on Desmond’s Escalade by then.
“Never get proper dry,” Eugene said. “Stay … juicy.”
“You must have soaked some of it in,” I suggested, “because you stink something awful.”
Eugene sniffed his forearm again. Eugene informed me, “Naw.”
Desmond saw us first, and he called my way to say, “How the hell did you get him out?”
Then we got closer, and Desmond found himself wafted at. Luther and Dale as well. Barbara clearly too.
“And why?” Luther asked me.
For her part, Barbara was happy to see Eugene. She got lively all of a sudden. She went squirming out the side window and jumped down into the weeds. She came wriggling around toward me and Eugene. She sidled up to him in a writhing crouch like she couldn’t be sure if she was due for a pat on the head or a kick.
“Well, hey,” Eugene told her and gave her pat. “What’s she doing here?” he wanted to know.
“We stopped at your place,” I said and before I could settle on how to continue, Eugene tugged at the collar of that Barbara Mandrell T-shirt.
“Why the hell’s she wearing this? You go in my house?”
I looked to the boys in a way that drew them out of Desmond’s Escalade. Luther and Desmond anyway. Dale stayed where he was in the way back. He didn’t suffer from decent impulses and so had yet to tune in to the fact that I was about to have to break some painful news to Eugene.
“Hey here,” Eugene told Luther.
Luther looked primed to say, “Hey here,” back, but Eugene’s aroma overcame Luther by the time he reached the front wheel well. So instead Luther invoked the Savior a dozen emphatic ways, covered his nose with hand, and told us, “Shit!”
“Frogs mostly,” I explained. “Probably gators and snakes some too. Must have got in his pores or something.”
Luther wasn’t really interested. The stink had also hit Desmond by then, and he wasn’t interested as well.
“Tell him about his dogs?” Luther asked me.
“What about them?” Eugene said.
“Come here,” I told Eugene.
Me and him and Desmond took a stroll down across the weedy, ruptured asphalt toward the street.
“That Boudrot came looking for you.”
“Why?” Eugene wanted to know.
“Why do you think?” Desmond asked him.
“Wasn’t me that put him in the lockup.”
Technically, Eugene had a point. Him and his swamp rat buddy Tommy had hung back when the rest of us had charged on in to take that Boudrot down. They were lurking behind a grassy hummock quarreling over wide-mouth lures. So they weren’t exactly in on the action when me and Desmond and Luther and Percy Dwayne Dubois corralled that Boudrot and hauled him off for Dale to take in, but that was probably too fine a distinction for an Acadian fuckstick to make.
Eugene had helped us find that Boudrot, and that was likely all that mattered.
“I think he figures you did your bit,” I told E
ugene.
He was prepared to go on sputtering about it until Desmond informed him, “Went looking for you at your place. We just come from there.”
Barbara, the lone surviving coonhound, had followed us down toward the road. Once we’d stopped walking, she’d flopped on the ground hard beside her master.
“Tear up the place?” Eugene asked us.
I nodded.
Desmond told him, “Yeah…”
“What else?” he asked us. He could tell there was something.
Desmond glanced over to as good as say he was leaving the hounds to me.
“He shot up your dogs,” I told Eugene.
We watched the news sink in. Eugene seemed to shrink a little. His mouth dropped open. He squinted at me. “Did what?”
“He stole a shotgun from out at K-Lo’s. Looks like he used that on them.” I pointed at Barbara. “She was down on the bottom of the pile. Only got hit a little.”
Eugene looked Barbara’s way and gave her a fond nudge with his laceless sneaker. “The rest of them?” he asked me.
I gave him a wince and a slight shake of my head.
Eugene squatted right where he was and covered his eyes up with his hand.
We must have been some kind of sight for the few folks passing on the main road. Me and Desmond. A hound in a T-shirt. An inmate in a sky-blue police-issue jumpsuit, and him squatting there in that weedy Big Lots wasteland weeping like a child.
TEN
We couldn’t put him anywhere that suited us all. We tried Eugene first in the way back. Desmond cracked the rear window. He had a theory about airflow in his Escalade that may or may not have been sound, but it surely didn’t help with the reptile stink. That Escalade soon smelled like we were parked at the bottom of swampy hole.
“Can’t we wash him or something?” Dale asked us.
“He’s clean,” I said. “Look at him. They scrubbed him half to death.”
Dale might even have tried to look at him, but it hardly would have mattered. My eyes were watering up in the front seat. Dale’s must have been in the back.
