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That night you walk into the shower by yourself. A man who had never even glanced at you before, a big stripe, hare-lipped, flat-nosed, his naked torso rife with a raw smell like a freshly uprooted cypress, clenches your skull in his fingers, draws you into his breath, squeezes until the cracking sound stops and you hear the words that he utters with a lover's trembling fondness an inch from your mouth: I'm gonna take your eyes out with a spoon.
It was late afternoon when the gunbull drove me in his pickup down to the Mississippi levee, where Aaron Crown, his face as heated as a baked apple under a snap-brim cap, was harrowing an open field, the tractor's engine running full bore, grinding the sun-hardened rows into loam, twisting the tractor's wheel back through the haze of cinnamon-colored dust, reslicing the already churned soil as though his work were an excuse to avenge himself and his kind upon the earth.
At the edge of the field, by a grove of willows, four black inmates, stripped to the waist, were heaping dead tree branches on a fire.
"Y'all ought to have Aaron in isolation, Cap," I said.
He cut the ignition and spit tobacco juice out the window.
"When he asks," he replied.
"He won't."
"Then that's his goddamn ass."
The captain walked partway out in the field on his cane and raised the hook and held it motionless in the air. Aaron squinted out of the dust and heat and exhaust fumes, then eased the throttle back without killing the engine, as though he could not will himself to separate entirely from the mechanical power that had throbbed between his thighs all day.
Aaron walked toward us, wiping his face with a dirty handkerchief, past the group of blacks burning field trash. Their eyes never saw him; their closed circle of conversation never missed a beat.
He stood by the truck, his body framed by the sun that hung in a liquid yellow orb over the Mississippi levee.
"Yes, sir?" he said to the captain.
"Water it and piss it, Crown," the captain said. He limped on his cane to the shade of a gum tree and lit his pipe, turned his face into the breeze off the river.
"I understand you're having some trouble," I said.
"You ain't heered me say it."
He walked back to the watercooler belted with bungee cord to the wall of the pickup bed. He filled a paper cup from the cooler and drank it, his gaze fixed on the field, the dust devils swirling in the wind.
"Is it the BGLA?" I asked.
"I don't keep up with colored men's organizations."
"I don't know if you're innocent or guilty, Aaron. But up there at Point Lookout, the prison cemetery is full of men who had your kind of attitude."
"That levee yonder's got dead men in it, too. It's the way it is." He wadded up the paper cup by his side, kneaded it in his hand, a piece of cartilage working against his jawbone.
"I'm going to talk to a civil rights lawyer I know in Baton Rouge. He's a black man, though. Is that going to be a problem?"
"I don't give a shit what he is. I done tole you, I got no complaint, long as I ain't got to cell with one of them."
"They'll eat you alive, partner."
He stepped toward me, his wrists seeming to strain against invisible wires at his sides.
"A man's got his own rules. I ain't ask for nothing except out. . . Goddamn it,
you tell my daughter she ain't to worry," he said, his eyes rimming with water. The top of his denim shirt was splayed tightly against his chest. He breathed through his mouth, his fists gathered into impotent rocks, his face dilated with the words his throat couldn't form.
I got back home at dark, then I had to go out again, this time with Helen Soileau to a clapboard nightclub on a back road to investigate a missing person's report.
"Sorry to drag you out, Dave, but the grandmother has been yelling at me over the phone all day," Helen said. "I made a couple of calls, and it looks like she's telling the truth. The girl's not the kind to take off and not tell anybody."
A black waitress had left the club with a white man the night before; she never returned home, nor did she report to work the next day. The grandmother worked as a cook in the club's kitchen and lived in a small frame house a hundred yards down the road. She was a plump, gray-haired woman with a strange skin disease that had eaten white and pink discolorations in her hands, and she was virtually hysterical with anger and grief.
"We'll find her. I promise you," Helen said as we stood in the woman's dirt yard, looking up at her on her tiny, lighted gallery.
