Tee Bobby had loaded Rosebud in the car and roared across the bridge that separated Poinciana Island from the rest of Iberia Parish, his anger burning in his chest, the words of Perry LaSalle like a dirty presence in his ears.
"Let's see if I understand this correctly, Tee Bobby. You want money to go to California? To make a record?" Perry had said. He had been stripped to the waist, combing his hair in a mirror by his wet bar, his gaze wandering through the sliding doors to the bass pond, where a woman in shorts and a halter was fly-casting on the water's surface.
"Yes, suh. I got a shot with a recording company in West Hollywood. But I got to have money to go out there, stay at a hotel for a week, maybe, buy meals, front a few dol'ars wit' this agent setting up the gig," Tee Bobby said.
"You sure this agent isn't throwing you a slider?" Perry said, his eyes watching the woman in the mirror.
"No, suh. It's just the way they do things out there."
"It sounds interesting, Tee Bobby, but if you're looking for a loan, my income is a little down right now. Maybe another time."
"Suh?"
"I'm short of cash, podna," Perry said, and grinned at him in the mirror.
"I ain't never made no claim on the estate," Tee Bobby said.
"You haven't what?"
"Never claimed no kind of inheritance. Neither my mother or my gran'mama, either. We ain't never axed money from your family."
"You think you're owed something by my family, do you?"
"Everybody know old man Julian was sleeping wit' my gran'mama."
"Ah, I get your drift now. We both share the same grandfather? Is that correct?" Perry said.
Tee Bobby shrugged and looked at the woman by the pond. She was lovely to watch, her skin unblemished by the sun or physical work, her body firm and graceful as she whipped the popping-bug over her head.
“You shouldn't refer to my grandfather as 'old man Julian,' Tee Bobby. That said, the child your grandmother had out of wedlock was not his. Mr. Julian had been dead over a year when Miss Ladice's baby was born. There was an overseer here named Legion Guidry. He did things he shouldn't have. But that was the nature of the times."
"The man people call 'Legion' is my grandfather?"
"Better talk to Miss Ladice," Perry said, slipping his comb into his back pocket and drawing the sleeve of a silk shirt up his arm.
Then Perry, with a grin on his face, still tucking his shirt in his slacks, opened the sliding doors and walked down to the bass pond to join his companion.
In the neon-lit darkness of the Boom Boom Room, Tee Bobby and Jimmy Dean smoked some high-octane Afghan skunk and snorted up a half-dozen lines of Colombian pink from Jimmy's private stock, so pure and unstepped on it roared up Tee Bobby's nostril with the white brilliance of a train engine inside a tunnel.
"Tell me that ain't righteous, my man. It put the snap in yo' whip, don't it? Forget that cracker on Poinciana Island. I'll introduce you to a lady down the road make you fall in love," Jimmy Dean said.
"I got Rosebud out front. Can you give me the money to go to California, Jimmy Dean?"
"If we talking about recording contracts, I got to have my lawyer draw up some papers, make sure you protected. Let's take a ride, drink some beer, make a house call on a couple of bidness associates later. It gonna be all right, man. The Sty got yo' ass covered, bro. Hey, go a li'l easy on my stuff. You slam a gram and you fry yo' Spam. You heard it first from Jimmy Style. Come on in back wit' me a minute."
Tee Bobby followed Jimmy Dean into the back room of the bar, where Jimmy Dean knelt down in front of a cabinet with a burlap bag spread by his foot.
"What you doing wit' that shotgun and them watch caps?" Tee Bobby asked.
"Sometimes you got to put a li'l scare into people. A couple of my artists think they gonna dump me for some Los Angeles niggers got more gold chains than brains. It ain't gonna happen."
"I ain't up for no guns," Tee Bobby said.
Jimmy Dean rested on one haunch, the barrel of a cut-down, pistol-grip pump shotgun propped at an angle on his shoulder, a box of twelve-gauge double-ought buckshot by his foot.
"Ain't nobody gonna get hurt, Tee Bobby. It's all show. But you want me to back your play, you got to back mine. Tell me what you want to do. Tell me now," he said, his eyes burrowing into Tee Bobby's face.
A few minutes later they drove across the bridge over the Teche and stopped at a convenience store that sold gas. They bought a twelve-pack of beer and a bucket of microwave fried chicken and a soda for Rosebud, who sat belted in the backseat, staring at the pecan orchards, the dust blowing out of the cane acreage, the carrion birds circling in a hot, brassy sky that gave no promise of rain, a truck filled with oil-field workers at the gas pumps.
"You gonna take Rosebud to California?" Jimmy Dean asked, glancing at the oil-field workers. He had tied a black silk scarf on his head, and the tails of the scarf hung from the knot down the back of his neck.
"Yeah," Tee Bobby replied.
"You doin' the right thing, man. I mean, getting out of here."
But while he spoke Jimmy Dean continued to stare at the oil-field workers, who were now lounging by the gas pumps, throwing a child's football to each other. They were all grease-stained, sweaty, tobacco-chewing white men, with crewcuts and hillbilly sideburns and faces that were red with sunburn. Their truck bore a Mississippi license plate. Jimmy Dean's eyes were close-set, a lump of cartilage working in his jaw. He sniffed and rubbed his nose with the back of his wrist, then bit down on a matchstick. "Let's get out of here," he said. "Something wrong?" Tee Bobby asked. "Yeah."
"What?" Tee Bobby asked.
"There ain't no open season on crackers."
They drove on up the state highway toward St. Martinville, chugging beers, throwing chicken bones out the window. The new cane in the fields was dry and pale green, the air crackling with electricity. The wind began gusting, buffeting the car, kicking dust out of the fields.
"I got to take a leak. Pull down by that coulee," Jimmy Dean said.
Tee Bobby turned off the highway onto a dirt road that led past a black man's house. He stopped by a clump of bushes downstream from a wooden bridge and a grove of gum trees, and Jimmy Dean got out and urinated into the coulee. The coulee was almost dry, the mud at the bottom spiderwebbed with cracks, and the odor of a dead armadillo rose into Jimmy Dean's face, causing him to wrinkle his nose and grimace while he shook off his penis. A four-wheeler roared across the field behind them, a teenage boy at the handlebars, a girl with long black hair clinging to his waist.
Jimmy Dean got back in the front seat and began rolling a joint. The four-wheeler turned in circles, the driver gunning the engine, scouring a cloud of dust in the air that drifted back through the car's windows. Jimmy Dean opened his mouth and flexed his jaws to pop the noise out of his ears.
"There's a white boy need a slap upside the head. Here, blow the horn," he said, and reached across the seat to press down on the horn button.
"That's Amanda Boudreau. Let it go, Jimmy," Tee Bobby said.
"That high school girl you been scoping out?"
"Not no more. She say I'm too old."
"Too old? What she mean is too black You let her talk shit like that and get away wit' it?"
Tee Bobby didn't answer. The noise of the four-wheeler was like a chainsaw cutting through a chunk of angle iron. Amanda's arms were wrapped tightly around the boy's stomach, the side of her face pressed into his back.
Jimmy Dean slapped his hand on the horn and held it down for almost ten seconds. When the driver of the four-wheeler turned around, Jimmy Dean shot him the finger over the top of the car.
The driver shot him the finger back, then rumbled across the wooden bridge into another cane field.
"You see what that motherfucker just did?" Jimmy Dean said.
Tee Bobby looked straight ahead, uncertain as to what he should say, grit blowing in his eyes, the humidity like steam on his skin.
"Let me ax you, Tee Bobby, how much shit you willing to take in one day?" Jimmy Dean said. "Perry LaSalle do everything except put his dick in your mouth and a li'l white pissant give us the bone in front of the girl who tole you she ain't getting it on wit' no raggedy-ass plantation nigger from Poinciana Island. 'Cause that's what it is, man."
"I ain't saying you wrong," Tee Bobby said.
"Then do something about it," Jimmy Dean said, handing Tee Bobby the joint.
Tee Bobby put the joint loosely in his mouth and shotgunned it, huffing air and smoke along the paper until it burned almost to his lips, holding each hit deep down in his lungs. But he made no reply to Jimmy Dean's challenge.
"How 'bout it, Tee Bobby? You don't stand up in Los Angeles, they'll use you to wipe their ass. If I'm putting out my bread, you got to show me ain't nobody shoving you around," Jimmy Dean said.
Tee Bobby gave the joint back to Jimmy Dean, his hand trembling slightly. He started the engine and heard the transmission clank loudly and reverberate through the floorboards when he dropped the gearshift into drive, almost like he had begun a mechanical process that would take on a life of its own. For just a moment, as the car inched forward toward the wooden bridge, he saw Rosebud in the rearview mirror, her face drowsy in the heat, a strand of hair stuck damply to her forehead.
"Go back to sleep, Rosebud. I'm going to talk to a smart-ass white boy a minute, then we be back on the highway," Tee Bobby said.
He was surprised by the resolution in his own words. When he looked across the seat at Jimmy Dean, he saw an approval in Jimmy Dean's face he had never seen there before. Maybe Jimmy Dean was right. A day came when you stopped taking people's shit.
Amanda and her boyfriend had pulled the four-wheeler to a stop in a dusty space between the cane field and a grove of gum trees next to a humped cluster of blackberry bushes. Amanda and the boy were watching a hot-air balloon drifting high in the sky to the west, the engine of the four-wheeler idling loudly, and they did not hear Tee Bobby's car approach them. Jimmy Dean reached inside the gunnysack at his feet and removed the two watch caps he had placed inside it with the cut-down twelve-gauge and a box of shells.
"Put it on, my man. Let's see if Chuckie want to stick his finger up in the air again," Jimmy Dean said.
"Just shake 'em up, right? That's all we doing, huh, Jimmy Dean?" Tee Bobby said.
"It's their call, man. Watch me and go wit' the flow," Jimmy Dean replied. He pulled a pair of leather gloves on his hands, then got out of the car, his watch cap stretched tightly over his face, the pistol-grip shotgun held at an upward angle.
"Hey, motherfucker, you just shot the bone at the wrong nigger!" he yelled, and jacked a round into the chamber.
Tee Bobby hurriedly pulled his watch cap over his face, his heart exploding in his chest. What was Jimmy Dean doing?
But the answer was simple: Jimmy Dean had just forced Amanda and her boyfriend to get on the ground, inside the hot shade of the sweet gums, a child's jump rope hanging from his left hand. He threw the jump rope in the boy's face.
"Tie her wrists to that tree," Jimmy Dean said.
"I don't want to," the boy said.
"What makes you think you got a choice?" Jimmy Dean said, and kicked the boy in the ribs.
"Okay," the boy said, raising his hands, his face jerking with the blow.
Jimmy Dean looked back at the road, then at the hot-air balloon drifting across the sun, his palms opening and closing on the shotgun. When the boy had finished looping the rope around Amanda's wrists, knotting it behind the tree trunk, Jimmy Dean leaned down and tested the tension.
"Now you gonna take a walk wit' me, make up your mind if you want to live or be a smart-ass some more," Jimmy Dean said. "You heard me, cracker, move! And take off your belt while you at it."
The boy walked ahead of Jimmy Dean, his skin almost jumping off his back each time Jimmy Dean touched him with the shotgun's barrel.
Tee Bobby stared down at Amanda through the weave of his watch cap. She wore elastic-waisted jeans and red tennis shoes with dusty socks and a purple blouse that was printed with little rabbits. Her cheeks were hollowed with shadow, her lips dry, caked on the edges, but there was no fear in her eyes, only anger and contempt. The skin on her wrists was crimped, her veins like green string under the tightness of the jump rope. He knelt down and tried to rotate the rope to a narrower place on her wrists, but instead he only managed to bunch and pinch the skin even worse.
"You filthy scum, get your hands off me!" she said, and reared her forehead into his cheek.
He felt the blow all the way to the bone. He started to cry out but clenched his teeth so she would not hear and recognize his voice. Then he lost his balance and fell against her, accidentally hitting her breast with his elbow.
He looked down at her, propped up on his arms now, wanting to apologize, conscious of his own stink, the foulness in his breath, the sweat that crawled like ants inside his cap. Then he saw the level of loathing and disgust in her eyes, just a moment before she gathered all the spittle in her mouth and spat it into his face.
He rose to his feet, stunned, her spittle soaking through the thread in his cap, touching his skin like a badge of disgrace. He hooked his thumb under his cap and pulled it above his eyes, then whirled away from her and the shocked recognition he saw in her expression.
Suddenly he was staring at Jimmy Dean, who had just walked back through the trees from the coulee, where he had tied up the boy with the boy's T-shirt and belt.
"You done it now," Jimmy Dean said.
"No, she ain't seen nothing," Tee Bobby said, pulling his cap back over his face.
"We'll talk about that in a minute. But right now it's show time," Jimmy Dean said, and unzipped his pants, the tails of his scarf fluttering on his neck. "You up for it or not?"
"I ain't signed on for this."
"She dissed you 'cause you black."
"Don't do it, Jimmy Dean."
"You're hopeless, man. Go back to the car 'cause that's where you left your brains at."
Tee Bobby walked away, out of the shade into the sunlight and the dust devils spinning out of the cane field. The wind tasted like salt, like stagnant water and diesel fumes from the state highway and a dead animal in the bottom of a dry coulee. He heard Amanda cry out, then Jimmy Dean's labored breathing inside the trees, followed by a grinding noise that built in Jimmy Dean's throat and burst suddenly from his mouth as though he had passed a kidney stone.
It was quiet inside the gum trees now, but Tee Bobby stood in front of his gas-guzzler, looking at Rosebud in the backseat, both of his palms pressed against his ears, knowing it was not over, that the worst moment still waited for him.
The shotgun's report was muffled, not as loud as he thought it would be, but maybe that was because he had pressed his hands so tightly against his ears. Or maybe something had gone wrong and the gun had misfired, he told himself.
He turned and saw Jimmy Dean walk out of the trees, the shotgun smoking, blood splattered on his shirt.
"She fought. She kicked the barrel. I only had one round. Get the shells," he said.
"What?" Tee Bobby said.
"Snap out of it. She's still alive. Get the fucking shells."
Tee Bobby opened the passenger door and removed the box of twelve-gauge double-oughts from the gunny-sack, his hands trembling, and started to give it to Jimmy Dean. But Jimmy Dean was already walking back toward the gum trees, and Tee Bobby, for reasons he would never be able to explain to himself, followed him, without even being commanded. Jimmy Dean stooped and picked up the spent casing he had ejected from his gun, then fished two shells from the box in Tee Bobby's hands and thumbed them into the gun's magazine.
"Stand back, 'less you want to get splattered," Jimmy Dean said.
Amanda's eyes glanced at Tee Bobby for only a second, but the expression of loss and sadness and betrayal in them would live in his dreams the rest of his life.
He whirled around and ran directly into his sister, who was staring wide-eyed at the scene taking place in the trees. When the shotgun discharged, Rosebud pulled at her clothes and beat at the air with her fists, as though she were being attacked, then ran out into the cane field, keening like a wounded bird.