by Rick Gavin
The thing about Delta cracker trash is that they never forget a slight but have short memories for a favor. A good turn is wasted on cracker trash, but an insult lasts forever. Sometimes it’s even handed down from one generation to the next. You could beat some fellow with a shovel in a fight you didn’t start, and twenty years later his grandson might show up to kick you to pieces or, if you’re not handy for it, any relation you have who’s within reach.
Out of the ten or twelve layabouts hanging around Grady’s, Dale had made enemies out of five, and three of them had relations lying around the place as well. So it turned out there were eight boys primed and ready to do Dale harm.
“Look who it is,” one of them said.
“I know you?” Dale asked him.
“Got your pistol?” I said to Desmond.
He fished it out of the console for me. I checked the clip. It would hold fifteen rounds, but Desmond had found it would jam if you loaded it full. It looked considerably less than not full to me. The thing looked damn near empty.
I showed him the clip. “What’s this?”
“Killed a snake. Wouldn’t hold still.”
There were only three rounds left.
“Who you going shoot?” Desmond asked me.
“Nobody much, I guess.”
Truth be told, I wasn’t hoping to shoot anybody at all, but Desmond’s pistol had a lot more heft to it when the clip was loaded. You could hit a hardhead like Dale with the thing and earn his full attention.
“What about you?”
Desmond kept a Browning under the seat. A twelve-gauge his uncle had sawed off years ago. Desmond reached down and pulled it out.
“Riot readies,” Desmond told me.
We’d fallen a little in love with a shell that was packed full of little rubber balls. If you didn’t want to do a boy lasting harm and still wanted to make an impression, you could let him have a riot-ready load from twenty or thirty yards out. It was like shooting a swarm of hornets at him, and you could usually have your way after that.
The only downside was that they bounced about anywhere they wanted.
“Don’t hit that damn Quonset hut,” I told him.
Me and Desmond had known enough ricochets to leave him thinking the same thing too.
Desmond slipped out of the Escalade and eased over to flank the place. I got out and stayed wide, found a spot where I doubted even a sawed-off could spray to hit me. From what I could see, Dale hadn’t tuned in at all to his peril. That was his style and his technique. He never seemed to quite know what was happening to him until it was too late to fix it.
Those boys were all reminding each other just who Dale was, but it turned out they didn’t need awfully much refreshing.
Dale spat. Dale said, “You boys ain’t ringing no bells.”
I think sometimes Dale just forgot that he’d stopped lifting weights. Back when he was a muscle head, Dale’s physique was a deterrent. He had enough sinews and bulges and oversized bits to persuade a man who didn’t know any better that Dale could take him apart. You could see his biceps well enough, but you couldn’t really make out his glass jaw or get much of a sense of Dale’s feeble, girlish way of throwing a punch. Now he was blubber mostly and usually winded and shiny with sweat. The sight of Dale might make you reconsider your diet, but that was about it.
All of those boys were smiling now. Grinning at Dale, shifting around to grin at each other. There was a beat-down in Dale’s future, and he still didn’t know it yet.
“Seen Percy Dwayne Dubois?” I shouted out.
The whole pack of them looked at me. It was just Dale and them out in front of the place. Eugene and Luther had gone inside the big bay door. Barbara the coonhound had climbed out of the car and had come over to stand at my side.
“What the hell’s that dog got on?” one of those layabouts asked me. He looked older than the rest. Probably a daddy to some there, an uncle to others. If anybody could keep this thing in check, it was surely him.
“T-shirt,” I told him. “Boy shot her.”
“What boy?” he wanted to know, more than a little peeved.
People might have been in favor of shooting each other every now and again, but only a lowdown snake of a man fired on a hound.
“Guy Boudrot,” I said.
He asked me back, “What the fuck kind of name is that?”
I was going to go with Acadian, but I went instead with, “French.”
“Shit.” He fairly spat it.
France and the bowels of hell are nearly identical for some people. This guy outside of Grady’s was clearly one of them. I decided to wander over to him, hoped to draw him into the sort of parley that might allow Dale to get scuffed up only a little.
The fellow was sitting in a bucket seat with ruptured vinyl upholstery. He had a Busch tallboy in one hand and a Case knife in the other. He was flipping the blade open and snapping it shut with his thumb.
Barbara followed me over. That fellow pointed at Eugene’s coonhound with his knife. “Goddamn Mandrells,” he told me. “I ain’t thought of them in a while.”
He took occasion to think of them as I stood there. He seemed gratified for the chance, judging by the way he reached down with his knife hand to work an adjustment on his member.
“I liked that little blond one,” he confessed.
I was not personally competent to distinguish between Mandrells, but one of those other layabouts proved to be some sort of Mandrell expert.
He shifted around. He told his elder colleague, “Irlene.”
“That’s the one.”
“Pretty girls,” I told him. I wasn’t about to play Mandrell favorites.
He sipped his beer. He fooled with his knife. He finally asked me, “What are you doing with him?”
We both studied Dale. He was standing over by a pile of battered car doors trying to look tougher than he was.
I didn’t have a simple answer, not an honest one anyway.
“We’re cousins,” I told him and shook my head. If there was one thing everybody in the Delta understood, it was that you couldn’t pick your kin.
That fellow pointed with the tip of his knife blade at a napping layabout. He was stretched out on the raw ground, was one of those twenty-something crackers who looked like he was maybe forty-five. Partly from the meth. Partly from neglect. Partly from the tattoos. His arms were covered in them. His neck. His ankles too.
“That boy,” the elder layabout told me and sighed. “Cousin of mine.” Even shiftless trash had standards a human could sink below.
I felt we had a bond now, so I tried to forge ahead.
“You seen a Dubois around here?”
My layabout pointed with his knife blade at Desmond. “What’s he up to over there?”
“Standoffish?” I told him.
“Damned if that don’t look like a sawed-off.”
“Goes where he does. I can’t break him of it.”
“You’d think,” that fellow told me and paused to finish off his beer, “being a gigantic nigger would be enough.”
Phony cordiality can only carry a fellow so far. I’d hoped I could grease the way enough to find out about Percy Dwayne, but then that elder cracker had to take a swipe at Desmond, and I could never quite swallow hard enough to make that sort of thing all right.
“Well, fuck it,” I said and turned toward Desmond. I raised a finger and twirled it. If Desmond had been driving a loader, he would have brought the bucket down. Instead he was packing a Remington and raised the sawed-off up.
“Can’t do nothing with them,” I told Desmond.
He leveled his gun. “Ain’t that the way.”
I found a pile of fenders to dive behind, caught up Barbara and took her with me. “Get down,” I shouted at Dale, but Dale wasn’t the sort to entertain orders. He just stayed where he was and gave me that look like nobody told him where to get.
Desmond squeezed off a riot-ready round, followed hard on by another, and the rub
ber pellets were straightaway on those boys like an Old Testament plague. Because Desmond didn’t have any barrel much, the shot went everywhere, and because he was firing rubber pellets, they ricocheted like nobody’s business. Those things were screaming all over that rubbishy lot and finding crackers where they sprawled.
That shot was about twice the size of BBs, and they’d leave you polka-dotted. Those boys couldn’t figure out what to do to get out of the way.
They all fished out their weapons, so I got a good look at the sort of arsenal we were up against. Since Desmond kept firing, they couldn’t take aim, were far too busy attempting to burrow. Everybody except for Dale, that is. He stayed where he was and got pissed.
“Hey!” he kept yelling Desmond’s way.
I heard Desmond tell him, “Hey, yourself.”
I think Desmond fired six shells altogether. He was loading up for another batch, when I called out to him, “Dog’s getting nervous.”
“All right,” Desmond said. “Guess I’m done.”
The elder cracker was trying to scrabble out from the crap he’d crawled up under when I mounted the pile, jumped up and down twice. That proved enough to raise a whimper.
“Percy Dwayne Dubois,” I told him.
When I got nothing back, I jumped again. Desmond had closed on us by then to keep an eye on the rest of the cracker trash. They were still in throes of wonderment, didn’t know what exactly had happened to them. They weren’t used to such a steep transition from shiftlessness to anguish, and they were peeved and stung and waving around their rusty pistols and sheath knives.
“Hell,” Dale said. “What the shit was all that?”
Dale looked like he had the measles. He’d done the thing he always does when trouble is coming at him. He’d turned around to see just what was headed his way.
“Should have ducked,” Desmond told him. “Like him.” Desmond jerked his head in my direction.
I jumped up and down on the pile again. “Percy Dwayne Dubois,” I said.
My cracker finally suggested, “Talk to Grady.”
“Why?”
“He got beef with Percy Dwayne. I don’t know shit about it.”
My cracker struck me as the sort who would make it a policy not to know shit about much. I got off his pile and told him, “I’d stay there if I was you. Mad gigantic nigger out this way.”
He made an I-hear-you-brother noise, so I jumped on his pile one time more.
I was just heading into the Quonset hut when Eugene showed up in the big bay door. There was a compressor running back in the bowels of the place, so he hadn’t heard a thing.
“Percy Dwayne problem,” he said. Then he caught sight of polka-dotted Dale and the speckled layabout who’d been fool enough to lounge around without his shirt. “What happened to them?”
“Riot ready,” I told him. We’d let one go in Eugene’s house a few years back, so he knew from high-velocity rubber pellets on the loose.
“How’s my hound?” he asked me.
Barbara had dropped to the ground a few yards behind me. She was trying to find her privates to lick underneath the hem of her shirt.
“She’s good. I had her. What’s the Percy Dwayne problem?”
“They hauled him off somewhere.”
“Who?”
“Some of them.” He jabbed his thumb back toward the garage.
“Why do folks think life out in the countryside’s so damn simple?” I asked Eugene as I stepped onto the slab garage floor and pointed down at Barbara. “Might want to stay here with her.”
I’m slow to exasperate anymore. It’s probably age and metabolism. I’m hardly the wanton hothead I used to be. Now I build to agitation, do it slowly and over time. Desmond is even more deliberate, and we talk about our upsets. Frequently at the Sonic. We’ll mull over our provocations and reason out what to do about them. So it’s less like rage and more like slow, considered retribution. But that’s all on our end. By the time we pop and swing on a guy, I’m sure he just feels like he’s getting punched all at once and suddenly.
When we arrived on the scene at Grady’s, I was hoping just to talk. I’ve got kind of a balky shoulder, and my hip goes twingy sometimes. So I was just looking for Percy Dwayne Dubois, wanted to clue him on that Boudrot. I wasn’t angling for trouble or hoping for a brawl. For his part, Desmond had gone semi-Pentecostal, but you can only give wall-to-wall crackers the sort of business they require.
So I was primed to a pitch as I mounted the slab and entered the body shop proper.
There at the first, I couldn’t see anything. They had fluorescents overhead, but the place was so greasy and dark and massive—tractor hangar size—that gazing into the depths of that garage was like looking at the night sky. A lot of black pricked here and there with stars.
I sure couldn’t see Luther and, because of the racket, I couldn’t hear him either. A compressor was running just about constantly, and there were two air wrenches going.
Two guys came out of somewhere, told me, “Look out,” and went blundering past with a bumper.
“Where’s Grady?” I asked them
One of them flung his head toward the back of the place.
The deeper I got in, the more I could see. Luther was talking to a couple of boys near a workbench by the back wall. He was shouting at them really, waving his arms and prancing around. Luther was naturally expressive, so I couldn’t be sure he was upset until I’d closed on the three of them close enough to hear him call those boys “cocksuckers.” That wasn’t Luther’s style at all. He was vulgar by lifestyle and pedigree and probably disposition, but he wasn’t one of those guys who swore and profaned in the general course of things.
When Luther spied me, he said, “These fuckers,” and spat on the cement floor.
“What’s the trouble?” I asked him.
“They got Percy Dwayne.”
“Where?”
“Won’t say.” He glared at the homelier of those two fellows, though that was a close call.
They turned out to be brothers. Greers from Arcola who had claims on Percy Dwayne. When I asked them why they’d snatched him, they tried to explain their reasons to me. The prettier one said anyway, “He took some shit and stuff.”
“We need him,” I said. “You can work this out later.”
Those brothers grinned and snorted.
“Which of you is Grady?” I asked them.
The homelier one said, “Him.”
He was still pointing when I smacked him with Desmond’s Ruger. I caught him just above the ear with the flat bulk of the thing. He had time for one offended glance before he dropped onto the floor.
“Like I said,” I was talking to Grady now, “you can work out your Percy Dwayne problems later.”
He weighed his options. Me and Luther watched him. He glanced at a mallet on the workbench. Looked around to see who was handy to help him. He might have even have tried to reason how much a pistol blow would hurt.
I guess it was pride and testosterone that caused him to ask me, “Who the fuck are you?”
I held the pistol whipping in reserve and punched him in the stomach. He doubled over and gurgled some. My shoulder ached like hell.
“Should have kicked him,” Luther advised me. “Like this.” Luther laid into the Greer with a snakeskin boot.
An audience was collecting by then. A dent puller. A paint guy. Some sort of female in a tube top. She lit a Lucky Strike. She had tattooed fingers and an angry cesarean scar.
She asked me and Luther, “What did he do?”
“Insurance company sent us,” I told her.
I didn’t even need to tell them to mind their own damn business. They appeared to figure an insurance company probably knew what it was about, so they all just sort of wandered back wherever they had come up from.
“Where’s Percy Dwayne?” I asked that Greer.
He just drooled and mumbled.
“Bring him?” Luther wanted to know.
; “Hell,” I said, “I guess.”
TWELVE
I couldn’t blame Desmond for being upset about the state of his Escalade. When he’d divorced Shawnica and she’d laid claim to the first Cadillac he’d owned, Desmond had sworn he’d buy another one brand new off the lot and keep it precisely the way he wanted it kept. That meant shiny and thoroughly detailed on a regular monthly basis. The money we’d taken off that Boudrot had made all of that possible. Now that Boudrot was loose, Desmond was having to half trash his vehicle to find him.
“Funny, isn’t it?” I said, and I touched on the particulars that made the whole business ironic.
I shouldn’t have been too terribly surprised that Desmond had a snort for that.
We’d parked Grady from the body shop between Luther and Dale on the backseat. Eugene was in the way back with his hound and smelling finally better than the dog. Partly because of the extra four feet between us and partly because of the caustic lye soap.
The Gojo in the body shop hadn’t done much for Eugene. He’d tell us every now and again, “I itch.”
Now we had to deal with Grady Greer who was as fragrant as a camel. Worse still, he was being uncooperative, had no plans to give Percy Dwayne up.
“You can have him back,” Luther promised. “We’ve just got pressing business with him.”
“Who’s to say I ain’t got pressing business?”
“Can I hit him?” Dale wanted to know.
Partly to frustrate Dale and partly because I wanted to be civilized, I tried instead to reason with that Greer from the body shop.
“We’ll just need him for a day or two. Then we’ll bring him right back to you.”
“The hell we will,” Luther informed me. “I ain’t giving up Percy Dwayne to this shithead.”
That Greer snarled at Luther and acquainted him with the harm he’d do to him in the wild.
“Can I hit him?” Dale asked me.
Desmond turned and informed me, “You’re steam cleaning every damn thing.”
“All right.”
I was talking to Desmond, but Dale assumed I was turning him loose on that Greer. No harm much came of it, though. Dale couldn’t throw a proper punch out in a bean field. In the back of an Escalade, he was good for even less. He caught that Greer with the sort of blow you might use to discipline a schoolgirl.
