Free Nowhere Nice (Nick Reid Novels) by Rick Gavin Page A

too long by the then to be qualified to say since he’d been a source of low-level antagonism for me for years. I couldn’t remember if he’d chafed me the moment I’d met him or just very shortly thereafter.
    Luther soon came out and explained it all to us. He was eating a catfish sandwich, which was shredded cabbage and about a half pound of fried fish between two slices of Texas toast. He took a bite. He chewed. He walked over to Dale and poked him with the toe of his snake-skinned boot.
    “How the hell did he do it?” I asked Luther.
    Luther jabbed his thumb toward the café-propane place. “Razorback fan,” he told us. “Dale had a thing to say.”
    “You get him some lunch?” I asked him.
    That was the sort of thoughtful gesture that didn’t occur to Luther naturally. He looked at me like I’d asked him if he’d laundered Dale’s undershorts.
    “I’ll go,” I told Desmond. “Otherwise, he’ll just start pissing and moaning again.”
    Desmond grunted and nodded. He instructed Luther to help him drag Dale to the car. Luther aired an objection or two about it before Desmond caught him on the cowlick with his open hand.
    So I stepped inside the café on a mission just to get Dale some ribs, and without any provocation on my part, that Razorback fan got wolfy with me.
    “Guess you want some too,” was the first thing I heard.
    Like Dale, he’d probably been muscular once but had fallen down on the upkeep. He was wearing a sky-blue dress shirt that he’d cut the sleeves off of, better to show off his Chevy tattoo on his left biceps and the scar from his polio vaccination (I guess) on his right.
    “Some what?” I asked him.
    He had a chuckle with his buddies. There were two of them sitting with him at a picnic table.
    “Yeah, sugar,” the lady behind the counter said. She was caramel-colored and had her hair all up and wrapped in a rag. I had to think she passed her life stinking of week-old fry grease and resenting the slights she must have suffered from the clientele.
    “Ribs, I guess,” I told her. “And all the trimmings.”
    “Half a rack?”
    I nodded.
    “You know what,” the guy with no shirtsleeves said. “Asshole.”
    I don’t mind getting called an asshole once I’ve actually been one. If I go into a house to repo a washer or take a sofa out from under Grandma and the family wants to vent about it, they can call me whatever they please. I’m not proud of that work, and I’m convinced this world’s increasingly stacked against decent industrious people of low pedigree. So when “asshole” or “fuckwad” comes my way, I consider it the price of doing business.
    But in a café in Arkansas when I’m only putting in an order and haven’t been up to the first little thing to get called an asshole about, somebody’s going to have to do a bit of explaining.
    “Did I hear you right?” I said to that fellow.
    He tightened up as best he could underneath his Chevy tattoo. He shifted his toothpick and grinned. “Asshole,” he said. He nodded.
    “You sucker punch a sack of shit, and you think you’re Sonny Liston?”
    He was grinning now. He set his toothpick on the napkin dispenser.
    “How long on that order?” I asked the woman behind the counter.
    “Five minutes.”
    I told that boy, “Let’s go.”
    So out we came into the lot. All four of us. Desmond was leaning against his front grill enduring prattle from Luther who very nearly stopped talking when he saw us step into the lot. He still had a few points to make with Desmond about proper catfish-frying technique, but he turned his attention to me and my posse while he said what he had to say.
    Dale was out of sight in the Escalade by then, and Barbara’s head was hanging out the window.
    “They ought to blow up all these goddamn bridges,” the fellow with the Chevy tattoo told me. “Keep you Mississippi trash over where you belong.”
    He’d squared up on me by then and was making and unmaking his fists. He