I cut my engine and drifted into the bank on top of my wake and tied up next to the rental. The small waves slapped against the sides of both aluminium hulls. Back in a clearing a tall black man sat on a sawed oak stump, drinking from a fifth of apricot brandy. By his foot were an opened loaf of bread and a can of Vienna sausages. He wore Adidas running shoes, soiled white cotton trousers, and an orange undershirt, and his chest and shoulders were covered with tiny coils of wiry black hair. He was much blacker than most south Louisiana people of color, and he must have had a half-dozen gold rings on his long fingers. He put two fingers of snuff under his lip and looked at me without speaking. His eyes were red in the sun-spotted shade of the oak trees. I stepped up onto the bank and walked into the clearing.
"What's the trouble, podna?" I said.
He took another sip of the brandy and didn't reply.
"Batist said you ran over the sandbar."
He still didn't answer.
"Do you hear me okay, podna?" I said, and smiled at him.
But he wasn't going to talk to me.
"Well, let's have a look," I said. "If it's just the shearing pin, I'll fix it and you can be on your way. But if you bent the propeller, I'll have to tow you back and I'm afraid I won't be able to give you another boat."
I looked once more at him, then turned around and started back toward the water's edge. I heard him stand up and brush crumbs off his clothes, then I heard the brandy gurgle in the bottle as though it were being held upside down, and just as I turned with that terrible and futile recognition that something was wrong, out of time and place, I saw his narrowed red eyes again and the bottle ripping down murderously in his long, black hand.
He caught me on the edge of the skull cap, I felt the bottle rake down off my shoulder, and I went down on all fours as though my legs had suddenly been kicked out from under me. My mouth hung open, my eyes wouldn't focus, and my ears were roaring with sound. I could feel blood running down the side of my face.
Then, with a casual, almost contemptuous movement of his body, he straddled me from behind, held my chin up with one hand so I could see the open, pearl-handled barber's razor he held before my eyes, then inserted the razor's edge between the back of my ear and my scalp. He smelled of alcohol and snuff. I saw the legs of another man walk out of the trees.
"Don't look up, my friend," the other man said, in what was either a Brooklyn or Irish Channel accent. "That'd change everything for us. Make it real bad for you. Toot's serious about his razor. He'll sculpt your ears off. Make your head look like a mannequin."
He lit a cigarette with a lighter and clicked it shut. The smoke smelled like a Picayune. Out of the corner of my eye I could see his purple suede cowboy boots, gray slacks, and one gold-braceleted white hand.
"Eyes forward, asshole. I won't say it again," he said. "You can get out of this easy or Toot can cut you right across the nipples. He'd love to do it for you. He was a tonton macoute down in Haiti. He sleeps in a grave one night a month to stay in touch with the spirits. Tell him what you did to the broad, Toot."
"You talk too much. Get finished. I want to eat," the black man said.
"Toot had a whole bunch of surprises for her," the white man said. "He's an imaginative guy. He's got a bunch of Polaroids from Haiti. You ought to see them. Guess what he did to her."
I watched a drop of my blood run off my eyelash and fall and break like a small red star in the dirt.
"Guess!" he said again, and kicked me hard in the right buttock.
I clenched my teeth and felt the clods of dirt bite into my palms.
"You got dirty ears, huh?" he said, and kicked me in the thigh with the toe of his boot.
"Fuck you, buddy."
"What?"
"You heard me. Whatever you do to me today I'm going to square. If I can't do it, I've got friends who will."
"I've got news for you. You're still talking now because I'm in a good mood. Second, you brought this down on yourself, asshole. When you start talking to somebody else's whores, when you poke your nose into other people's shit, you got to pay the man. That's the rules. An old-time homicide roach ought to know that. Here's the last news flash. The chippy got off easy. Toot wanted to turn her face into one of his Polaroids. But that broad is money on the hoof, got people depending on her, so sometimes you got to let it slide, you know what I mean? So he put her finger in the door and broke it for her."
"Hey," he said in an almost happy fashion, "don't look sad. I'm telling you, she didn't mind. She was glad. She's a smart girl, she knows the rules. It's too bad, though, you don't have a pussy between your legs, 'cause you ain't money on the hoof."
"Get finished," the black man said.
"You ain't in a hurry, are you, Robicheaux? Huh?" he said, and nudged me in the genitals with his boot.
The blood dripped off my eyelash and speckled the dirt.
"Okay, I'll make it quick, since you're starting to remind me of a dog down there," he said. "You got a house, you got a boat business, you got a wife, you got a lot to be thankful for. So don't get in nobody else's shit. Stay home and play with mama and your worms. If you don't know what I'm talking about, think about screwing a wife that don't have a nose."
"Now let the man pay his tab, Toot."
I felt the weight of the razor lift from behind my ear, then the white man's pointed boot ripped between my thighs and exploded in my scrotum. A furnace door opened in my bowels, a piece of angle iron twisted inside me, and a sound unlike my own voice roared from my throat. Then, for good measure, as I shuddered on my knees and elbows, heaving like a gutted animal, the black man stepped back and drop-kicked me across the mouth with the long-legged grace of a ballet dancer.
I lay in an embryonic ball on my side, blood stringing from my mouth, and saw them walk off through the trees like two friends whose sunny day had been only temporarily interrupted by an insignificant task.
I look out of the door of the dustoff into the hot, bright morning as we lift clear of the banyan trees, and the elephant grass dents and flattens under us as though it were being bruised by a giant thumb. Then the air suddenly becomes cooler, no longer like steam off an oven, and we're racing over the countryside, our shadow' streaking ahead of us across rice paddies and earthen dikes and yellow dirt roads with bicyclists and carts on them. The medic, an Italian kid from New York, hits me with a syrette of morphine and washes my face from his canteen. He's barechested and sweaty, and his pot is strung with rubber spiders. Say goodbye to Shitsville, Lieutenant, he says. You're going back alive in '65. I smell the foulness of my wounds, the dried urine in my pants, as I watch the geographic history of my last ten months sweep by under us: the burnt-out ville where the ash rises and powders in the hot wind; a ditch that gapes like a ragged incision in the earth, where we pinned them down and then broiled them alive with Zippo-tracks; the ruptured dike and dried-out and baked rice paddy still pocked with mortar rounds where they locked down on us from both flanks and marched it right through us like a firestorm. Hey, Lieutenant, don't touch yourself there, the medic is saying. I mean it, it's a mess down there. You can't lose no more blood. You want I should tie your hands? They got refrigeration at the aid station. Plasma. Hey, hold his goddamn wrists. He's torn it open.
"That's an ice bag you feel down there," the doctor was saying. He was a gray, thick-bodied man who wore rimless glasses, greens, and a T-shirt. "It'll take the swelling down quite a bit. It looks like you slept well. That shot I gave you is pretty strong stuff. Did you have dreams?"