"It's the Dixie Mafia, Dave. There's a nest of them over on the Mississippi coast."
I drew the paddle through the water and let the boat glide into a cove that was freckled with sunlight. I cast a popping bug with yellow feathers and red eyes on the edge of the hyacinths. A solitary blue heron lifted on extended wings out of the grass and flew through an opening in the trees, dimpling the water with its feet.
"But you didn't bring me out here to talk about wise guy bullshit, did you?" Clete said.
I watched a cottonmouth extend its body out of the water, curling around a low branch on a flooded willow, then pull itself completely into the leaves.
"I don't know how to say it," I said.
"I'll clear it up for both of us. I like her. Maybe we got something going. That rubs you the wrong way?"
"A guy gets involved, he doesn't see things straight sometimes," I said.
"'Involved,' like in the sack? You're asking me if I'm in the sack with Megan?"
"You're my friend. You carried me down a fire escape when that kid opened up on us with a.22. Something stinks about the Flynn family."
Clete's face was turned into the shadows. The back of his neck was the color of Mercurochrome.
"On my best day I kick in some poor bastard's door for Nig Rosewater. Last week a greaseball tried to hire me to collect the vig for a couple of his shylocks. Megan's talking about getting me on as head of security with a movie company. You think that's bad?"
I looked at the water and the trapped air bubbles that chained to the surface out of the silt. I heard Clete's weight turn on the vinyl cushion under him.
"Say it, Dave. Any broad outside of a T amp;A joint must have an angle if she'd get involved with your podjo. I'm not sensitive. But lay off Megan."
I disconnected the sections of my fly rod and set them in the bottom of the boat. When I lifted the outboard and yanked the starter rope, the dry propeller whined like a chain saw through the darkening swamp. I didn't speak again until we were at the dock. The air was hot, as though it had been baked on a sheet of tin, the current yellow and dead in the bayou, the lavender sky thick with birds.
Up on the dock, Clete peeled off his shirt and stuck his head under a water faucet. The skin across his shoulders was dry and scaling.
"Come on up for dinner," I said.
"I think I'm going back to New Orleans tonight."
He took his billfold out of his back pocket and removed a five-dollar bill and pushed it into a crack in the railing. "I owe for the beer and gas," he said, and walked with his spinning rod and big tackle box to his car, his love handles aching with fresh sunburn.
THE NEXT NIGHT, UNDER a fan moon, two men wearing hats drove a pickup truck down a levee in Vermilion Parish. On either side of them marshlands and saw grass seemed to flow like a wide green river into the Gulf. The two men stopped their truck on the levee and crossed a plank walkway that oozed sand and water under their combined weight. They passed a pirogue that was tied to the walkway, then stepped on ground that was like sponge under their western boots. Ahead, inside the fish camp, someone walked across the glare of a Coleman lantern and made a shadow on the window. Mout' Broussard's dog raised its head under the shack, then padded out into the open air on its leash, its nose lifted into the wind.
NINE
MOUT' STOOD IN THE DOORWAY of the shack and looked at the two white men. Both were tall and wore hats that shadowed their faces. The dog, a yellow-and-black mongrel with scars on its ears, growled and showed its teeth.
"Shut up, Rafe!" Mout' said.
"Where's Willie Broussard at?" one of the men said. The flesh in his throat was distended and rose-colored, and gray whiskers grew on his chin.
"He gone up the levee to the sto'. Coming right back. Wit' some friends to play bouree. What you gentlemens want?" Mout' said.
"Your truck's right yonder. What'd he drive in?" the second man said. He wore a clear plastic raincoat and his right arm held something behind his thigh.
"A friend carried him up there."
"We stopped there for a soda. It was locked up. Where's your outboard, old man?" the man with whiskers said.
"Ain't got no outboa'd."
"There's the gas can yonder. There's the cut in the cattails where it was tied. Your boy running a trot line?"
"What y'all want to bother him for? He ain't done you nothing."
"You don't mind if we come inside, do you?" the man in the raincoat said. When he stepped forward, the dog lunged at his ankle. He kicked his boot sideways and caught the dog in the mouth, then pulled the screen and latch out of the doorjamb.
"You stand over in the corner and stay out of the way," the man with whiskers said.
The man in the raincoat lifted the Coleman lantern by the bail and walked into the back yard with it. He came back in and shook his head.
The man with whiskers bit off a corner on a tobacco plug and worked it into his jaw. He picked up an empty coffee can out of a trash sack and spit in it.
"I told you we should have come in the a.m. You wake them up and do business," the man in the raincoat said.
"Turn off the lantern and move the truck."
"I say mark it off. I don't like guessing who's coming through a door."
The man with whiskers looked at him meaningfully.
"It's your rodeo," the man in the raincoat said, and went back out the front door.
The wind blew through the screens into the room. Outside, the moonlight glittered like silver on the water in the saw grass.
"Lie down on the floor where I can watch you. Here, take this pillow," the man with whiskers said.
"Don't hurt my boy, suh."
"Don't talk no more. Don't look at my face either."
"What's I gonna do? You here to kill my boy."
"You don't know that. Maybe we just want to talk to him… Don't look at my face."
"I ain't lying on no flo'. I ain't gonna sit by while y'all kill my boy. What y'all t'ink I am?"
"An old man, just like I'm getting to be. You can have something to eat or put your head down on the table and take a nap. But don't mix in it. You understand that? You mix in it, we gonna forget you're an old nigra don't nobody pay any mind to."
The man in the raincoat came back through the door, a sawed-off over-and-under shotgun in his right hand.
"I'm burning up. The wind feels like it come off a desert," he said, and took off his coat and wiped his face with a handkerchief. "What was the old man talking about?"
"He thinks the stock market might take a slide."
"Ask him if there's any stray pussy in the neighborhood."
The man with whiskers on his chin leaned over and spit tobacco juice into the coffee can. He wiped his lips with his thumb.
"Bring his dog in here," he said.
"What for?"
"Because a dog skulking and whimpering around the door might indicate somebody kicked it."
"I hadn't thought about that. They always say you're a thinking man, Harpo."
The man with the whiskers spit in the can again and looked hard at him.
The man who had worn the raincoat dragged the dog skittering through the door on its leash, then tried to haul it into the air. But the dog's back feet found purchase on the floor and its teeth tore into the man's hand.
"Oh, shit!" he yelled out, and pushed both his hands between his thighs.
"Get that damn dog under control, old man, or I'm gonna shoot both of you," the man with whiskers said.
"Yes, suh. He ain't gonna be no trouble. I promise," Mout' said.
"You all right?" the man with whiskers asked his friend.
His friend didn't answer. He opened an ice chest and found a bottle of wine and poured it on the wound. His hand was strung with blood, his fingers shaking as though numb with cold. He tied his handkerchief around the wound, pulling it tight with his teeth, and sat down in a wood chair facing the door, the shotgun across his knees.