by Rick Gavin
That Boudrot looked the whole crowd of us over. It took him a while to pick me out. Hell, I probably wouldn’t have picked me out. Some guy in sailor whites? He finally laughed and pointed, and those buddies of his had a good hoot about it as well.
He left Tula and those boys on the hilltop and came sauntering down toward me. He tried to saunter anyway, but his gate was too damn short, so he bounced more than he meant to and came faster than he would have liked.
Larry’s mother was easing back my way just as that Boudrot closed. They both reached me at about the same time.
“Shit howdy,” that Boudrot told me. “Look at you.”
“Larry’s in the Coast Guard,” Larry’s mother said.
That Boudrot treated her to his shut-the-fuck-up glance and grabbed a handful of my top, a fair clump of chest hair too. “You look like a faggot,” he said.
A few of the dog owners heard him and took the kind of offense that civilized people take. They made disapproving faces at that Boudrot, but he wasn’t remotely the sort dialed in to give a happy shit.
“He’s in Budapest.”
“Shut it, sister,” that Boudrot told her.
I tried to steer her away, but she was no more the sort to get steered than that Bourdrot was the sort to get chastened.
“Constantinople,” she managed to get out before that Boudrot swung on her with his open hand.
You probably could have heard the racket of it way up in the deserted clubhouse. She went down without further commentary, just laid down on the ground. The civilians around looked torn at first between being appalled and grateful. Since they were fundamentally civilized, they went with appalled in the end.
One of the guys said into his phone, “Gotta go,” and stalked directly over. Big guy. Linebacker type.
“Don’t,” I told him, but it didn’t help.
That Boudrot pulled out a pistol, a shiny Smith & Wesson. He caught that boy on the jaw, never hesitated at all. The skin parted. The blood gushed. That fellow staggered back and stumbled. Before that Boudrot could wind up and hit him again, he sat down on the ground.
Now there was general consternation.
“Ya’ll go on,” that Boudrot said, and he waved his pistol to help them decide. It seemed to do the trick.
There was a lot of dog calling and frantic noises. While all those people moved away across the hillside from me and that Boudrot, it wasn’t like they were going to leave their dogs behind. The dogs, of course, didn’t seem too alarmed by the runty guy with the pistol, so they just kept darting and playing the way they’d been before.
“Where’s my money?” that Boudrot asked me.
“I’ve got it.”
“I don’t fucking see it.”
“It’s around.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Desmond’s bush was doing some shaking. Not I’m-trying-to-signal-you shaking but something closer to there’s-a-hornets’-nest-in-here.
“Where?” that Boudrot asked me and poked me on the breastbone with the barrel of his gun.
“Girl first.”
He laughed. He didn’t sound happy.
“Up in the car isn’t it?”
I gave him a shrug.
“Or it ain’t anywhere,” he said. “Burned through it, didn’t you? You and all them boys.”
I guess I grinned a little more than I should have. That Boudrot raised his pistol a foot from my head and pointed the bore of it at my right eye. It was just the sort of move I’d seen from him earlier, back on that hilltop off Kicker.
“Didn’t I tell you it’d all end up like this?”
I made like I couldn’t say, but I did sort of remember that Boudrot yelling at me and Desmond in the courthouse. The bailiffs wrestling with him and him still screaming about how we were as good as dead.
“Your money’s up there,” I said and pointed with my cowlick mostly toward the hilltop while I waited for Desmond to go on and shoot that Boudrot somewhere or another.
I looked toward his bush. The limbs were lurching and pitching. Then Desmond started singing out. In agony, it sounded like. That Boudrot heard the racket, and me and him watched the bush together as Desmond came fighting through it and flung himself into the pond.
“Ants!” he shouted. He ducked under the water and came up swatting himself all over. The dogs that hadn’t been gathered up yet all stopped where they were and barked. Even Barbara. Desmond went wild scraping ants off himself, big red ones from what I could see. His TEC-9 was either back in the bush or down with the golf balls and the eight irons.
I probably would have told myself, “Uh-oh,” but that Boudrot said it for me. He still had his pistol pointed at my eye. I turned my head enough to see Tula between those lackeys on the hilltop.
“Wasn’t ever about the money,” that Boudrot said and pulled the trigger.
I think I just had time enough to wish I was wearing something else. I doubt Popeye would have wanted to die in a sailor suit on a derelict golf course in Tuscaloosa. I sure had things I’d rather be doing and garden spots I’d yet to see.
I remember going rigid as the pistol hammer fell. I heard the dull metallic thud and waited for the explosion. Waited a little further. Waited a bit more. Then I stopped squinting and looked at the gun. That Boudrot broke out laughing.
That was twice in a day I’d been on the business end of an empty chamber.
“Next one’s for real,” he told me, but we didn’t get that far.
I shoved his wrist aside and grabbed him like I’d been trained in the army. He screamed when I dislocated his shoulder, just grunted when I broke his arm. He didn’t make much racket at all when I busted his nose with a Glasgow kiss. I tossed his Smith & Wesson in the pond.
He’d given over entirely to whimpering by the time he staggered out of my reach. I caught a glance of Tula up on the hilltop stomping one of those lackeys’ knees. He pitched and over and collapsed. Even from where I was, I could hear his pitiful shriek. She slugged the other one and bolted. He had too much gut to catch her. He didn’t even bother to chase her and, what with all the people, failed to pull out his gun.
“Fucker!” that Boudrot informed me. It came out primarily as nose blood.
Barbara had wandered from the lake by then. She jabbed my knee with her snout, and then—being a hound and all—she got distracted by a scent.
She alerted, that way hounds will sometimes, and she closed hard on that Boudrot. She sniffed his trouser leg for a good quarter minute and then chuffed once like a bear.
I was about to advise that Boudrot to either run or drop and cover, but he chose the first one before I could even speak. He was holding his bad arm with his good hand, and his nose was dripping all over his shirtfront as he struck out across the dam with Barbara hard behind him. She’d surge up to bite the back of his thigh, let him run some and close again.
There wasn’t much doubt she knew just who he was. When a guy mows down your littermates—point-blank with a shotgun—there’s little chance you’ll forget him. Even if you’re just a hound.
I went over to see to Desmond. He was still wallowing around in the pond.
“Go on,” he told me. “I’m all right.” Desmond showed me his lumpy forearm.
I just had to follow the sound of that Boudrot. He was visiting hard talk on Barbara. I heard her bay a couple of times. From sheer joy, I had to think. For man or animal, there’s nothing quite so sweet as retribution.
I walked across the dam and up a root-ruptured cart path. I didn’t want to arrive on the scene too soon and cut short Barbara’s fun.
I finally found the two of them back in some piney scrub that had once been a sand trap. Every time that Boudrot twitched, Barbara took a little skin.
“Do something with him,” that Bourdrot told me.
“Her.”
He whined. She bit.
“Call her off.”
“She’s part of that pen of dogs you shot. Was it … yesterday?”
Sh
ooting dogs was like breathing for that Boudrot. If he could have shrugged at me, he would have.
“Get him,” I said, not that Barbara needed egging on.
That Boudrot squirmed and Barbara laid full into him all over. I’d seen hounds go after foxes and rabbits like that but never an Acadian fuckstick from Cut Off, Louisiana.
I made him beg me to get her off him, and I let it go on for a while.
“All right,” I finally said as I grabbed Barbara by her back legs. She turned to snap at me couple of times before she settled down. Then she whimpered once and licked me. I told her, “Stay,” and for some reason she did.
I eased over to where that Boudrot was and pointed my Kimber at his forehead.
“Let’s see if mine’ll go off,” I said as I pulled the trigger. That Boudrot shrieked like a maiden aunt. I showed him the clip in my other hand and then caught him hard across the jaw with that heavy .45.
Barbara wanted me to kill him. I sure wanted to kill him too, but I also had a nagging need for that Acadian fuckstick to suffer. I’d decided he’d do more of that in Parchman than six feet under ground.
So I made an executive decision, but I didn’t tell that Boudrot. I took Barbara aside and explained it to the hound.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Me and that Boudrot and Barbara met Tuscaloosa SWAT as they swarmed toward us over the dam.
“DOWN!” If they all said it once, they said it a dozen times.
I grabbed Babara and took her to the ground with me. Those boys were all Kevlared and helmeted up. They were primed to shoot something, and with hair-trigger cops, a dog will always do.
I left that Boudrot to fend for himself. He was all dog bites and busted bones and parted skin. He just stayed where he was and launched into a tirade. He seemed chiefly disappointed in the state of Alabama as a fit place to get up to the sort of mischief he tended to be about. He was partial to the Delta, out by Greenville most especially, and he rattled on in a mucousy way about the failings of Tuscaloosa until a couple of SWAT boys closed hard on him and slammed him to the ground.
Another pair charged over to see to me.
“Go easy on the dog,” I told them.
“Shut up,” one of them suggested as he crushed my neck with his knee.
There’s a reason people don’t like cops, and it’s chiefly cop inflicted. They too often operate with the attitude “I’ll treat you like shit until word comes down I shouldn’t anymore.”
These guys were accomplished at that sort of thing. They gave me a pretty rough time. I’d thrown down my pistol as soon as I’d laid eyes on those boys, and I only had two pockets and not a thing in either one. So there was nothing to find, but they kept searching until I was scuffed up all over.
Then one of them fetched my gun off the ground while the other one jerked me upright.
“Maybe you ought to…”
I was going to suggest they put some kind of leash on Barbara, but the SWAT boy at my elbow wasn’t feeling suggestible. He leaned in and hissed, “Shut up, dirtbag.”
If anything, they were treating that Boudrot worse, and he had actual broken bones. I drew some consolation every time that Boudrot screamed.
They walked us along the weedy fairway to the parking lot. When I’d cluck to keep Barbara coming, one of those cops would shake me hard.
There was an armored truck, like a minibus, parked in with a bunch of squad cars. I could see Tula talking to what looked like a captain alongside three guys laid facedown on the gritty asphalt. Two of them were Boudrot’s lackeys. Desmond was the third.
When we reached the lot, one of my guys handed my pistol to the captain. The other one gave him the spotted T-shirt he’d pulled out of my waistband.
The captain held it up by the shoulders for inspection.
“Moo, goddammit,” he said.
“You all right?” I asked Tula.
The guy on my elbow jerked me and look prepared to escalate until his captain told him, “Cut him loose.” He pointed at Desmond. “That one too. Let’s make some sense of this.”
That fellow pulled out a big tactical knife and sliced off my Flex-Cufs. I was still standing there rubbing my wrists to get the blood flowing when Tula slugged me.
She had a hell of a punch, and I wasn’t looking for it, so I didn’t dodge or shirk. I just stood there and took it flush on the jaw. I saw stars and tasted iron and half wanted to drop down on my knees and cry.
“Ow!”
“Where the hell have you been!? And what the hell’s that?” She had my sailor suit in mind.
Both fair questions. I should have been armed with decent answers. Instead I just said, “It’s complicated.” And I was meaning to tell her how.
But Tula exhaled hard through her nose and drew back and hit me again.
“Quit it.”
“That little asshole could have killed me.”
“We knew he was waiting on us,” I told her.
“You didn’t know shit,” she said back.
Desmond had been cut loose as well and was lifting his wet self off the ground by then.
“And you took your sweet time,” Tula informed us both. Then she spat with the sort of vigor K-Lo would have found beguiling.
I looked to Desmond for some help.
He turned and said to Tula, “Yeah. I guess. All right.”
She didn’t do a thing but stand there.
“Why don’t you hit him?” I asked her.
“I don’t sleep with him,” she said. “You either. Probably. Now.”
That got everybody’s attention. The cops all looked at me and Tula. That Boudrot wheezed at us through his broken nose. Even his lackeys on the ground had a chuckle between them about it. The one with the dislocated kneecap was handy, so I kicked him one time hard.
“I’m sorry,” I told Tula. “We ran into some trouble, what with Luther and them. For what it’s worth, I didn’t know what I’d do back there when I thought he’d shot you.”
“Shot who?” the captain asked.
“Some girl.”
“And you saw it?”
I nodded.
“You too?”
Desmond nodded.
“Everybody goes,” the captain announced to his officers. They gathered all of us up.
“Her too.” I pointed at Barbara. When the captain balked, I said, “Hell, she caught him.”
Tula said, “I’ll get her.” Then she asked us, “Where’s the rest of your crowd anyway?”
“Over at a rib place somewhere.” That was the best Desmond could do.
“Shack,” I said the captain’s way. “Next to some sort of car lot.”
“Archibald and Woodrow’s,” the captain said. “Take them with you. Pick them up,” he told one of his officers. A tubby blond boy with a toothpick in his mouth.
Tula caught me sizing up the state of my Ranchero as me and Desmond followed that officer to his four-by-four.
“You and that damn car,” she said. She troubled herself to spit again.
* * *
Naturally, we rolled up on a brawl at that rib place in Tuscaloosa. Luther and Percy Dwayne had gotten into it with a trio of frat boys. Big guys. Athletic scholarships probably. Strapping and clean-cut and very likely decent and dumb. Untutored certainly in the ways of Delta cracker trash. That was easy enough to see straightaway because Luther and Percy Dwayne were flogging those boys to a fare-thee-well.
Luther was beating one of them with a galvanized bucket while Percy Dwayne was kicking at a second one and half standing on the third one. That boy was trying to crawl under a flatbed truck, but Dale—who wasn’t otherwise fighting—kept pulling him out by the ankles and telling him, “Naw.”
Our cop asked us, “Yours?”
“I guess,” Desmond told him.
“You’ve got two minutes to crank them down, or I’ll have to call it in.”
Eugene saw us first. He was watching the fun while gnawing on a rib bone.
“Hey,” he sa
id. He jerked his head by way of pointing toward the barbecue joint. “Ought to get you a slab. Them boys know what they’re doing.”
“Ribs and chopped and every damn thing,” Dale told us as he pulled that crawling frat boy out from under the truck again.
“What’s all this?” I asked.
Luther left off swinging his bucket long enough to say, “Got all mouthy with us.” He drew our attention to the boy Percy Dwayne was kicking. “Him especially.”
“Yeah,” Percy Dwayne said. He caught that boy in the backside with some sort of half-cocked judo stomp.
“Going to have to leave it,” I told them all, “or he’s going call his friends.”
I think that was the first notice any of them had taken of that city police four-by-four.
“Where’s Barbara?” Eugene wanted to know.
Desmond told him, “Tula’s got her.”
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Those frat boys became an instant afterthought. Our crew shifted across the lot toward the Blazer.
Percy Dwayne jabbed a thumb toward the restaurant. “They probably want you to pay them something. I think we kind of broke some stuff and shit.”
* * *
I tried to discourage that police captain from interrogating our crew. I told him they hadn’t seen anything, had served as ballast mostly. I just didn’t want them describing what we’d been up to the past day and a half, all the mayhem we’d been a part of from Arkansas to Alabama. It turned out I didn’t need to worry. Those boys mostly giggled and ate nabs.
Cops are provincial anyway. The locals were fixed on all the trouble that Boudrot had made in Tuscaloosa. Tula directed them to a trailer up by Holt where she’d been held. It had been where the dead girl lived, Boudrot’s prison girlfriend and a local exotic dancer who me and Desmond had seen him shoot right in the head. Tula told her story to the captain and some detective with a soul patch. Then me and Desmond took turns telling our version of events to those two as well. We knew which stuff to leave out and which items to skip over. We just hit the Boudrot atrocities and left everything else unsaid.
