Raylan (2 page)
S
outh of Barbourville Raylan turned off the four-lane and cut east to follow blacktops and gravel roads without names or numbers through these worn-out mountains of Knox County, the tops of the grades scalped, strip-mined of coal to leave waste heaps, the creeks down in the hollows tainted with mine acid. Raylan followed Stinking Creek to the fork where Buckeye came in and there it was, up past the cemetery, Crowe’s grocery store, the name displayed in a Coca-Cola sign over the door,
CROWE’S GROCERIES & FEED
.
He let Angel’s BMW roll past the screen door standing open and came to a stop. He’d had the car washed in Somerset and wore a dark suit and tie for this visit, wanting Mr. Crowe to make a judgment about him. In its piece about Stinking Creek,
Newsweek
called Pervis “Speed” Crowe the top marijuana grower in East Kentucky. Crowe said in the magazine, “Prove it. I run a store for these poor people come up from the hollers with their food stamps. When’s anybody seen me cultivatin herb?”
There he was behind the counter by an old-style scale he used to weigh potatoes, cuts of fatback, the shelves behind him showing sacks of flour and cornmeal. Eggs ten cents apiece reduced to four bits the dozen.
All these stores looked the same to Raylan, the same people coming in to buy necessities, then taking forever to spend ninety-nine cents on an angel food cake, some candy and Kool-Aid for their kids waiting, not saying a word.
A young girl starting to bud sat on cow-feed sacks in her shorts drinking an RC Cola. Raylan had bought Beech-Nut scrap in stores like this when he was a kid, wanting to hurry up and get enough size to become a federal officer, the kind went after armed felons.
The girl on the cow-feed sacks kept looking up at Raylan like she was wondering about him, thinking hard of something to say, until she found a sweet voice to ask him, “Sir, would you think I’m bold to inquire what you do as your job?”
Raylan smiled. “Which one’s the question, what I think or what I do?”
Pervis Crowe, called “Speed” in the magazine, said, “Loretta, don’t you know Drug Enforcement, you see a man wearin a suit of clothes? They come around sniffin the air.”
“You got me wrong,” Raylan said, “I’m marshals service. We go around smelling the flowers, till we get turned on to wanted felons. I understand, Mr. Crowe, you have a couple of boys work illegal trades.”
Pervis said, “You hold warrants on ’em?”
“I did, they’d be gone,” Raylan said. “You wouldn’t see ’em for goin on two hundred and forty months.”
“Where you been?” Pervis said. “I don’t know a judge hands down more’n a few years.”
“Doesn’t matter to me,” Raylan said. “I wondered if you’re related to the Florida Crowes.”
“From some distance. How they makin it?”
“Doin time or dead,” Raylan said. “I sent one to Starke while I was workin down there. I did wonder, is that Dewey Crowe one of yours? Wears gator teeth and joined that Heil Hitler club? Told me he was from Belle Glade.”
“I mighta heard of the boy,” Pervis said, “but he don’t raise my interest none.”
“Wants you to know he’s bad,” Raylan said, “but doesn’t have it down yet. I’d like to meet your boys.”
“They’re a different stock,” Pervis said. “Wear clean clothes every day and drive Chevrolets.”
“Pickups,” Raylan said, “with a .30-.30 racked in the back window. Otherwise they drive Cadillacs. I wouldn’t mind talking to ’em, though it’s not my reason to stop by. I thought I’d buy a jar and take it down memory lane. I’m on my way to Evarts and on to Eastover, where I dug coal as a boy.”
“You managed to get out,” Pervis said, “before bad habits set in.”
“I was lucky,” Raylan said. “I didn’t mind going to school, found I liked to read stories.”
“Else you’d be wanted for bustin into drugstores,” Pervis said. “Clean out the painkillers and sell ’em to folks want to stay numb, not have to think.”
“You carry those people?”
“The ones grow reefer in their backyard I keep on the books. They sell a crop and pay their store debt with hunnert-dollar bills.”
“Can I ask why they call you Speed?”
He was stringy and stooped in his seventies, wore a hairpiece that wasn’t bad, though Raylan could tell Pervis set it on his head every morning. Had a neat part that was in it forever. Pervis let his expression sag into deep lines. He had not smiled since Raylan entered the store.
“I sold ninety-proof whiskey clear as spring water, not a speck of charcoal in her. I sold it from a Ford looked like it was stock I used as my store. Never stopped runnin these hills and acquired ‘Speed’ as my handle. You understand this was fifty years ago. I raced quarter-mile dirt and worked up to try NASCAR. Came up against Junior Johnson and saw my future get put on the trailer.”
“You sell groceries now,” Raylan said, “and your boys run your other business.”
Pervis said, “Finally gettin to it, aren’t we?”
“I’m not Drug Enforcement,” Raylan said. “Long as they got nothin on you I don’t either. But I’m told you got fields of marijuana, a good thousand acres, from here to West Virginia.”
“What’s good about it?” Pervis said. “You plant a third for the law, a third for the thieves and what’s left you sell to dealers, the ones makin the profit. I’m confidin this to you so we don’t waste time lyin to each other. I didn’t know your daddy, but I’ll swear by your granddaddy. Six years I came over to Harlan and sold all the liquor he cooked and we did better’n fair.”
Raylan said, “I’m told he was a preacher.”
“Cooked all week and preached Sunday,” Pervis said. “Boy, you don’t know your own people.”
“I knew your boy Coover back in my school days till he quit to roam the earth, do whatever he wanted. And Richard . . . ?”
“Been goin by Dickie since he was a tad.”
“What I have is a situation here,” Raylan said. “I’m told your boys took payment for weed they never delivered.”
“You with Better Business,” Pervis said, “check on customer complaints? I might’ve heard about this. The DEA fella comes down here in his dress shoes and pays for product before he’s given any. Anxious, in a hurry to get her done. Like cuttin a fart he believes is gas and messes hisself. I’m to take your word my tads cheated this man?”
Raylan said with a straight face, “I know you love your tads. Now and then you notice them growin up to what they are today. But you heard it wrong. It wasn’t a federal agent makin the deal, it was a wanted felon. I went to that motel room with an arrest warrant on me.”
Raylan gave Pervis time to step in and say something, but he didn’t.
“I found Angel Arenas in the room,” Raylan said, “without his kidneys.”
Raylan waited again, Pervis staring at him.
“Bare-naked in an ice bath.”
Pervis said, “This boy’s missin his kidneys?”
“They offered ’em back later on, while he’s in the hospital, for a hundred thousand.”
Raylan waited again before saying, “But he won’t have to pay for ’em.”
Pervis didn’t ask why, didn’t say a word.
Raylan told him, “We’re on the case now, the marshals. Gonna stop this new business startin up.”
“You’re tellin me to my face,” Pervis said, “my boys cut this man open and took his kidneys?”
“I think they had somebody along knew how. Whoever he is,” Raylan said, “I’m gonna find him.”
This time Pervis brought a pack of Camels from his shirt pocket, got one lighted and blew a stream of smoke like he was cooling himself off. He said, “Well, I know it wasn’t my boys. Who was it told you?”
“The man waitin to get his kidneys back,” Raylan said.
“He name my boys?”
“After a while he did.”
“He lied,” Pervis said, “account of the broke deal. My boys farm reefer, they don’t cut into a man’s body for his parts. Even if they knew how.”
“They shoot a buck,” Raylan said, “they know how to dress him out.”
He was on the edge with this old man, one time bootlegger, dirt-track driver, the man pinching his cigarette between his fingers staring at Raylan. Raylan said to him, “Mr. Crowe, I respect how you feel, but I’m gonna have a talk with your boys, in your presence if you want. Have ’em come by the next day or so, or I’ll hunt ’em down.”
“I always felt,” Pervis said, “we’re a good twenty years behind the times livin here, what we get by on. But it’s how I like it. Now you tell me we’re catchin up, gettin into this new business, sellin parts of the human body.”
“You brought yourself up-to-date,” Raylan said, “wholesaling marijuana. Drug Enforcement thinks of your boys as high-tech rednecks drivin around in Cadillacs, talkin to each other on cell phones.”
“You ever get to accuse my boys face-to-face,” Pervis said, bringing out a jar of moonshine from under the counter, a peach floating in the clear whiskey, “this’ll help ease your pain.”
P
ervis put on his gray hat with the snap brim he’d been wearing the better part of his life, and went up the log steps two hundred feet to his home: a two-story white frame house he’d have repainted as it showed wear. He went in the bathroom and took a leak, shook the dew off his lily and started going again, goddamn it.
Rita was on the couch in the sitting room watching
Days of Our Lives
. He got close enough to see she was asleep in her maid’s uniform, her bare legs coming out of the skirt that covered her hips and stopped there.
Rita was a black girl, black as ebony, man oh man, the Queen of Africa Pervis found waiting in line for work. He said to her, “You’re on the dodge, aren’cha? You know how to pick this stuff? Don’t matter. You cook?”
Rita said, “What you have in mind?”
She was his maid and cooked all right, mostly Mex. Pervis paid her a hundred dollars a day every day at supper. A time came, he said, “How much you have in the suitcase? The one in your closet?” He thought about it and said, “Jesus Christ, you must have a hunnert thousand easy.”
“A hundred and five,” Rita said. “But it ain’t in the suitcase.”
“You leavin me?”
“I got to get into something, put the whole thing into weed you let me have cheap cause we in each other’s hearts. Least once a week you feel stirrings in your dick, who is it says time to go beddy-bye?”
Pervis said, “You want to sell weed?” Like he couldn’t believe his ears. “That’s all? You want to be set up? Tell me what you want.”
Feeling better now, relieved. He’d help her out if she’d stay here in the house. They’d talk about it. Right now he had to see Bob Valdez. Sat down by the phone and dialed Bob’s number. He waited a few rings, hung up, waited a minute and dialed the number again.
This time he heard, “Bob Valdez, at your service.”
“Bob,” Pervis said, “you keep your cell on you. Have I told you that before? I believe I have.” He didn’t give Bob a chance to say a word, told him, “Stay put, I’m comin out to see you,” and hung up the phone.
Bob Valdez, the name he was going by at this time, was loaned to Pervis by the Mexican Mafia—what they called themselves—to act as security, watch over the patches and see they got their cut. Pervis would put up with it for the time being. This Bob Valdez had been a gun thug for mine owners during strikes. He had his own patch and drove a four-door Mercedes, a black one. He also had a tricked-out ATV, that little all-terrain number that climbed up the sides of mountains. Bob was a born American, but preferred acting Mexican in his ways. Today Pervis would tell Bob about this marshal bothering him.
T
hey had breakfast in Harlan at the Huddle House, Art noticing the way Raylan broke up a strip of bacon in his grits, a pat of butter melting in it, and added salt, Art asking Raylan if he’d tried the jar Pervis gave him.
“It was good. The peach didn’t mess it up any. I had a couple of pulls and gave it to an old coot on the street. It brought tears to his eyes.”
Art said, “You know marijuana’s now the biggest cash crop in the state?”
“Makes you proud,” Raylan said. “We right on California’s tail, and I guess Maui Wowee’s. It shows we’re resourceful. Seventy thousand coal miners out of work, a bunch of ’em become planters. Last night on TV this news reader with the hair said marijuana was getting out of hand. He said you come across any patches, be sure to report it to the police. You believe it? The only people get worked up over reefer are ones never tried it.”
Art said, “You haven’t seen Pervis’s boys.”
“Not yet.”
“You know he’s called them by now,” Art said. “You can kiss your BMW good-bye, they’ll know it. DEA has a
Mer
cedes they might let you have.”
Raylan liked the way this breakfast was going.
He said, “The one I want is the doctor, and the only way I have of getting to him is through the Crowes, to tell me about him. Was the doctor working for a cut, so to speak? Or’d they grab one off the street. The doctor at the hospital said he was a pro. Used the latest method of extracting kidneys, the right spots in the belly, but didn’t close up after. That was left to whoever used the staples. One of the Crowes? I want to ask ’em about it in a public place, so I don’t get shot or beat up.”
