me.”
“Tell you what I told Burkhart the five, six times he been around banging on doors day and night with his bloodhounds, asking the same damn question, shouldering his way inside of peoples’ homes without no search warrant or legal right. There ain’t no white folks out here except the ones kicking up dust on this road.”
“So you didn’t hear a mess of gunfire in the woods back of Belmont Heights, that pine forest by the river, eight, ten days back?”
Ladarius frowned as if giving it some serious thought.
“Seems like I would’ve heard gunshots in them woods, living so near.”
“Seems like you would, yes.”
Ladarius wrinkled his brow as if trying hard to recall.
“No, sir, didn’t hear no shooting.”
“And never saw any of those punk-ass kids coming and going from those woods. Young troublemakers.”
“No kids, no shooting, no rumors like that, no, sir.”
Webb eyed him for a minute but couldn’t penetrate his dull-witted mask.
“If I was to give you my personal cell number, would you call me if you suddenly realize one or more of those rumors were true?”
“Would I call you?”
“Would you let me know about strangers out here, hiding out, plotting mischief against me and my business? The well-being of our fair city.”
“That’s a lot of responsibility,” Ladarius said.
“Make it worth your while.”
One of Ladarius’s girls, five or six years old, wandered out onto the porch chewing on her thumb and looking out at her father.
Webb scribbled his number on a yellow notepad and tore off the page, held it out. Ladarius gave the paper an insolent look, then reached out for it.
“Day or night, you see that rumor walking around, call me. There’ll be a chunk of change for you if you got it right.”
“Now, that would be my lucky day, wouldn’t it? Heavens opening up.”
“’Cause, Ladarius, on the flip side of my generosity is the fact that if I was to find out later on that those rumors were indeed true and some radical was hiding his sorry punk ass out here and folks like you knew about it all along and were aiding and abetting this snot-nosed criminal, well, I’d hate to think what havoc some kerosene might cause to all the kindling lying around here.”
Ladarius stepped away as Webb pulled back onto the road. In the rearview mirror he watched his old high school chum walk back to his shanty, adding to the litter in his yard a wadded-up yellow ball of paper.
ELEVEN
WEBB SLOWED FOR SOME POTHOLES, then floored it through the rest of Belmont Heights and sped into the next neighborhood, the jam-packed trailer camp where the United Nations of Mexicans and Nicaraguans had their world headquarters.
A couple dozen wetbacks were lying around in the beds of their pickup trucks sipping beer and laughing, a few playing ragtag soccer in the rutted field nearby. All of them waiting to be summoned back to work by Webb’s foreman.
The stink that started back at Ladarius’s place grew stronger the farther west he went. “The smell of money” is what hog farmers liked to call that reek of swine manure and piss. Hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and methane is what it actually was.
Hogs were prodigious shitters. Pound for pound they put out three times what a human did. In all, Webb’s eight thousand hogs produced ten thousand gallons of soupy manure every day. No way to keep the putrid smell from drifting with the wind. The prevailing breezes swept those particles east across the migrant labor camp and into Belmont Heights, where they settled and took root in the grain of the wood houses and the weave of peoples’ clothes and the fabric of their furniture, coated their utensils and pots and pans and dishes and glasses. A fine invisible mist of hog shit raining down on Ladarius Washington, his daughters, and the other fine people of Belmont Heights.
From time to time some of them complained about headaches, sore throats, burning eyes, ulcers, and blisters, and once in a while one
“Tell you what I told Burkhart the five, six times he been around banging on doors day and night with his bloodhounds, asking the same damn question, shouldering his way inside of peoples’ homes without no search warrant or legal right. There ain’t no white folks out here except the ones kicking up dust on this road.”
“So you didn’t hear a mess of gunfire in the woods back of Belmont Heights, that pine forest by the river, eight, ten days back?”
Ladarius frowned as if giving it some serious thought.
“Seems like I would’ve heard gunshots in them woods, living so near.”
“Seems like you would, yes.”
Ladarius wrinkled his brow as if trying hard to recall.
“No, sir, didn’t hear no shooting.”
“And never saw any of those punk-ass kids coming and going from those woods. Young troublemakers.”
“No kids, no shooting, no rumors like that, no, sir.”
Webb eyed him for a minute but couldn’t penetrate his dull-witted mask.
“If I was to give you my personal cell number, would you call me if you suddenly realize one or more of those rumors were true?”
“Would I call you?”
“Would you let me know about strangers out here, hiding out, plotting mischief against me and my business? The well-being of our fair city.”
“That’s a lot of responsibility,” Ladarius said.
“Make it worth your while.”
One of Ladarius’s girls, five or six years old, wandered out onto the porch chewing on her thumb and looking out at her father.
Webb scribbled his number on a yellow notepad and tore off the page, held it out. Ladarius gave the paper an insolent look, then reached out for it.
“Day or night, you see that rumor walking around, call me. There’ll be a chunk of change for you if you got it right.”
“Now, that would be my lucky day, wouldn’t it? Heavens opening up.”
“’Cause, Ladarius, on the flip side of my generosity is the fact that if I was to find out later on that those rumors were indeed true and some radical was hiding his sorry punk ass out here and folks like you knew about it all along and were aiding and abetting this snot-nosed criminal, well, I’d hate to think what havoc some kerosene might cause to all the kindling lying around here.”
Ladarius stepped away as Webb pulled back onto the road. In the rearview mirror he watched his old high school chum walk back to his shanty, adding to the litter in his yard a wadded-up yellow ball of paper.
ELEVEN
WEBB SLOWED FOR SOME POTHOLES, then floored it through the rest of Belmont Heights and sped into the next neighborhood, the jam-packed trailer camp where the United Nations of Mexicans and Nicaraguans had their world headquarters.
A couple dozen wetbacks were lying around in the beds of their pickup trucks sipping beer and laughing, a few playing ragtag soccer in the rutted field nearby. All of them waiting to be summoned back to work by Webb’s foreman.
The stink that started back at Ladarius’s place grew stronger the farther west he went. “The smell of money” is what hog farmers liked to call that reek of swine manure and piss. Hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, and methane is what it actually was.
Hogs were prodigious shitters. Pound for pound they put out three times what a human did. In all, Webb’s eight thousand hogs produced ten thousand gallons of soupy manure every day. No way to keep the putrid smell from drifting with the wind. The prevailing breezes swept those particles east across the migrant labor camp and into Belmont Heights, where they settled and took root in the grain of the wood houses and the weave of peoples’ clothes and the fabric of their furniture, coated their utensils and pots and pans and dishes and glasses. A fine invisible mist of hog shit raining down on Ladarius Washington, his daughters, and the other fine people of Belmont Heights.
From time to time some of them complained about headaches, sore throats, burning eyes, ulcers, and blisters, and once in a while one
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