Ranchero Read Online Free PDF Page B

corn.
    Desmond told me the ears went to Arkansas cattle and the stalks to biofuel. Then he pointed at a silo back off the road on a farm he’d worked before he’d gotten husky. When Desmond talked about his bulk, that was the word he always used.
    I had to pivot around to even find him in that Geo. He’d made a kind of fainting couch out of the driver’s seat, had shoved it well back off the rails and was all but reclining with his feet on the pedals and his head in the rear window well. It was like he was a row behind me at the cineplex.
    “Tell me about Luther,” I said, but Desmond pointed instead to a grain bin and went on at some length about a combine driver he’d known.
    I don’t think Desmond missed farming so much as he missed being tractor-seat sized. I doubt it was all hot dogs that did him in. Desmond was doomed to be gigantic, and once the fieldwork had dried up, there wasn’t much for him to do but sit around and swell.
    His sister was huge. His father had been massive, and Desmond’s mother was so doughy and weak on her pins that she hardly ever left her bed. I’d met her once. Her tiny head had been sticking out of a heap of blankets in her stifling bedroom. She was wearing some kind of elaborate wig with bangs and braided bits, and she must have tossed it on to receive me because the thing was a little cockeyed.
    “And Luther?” I asked Desmond when the combine talk was done, but before he could speak his phone rang. Well, it didn’t ring exactly. It played a snatch of Barry White’s “Satin Soul” and then played it three or four times more before Desmond could dig the thing out of his shirt pocket and look to see who was calling.
    He tossed his phone my way. “It’s you,” he told me.
    It was, in fact, my Motorola ringing Desmond up. I didn’t quite know what to say when I answered, so I said just, “Yel-low.”
    “Who’s this?” that Dubois asked me.
    “Who you looking for?”
    “I got him,” that Dubois fairly howled in the direction, I guess, of his wife. Then he came back my way and said, “We’ve been calling all your numbers. Nobody gives a shit about you.”
    “I’m coming for you, asshole.”
    He went half to pieces laughing. “Where you coming?”
    “I’ll find you,” I told him. “Don’t you worry about that.”
    “Then I guess you’re wanting your truck thing back? It’s a hell of a pretty ride, but I can be convinced to hand it over.”
    “I’m listening,” I said.
    “Going to cost you five thousand,” that Dubois told me. “Did I tell you it’s a hell of a pretty ride?”
    “I think you did.”
    I didn’t say anything for about a half minute, which Percy Dwayne didn’t much care for.
    “So?” he said, and when I still didn’t say anything, he said it again. “So?”
    “That’s a lot of money.”
    “Not for this beauty.”
    “Let’s say I pay it. How’s this going to happen?”
    “Twenties,” he said, and instructed me to drop the cash the following day at noon at an address up in Webb. “Put it in the mail slot,” he told me.
    “Five thousand in twenties? That won’t fit in any damn mail slot.”
    “Then put it in a bag on the porch,” he said. “Just put it some damn where.”
    “What about the car?”
    “You’ll get it,” he told me, “once I have the money.”
    Desmond was drifting so that he hit an armadillo in the middle of the oncoming lane. It was ripe and greasy, and I feared for a second we’d spin into the ditch. Even Desmond stopped whistling and cut loose with a “Shit howdy.”
    “I don’t know,” I told Percy Dwayne. “This world’s full of cars.”
    “Well,” he said, “you’ll pay me or you won’t.”
    “Can’t argue with you there.”
    “Figure it out and call me in an hour.” And with that he started rattling off his number.
    “It’s my number, moron. I know it already.”
    Percy Dwayne swore a little further and hung up.
    “They all this dumb?” I asked Desmond.
    He nodded. “It’s