Ranchero Read Online Free PDF Page A

one thing alone. “These goddamn people,” he told me, “make me tired.”
    Out on 7, Desmond parked by a sorghum patch on the far side of the cruiser.
    He called out to Kendell, “Hey here.” He told him, “I guess you’ll be wanting Dale’s gun.”
    Kendell said, “I suppose.” He looked a little weary to see us.
    Kendell had heard all about us on the scanner. Desmond told him, “Wasn’t nothing we planned.”
    “Hell, boys, I hope not,” Kendell said as he climbed out of his cruiser.
    Kendell was, if anything, blacker than Desmond and hard everywhere Desmond was soft. We all leaned on the cruiser fender while Kendell told us what he’d heard. That Dale was at the hospital getting his head sewn up. That me and Desmond were the ones behind it. That there were proper warrants sworn out but no push much to enforce them since nobody—except Patty—gave a happy goddamn about Dale.
    “The gun’ll help,” Kendell allowed, and then studied me a little. “What the hell,” he finally asked me, “happened to you.”
    “A Dubois beat me with a shovel.”
    Kendell snorted by way of suggesting I was rigorously full of shit. “A Dubois would have put you in the ground.”
    I unfolded K-Lo’s pink invoice and handed it to Kendell. I knew he knew it was as reliable as an affidavit given K-Lo’s anal approach to his clientele. K-Lo’s customers may have been lowlives, but he made it his special business to know precisely which lowlives they were.
    “Hmm,” Kendell said as he studied the thing. “Percy Dwayne Dubois.” Then he gazed toward the tree line—over the Metro and out past the sorghum patch—while he ran through his mental catalog of Duboises he’d run up on until he’d settled on a candidate or three.
    “Drives a Wrangler?”
    I shook my head, and Desmond added helpfully, “Weren’t but a fireplace shovel.”
    Kendell surveyed me once further. “Pacer. Back left fender rusted through.”
    “That’s him,” I said.
    Kendell ran a finger of one hand across the knuckles of the other. “Tats?” he said. “Little fellow? Blond?”
    I nodded.
    With that he laid his hand out maybe four feet off the ground. “About this tall?” Kendell winked at Desmond and then smiled at me as if to suggest my Dubois had been a gay dwarf hanger-on.
    “The shovel might have been small, but the Dubois wasn’t. I’ll be happy to tap you with it?”
    “Should have seen what it did to Dale,” Desmond said, and Kendell allowed he wished he had.
    He’d pulled that Dubois and his wife over a few times for a variety of infractions. Or rather he’d stopped them for speeding and then had piled on the citations afterward. Driving once without a hood. Once with three stolen car seats and a pair of plundered strollers. Once with that baby of theirs on the dashboard to make room for his daddy’s bong.
    “Caught them doing eighty riding through here on two donuts. She was driving and didn’t stop until we’d blocked the road at Holcombe. He’s bad,” Kendell said, “but that wife of his, she’ll do any damn thing.”
    I caught myself wondering how close I’d come to getting chopped up into bits.
    Kendell told us she was a Vardaman, which prompted Desmond to groan. The only Vardaman I’d ever heard of was the Mississippi senator who’d called Teddy Roosevelt a coon-flavored miscegenationist to his face.
    “One of that brood,” Kendell assured me, “from over in the hills by Okolona.”
    Then Desmond and Kendell threw in together to make me understand there were people about in the Delta who’d migrated to the place because the folks back where they’d come from weren’t malicious enough to suit them.
    The Delta was home still to pockets of ignorant misfits and temperamental throwbacks, Confederates to the marrow fueled by white-hot resentments and sustained by bigotry. It seemed that Dubois’s wife had come to the Delta to be among her own the way some people move to Berkeley or to Paris.
    “Where do