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“You doin’ the right thing, man. I mean, getting out of here.”
But while he spoke Jimmy Dean continued to stare at the oil-field workers, who were now lounging by the gas pumps, throwing a child’s football to each other. They were all grease-stained, sweaty, tobacco-chewing white men, with crewcuts and hillbilly sideburns and faces that were red with sunburn. Their truck bore a Mississippi license plate. Jimmy Dean’s eyes were close-set, a lump of cartilage working in his jaw. He sniffed and rubbed his nose with the back of his wrist, then bit down on a matchstick. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
“Something wrong?” Tee Bobby asked.
“Yeah.”
“What?” Tee Bobby asked.
“There ain’t no open season on crackers.”
They drove on up the state highway toward St. Martinville, chugging beers, throwing chicken bones out the window. The new cane in the fields was dry and pale green, the air crackling with electricity. The wind began gusting, buffeting the car, kicking dust out of the fields.
“I got to take a leak. Pull down by that coulee,” Jimmy Dean said.
Tee Bobby turned off the highway onto a dirt road that led past a black man’s house. He stopped by a clump of bushes downstream from a wooden bridge and a grove of gum trees, and Jimmy Dean got out and urinated into the coulee. The coulee was almost dry, the mud at the bottom spiderwebbed with cracks, and the odor of a dead armadillo rose into Jimmy Dean’s face, causing him to wrinkle his nose and grimace while he shook off his penis. A four-wheeler roared across the field behind them, a teenage boy at the handlebars, a girl with long black hair clinging to his waist.
Jimmy Dean got back in the front seat and began rolling a joint. The four-wheeler turned in circles, the driver gunning the engine, scouring a cloud of dust in the air that drifted back through the car’s windows. Jimmy Dean opened his mouth and flexed his jaws to pop the noise out of his ears.
“There’s a white boy need a slap upside the head. Here, blow the horn,” he said, and reached across the seat to press down on the horn button.
“That’s Amanda Boudreau. Let it go, Jimmy,” Tee Bobby said.
“That high school girl you been scoping out?”
“Not no more. She say I’m too old.”
“Too old? What she mean is too black. You let her talk shit like that and get away wit’ it?”
Tee Bobby didn’t answer. The noise of the four-wheeler was like a chainsaw cutting through a chunk of angle iron. Amanda’s arms were wrapped tightly around the boy’s stomach, the side of her face pressed into his back.
Jimmy Dean slapped his hand on the horn and held it down for almost ten seconds. When the driver of the four-wheeler turned around, Jimmy Dean shot him the finger over the top of the car.
The driver shot him the finger back, then rumbled across the wooden bridge into another cane field.
“You see what that motherfucker just did?” Jimmy Dean said.
Tee Bobby looked straight ahead, uncertain as to what he should say, grit blowing in his eyes, the humidity like steam on his skin.
“Let me ax you, Tee Bobby, how much shit you willing to take in one day?” Jimmy Dean said. “Perry LaSalle do everything except put his dick in your mouth and a li’l white pissant give us the bone in front of the girl who tole you she ain’t getting it on wit’ no raggedy-ass plantation nigger from Poinciana Island. ’Cause that’s what it is, man.”
“I ain’t saying you wrong,” Tee Bobby said.
“Then do something about it,” Jimmy Dean said, handing Tee Bobby the joint.
Tee Bobby put the joint loosely in his mouth and shotgunned it, huffing air and smoke along the paper until it burned almost to his lips, holding each hit deep down in his lungs. But he made no reply to Jimmy Dean’s challenge.
“How ’bout it, Tee Bobby? You don’t stand up in Los Angeles, they’ll use you to wipe their ass. If I’m putting out my bread, you got to show me ain’t nobody shoving you around,” Jimmy Dean said.
Tee Bobby gave the joint back to Jimmy Dean, his hand trembling slightly. He started the engine and heard the transmission clank loudly and reverberate through the floorboards when he dropped the gearshift into drive, almost like he had begun a mechanical process that would take on a life of its own. For just a moment, as the car inched forward toward the wooden bridge, he saw Rosebud in the rearview mirror, her face drowsy in the heat, a strand of hair stuck damply to her forehead.
“Go back to sleep, Rosebud. I’m going to talk to a smart-ass white boy a minute, then we be back on the highway,” Tee Bobby said.
He was surprised by the resolution in his own words. When he looked across the seat at Jimmy Dean, he saw an approval in Jimmy Dean’s face he had never seen there before. Maybe Jimmy Dean was right. A day came when you stopped taking people’s shit.
Amanda and her boyfriend had pulled the four-wheeler to a stop in a dusty space between the cane field and a grove of gum trees next to a humped cluster of blackberry bushes. Amanda and the boy were watching a hot-air balloon drifting high in the sky to the west, the engine of the four-wheeler idling loudly, and they did not hear Tee Bobby’s car approach them. Jimmy Dean reached inside the gunnysack at his feet and removed the two watch caps he had placed inside it with the cut down twelve-gauge and a box of shells.
“Put it on, my man. Let’s see if Chuckie want to stick his finger up in the air again,” Jimmy Dean said.
