Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) (17 page)

“What the hell’s them?” Eugene asked.

“Fillet,” Ricky told him.

“Can I get one?”

I cut mine in half and forked a portion onto my bread plate. I offered it to Eugene.

“Might have cooked it,” he said to me by way of “thanks a bunch.”

A couple of boys came in along about then. Whiskers and dungarees and greasy seed caps. One of them had a word with the hostess while the other one just looked at us. Looked at Desmond, I have to guess now. He slapped his buddy on the arm to get him focused on Desmond too. Then they appeared to change their minds about dining and went out just like they’d come in.

“Know them?” I asked Desmond.

He shook his head.

“You?” I said to Ricky.

“The big one’s Fred or Frank or something.”

“Fred or Frank what?” I asked him.

“Purdy,” he said.

“Let’s go,” Desmond told us, and he was gliding already toward the door before he’d finished talking.

“What about my tooth?” Dale wanted to know.

Eugene grabbed my baked potato.

“Can’t we get pie or nothing?” Percy Dwayne wanted to know.

“Nick’ll buy you a tooth,” Desmond called out to Dale. He’d reached the door and held it open for us.

I drove our crew out ahead of me. They complained the whole way to the lot.

“I’m already buying a Cadillac,” I told Desmond.

“So what’s an incisor?” he said.

We’d just piled into the Escalade—all of us but for Eugene who’d lifted Barbara out of the way back to let her pee in the steak house lot—when Ricky came out with a pastry box.

“Shortcake,” he told us, “for the road.”

There were general hosannas from the backseat. Ricky reached into to shake Desmond’s hand and then mine, and that’s when the Purdys swarmed up from every damn direction they could.

The two who’d come into the restaurant were sitting across the way in their truck, and Purdy Neons and Purdy Geos, even a couple of Purdy Fiestas came flying into the parking, bouncing across the skirting.

Desmond told the bunch of us, “Hold on.”

With that he dropped his Escalade into gear and left the steak house the way, I had to think, nobody had left the steak house before. We roared across a weedy patch and down through a ditch toward the blacktop. A Purdy tried to head us off in an orange Wrangler. He came at us off our right flank, and Desmond nudged him with the bumper. It didn’t take much to lay that trifling piece of shit right on its side.

“Aw,” I heard from Luther. “They going to be stirred up now.”

And I was going to say to him, “Now!?” but Percy Dwayne set up a fuss instead.

All the bouncing had wrecked the whipped cream on the shortcake Ricky had supplied us, and Percy Dwayne treated the mess in the pastry box like an authentic catastrophe.

“Look at this,” he fairly wailed, and he showed his seat mates the carnage.

“Fucking Purdys,” Luther said.

We had Purdy’s coming at us like star fighters on the road. We’d gotten on the blacktop just in time, but they were all turning around wherever they could and chasing behind us.

“You sure you didn’t hack her up and throw her in the river?”

“Didn’t even get any regular sex.”

“What kind of sex did you get?”

“Rather not say.”

I didn’t press him since Desmond was doing about ninety by then.

Vicksburg is rather confining. The city is chiefly down by the river with bluffs above it where all the batteries were during the Civil War. Desmond raced up Washington Street to Clay and swung east up out of the city proper. He’d managed to put enough distance between us and the Purdy posse—those four-cylinder heaps they drove could barely hold fifty going up hill—to let us pull off the road at the battlefield without any Purdys seeing us.

The park was closed. It was just past sunset. A chain was up beside the gatehouse, and Desmond rammed right through it. The busted chain came whipping around and cracked the back side window with enough force and racket to distract Dale from his missing tooth.

He took his finger out of his mouth long enough to tell us, “Shit.”

“I was kind of hoping to trade this in,” I told Desmond.

“Might still,” he said and hit a speed bump at somewhere north of forty. Desmond was the only one wearing a seatbelt, so the rest of us levitated. Fortunately, the lid of the pastry box was shut because Ricky’s shortcake had to be getting close to soup.

Desmond pulled into an overlook with an obelisk and cannons. He left the engine running but shut off all the lights.

“Road just go around?” I asked him.

Desmond nodded.

This wasn’t your standard Civil War battlefield park, like Shiloh or Antietam, with treeless stretches of farmland that troops might have charged across. This was all close and wooded on a bluff above the river.

“Got to pee,” Luther informed us all, and then the pack of them got out.

Even Barbara came out of the way back, and she followed the boys over to a handsome rock wall where they all drained their bladders. Then they came wandering back to where me and Desmond stood by the Escalade, all of them but for Dale who had a bashful bladder problem. He was still over against the wall when the headlight beams played in the trees.

“Purdys?” I asked Desmond, like he would know somehow.

Whatever car it was had stopped down at the gatehouse and was sitting. We could hear both the ticking of the engine and the racket of a couple of crackers in agitated conversation. The place where we were parked, a half-moon loop called Pemberton Circle, was the first pull out off the main loop if they decided to come in.

I said to Desmond, “So?”

“Could be a couple of boys out drinking.”

“And if it’s not?”

“They might stay right there,” Desmond told me, “this being history and all.”

I knew just what he meant. Those Purdys had passed their entire lives in and around Vicksburg, and you could about be sure not a one of them had ever set foot in the battlefield park. Exposure to actual history off plaques and brochures and from scale-built dioramas wasn’t a thing they needed when they could just sit drinking forties and being dumb.

So I could imagine the sort of debate those boys were having at the gate. In the few minutes since they’d shown up another car had pulled up behind them. That second guy was playing his radio—some sort of twangy yokel bullshit. They all had to shout over it to be heard.

That helped us there at Pemberton Circle once we’d prevailed upon Dale to be quiet. He’d started in with his molar and the tenderness of his stub. I was going to suggest that he shut the fuck up when Desmond hit him in the stomach. Same result but with moist wheezing instead of the whining I would have earned.

“We can take them,” Luther informed us. “Why don’t you bust out some of your guns.”

“Want to just mow them down?” I asked him.

There in the twilight I watched Luther and Percy Dwayne consult with glances. Then they both turned my way and nodded.

Percy Dwayne asked me, “Why the hell not?”

“You’d go to Parchman for these shitheads?”

“Ain’t like we’d ever get found out.”

I hadn’t passed much quality time with Percy Dwayne and Luther’s ilk since back when we’d first tangled with that Boudrot over my Ranchero. So I had pretty much forgotten about the inner workings of their cracker minds. The stew of self-pity and rationalization that passes with their sort for thought.

Here Percy Dwayne and Luther had been chased into a Civil War park by a bunch of guys they hadn’t personally done a damn thing to provoke. So if they shot them all down and left them, they’d be well within their rights. Better still, nobody would think to look for them because they weren’t down Delta creatures. They were Sunflower County Duboises after all. To their way of thinking, even Purdys should have known they weren’t the sort to tolerate getting chased.

“We’re not shooting anybody,” I told them, “unless there’s no help for it.”

“Might ought to go ahead and give us a gun,” Percy Dwayne suggested.

Desmond took over. He pointed at Dale who was sitting on the asphalt holding his stomach and laboring to breathe.

“Want some of that?” Desmond asked.

“Guess we’ll shut the fuck up,” Luther told him.

You could educate a Dubois in the short term. The trouble was that it never seemed to take.

It sounded to me like those boys at the gate had fallen into confounded silence. There was an outside chance that one of them was on the phone to Purdy reinforcements. Then they’d just sit there and wait until a whole flotilla of Purdys could swamp the place. More likely, though, they were mulling what a foray into the park might mean.

Desmond was surely correct in assuming they didn’t know the territory. The chances were high that at least one of those boys had an outstanding warrant on him, so he wouldn’t be at risk for trespass alone but probably some felony too.

“Wait them out?” I asked Desmond.

He appeared set to nod just as Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra chimed in from the Escalade cup holder. Desmond’s ringtone had long been a snatch of “Satin Soul,” long enough probably for a Purdy to have heard it a time or two before.

“Shit,” Desmond said.

The Escalade windows weren’t just all down. The doors were all standing open. We saw the headlights shift in the treetops as whatever Purdys had gotten out of their cars got back in them. Those tiny engines revved and whine. Barry White seemed to have provoked them. They were coming on in after us, fighting through both their fear of Desmond and their distaste for American history.

“Let’s go,” I said.

“I ain’t running from them.” It was Dale on the ground talking bold.

Me and Desmond found we lacked the patience to quarrel with Dale at all.

“Fine,” I said. “Be sure and tell them about your tooth.”

“I just might.” Dale had gone all pouty. There wasn’t a thing for us to do but leave him where he was.

The rest of us charged toward the Escalade.

“Go on,” Dale said. He’d gone pitiful. Once Dale had made up his mind to do a thing—no matter how ill-considered—it was sort of like a vault door slamming shut. You could only undo his thinking with appreciable time and effort, and we didn’t have enough of either to hope to sway him at all.

“They’ll pound him,” Eugene informed us all.

“Hell,” Luther said, “wouldn’t you?”

A bend in the loop road served to mask our escape. We pulled out of the north end of Pemberton Circle as those Purdys were pulling in from the south. They came in harder than they should have. A speed bump caught the muffler on one of their coups. Desmond stopped just a little ways up Confederate Avenue, and we sat and listened to what sounded like a Purdy conniption.

One of them set to clucking: “Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.”

We could hear at least two other Purdys laughing at that boy’s distress.

“Touching, isn’t it?” Desmond said. “Pack of shitbags,” he added.

Then they turned their wholesale attention to Dale and blamed him for the mess they were in.

“Sounds like what? Four?” I asked.

Desmond nodded.

“Five?” Percy Dwayne said. “Listen.”

We did.

“Four regular. And that one that sounds like somebody’s squeezing his balls.”

“You might be right.” That was something I’d never said before to Percy Dwayne.

“Am,” he told me. “Five of us too. Six with him.” He country pointed with his nose in the general galactic direction of Dale.

“What the hell we doing back here?” Eugene asked.

I shifted around to take them all in—Luther and Percy Dwayne, Eugene and Barbara. It was hard to conceive of those boys as musketeers. Particularly where it came to Dale. He didn’t inspire that kind of feeling in anybody who knew him even a little.

“You want to go back?” I asked them

“We can swarm on in and take those boys,” Luther told me. Then he glanced at Eugene and Percy Dwayne and both of them gave me the dumb show version of “Fuck yeah.”

“They’re liable to kill him,” Percy Dwayne said as if he thought that were a bad thing.

“Been in this damn car all day,” Luther said.

I was about to tell Desmond to back on up when we heard the gunshot.

“Hmm,” Desmond told me. “I’d feel kind of bad if they killed him.”

“Sure hope that Purdy girl was worth it.”

Desmond thought about her for a moment before he told me, “Naw.”

SEVENTEEN

Instead of backing up, Desmond blew his horn. We could hear those Purdys scrambling.

“They coming,” Desmond said.

One of them even squealed his tires a little through the lot.

“Was she as dumb as them?” I asked Desmond.

He nodded. “But built,” he told me. “Torpedos.”

“I guess you were taking a break from the Lord.”

Desmond nodded. “Stray from the path, and see where it gets me.”

“Me too, apparently.”

We had to wait for those Purdys to finally come out on the north end of Pemberton Circle. I don’t know where white trash finds the shit they drive. You’ve got to do some powerful looking to turn up a Fiat in Mississippi, but damned if the lead car wasn’t a Lada Riva. So not even fine Italian craftsmanship but Soviet handiwork instead.

The thing was screaming our way. The duct tape on it caught the light of the rising moon. There was a Fiesta right behind it with its entire exhaust system dragging the ground. Sparks were shooting out like the tail of a comment. We were all a little mesmerized.

“Probably should go,” I finally managed to tell Desmond.

He dropped the Escalade into gear and raced ahead about fifty yards.

“Don’t lose them,” Eugene shouted from the way back.

And there was genuine danger of leaving those Purdys struggling well behind. They had bald tires and tiny engines and busted muffler hangers. If Desmond went faster than thirty-five, he pulled away like they were dead stopped.

It wasn’t much of a chase as far as velocity went, but it had its compensations. One of those Purdys kept firing a pistol at us. Some kind of nickel-plated revolver. We would have been more upset about it if he’d gone to the trouble to aim. Instead he just shoved his arm out the passenger window of the Lada Riva and kind of shot in the air like he was celebrating a West Bank holy day.