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The light out in the trees was gone. The air was gray with mist, the bayou dimpled by the rolling backs of gars.
"Who are you?" I called.
It was quiet, as though the person in the trees was considering my question, then I heard a paddle or an oar dipping into water, raking alongside a wood gunnel.
"Tell me who you are!" I called. I waited. Nothing. My words sounded like those of a fool trapped by his own fears.
I unlocked the bait shop and turned on the flood lamps, then unchained an outboard by the end of the concrete ramp, set one knee on the seat, and shoved out into the bayou. I cranked the engine and went thirty yards downstream and turned into a cut that led back into a dead bay surrounded by cypress and willows. The air was cold and thick with fog, and when I shut off the engine I heard a bass flop its tail in the shallows. Nutrias perched on every exposed surface, their eyes as red as sapphires in the glow of my flashlight.
Then, at the edge of the bay, I saw the path a boat had cut in the layer of algae floating between two stumps. I shined my light deep into the trees and saw a moving shape, the shadow of a hunched man, a flash of dirty gold water flicked backward as a pirogue disappeared beyond a mudbank that was overgrown with palmettos.
"Aaron?" I asked the darkness.
But no one responded.
I tried to remember the images in my mind's eye—the breadth of the shoulders, a hand pulling aside a limb, a neck that seemed to go from the jaws into the collarbones without taper. But the reality was I had seen nothing clearly except a man seated low in a pirogue and—
A glistening, thin object in the stern. It was metal, I thought. A chain perhaps. The barrel of a rifle.
My flannel shirt was sour with sweat. I could hear my heart beating in the silence of the trees.
I came home for lunch that day. Alafair was at school and Bootsie was gone. There was no note on the corkboard where we left messages for one another. I fixed a ham and onion sandwich and a glass of iced tea and heated a bowl of dirty rice and ate at the kitchen table. Batist called from the bait shop.
"Dave, there's a bunch of black mens here drinking beer and using bad language out on the dock," he said.
"Who are they?" I asked.
"One's got a knife instead of a hook on his hand."
"A what?"
"Come see, 'cause I'm fixing to run 'em down the road."
I walked down the slope through the trees. A new Dodge Caravan was parked by the concrete boat ramp, and five black men stood on the end of the dock, their shirtsleeves rolled in the warm air, drinking can beer while Jimmy Ray Dixon gutted a two-foot yellow catfish he had gill-hung from a nail on a light post.
A curved and fine-pointed knife blade, honed to the blue thinness of a barber's razor, was screwed into a metal and leather cup that fitted over the stump of Jimmy Ray's left wrist. He drew the blade's edge around the catfish's gills, then cut a neat line down both sides of the dorsal fin and stripped the skin back with a pair of pliers in his right hand. He sliced the belly from the apex of the V where the gills met to the anus and let the guts fall out of the cavity like a sack of blue and red jelly.
The tops of his canvas shoes were speckled with blood. He was grinning.
"I bought it from a man caught it in a hoop net at Henderson," he said.
"Y'all want to rent a boat?"
"I hear the fishing here ain't any good."
"It's not good anywhere now. The water's too cool."
"I got a problem with a couple of people bothering me. I think you behind it," he said.
"You want to lose the audience?" I said.
"Y'all give me a minute," he said to the other men. They were dressed in tropical shirts, old slacks, shoes they didn't care about. But they weren't men who fished. Their hands squeezed their own sex, almost with fondness; their eyes followed a black woman walking on the road; they whispered to one another, even though their conversation was devoid of content.
They started to go inside the shop.
"It's closed," I said.
"Hey, Jim, we ain't here to steal your watermelons," Jimmy Ray said.
