Authors: Rick Gavin

Ranchero (24 page)

“Complex” was a little ambitious. It was an office with a breezeway to another office that hadn’t been built yet. Pearl’s doctor determined that Desmond’s momma had a plumbing problem. Not so simple a one as Guy’s had been but fixable nonetheless. Beyond that, of course, she also had an OxyContin problem, which Desmond sent her for a month to a niece’s up in Oak Park to address. She got off the pills by getting on the Yellow Tail instead.

Guy, for his part, didn’t choose to bother with a trial. He spun some wild story about a crazy cracker bastard and a black guy half again as big as a cow. The meth was all theirs. They’d just trussed him up and dumped it on him. Worse still, the cop that had found him was as dirty as the day is long.

Dale didn’t remember it quite that way. He’d done a fair bit of subduing. That the Acadian fuck stick had put up a fight was clear enough from Dale’s injuries. Then there was the body police had been put onto over near Louise. Some lowlife from Jackson who appeared to have been throttled to death with a pistol. The nickel-plated Glock found on the floor alongside him had Guy’s fingerprints all over it in blood.

At his allocution, Guy tried to rant about one thing and another, but the judge gaveled him hard and shut him down. Guy threw up his shackled hands and said, “What’s the fucking use?”

Me and Desmond had come for the show and were sitting in the back of the courtroom. Dale was up front in his dress uniform with Patty at his side. Guy didn’t give a rat’s ass about him, but when me and Desmond rose together to make sure he saw us, it took three bailiffs to finally knock him over and hold him down.

I had to figure he’d make the sort of friends during his stay in Parchman who’d have an interest in his drainpipe and wouldn’t give a shit who he was.

We capped the day off with steaks at Luscos over on the far side of Greenwood. We drove there in Desmond’s spanking new, resplendent Escalade.

I didn’t keep up with Percy Dwayne and Luther, though I saw them once at a traffic light. I was over by Greenville where the truck route crosses Highway 1, and they eased up beside me and blew the horn. Percy Dwayne was still driving Guy’s Tundra. He’d get caught in it or not.

Angie came down, and we hunted ducks. That’s what we called it, anyway. We sat on a blanket in the sun over by Tarpley Neck, on a little rise from where we could see the Mississippi. We drank wine all afternoon and didn’t talk about anything much. We were easy enough together that we didn’t actually need to talk.

I had Angie get in touch with Pearl’s worthless son in New Orleans so I could offer him five hundred dollars to spend a weekend with his mom. I’d never seen Pearl prouder. She even got to nurse him a little once her outdated dingy mayonnaise very nearly did him in.

Pearl was so delighted that I negotiated Christmas for an even thousand. Little of my life felt different, but nothing was the same. I didn’t have frets and worries. I worked for K-Lo when I wanted, and it turned out I wanted almost all the time. The change was largely internal, but I couldn’t quite put it into words. I didn’t have to, in the end, because Desmond did it for me.

“When you’ve got money,” Desmond told me one day in between Coney Islands, “everything slows down.”

That was it, and we were living already in the slowest place on earth. Time in the Delta is measured in agriculture. Fertile and fallow. Deluge and drought. Seed and harvest. About the only monotony breaker was a car that would go fast. I had one, so it was only a matter of time before Kendell snared me.

I was watching a crop duster on a back road between Rising Sun and Quito. Those pilots are all about half crazy—flying twelve feet off the ground, dodging power lines and hedgerows, threatening a stall with every turn. He swept around so tight his wings went perpendicular to the ground.

His Ag Cat was yellow and looked freshly painted. I could barely take my eyes off the thing. It hardly mattered to me, in the Delta way, that I was doing eighty.

Apparently, it mattered to Kendell. He was behind me for a while before I glanced at my rearview mirror and saw his beacon. Kendell gave me a yelp on his siren and pointed up ahead toward a dirt tract that bisected a cotton field.

I pulled in. He pulled in behind me. I was out of the Ranchero and leaning on the fender when Kendell finally climbed from his cruiser and walked up. He hadn’t bothered to bring his summons book.

“Don’t think I don’t know what you did,” Kendell said. Together we watched that Ag Cat swoop and glide. “You and Desmond and them other fellows.”

Kendell’s not the sort I’d want to insult with a lie. So I just stood there and didn’t say a thing.

“I talked to Calvin,” he told me.

I had to think back. “Dashiki,” I said.

Kendell nodded. “He gave me a fair idea of what’s what.”

“Keep an eye on Dale,” I told him.

“Doing it already,” Kendell said.

We watched that Ag Cat bank into a roll as it swooped out over the blacktop.

“Fool,” he muttered. About the pilot. Maybe me. Possibly both.

“Tell me this,” I said to Kendell. “Am I making you tired?”

“Maybe,” he allowed, “a little at the edges.” Then he took a moment to study my Ranchero from end to end. “Nice … uh … car,” he told me.

Kendell went back to his cruiser and whipped out onto the pavement, flinging gravel. I stayed where I was and watched that lunatic pilot finish his work.

Once he’d sprayed the last rows, he banked my way and came screaming directly at me, probably not more than twenty feet off the ground. He passed over in a yellow flash. I could see him beneath the canopy. He was grinning. He was upside down.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.