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"I don't use that name. My name is Jean-Jacques, me."
"Sorry, I thought your friends called you otherwise," Atkins said.
The man named Guilbeau was tall and had a long face, like a horse's, and a narrow frame and a stomach that protruded in a lopsided fashion, like a person whose liver has calcified. He dropped the tailgate on a wagon and set a crimson carpetbag on it that was woven with a floral design. He unsnapped the wood laches on the bag, then lifted a gold watch from his vest pocket and clicked it open and looked at the time.
Jean-Jacques stuck his hand inside the bag and picked up a sheaf of bills that was tied with string.
"Script?" he said.
"It's the currency of your country, sir," Guilbeau said.
"Wipe your ass wit' it," Jean-Jacques said.
Guilbeau hooked his little finger in his ear, then examined the tip of it.
"Would you prefer a promissory note?" he asked.
"I paid gold for them guns."
"Sorry you feel so badly used. Maybe you can share your complaint with some of our boys who had to fight with flintlocks at Shiloh," Guilbeau said.
"I seen you befo'. Wit' Ira Jamison," Jean-Jacques said.
Guilbeau put a twist of chewing tobacco in his mouth and chewed it thoughtfully in one jaw. He spit in the leaves at his feet and lifted the carpetbag from the tailgate of the wagon and walked it down to the bank and dropped it in the rowboat in which Jean-Jacques had come ashore.
Jean-Jacques watched the black men load the cases of Enfields into the wagons. Most of them were barefoot, their clothes in tatters, sweat sliding down their faces in the heated enclosure of the trees. His own men were hung over and sick, sleeping under a shade tree on the bank. He no longer felt like a ship's captain but instead like an object of contempt who stands by impotently while thieves sack his house. He opened and closed his hands and bit down on his lip, but continued to do nothing while the black men crunched back and forth in the leaves and flung the British rifles heavily into the wagons, case upon case, latching up the tailgates now, the armed enlisted men in the wagon boxes lifting the reins off the mules' backs.
"Ain't right what y'all doing," Jean-Jacques said.
"We'll be mixing it up with the blue-bellies soon. You're welcome to join us. Be a lot of opportunities if this war comes out right," Atkins said.
"Ira Jamison got his thumb in this," Jean-Jacques said.
"That's about like saying there's crawfish in Lou'sana, Jack," Atkins said.
"'It'll him the man who steals from me don't just walk away, no."
"My regards to your sister. She's an exceptional woman. Two thirds of the soldiers at Camp Pratt can't be wrong," Atkins said.
He mounted his horse and rode to the head of the wagon train. Jean-Jacques watched as the wagons creaked over the live oak roots, snapping pecan husks under the iron rims of the wheels, the sun-heated dust floating back into his face.
SATURDAY afternoon he rode his horse to the brick saloon next to his sister's brothel and stood at the bar and ordered a whiskey. The bartender served him without speaking, and others returned his greeting obliquely, an obstruction in their throats, their eyes not meeting his.
A bearded man with a pinned-up sleeve, his arm taken at Manassas Junction, looked him boldly in the face, then tossed his cigar hissing into a spittoon six inches from Jean-Jacques' shoe.
"I'm glad you got a good aim, you," Jean-Jacques said.
But the ex-soldier studied the brown spots on the back of his hand and took no pleasure in Jean-Jacques' sense of humor.
A cotton trader from up on the Red River, whom he had known for years, was sitting at a table behind him, one corner of the opened newspaper he was reading held down with a beer glass to stop it from fluttering in the breeze that blew through the door.
"Pretty damn hot today, huh?" Jean-Jacques said.
"Why, yes it is," the man said, leaning forward in his chair, his eyes focusing outside.
Jean-Jacques picked up his whiskey and approached the cotton trader, but the cotton trader rose from the table, gathering up his hat hurriedly, and went out the door. Jean-Jacques stared after him, then looked about for an explanation. Every back in the saloon was turned to him.
He looked down at the opened newspaper and tried to make sense out of the headlines. But the only words he recognized on the page were those of his own name, in the first paragraph of an article that might as well have been written in Chinese.
