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I walked on into the trees toward the dirt road and the parked white car. Then I saw the driver flip his cigarette out into the leaves and start the engine. But he didn't drive past me so I could look clearly into the car or see the license plate in the rear. Instead, he backed down the dirt road, the spangled sunlight bouncing off the windshield, then straightened the car abruptly in a wide spot and accelerated around a bend that was thick with scrub oak. I heard the tires thump over the wooden bridge south of my property and the sound of the engine become thin through the trees.
I went back to the house, slipped the clip out of the .45, ejected the shell from the chamber, snicked the shell into the top of the clip again, and folded the towel over the .45 and the clip and replaced them in the dresser drawer. Annie was washing dishes in the kitchen. I stood beside her but didn't touch her.
"I'll say it only once and I'll understand if you don't want to accept it right now," I said. "But you mean a lot to me and I'm sorry I talked to you the way I did. I didn't know who those guys were, but I wasn't going to find out on their terms. Annie, when you love somebody dearly, you don't put limits on your protection of them. That's the way it is."
Her hands were motionless on the sink, and she gazed out the window into the backyard.
"Who were they?" she said.
"I don't know," I said, and went into the front room and tried to concentrate on the newspaper.
A few minutes later she stood behind my chair, her hands on my shoulders. Then I felt her bend down and kiss me in the hair.
After lunch I got a telephone call at the dock from the Drug Enforcement Administration in Lafayette. He said his name was Minos P. Dautrieve. He said he was the resident agent in charge, or "RAC," as he called it. He also said he wanted to talk with me.
"Go ahead," I said.
"No. In my office. Can you come in?"
"I have to work, Mr. Dautrieve."
"Well, we can do it two or three ways," he said. "I can drive over there, which I don't have time for. Also, we don't usually interview people in bait shops. Or you can drive over here at your convenience, since it's a beautiful day for that sort of thing. Or we can have you picked up."
I paused a moment and looked across the bayou at the Negroes fishing in the shallows.
"I'll be there in about an hour," I said.
"Hey, that's great. I'm looking forward to it."
"Were your people out at my place this morning?"
"Nope. Did you see somebody who looked like us?"
"Not unless you guys are driving Corvettes."
"Come in and let's talk about it. Hell, you're quite a guy."
"What is this bullshit, Mr. Dautrieve?"
The receiver went dead in my hand.
I went out on the dock where Batist was cleaning a string of mudcat in a pan of water. Each morning he ran a trotline in his pirogue, then brought his fish back to the dock, gutted them with a double-edged knife he had made from a file, ripped the skin and spiked fins from their flesh with a pair of pliers, and washed the fillets clean in the pan of red water. He was fifty, as hairless as a cannonball, coal black, and looked as though he'd been hammered together out of angle iron. When I looked at him with his shirt off and the sweat streaming off his bald head and enormous black shoulders, the flecks of blood and membrane on his arms, his knife slicing through vertebrae and lopping the heads of catfish into the water like wood blocks, I wondered how southern whites had ever been able to keep his kind in bondage. Our only problem with Batist was that Annie often could not understand what he was saying. Once when she had gone with him to feed the livestock in a pasture I rented, he had told her, "Mais t'row them t'ree cow over the fence some hay, you."
"I have to go to Lafayette for a couple of hours," I said. "I want you to watch for a couple of men in a Corvette. If they come around here, call the sheriff's department. Then go up to the house and stay with Annie."
"Qui c'est une Corvette, Dave?" he said, his eyes squinting at me in the sun.
"It's a sports car, a white one."
"What they do, them?"
"I don't know. Maybe nothing."
"What you want I do to them, me?"
"You do nothing to them. You understand that? You call the sheriff and then you stay with Annie."
"Qui c'est ti vas faire si le sheriff pas vient pour un neg, Dave. Dites Batist fait plus rien?" He laughed loudly at his own joke: "What are you going to do if the sheriff doesn't come for a Negro, Dave? Tell Batist to do more nothing?"
