Free Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) by Rick Gavin

well water on the Arkansas side runs to spoiled and brackish somehow. They grow peanuts and keep cows. They’ve got nothing like the scale of farming that’s routine on the eastern side. There are trees and goats and pastureland and not the first speck of soybeans or cotton.
    Barbara got antsy near Eudora, so we stopped in the gravel lot of some business that looked to be a combination propane works and café. You could bring in your tanks and get them filled on the north side of the structure. Judging by the scent from the range hood, you could get gastric distress down south.
    That café had a big weathered menu attached to the front siding, a sheet of plywood on which somebody had painted a catfish (as it turned out) and a half rack of ribs in a puddle of sauce. There was something called angel slaw available as a side, in addition to EVERY DAMN KIND OF FRITTER! and WHITE BREAD IF YOU WANT IT.
    The aroma was enough to bring Dale entirely out of the way back.
    “Lord, look,” he said as he studied the menu. “Who’s going to front me some cash?”
    It ended up being me. Luther didn’t let out money as a rule, and Desmond hated Dale, so Dale knew to wander my way. I was standing over by a weedy patch where Barbara was making her business.
    I fished two fives out of my billfold and shoved them Dale’s way.
    Desmond was still digesting his chicken-fried thing, but Luther guessed he could eat again, so him and Dale went into the café. They were gone for maybe two minutes before Dale came back out trailed by a man he was planning to fight in the lot.
    I was still over with Barbara. She was feeling fragile, I guess. Not confident enough anyway to just squat and get things over with. She was circling and sniffing and shivering a little. She’d look up at me every now and again and whine. Desmond was on the phone to his Pentecostal girlfriend. He was trying to explain what he was up to without actually telling her anything. So we weren’t in any position to intervene on Dale’s behalf, and Luther hadn’t even bothered to come outside.
    Dale and the fellow who’d followed him out had some words there in the lot.
    Dale said, “The hell I did.”
    That fellow told him, “Shit.”
    Dale had something else on his mind and was casting around for the appropriate inflammatory language when the gentleman who had followed him out knocked Dale down with a punch. It wasn’t a cinematic punch or even a bottom-of-the-ticket bloated heavyweight haymaker. The guy just lurched at Dale and hit him. I guess most anywhere would have hurt given that Dale had been beaten fairly thoroughly just the night before.
    He went down like his bones had all dissolved at once. The guy who’d punched him said, “Shit,” again and spat. His buddy was just coming out the door to see the fight by the time it was over.
    He glanced at Dale. He asked his pal, “You want dark meat, right?”
    The guy who’d punched Dale told him, “I guess,” and the two of them went back inside.
    Desmond had missed the whole thing. His back was to the action, and he was comprehensively preoccupied trying to explain to his Pentecostal girlfriend what exactly had carried him all the way to Arkansas.
    I caught Desmond’s eye and pointed. He turned around to see Dale piled up in the lot. The last Desmond knew Dale had gone in to buy a bag full of greasy lunch, and there he was tipped over and semiconscious out in the parking lot.
    “Got to go,” Desmond told his Pentecostal girlfriend. He listened to her for half a minute and then added, “Yes, praise Him.”
    He shoved his phone in his pocket and looked to me for an explanation, which is to say Desmond showed me his upturned palms as he said my way just, “Huh?”
    “I hate to call it a fight.”
    “He just went in, didn’t he?”
    I nodded. Barbara whimpered. Dale snorted up a puff of gravel dust.
    “Guy punched him once.”
    “How do you piss off anybody that quick?” Desmond asked me.
    I’d known Dale