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"You really want me to connect you?"
"It's what my people need."
"Maybe you should let those white-collar cocksuckers make their own score."
I had a feeling Clete would agree with him.
We ate outside Covington, then took a two-lane road toward Mississippi and the Pearl River country. Finally we turned onto a dirt road, crossed the river on a narrow bridge, and snaked along the river's edge through a thick woods. The water in the river was low, and the sides were steep and covered with brush and dried river trash.
"It's weird-looking country, isn't it?" Tony said. "Have you ever been around here before?"
"No, not really. Just on the main highway," I said.
But I could never hear the name of the Pearl River without remembering the lynchings that took place in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s and the bodies that had been dredged out of the Peal with steel grappling hooks. "Why do you keep your plane over here?"
"A beaver's always got a back door," he said. "Besides, nobody over here pays any attention to me."
We wound our way down toward the coast, splashing yellow water out of the puddles in the road. Then the pines thinned and I could see the river again. It was wider here, and the water was higher, and sunk at an angle on the near bank was an old seismographic drill barge. It was orange with rust, and its deck and rails and four hydraulic pilings were strung with gray webs of dried algae.
"What are you looking at?" Tony said.
"I used to work on a drill barge like that. Back in the fifties," I said. "They were called doodlebug rigs because they moved from drill hole to drill hole."
"Huh," he said, not really interested.
I turned and looked at the drill barge again. All the glass was broken out of the iron pilothouse, and leaves drifted from the tree branches through the windows.
"You want to stop and take a look?" Tony said.
"No."
"We got plenty of time."
"No, that's all right."
"It makes you remember your youth or something?"
"Yeah, I guess," I said.
But that wasn't it. The drill barge disturbed me, as though I were looking at something from my future rather than my past.
"You see that hangar and airstrip?" Tony said.
The woods ended, and up ahead was a cow pasture with a mowed area through the center of it, and a solitary tin hangar with closed doors and a wind sock on the roof.
"That's where you keep your plane?" I said.
"No, I keep my plane a mile down the road. Just remember this place."
"What for?"
"Just remember it, that's all."
"All right."
We drove past the pasture and clumps of cows grazing among the egrets, then entered a pine and hack-berry woods again. At the end of the shaded road I could see more sunny pastureland.
"I want to tell you something, something I haven't been honest about. Then I want to ask you a question," Tony said.
