Beluga (3 page)

Kalil hated to tell us. “Oscar.”

“Give it back to him” was my suggestion.

“Send one of them,” Desmond suggested to Kalil.

We all looked at Kalil's staff on hand. They were sitting on the homely sofa Kalil could never sell. With the tufts and the skirts and the Chesterfield buttons. They weren't, as a group, inspiring. I knew the boys on either end. They'd get put in a closet, too. The ones in the middle were entirely new to me, but Desmond was acquainted with one of them.

“What about him?” Desmond asked and pointed at the boy he knew.

“Some fool went after him with a Garden Weasel. He's still a little gun-shy.”

“We don't even work for you anymore.” I knew that was a last resort when I said it.

“Maybe you miss it,” Kalil suggested. “Or maybe you ought to find out.”

“It's a stove?” Desmond asked him.

And there we were, right back in it again.

We drove over in my Ranchero and parked it back beyond a hedgerow, well out of gunplay range. The good Lawtons lived in a Lawton compound that backed onto a rice field. They had dirt instead of grass and a couple of cannibalized sedans, but their place overall was a shade more neat than not. The bad Lawtons lived in a domesticated landfill. They just went to the doors, both front and back, and pitched out whatever they'd decided didn't belong under the roof anymore. That might be last night's pizza boxes or a dinette chair.

When we peeked around the trees, we spied a county cruiser parked in the Lawtons' yard. Parked, anyway, behind a harrow and some sort of busted seeder. The driver's door was open, and Kendell was sitting under the wheel.

He saw us, too.

“Can't leave it alone,” he shouted out our way.

We went over to him crouching low since you couldn't be sure a Lawton might not squeeze off the odd recreational round.

Kendell was Desmond's cousin somehow. He was a ferocious Baptist and had disapproved of how me and Desmond hadn't been up to much for a while. He had suspicions about what we were living on and everything we'd gotten up to, but I guess he decided to pray for us both instead of haul us in. I liked Kendell. He was what I had instead of a stout, unwavering conscience.

“Kalil snared us,” I told him.

Kendell nodded. “Bound to in the end.”

“What are you here for?” Desmond asked him.

“They took a shot at the meter reader.”

“What the hell for?” I knew when it came out the sort of looks I'd get. Desmond and Kendell eyed me the way Delta people often did when I tried to apply some regular standard of cause and effect to the place.

The bad Lawtons were essentially sovereign citizens without the impeccable philosophical underpinnings and the patriotic good humor of constitutional crackpots most everywhere else. They'd shoot at you, if you were a meter man, because they had bullets and a gun.

“What brings you?” Kendell asked us.

Desmond sort of pointed at the house. “Boy in the closet. One of Kalil's.”

“Who?”

“Ferris,” I said. “Know him?”

Kendell nodded. “Like the wheel.”

“You waiting on backup?” Desmond asked him.

Kendell climbed out of his cruiser. “Guess you'll have to do.”

They didn't believe in SWAT in the Delta. There was never a shortage of hulking rednecks wearing a county badge, the sorts of eager brawlers you could pitch into trouble like a terrier down a rathole. I could tell by the way Kendell glanced at me, I was his cracker for the moment.

“Me and him,” he said and pointed at Desmond, “we'll work our way around back. You get them talking. See what they want this time.”

“Want to keep their stove, I'm guessing.”

“Why don't you talk them out of that.”

“Already shot at the meter reader,” I reminded Kendell.

“Make yourself little,” he told me. Beyond that he only winked.

Kendell and Desmond went the long away around, through the corn instead of the rice field, and I saw them take cover in the back of the lot behind what had once been an outhouse. It was vine-choked and tumbledown but big enough to crouch behind.

“Hey, Oscar,” I shouted.

A couple of dogs barked from under the porch. They'd been Lawton dogs long enough to have the good sense to stay just where they were. People who'd shoot at a meter man wouldn't think twice about a mongrel.

After maybe half a minute, Oscar shouted back, “He's not here.”

“It's Nick Reid, Oscar. I know it's you.”

“Ain't me.”

“You got a fellow in the closet?”

“Maybe.”

“Think I can have him back?”

“Well,” Oscar told me, “I don't know about that.”

So we'd finished with the preamble and had arrived at the terms.

“What'll it take?”

I could hear racket from inside and Lawtons shifting around. It wasn't much of a house. The windows were all flung open, and the nasty curtains were hanging over the sills.

“Says he wants our stove,” Oscar finally shouted. “Can't have it.”

“All right.”

“And we want some Fritos.”

“Fine.”

“The big bag. And a twelve-pack of Busch.” There was some muttering in the wake of that. “Hell, a case.”

Kendell eased out from behind the viney outhouse far enough to look my way. I just shook my head and shrugged. A Lawton would want what a Lawton would want.

“All right,” I said. “I can do all that.”

I let the Lawtons enjoy their moment of triumph before I shouted out, “Hey, Oscar.”

“What?”

“You'll need to send that boy out first.”

“The hell I will.”

“That's the only way it'll work.”

There was discussion about that inside.

“And some cigarettes,” Oscar called out. “Three whole damn cartons. Winstons.”

“All right,” I said and waited.

The front door opened, and Ferris came out. He was blinking and in his stocking feet. I motioned for him to come over to me, but he turned instead toward the doorway to piss and moan about his shoes. Then he changed his mind the way that people often do at gunpoint. He crossed the yard to join me at a trot.

“Shit, man,” Ferris told me. “I ain't had them boots a week.”

“You're welcome.”

“Quitting this damn job.” Ferris went stalking toward the road in his filthy socks.

“So?” Oscar called out.

“Going in a minute. I'll pick up all your stuff,” I told them. “Got to get this guy you shot at straightened out first.”

“What guy?”

“Meter reader.”

“Ain't done it!” Oscar had a gift for righteous indignation.

“Somebody did.”

I could hear from inside the sound of a Lawton huddle. That was how they always decided who exactly would get blamed for what. It was like what people do with their Visa cards, trying to pick out the one to use that's got a little more room on it than the others. If a Lawton in there had no charges pending, he was going to get the blame.

They must have all been in trouble, because Oscar soon told me, “That boy of yours, he did it.”

“Ferris shot the meter man?”

By now Kendell and Desmond had slipped up through the side yard and were pressed against the house, easing toward the front.

“Tried to stop him. Wouldn't pay me no mind.”

“So you put him in the closet?”

“Couldn't figure what else to do. Got a bad streak or something. Ought to tell somebody about it.”

I glanced toward Ferris out in the road. He was having an animated conversation with himself.

“Well, all right, then. I'm sorry for all the upset.”

I waited until Kendell had slipped up just alongside the front door. He nodded.

“Fritos and what now?” I said, and that was enough to bring Oscar out. He hated to have to repeat a thing. Everybody in the Delta knew you didn't ask Oscar Lawton to say something twice.

Oscar jerked open the door and came onto the stoop. He looked half determined to shoot me, but Kendell grabbed Oscar's rifle barrel and snatched his gun away before Oscar could react.

Like usual, he was wearing a pajama top and a pair of undershorts. What hair he had left was standing straight up. I had to think Oscar was pushing eighty.

He told Kendell, “Aw,” which was Oscar's standard version of “I guess I'm just giving the hell up.”

Kendell supplied him with the usual instructions, and Oscar invited his household out into the yard. His two boys carried their mother out on what looked like a toilet chair and set her down hard enough to prompt her to bark at them a little. One of those boys was sixty if he was a day. I think the other one was about seventeen.

“Who's going in?” Kendell asked them.

They all pointed at the teenager. He shoved his hands together to make it easy for Kendell to cuff him up.

“How much?” I shouted at Ferris.

He stopped raging in the road and looked at me.

“What do they owe on the stove?”

Ferris scratched his head. He fished a sheet out of his pocket and studied it briefly. “Thirty-two dollars,” he said.

“I ain't got it,” Oscar told me. That's what he always told us.

Me and Desmond went inside and found two twenties in the Bible. We left change and came back out. Even if it was only thirty-two dollars from bad Lawtons, it felt good to be up to something after nearly a year of swanning around and living on our swag.

Kendell was having a word with Oscar. The Baptist in him made him tireless.

“You can't just shove folks in your closet.”

Oscar nodded. “Tell me about it.” He pointed at his son, the older one. He had on a pajama top, too. “Weren't no room until he took his golf clubs out.”

 

THREE

So we went back to work, but me and Desmond were like the special forces. Kalil called us in on the thorny jobs, and as the economy sank in the Delta and the available work ebbed away, Kalil would have me and Desmond go in and sort his business out.

He stayed firmly unsympathetic. You couldn't bend him with a story. People would try all sorts of calamities on him. They couldn't pay for their dinette, their sofa, their TV because of the flood or the
E.coli
or their momma's emergency surgery or some Social Security snafu or the radiation in their basement or a boss (for no damn reason) holding up their check. A few of them would even come right in the store and try to be persuasive. They'd drag children with them and have them rehearsed so they would cry when the time was ripe.

Frequently, Kalil would hold his fire until they'd finished. Then he'd tell them, “Thirty dollars,” or whatever sum they owed and assure them me and Desmond would come haul away their stuff.

That's when the crumpled bills would come out from handbags and trouser pockets. I even saw a boy once pull (I figured) his last twenty from a tiny pouch on his daughter's tennis shoe. Kalil would do the math on his clipboard. The thing was always right at hand. He'd produce a receipt and offer it like he was conducting regular commerce.

There was never so much as a hint of compassion from him. I guess that's why Kalil drank. Armagnac mostly with a splash of Tab. Once he had two in him, he'd sing.

So me and Desmond, if you can believe it, were the human face on the operation. We'd agreed to take the “troubled cases.” That's what Kalil liked to call them. He knew if we came back empty-handed, there wasn't a thing to be done. He paid us a retainer—cash on the first of the month with no taxes drawn from it. It all went straight into our big plastic toolbox down in Pearl's basement.

I don't know why we hadn't thought to work a little before we went back to Kalil. If you roll around all day doing nothing, people get suspicious. People who wouldn't pay you any attention otherwise. So not just Kendell but Kendell's colleagues, and not just Pearl but Pearl's friends, too. Everybody suddenly wonders how you get by doing nothing, where the profit might be in spending your afternoons detailing your car.

I'd even lost a girlfriend over it. I'd sort of been seeing Pearl's niece, Angie. She worked at a hospital up in Memphis, all but ran the place really, and she sort of knew where me and Desmond had come by our pile of cash. Only because I'd gotten full of wine one night and had essentially told her.

She was okay with it until she'd decided she was less okay than she'd thought. So we drifted off the way people will, her one way and me another, and I didn't want that to happen in the general course of things. I didn't want me and Desmond to fall out of favor with everybody. Or just have people like Larry and his buddy Skeeter left for friends.

Once we could say we were back with Kalil—he let us call ourselves supervisors—it was a handle folks could hold to, and that's exactly what they did. The trouble was that as the economy in the country soured, opportunity dried up in the Delta to the point of desiccation. So the ordinary cases got special at a pretty alarming rate.

Kalil wanted to be paid. He had the right to be paid or get his merchandise back, but his clients as a rule were only barely slipping by, so every hiccup turned into a problem. They'd get furloughed from the catfish works for a week or two, and there me and Desmond would be at the door to repossess their bedstead or relieve them somehow of cash they didn't have. It was a sorry state of affairs to be caught between Kalil and decent, luckless people. And me and Desmond without much appetite for Armagnac and Tab.

We weren't three months into supervising when it all came to a head. Kalil had sent me and Desmond out after a washer-dryer. The people only had a couple of payments left, but they couldn't come up with the cash, and the boy Kalil sent out first had only brought back washer hoses.

So me and Desmond rode out. They lived on Black Bayou halfway between Leland and Greenville. Their house wasn't much, but the grass was cut, and there was hardly any junk in the yard. They were out where we could see them, the whole family, I guess. The mother and father, a couple of kids. They were all gathered around a swing set, a brand-new one the man of the house was finishing tightening up with a wrench.