“Listen to this shit,” he says and glances at me. “The sixteen-inch barrel of an assault weapon is rifled at 1:32. What’s the rotation of a bullet passing through at eighteen hundred feet per second?”
He’s wearing a black tee with an open, brown JROTC uniform shirt over it, so that when his fingers pop, I can see the little wave of his pecs and a jump in that vein in his bicep. Brown polyester whips in the wind. I can smell his skin.
“What?” I ask. I’m in a pixie skirt, pleated to hide my thighs.
“Bootleggers cut sixty liters of eighty proof rum with fifty liters of water. What proof results? Can you believe it? I’m sniper school material. My night vision is off the scale. I mean, I could have my ATF tactical badge today, but I got to learn this shit?”
Strewn across the backseat are coils of black rope.
“I’ll tutor you,” I tell him. “I’ll be the answer to all your questions.”
He glances up at the sky, smiles. “You gonna teach me Spanish, too?”
“You gotta learn Spanish?”
“Yeah, they say the whole future of the ATF is about Mexicans. They showed us this current events video. If you had seen this chart they had — by the year 2035, America is completely shaded yellow, with red zones in every major city.”
“What’s all the black rope for?” I run a loop through my fingers, feel the heat.
Randy trains his brown eyes on me, blinks back to the road. Past the fire station, we hit open road and pick up speed.
All his antennas start to sing. “Special ops,” he says.
“Kinky,” I tell him, and he kind of blushes. Behind him, the rice fields are a blur of gray-green water, and I wonder if he has any idea about the raid on my house or whether he’s just not letting on to the fact that he’ll be holding the flashlight when the advance team pulls me from my bed — in the semisheer emerald chemise I ordered special from Baton Rouge — only hours after he’s kissed me goodnight from the dance.
This thought, combined with black rope, makes the cords in the back of my neck go electrical, and I know I should have joined the Future ATF instead of the stupid Spirit Squad. I want my ATF outfit — Gore-tex boots, black Kevlar, a Spectra assault suit with chemical-proof panels thick enough to stop sarin nerve gas, yet still elastic enough to let you kick for the throat.
“I got the Super Sport for tomorrow night,” I tell him.
“About tomorrow.”
“I know, I know. You haven’t officially agreed to take me to the dance or anything, but my dress, forget about it. It’s a black silk skirt over a skin-tight catsuit.”
As we near the gates to my drive, we pass Jim Green, riding his bicycle at the edge of the road. Jim Green’s the most powerful man in south Louisiana, and Randy’s head turns as we pass him.
We park down the road a bit, and Randy leaves her running. I get out and lean against the Jeep’s grill, which is papered with the wings of dragonflies. I can tell by the way he puts his hands in his back pockets when he gets out, how he places his feet just so in the shale gravel in front of me, that he’ll try to give me another excuse.
“Look,” he says, “I’m eighty-five percent sure I’ll have tomorrow night off.”
Randy works some nights as a watchman on an oil recovery vessel parked in the Black bayou.
“My dad can have that boat sunk by tomorrow,” I say. “Towed to sea and burned. You don’t believe me, but believe me.”
Randy smirks. “Maybe it’s more like ninety percent,” he says. He casts a weary glance at the bicycle pedaling toward us. “That’s James Green, isn’t it? The former gravity drainage commissioner?”
The gravity drainage commissioner approves all building permits. He can rezone your house while you sleep, revoke watertable access, run a bayou through your land, or declare your property in a floodplain. Everyone must deal with him.
“Yeah, my dad and those guys all went to the Cold War together.”
“They have a video on James Green in current events.”
“Sobriety is their only current event. They flew high in Germany, that’s for sure. Then they ran southwest Louisiana for a while. Now, they drink a lot of coffee.”
“No offense, but your dad’s had documented problems running boats, planes, and cars, let alone the eighteenth state of the union.”
“You can’t even manage taking me to a dance.”
“I’m coming to your fish fry,” he says, “and we’re at ninety percent, okay?”
This is the point where he’s supposed to kiss me. I’m assuming he wants to kiss me. I’ve got him loosened up, joking, but he glances away, wishing, I think, that I’d kiss him. This is half of why I’m sweet on him. But I won’t let him off the hook.
“Bring a fishing pole,” is all I tell him before he climbs in his Jeep and burns out, leaving zaggy trails in the shale.
Jim’s brakes squeak him to a stop beside me. “I used to have a Jeep just like that,” he says.
He dismounts, and we walk across the big grates that mark our property. The grates are made to break the ankles of cows that try to cross, but there’s been no cows on our land for years.
“I presume that’s the Future ATF boy Teeg told me about,” Jim says. He wears a bubble-head helmet and Spandex cycling shorts tight enough that you can see his noodle, but he has dark, intense eyes and a silver tooth that will give you les frisons when he flashes it at you.
“He won’t go to the Sadie Hawkins with me,” I tell Jim.
“An obvious fool.”
Ahead through the trees are the muffled sounds of an engine revving and the clipped barking of Beau.
“You sure that raid’s this weekend? I mean, couldn’t we get it moved back a week? You can make a call or something, right?”
Jim thinks a moment on this. A storm blew through last week, clearing all the dead wood from the pecans and live oaks, and the downed branches give like dry sponges under our feet.
“Wouldn’t it be easier to get the dance moved back instead?” he asks me.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I say and stuff my hands in my pockets. He sounds pretty dang casual considering they raided his offices earlier this year. Though he knew they were coming, he didn’t realize they were going to tear the place apart. All his fish died and his carpets still stink like pepper gas.
Around a bend in the drive, my father stands next to Doc Teeg’s dually pickup, which has obviously just seen a rut. Brown water still drips from its panels, and there’s about a thousand pounds of mud-splashed slot machine in back. They’ve been driving around our property unlocking all the old gates so that the ATF doesn’t knock our fences down. My father’s pants are wet, though Teeg’s are clean.
“Shotgun,” I call.
Berlin sits in the back seat with Jim as we drive down to throw the slots in our lake. I change all the radio presets while Teeg talks to my dad about Beau, the two of them eyeing each other in the rearview mirror.
“I’m just saying, maybe we should tie him up. I don’t want him loose with all those people running around,” Teeg says.
“Nothing’s gonna happen to Beau,” Berlin tells him.
“A man doesn’t want his dog to get shot for no reason.”
“He’s not your dog anymore.”
“Shot?” I ask.
“Whoa, whoa,” Jim Green says. “Slow down now. From what I gather, there’s a newer, friendlier ATF out there, one committed to nonlethal means — concussion canisters, caustic sprays, stun wands, and so on. They’re not into bullets anymore.”
Teeg opens his mouth to speak, but from above comes the drone of an airplane, and we all power down our windows to lean out for a look. The trees are thick though, so there’s nothing to see.