Beluga (9 page)

“A girl?” Larry muttered. “She don't want no piece of me.”

“The woman in the house where Shawnica used to live? Sent her to the hospital, too,” I told Larry.

“Whose tires did you steal?” Desmond asked him.

“What did you do with my gun?” Larry wanted to know of me.

“Who'd you take them off of?” That was Desmond again.

“Little silver thing in the glove box.”

“Gone,” I told him. “Weed, too.”

Larry had just enough of a fit to let him stay on the sofa to do it. Something on the order of a shiftless seizure.

“Who's after you?” I asked Skeeter this time.

“I don't know them West Memphis boys,” he told me.

“Who?” I asked Larry.

Larry picked the one unbroken TV remote and pointed it at the set.

“I'll put that in your colon,” I told him.

Larry said to Skeeter, “Shit.” He told us, “Bugle's people. Way I figure it, anyhow.”

“The kid you ran over,” Desmond said.

Larry nodded.

“Bugle what?” I asked Larry.

“Shambrough,” Larry said. Desmond and Skeeter knew enough to groan.

“Shambrough?” I said. “Who's that?”

Desmond, who'd been all over me to take it easy on Larry, stepped over to the sofa, picked Larry up, and tossed him into the kitchen.

“Shambrough?” I said to Skeeter.

He shook his head. He looked deflated and more than a little unnerved. “Don't want to be messing with them.”

“Well, we're kind of in the middle of messing with them, aren't we?”

Skeeter showed me both of his palms at once. “Didn't know nothing about it.”

Larry yelled at Desmond, gathered himself, and came back into the front room. Desmond snatched him up and pitched him straight back into the kitchen again.

“Who are these people?” I asked Desmond.

Even he didn't want to say.

“Some kind of Arkansas mob?”

Larry was stirring. Desmond told him, “I'd stay in there.”

“Business people, right? Let's just square it with them.”

“They're not business people,” Desmond told me. “They're Shambroughs.”

“What the hell does that even mean?”

“You can't square shit with those people, and you sure as hell don't fuck with them,” Desmond shouted into the kitchen.

Desmond charged into the kitchen and pitched Larry into the living room. Another hour or two of that, and I'd probably have to intercede.

“Bunch of cons?” I asked.

“Worse,” Desmond told me. “Been around here forever. They own a big spread. Pass for decent people. Got enough money to make us all disappear.”

I didn't like the sound of that. At least you knew where you stood with cons. Vicious bastards all dolled up and walking on their hind legs presented another problem altogether.

I was about to quiz Desmond and Larry and Skeeter further about the Shambroughs when the door spring twanged and the door jerked open. I pulled my Ruger out of my waistband. Desmond did the same with the Glock I'd lent him, and we brought both barrels to bear on Shawnica. She was standing in the doorway with a number-ten can full of tamales, a sack of saltines, and a bottle of Russian dressing—the traditional Delta accompaniment.

She looked from Desmond to me and back to Desmond. She told us both, “Uh-huh.”

 

EIGHT

Frightened wasn't one of Shawnica's emotions. She was partial to incensed. She informed us there wasn't a white girl on the planet who could drive her out of her house. To his credit, Larry knew to stay wherever Shawnica was, and Skeeter decided he'd stick by as well. Shawnica had a shotgun in the kitchen closet. We cleaned it up, loaded it, and put it out where they could get it. Then me and Desmond left them for the night.

“Why didn't you tell her who was behind it?” I asked Desmond out in the yard.

“She'd kill Larry,” he told me, “and we don't need him dead just yet.”

“Where do they live?” I asked him. “The Shambroughs.”

“Come on.”

I followed Desmond back into Indianola, west through town on the truck route and then south just shy of Leland on the Tribbett road to a place called Geneill. They had a sign, anyway, and an old commissary building overgrown with creepers and collapsed on one end. There was a cinder shoulder just beyond it where we could both pull off. I eased in behind Desmond and followed him on foot back up the road.

“They call it Eponia, or something like that.” He pointed across what looked like a wheat field. I couldn't really tell my crops apart in the dark. There was enough moonlight to illuminate the white clapboards. It was a sprawling plantation house set well back across the field in what looked like an oak grove. The windows were lit. We heard a hound bark. A screen door slapped against the jamb. Even in the dark and well away across the field, it looked like a grand old pile.

“Homeplace?” I asked Desmond.

“Uh-huh. Shambroughs built it probably a hundred and fifty years ago now. They owned everything around here for miles. But this new batch, they don't farm. Sold off big chunks. Leased out the rest.”

“What are they into mostly?”

“Big on stealing shit, the way I hear it.”

“You mean like … tires?”

Desmond grunted. He appeared to be nodding. “Started with barge loads of fertilizer. That's the story, anyway. Coal. Fuel oil. Got to where they'd take any damn thing.”

“Take it where?” I asked Desmond.

“I don't know. Had crews and stuff to move it, and then the shipping folks started paying them to leave them alone.”

“Protection?”

Desmond nodded.

“So now they're down to stealing whatever they don't get paid not to steal?”

“Something like that. Guess the tire people got behind.”

“How many of them are there?”

We could occasionally hear voices drifting our way from the big house on the breeze.

“Mr. Lucas runs the show. He's got a brother in New Orleans or somewhere who's into shit down there and a couple of boys, I think, around here somewhere. Maybe down by Yazoo City. He's got crews of locals. Hoyts and Tuttles mostly. They've been working for Shambroughs since back when they used to farm.”

“Anybody up in West Memphis?”

“Must have. Don't know for sure. That Bugle must be one of his.”

“Think the ninja schoolgirl's contract work?”

Desmond nodded. “They're proper people as far as it goes. The studs and the tats and every damn thing pierced—that ain't Shambroughs at all.”

“Think we ought to fill Kendell in?”

Even in the dark I could tell Desmond was looking at me like he'd decided I was daft. “He'd lock Larry up. Skeeter, too. Maybe even you and me.”

“We might all be safer in jail. No ninja schoolgirl. No Shawnica.”

Desmond gave it a moment's placid thought before he told me, “Naw.”

We'd been standing outside in the open air a good ten minutes by then, and I hadn't swatted a single mosquito. They just weren't anywhere around.

“How come I'm not getting chewed up?”

“Overspray,” Desmond told me. “They've killed everything to the road.”

The Delta could be so alive in spots—so snaky and bug-ridden and verdant—that I forgot sometimes it was a poisoned place at heart. The sky was full of crop dusters for three-quarters of the year. I spent more time than I cared to think about washing overspray off my Ranchero. The tang of fertilizer, pesticide, and defoliant in the air was the constant perfume of the Delta.

“So what do we do?” I asked Desmond.

“Get rid of those tires. Dump that trailer. Get Skeeter and Larry some damn place else.”

We parted company out there on Geneill Road. Desmond headed back toward Indianola, but I went another way and got on the route that would take me past Officer T. Raintree's house. I rode by going one way, turned around, and came back. Then I pulled up and parked just across the street.

Her small house was lit up throughout. It made quite the contrast with the Shambroughs' sprawling pile of a place in its grove. I could see the shifting light from the TV and the top of Tula's son's head as he ran back and forth across the front room before the picture window.

Then Tula showed up to give him what looked, from where I was, like a talking-to. She was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, had unclipped her hair and let it fall. All that womanliness she kept bottled up to make life possible on the job was on display through her picture window as she told her son a thing or two. About being a little man, I had to guess. About going to bed when she said so.

I sat there and watched until I felt a little creepy at it. Then I started up the engine and eased off, turned my lights on down the road. I tried to pretend as I drove toward home that I didn't know what I'd do in the morning. That I'd not settled on my usual way of dealing with upset in my life. But I knew. I only had a couple of gears, and I was partial to the one that involved blundering dead ahead.

*   *   *

With my mind made up, I slept well enough. I strapped on my Bersa when I got dressed, and I called Desmond to get a read on what he thought we ought to be up to. He wanted us helping Skeeter and Larry to hurry up and dump those tires. He figured we could make Kalil's collections going down and coming back.

“Sounds good,” I told him. “I'll meet you in Belzoni. I promised Pearl I'd carry her to her doctor this morning.”

“She okay?” Desmond asked me.

“Female thing,” I said, knowing that was sure to shut Desmond up.

Desmond's mother had passed the previous year through a regular female-thing minefield, and Desmond had gotten to where he'd sooner stick his hand in a bucket of moccasins than have to even think about a gynecologist again.

I drove straight over to Geneill Road and parked where me and Desmond had parked. I walked down past the commissary for a look at the Shambrough place in the daylight. I could see where the roof was patched and the paint was coming off the siding. The yard looked a little ragged, and they had dead limbs in their trees. So they weren't superhuman after all but just as half-cocked and neglectful as everybody else.

I went back to my Ranchero, started it up, and made my way straight over to the Shambroughs' gravel driveway. They had a sign out by the end of it, a few yards off the road, a raw cypress plank suspended by chains with the name of the plantation burned into it. Not anything like Eponia. The place was called Elysium.

There was no gate. I drove straight down to the house. There were the usual trucks and 4
×
4s parked in front of the place. A two-car garage off the north end off a sunroom had both of its doors raised to reveal two bays full of packaged merchandise, no room at all for cars. I saw what looked like about fifty food processors, twice as many dehumidifiers, a few dozen window air-conditioning units, and several of what appeared to be boxed up sewing machines.

A hound came over from the side yard, crept up to me like it was used to getting kicked. It blinked that way battered dogs do, rolled over and showed me its belly. The creature was hanging with plump tics. I guess there are some things even crop dusters can't kill. I gave it a rub anyway, and it wriggled in gratitude.

The front porch wrapped around and was thick with ferns. There was a stack of yellowed newspapers on the glider. I knocked on the door screen but couldn't raise much racket and so pulled it open and banged the big bronze knocker a few times.

A small black woman with sleepy eyes and a lavender maid's uniform finally unbolted the door and drew it open. She just stood there looking at me like I'd made some horrendous mistake. Either nobody ever used the front door or no one was fool enough to just come knocking.

“I'm here to see Mr. Shambrough,” I said.

“Mr. Lucas?” The pitch and rasp of her voice was surprising. She sounded just like Miles Davis.

“Right,” I told her.

She looked me over one time further and shut the door.

I could hear the floorboards creak as she exited the hallway. Then there was nothing for a while but the occasional whimper of the Shambrough hound. The dog knew enough to stay down in the yard and not venture onto the porch. I parked on the glider. I waited. I read a week-old
Clarion-Ledger.
Finally I heard the floorboards pop and squeak and the front door swing open again.

I got up off the glider and went back over. The maid told me, “Come on.”

I stepped inside and followed her. That house was built on a scale you just don't see much anymore. A staircase swept up out of the foyer to a grand mezzanine. The ceiling was probably forty feet away. The walls were hung with taxidermy and formal portraits of long-dead Shambroughs. Grandma on one side and the business end of a black bear on the other. There was a sideboard along the south wall with a stuffed albino raccoon parked on it.

I followed that maid to the parlor doorway. She pointed inside and looked at me with all the warm humanity she probably mustered for a chicken before she shoved it in the oven.

“Thanks,” I told her and stepped into the parlor.

She snorted at me by way of reply.

The room was decorated like a Tennessee Williams fever dream. More taxidermy. More portraiture. Bronzes all over the place—horses and wolves and Indian chiefs and noble-looking hounds. Every tabletop, every shelf. There were even a few on the floor. I could readily see that the maid, aside from doing a splendid Miles Davis impression, didn't waste too terribly much of her time with the feather duster. But then the blinds kept the room in half light, so it probably looked cleaner than it was.

I heard a toilet flush, the sound of water running. A door on the far wall swung open, and out came Lucas Shambrough (I had to figure) in pajamas and a bathrobe. A silk bathrobe that he was cinching shut as he stepped into the parlor.