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"Get out of the truck," he said.
"I ain't did nothing, boss."
"You got that sonofabitch on my ass. You call that nothing?"
"Not my fault, boss."
They were both standing outside the truck now. The sky was hot and bright and wind was blowing dust out of the cane field and birds were clattering in the persimmon trees. Jackson Posey reached behind the driver's seat. Junior heard something hard clank against metal.
"Drink it," Posey said.
But Junior shook his head.
"Good 'cause now I can send your skinny black ass right back up to "Gola."
"Ain't nobody in the camp supposed to get the Mussolini treatment. Miss Andrea don't allow it."
"Miz Lejeune don't write the rules now. What's it gonna be? Don't matter to me one way or another." Posey shook a cigarette loose from a package of Camels and inserted it in his mouth.
Junior took the bottle of castor oil from the guard's hand and unscrewed the cap. The bottle was brown and heavy, the oil as viscous as syrup. He began to drink, then gagged and started again. The guard looked at his watch.
"All of it," Posey said.
"Ain't right, boss."
"You messed up the man's pussy. What do you expect him to do? Like my daddy used to say, life's a bitch, then you die. Chug it down, boy."
Posey watched while Junior finished the bottle, then fingered a reddish purple scab on his arm, one that had not been there only two days ago. He drew in heavily on his cigarette, his eyes draining, as though he were purging himself of any intimations of his own mortality.
"It ain't nothing personal, Junior," he said.
"It's real personal, boss."
The guard stared emptily at the heat waves bouncing off the bayou and flicked his cigarette into the wind.
By the time Junior got back to the camp his bowels were collapsing inside him.
Hogman stopped his account and picked up a bottle that had fallen from his bottle tree. He wedged it in the fork of the tree and seemed to lose interest in both Father Jimmie and me and the story he had been telling.
"Go on, Hogman," I said.
"Junior started believing he was gonna have a life besides jailing and road-ganging. Gonna get a pardon from the governor and be a big star up Nort'. Just like Leadbelly."
"Andrea Lejeune was going to work a pardon for him?"
"That's what he t'ought. She made Jackson Posey keep taking Junior up to the house when Mr. Lejeune was gone. Junior talked about her all the time, how pretty she was, what she smelled like, how she had all these fine manners, how she knew every ting about his music. A whole bunch of people come up from New Orleans to hear him sing and play his twelve-string in the backyard."
"What happened to him, Hogman?"
"Don't know. I got paroled. Last time I seed Junior he was playing "Goodnight Irene' on the steps of his cabin, waiting to see if Miss Andrea was gonna drive by in her li'l convertible."
"I think you're holding out on me, partner."
"Miss Andrea got killed in a car wreck two or tree years after I left the camp. Mr. Lejeune lived up in that big house wit' just himself and his li'l girl. Junior disappeared. Ain't nothing left of him but a voice on scratchy old records. Nobody cared what happened back then. Nobody care now. You axed for the troot'. I just give it to you."
Hogman walked inside the back of his house and let the screen door slam behind him.
Chapter 13.
