Ranchero by Rick Gavin Page A

sack with all the twenties showing, and we took turns lifting it off the table and being satisfied.
    “What’s this for?” Pearl finally asked me.
    I told her straight up that I’d be buying back Gil’s Ranchero from that fellow who had beat me with his fireplace shovel and driven it off.
    “When’s this?” Luther wanted to know.
    “Tomorrow. Around noon. Up in Webb,” I told him.
    “You need to go home?” I asked Desmond.
    “I need to go home,” Luther said.
    “Nobody’s talking to you.” I told him. “We’re not finished yet.”
    Desmond weighed his momma’s pain against the chance of running into Dale. He finally told me, “Think I’ll just stick here.”
    Even given the hour, Angela Marie was determined to drive back to Memphis. That was a three-hour trip no matter how you cut it.
    “Watch yourself,” I told her. “There are K-Lo’s all over the place.”
    She handed me one of her business cards. “Let me know how this turns out.”
    “All right.”
    “Maybe one day we can go duck hunting.”
    “I can sit in a blind and drink about as well as anybody.”
    I didn’t realize how small and cramped my car shed apartment was until me and Desmond and Luther were all inside it. It was a little better than sleeping in the Geo, but not that much. I offered my bed to Desmond, but he preferred the floor. Not the floor dressed up for sleeping and made to pass for some kind of palette, but just the floor as it was—uncarpeted wood.
    Once Desmond got down on it, he lay on his back and went right to sleep.
    I tend toward insomnia and couldn’t help but resent him a little, all the more once Luther started to talk.
    He was stretched out on the sofa. I was across the room in the bed. Luther seemed primed to chat at me for a while. He had nothing specific in mind, but he was still giddy from all the swell shit Pearl had insisted on him, and he went through the list and described each item in turn.
    Then he told me there were fish that lived in trees. He said there was liquor made from cobras that he wouldn’t fucking drink and a beer he’d had once at a bar in Jackson that was brewed in outer space. He said he was married one time for about a day and a half. Had a foot fungus two years back he’d cured with Clorox. He wondered what Muslims were up to in a general sort of way. Then he just stopped talking because he was asleep.

TEN
     
    As for me, I didn’t sleep at first. By at first I mean from midnight until about half past three. Desmond was snoring on the floor, and Luther was wheezing on the couch. He sounded like he was trying to bring up a hairball.
    Worse still, Luther had insisted on stripping down to his underwear alone. He’d flung back his blanket and was all uncovered and revealed. His underwear was alarmingly brief, what passes in Walmart for man-sexy.
    Luther, in keeping with the cracker tradition, was tatted up across his chest. He had a likeness of Dale Earnhardt over his left nipple and a flat-bottomed fishing boat just above his right. There was something coming up over his shoulder, either a dragon or Tammy Wynette. His midriff featured what appeared at first like a snatch of Latin in Gothic script. I got a closer look on the way to the toilet. It wasn’t Latin after all but Go Fuck Yourself all done up and ornate.
    I awoke gradually to crows having a spat in the neighboring live oak. The sun was well up, and the apartment was as fragrant as a stockyard. Desmond was still snoring, and I shifted around to find Luther alongside me in the bed. So I woke all the way up in an alarming hurry.
    Luther stretched and groaned. “Sofa didn’t cut it.” Then he told me, “Watch this,” arched his back, and broke loud, clammy wind.
    I was on my feet so fast that I was dizzy.
    As best I could tell, Desmond hadn’t moved so much as an inch. He looked like a chalk outline waiting to happen.
    “You in there?” I asked him.
    Desmond gave me a grunt by way of reply but just stayed where he