"Suit yourself," he said, and raised the bottle to his mouth and drank. Then he blew air out through his nose and looked at his cigarette boat. The scars on his back were like broken necklaces spread across his skin. He shifted his weight on his feet.
"Well, it's a beautiful day, and I'm about to go," he said. "You got something you want to tell me, 'cause I want to get out before it rains."
"I just had a couple of speculations. About who's making decisions for you these days."
"Oh yeah?" he said. He drank from the beer with one hand on his hip and looked away at the marsh, where some blue herons were lifting into the sky.
"Maybe I'm all wet."
"Maybe you got a brain disease, too."
"Don't misunderstand me. I'm not taking away from your accomplishment. I just have a feeling that Claudette has turned out to be an ambitious girl. She's been hard to keep in the kitchen, hasn't she?"
"You're starting to piss me off, Dave. I don't like that. I got guests here, I got a morning planned. You want to come along, that's cool. Don't be messing with me no more, podna."
"That is the way I figure it. Tell me if I'm wrong. Johnny Dartez wasn't a stand-up guy, was he? He was a dumb lowlife, a street dip not to be trusted. You knew that one day he'd trade your butt to the feds, so either you or Claudette told Victor Romero to take him out. Except he killed everybody in the plane, including a priest.
"Then I stumble into the middle of things and complicated matters even more. You should have left me alone, Bubba. I wasn't any threat to you. I'd already disengaged when your monkeys started coming around my house."
"What's all this about?" one of the Italians said.
"Stay out of it," Bubba said. Then he looked back at me. His thick hand was tight around the beer bottle. "I'll tell you something, and I'll tell you only once, and you can accept it or stick it sideways up your ass. I'm one guy. I'm not a crime wave. You're supposed to be a smart college guy, but you always talk like you don't understand anything. When you mess with the action out of New Orleans, you fuck with hundreds of people. You wouldn't leave it alone, they slammed the door on your nose. Stop laying your shit off on me."
"Claudette was in Romero's apartment."
"What are you talking about?"
"You heard me."
"She don't go anyplace I don't know about."
"She had her thermos of gin rickeys with her. She left wet prints all over his kitchen table."
His gray-blue eyes stared at me as though they had no lids. His face was frozen, his jaw hooked sideways like a barracuda's.
"You really didn't know, did you?" I said.
"Say all that again."
"No, it's your problem. You work it out, Bubba. I'd watch my ass, though. If she doesn't eat up your operation, these guys will. I don't think you're in control of things anymore."
"You want to find out how much I'm in control? You want that nose busted all over your face right here? Come on, is that what you want?"
"Grow up."
"No, you grow up. You come out to my home, you come out to my business, you talk trash about my family in front of my friends, but you don't do nothing about it. It's like you're always leaking gas under people's noses."
"You should have seen a psychiatrist a long time ago. You're fucking pathetic, Bubba."
He swirled the beer in his bottle.
"That's your best shot?" he said.
"You couldn't understand. You don't have the tools to."
"All right, you had your say. How about getting out of here now?"
"You don't have your father around anymore to slap your face in front of other people or beat you with a dog chain, so you married a woman like Claudette. You're pussy-whipped by a dyke. She's pulling apart your whole operation, and you don't even know it."