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"I did."
Po' Willie, why ain't you come to see me first?" Jean-Jacques said, and cupped his hand on the back of Willie's neck.
"You're a criminal," Willie said.
"But I got my good points too, ain't I?"
"Undoubtedly. Oh, Jean-Jacques, I've made a mess of things," Willie said.
Jean-Jacques put his mouth close to Willie's ear. "I can put you on a boat for Mexico when it's the right time. Let's go next door to my sister's and get your ashes hauled," he said.
"That's a grand suggestion, and please don't hold it against me for not acting on it. But I have to puke," Willie said.
He reeled out the back door into an overgrown coulee and bent over behind a tree just as an enormous volume of whiskey and beer and pickled food surged out of his stomach. He gasped for breath, then rinsed his face in a rain barrel and dried it on his shirt. The night air was soft with mist, the moon buried in the clouds above the cane fields. Next door the piano player was playing a minstrel song titled "Dixie's Land." Willie shouldered a mop propped against a cistern and began a parody of close-order drill in the yard behind the brothel, then flung aside the flap on the tent in the side yard and marched through the row of cots inside, counting cadence for himself, "Reep... reep... reep," saluting two naked people caught at the worst possible moment in their coupling.
He continued out the far end of the tent and on down the road, passing a horseman whose face was shadowed by a wide hat. The wind changed, and he saw dust blowing out of the fields and a tree of lightning splinter across the sky. He left the road and crossed the dirt yard of the laundry where Flower worked and walked through the iron pots in the backyard and the wash that was flapping on the clotheslines and stopped by the back window of her cabin.
"Flower?" he said.
He heard her rise from her bed, then push open the wood flap on the window with a stick.
"What you doing, Mr. Willie?" she asked.
"Did Rufus Atkins come upon the poetry book I gave you?"
"Yes, suh, he did."
"Did he report you?"
"No, suh, he ain't done that. I mean, he didn't do that."
"Come close, so I can see your face."
"You don't sound right, Mr. Willie," she said.
"Did Rufus Atkins make you do something you didn't want to?"
"I ain't got no control over them things. It don't do no good to talk about them, either."
"I've done you a great harm, Flower."
"No, you ain't. I mean, no, you hasn't. You better go back home now, Mr. Willie."
He was about to reply when he heard horses out on the road.
"Who's that?" he said.
"The paddy rollers. Oh, suh, please don't let them catch you here," she said.
He walked back through the yard and the darkness of the oaks that grew on each side of the laundry. He was sweating now, the wind suddenly cold on his face. He heard thunder crack in the south and rumble across the sky, like apples tumbling down a wooden chute. He stepped out on the road and walked toward the lights in the saloon and the tinny music in Carrie LaRose's brothel, his pulse beating in his wrists, his palms damp, a tightness in his throat he could not quite explain.
There were six riders spread across the road in front of him, led by a seventh man in a rain slicker and flop hat, like cavalry advancing on an enemy position, their saddles hung with pistols and coils of rope and braided whips, their faces bladed with purpose.
"Hold your hands out by your sides, friend," the leader said.
"I think not. Unless you have governance over a white man talking a walk," Willie said.
The leader rode his horse forward. Lightning rippled through the clouds overhead and the wind flattened the tops of the young cane in the fields. The leader of the horsemen leaned down on his pommel, the saddle creaking with the shift in his weight.
