Ranchero Read Online Free Page B

altogether with terrain about as far from Virginia hillbilly hollows as I could get. Everything was slower and hotter, the local manners approached baroque, and racing down a Delta road with crop dusters on the horizon was like driving into 1952.
    The Delta was otherworldly, even for folks in the rest of Mississippi who’d explain away outlandishness that transpired in the Delta by shrugging and saying, “It ain’t like nowhere else.”
    The place had a reputation for the natives living a little too close to the ground. The black trash was trashier than in normal Mississippi. The Delta crackers were capable of almost any enormity sober and everything otherwise once they’d gotten drunk.
    The Delta had its own rules, its own peculiar customs. There were people in the Delta who’d help you out for no conceivable reason and people who’d extract your vital organs for sport. I’d hardly begun to understand the whys and wherefores of the place, which made Desmond indispensable to me. He was my guide to all things Mississippi flatland. I had need of Delta insight and Delta education, and Desmond was my personal lyceum.
    He never played the radio when he was behind the wheel of his Geo. Instead he whistled through his teeth and drifted all over the road. Steering never seemed to hold much lasting interest for Desmond. He preferred pointing out silos and telling tales of various farms he’d worked on back when he could fit in a tractor seat.
    There were squashed armadillos all over the place putrefying in the sun, and given the way we wandered we rarely failed to hit a carcass. Consequently, the ride out to Highway 7 was perfumed with rancid meat and what I’d grown to think of as eau de W. R. Grace—a tangy chemical nosebleed aroma that was the signature scent of the place.
    We found Kendell backed in a slot between two cypress trees. I’d met him on a repo that had soured on me on a couple of months before. I was trying to get payment from a covey of Klinnards when the whole thing had gone sideways.
    They’d fallen to fighting each other—the entire crew—and we were in their trailer at the time. They were all Delta fat, about Desmond’s size but too full of beer to be lively, so they’d just laid on each other and described the thrashings they’d inflict if they could.
    One of them got squashed so thoroughly that he passed out in the doorway and so trapped me and the rest of his clan inside. That’s when I put in the 9-1-1 that Kendell responded to.
    I watched him out a window as he exited his cruiser and pepper-sprayed all the mongrels that came snarling up to meet him. Kendell lay against that trailer door while I pulled it from inside, and we made a gap that Kendell could slip in through.
    He wasn’t hungry for particulars. Kendell just drew out his lacquered nightstick and went about tapping Klinnard bony parts. It earned him undivided Klinnard attention.
    Kendell was from Tchula and knew his Delta crackers inside out. Duboises would have ganged up on him and fought him to the death. They’re pretty much the Gurkhas of the region, but Klinnards are more like the Vichy French and don’t have any steel to speak of.
    “You going to pay this man?” Kendell asked, and all those Klinnards pledged they would.
    Two of them made the mistake of swearing on their mother’s grave, their mother who Kendell knew to be sitting in jail in Alabama, so he swatted those boys once further in righteous exasperation before advising them all to scratch up the cash due on their TV.
    They came within thirteen dollars of everything they owed, and I was quick to let it go at that so I could follow Kendell out.
    I squeezed behind him through the door gap and down the rickety cinder-block steps into the landfill that passed with those Klinnards for a yard. The dogs all shied and cowered as Kendell made way to his cruiser with me trailing close and prattling out of nerves and gratitude.
    When I finally shut up, Kendell volunteered