Charlie — Corporal Baltimore, a provost guard and model soldier — suggests we head up San Felipe to get a cool soda. We notice two mounted policemen down the block; I know one of them, a mammoth named Rufus Daniels. The colored housekeepers here refer to him as “Dan’l Boone, a nigger-baiter, one of the meanest cops around.” I tell Charlie and Ben, my other companion, we should stay to one side of the street and keep our heads down. The officers see us. They turn their stallions to keep us in view, straighten in their saddles. We pass an alley, and my stomach clenches. A pair of colored teens is kneeling in the dirt, throwing dice. Canned goods, the community calls its boys. Don’t matter what they do — even if they doing nothing — they just canned goods for the cops. Lately, the police have mounted an intense campaign against crap-shooting, citywide, increasing neighborhood tension. I quicken my stride, so if Daniel Boone stops to inspect us, we’ll be past the alley and he won’t see the boys. But the boys look up, hear the hoofbeats, and hightail it out of there. Charlie, Ben, and I fall back, startled, as the kids run foolishly up the street, in plain sight. The stallions crackle past us, knocking us over; a tail whips my face, a breath-stealing sting.
The kids swing past a woman at a clothesline. She’s wearing a man’s T-shirt and shorts, her brown skin wet with sweat. The cops dismount; Daniels fires his pistol at a slat fence the boys have leaped. The woman screams and falls to the grass, covering her ears. Daniels’s partner, a thin, box-faced man, peers around the fence, shakes his head. “Little devils are gone,” he says. “Quick as damn greyhounds.” Daniels jerks the woman to her feet. “You know them nigger kids, hm? Tell me where they live!” She shivers in his grip. The T-shirt rides up her waist. Daniels laughs. “I’m waiting, Mammy. Where they at?”
Charlie steps forward, toward the yard. I lay my hand on his arm, whisper, “No.”
“You … you raised your six-shooter,” the woman stammers. “They was just kids!”
“No ma’am,” Daniels says. “I fired into the ground. It was only a warning shot. Right?”
She stares at him as if at a haint.
“Right?”
“Charlie, no!” I hiss, but it’s too late. “Excuse me, officer,” Charlie says, stepping onto the lawn. On the clothesline behind him, bedsheets flutter like herons. “I think it’s pretty clear this woman doesn’t know anything.”
Daniels shoves her to the ground. “You uppity son of a bitch,” he says, planting his feet, a dime-novel gunslinger. “You questioning an officer of the law?”
“No sir. I’m just saying — ”
“You uppity son of a bitch,” he says again. “Ever’ since you goddam soldiers got here, biggety nigger women like this one trying to take the town. Feeling confident and brave with y’all around, eh? Well, I’ll show you confident.” He swings his pistol, clipping Charlie on the cheek. Charlie staggers back. Daniels is on him again, clubbing his forehead. The other cop trains his gun on Ben and me. Daniels hovers over Charlie now, kicking his ribs. “What say we send this cow to the Pea Farm, eh? Give her ninety days to think about refusing to aid justice. And as for you, you uppity son of a bitch, I guess I gotta keep hitting you till your heart’s right.” He kicks Charlie twice in the groin.
According to testimony I’ll offer later at the trial — all of which Daniels’s partner will refute — the big cop turns to me, then. “You and your friend get the hell out of here now, and don’t never come back to this neighborhood, hear? Spread the word at that monkey’s nest. We don’t want to see you monkeys no more.”
His partner raises his pistol and breaks the air twice. Ben sprints down the alley. I walk slowly — the only defiance I can muster — glancing back at Charlie, motionless on the grass, his head a bloody pulp. My knees are weak, and I tremble like a puppet. With each step I feel earth hammering my heel bones, up my legs and spine, into the base of my brain. My comrades at the camp will swarm like hornets when they hear the cops have killed Charlie. For no reason. No reason at all. Sweat streaks my neck as I’m walking, crying, walking, walking … into Brock’s Combo Burger to order a sandwich to go. A teenage girl wearing braces hands me a Coke and a straw. I must look dazed; she exaggerates her movements to catch my attention, and I take the drink from her. The smell of sizzling meat and melted cheese, the rank intimacy of human sweat, churns my stomach. I wipe my eyes, spill coins near the register. The girl has to count them for me. When I walk back outside, gripping my food bag, the heat slaps me in the face. Across the street, the old woman turns a hose on her garden.
The Gulf Coast seethes in the sun. In scorched rice paddies, still water steams lightly, brown and mud-thickened, rippling with finger-thin snakes and waterstriders, mosquito larvae, chiggers. Gator country. The air smells like burnt paper. Ahead of me, just off the highway, I see the edge of hundreds of miles of oil refineries and chemical storage tanks ringing the coast, a skeletal city. I eat my burger quickly, before the odors get worse. Clouds bank against the blue, foamy as sea waves.
The address Bitter gave me for Elias Woods is in a cheap housing development for oil workers, boxes built on a swamp. As I slow, looking for street names, I’m aware of more and more water seeping boisterously onto the asphalt, until finally I can go no farther. The neighborhood is submerged. Ahead of me, roofs poke out of slimy brown whirlpools; treetops — big, arthritic hands — twist from algae swells. An empty boat bumps against a basketball goal whose backboard barely breaks the muddy surface. Two dogs paddle through willows, past a listing hound’s-tooth couch snagged on something metal. A wooden sign propped against a chimney says DAMN. Or DAMNED.
I get out of my car and stand at the mess’s lip. Water laps at my shoes, scummy, a green and purple film in its center. The back of my mouth aches in the ashy air. Through mistletoe limbs, clustered on the eastern horizon, I see refinery flames wrinkling the air like cellophane. Texas City. Seagulls startle me, cawing overhead, sounding like scared little girls, and I imagine Mama running through a mushroom cloud.
If Elias Woods lives here, he uses a scuba tank. The address paper sticks to my palm like a delicate dogwood blossom. I return to the car, back out, and head for the first functioning building I see, a filling station, Blake’s Service and Handi Lube. A gray-haired man in a dirty green suit kneels by the gas pumps, tracing their shadows on cracked cement with a piece of blue chalk. He grins, embarrassed, when I pull up. “Bid’ness slow today,” he says through my open window. “Just trying to stay occupied. Fill ‘er up?”