"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?"
I could tell from the sunlight on the oak trees outside that it was late afternoon. The wisteria and blooming myrtle on the hospital lawn moved in the breeze. The drawbridge was up over Bayou Teche, and the two-deck pleasure boat was going through, its paddle wheel streaming water and light.
My mouth was dry, and the inside of my lip felt as though it were filled with wire.
"I had to put stitches in your scalp and six in your mouth. Don't eat any peanut brittle for a while," he said, and smiled.
"Where's Annie?" I asked thickly.
"I sent her for a cup of coffee. She'll be back in a minute. The colored man's outside, too. He's a big fellow, isn't he? How far did he carry you?"
I had to wet the row of stiches inside my lip before I could talk again.
"About five hundred yards, up to the four-corners. How bad am I down below, Doc?"
"You're not ruptured, if that's what you mean. Keep it in your pajamas a couple of nights and you'll be all right. Where'd you get those scars around your thighs?"
"In the service."
"I thought I recognised the handiwork. It looks like some of it is still in there."