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"Mr. Boggs," I heard Tee Beau say.
"Get the car keys and open the trunk," Boggs said.
"Mr. Boggs, they ain't no need to do that. That boy too scared to hurt us."
"Shut up and get the guns out of the trunk."
"Mr. Boggs…"
I heard a sound like someone being shoved hard into a wall, then once again the report of the pistol, like a small, dry firecracker popping.
I swallowed and tried to roll on my side and crawl farther down the coulee. A bone-grinding, red-black pain ripped from my neck all the way down to my scrotum, and I rolled back into the ferns and the thick layer of black leaves and the mud that smelled as sour as sewage.
Then I heard the unmistakable roar of a shotgun.
"Try some Pepto Bismol for it," Boggs said, and laughed in a way that I had never heard a human being laugh before.
I slipped my palm away from my chest, put both of my hands behind me in the mud, dug the heels of my shoes into the silt bottom of the stream, and began to push myself toward a rotted log webbed with dried flotsam and morning glory vines. I could breathe all right now; my fears of a sucking chest wound had been groundless, but it seemed that all my life's energies had been siphoned out of me. I saw both Tee Beau and Boggs silhouetted on the rim of the coulee. Boggs held the pistol-grip twelve-gauge from the car trunk at port arms across his chest.
"Do it," he said, took the nickel-plated revolver from his blue jeans pocket, and handed it to Tee Beau.
"Suh, let's get out of here."
"You finish it."
"He dying down there. We ain't got to do no more."
"You don't get a free pass, boy. You're leaving here dirty as I am."
"I cain't do it, Mr. Boggs."
"Listen, you stupid nigger, you do what I tell you or you join the kid up in the can."
In his oversized clothes Tee Beau looked like a small stick figure next to Boggs. Boggs shoved him with one hand, and Tee Beau skidded down the incline through the wet brush, the branches whipping back across his coat and pants. The pistol was flat against his thigh. He splashed through the water toward me.
I ran my tongue across my lips and tried to speak, but the words became a tangle of rusty nails in my throat.
He knelt in front of me, his face spotted with mud, his eyes round and frightened in his small face.
"Tee Beau, don't do it," I whispered.
"He done killed that white boy in the bat'room," he said. "He put that shotgun up against Mr. Benoit face and blowed it off."
"Don't do it. Please," I said.
"Close your eyes, Mr. Dave. Don't be moving, neither."
"What?" I said, as weakly as a man would if he were slipping forever beneath the surface of a deep, warm lake.
He cocked the pistol, and his bulging eyes stared disjointedly into mine.
Some people say that you review your whole life in that final moment. I don't believe that's true. You see the folds in a blackened leaf, mushrooms growing thickly around the damp roots of an oak tree, a bullfrog glistening darkly on a log; you hear water coursing
over rocks, dripping out of the trees, you smell it blowing in a mist. Fog can lie on your tongue as sweet and wet as cotton candy, the cattails and reeds turning a silver-green more beautiful than a painting in one flicker of lightning across the sky. You think of the texture of skin, the grainy pores, the nest of veins that are like the lines in a leaf. You think of your mother's powdered breasts, the smell of milk in her clothes, the heat in her body when she held you against her; then your eyes close and your mouth opens in that last strangled protest against the cosmic accident that suddenly and unfairly is about to end your life.
He was crouched on one knee when he pulled the trigger. The pistol went off ten inches from my face, and I felt the burnt powder scald my skin, the dirt explode next to my ear. My heart twisted in my chest.
I heard Tee Beau rise to his feet and brush his knees.
