I ran my tongue across my lips and tried to speak, but the words became a tangle of rusty nails in my throat.
He knelt in fr
ont of me, his face spotted with mud, his eyes round and frightened in his small face.
“Tee Beau, don’t do it,” I whispered.
“He done killed that white boy in the bat’room,” he said. “He put that shotgun up against Mr. Benoit face and blowed it off.”
“Don’t do it. Please,” I said.
“Close your eyes, Mr. Dave. Don’t be moving, neither.”
“What?” I said, as weakly as a man would if he were slipping forever beneath the surface of a deep, warm lake.
He cocked the pistol, and his bulging eyes stared disjointedly into mine.
Some people say that you review your whole life in that final moment. I don’t believe that’s true. You see the folds in a blackened leaf, mushrooms growing thickly around the damp roots of an oak tree, a bullfrog glistening darkly on a log; you hear water coursing over rocks, dripping out of the trees, you smell it blowing in a mist. Fog can lie on your tongue as sweet and wet as cotton candy, the cattails and reeds turning a silver-green more beautiful than a painting in one flicker of lightning across the sky. You think of the texture of skin, the grainy pores, the nest of veins that are like the lines in a leaf. You think of your mother’s powdered breasts, the smell of milk in her clothes, the heat in her body when she held you against her; then your eyes close and your mouth opens in that last strangled protest against the cosmic accident that suddenly and unfairly is about to end your life.
He was crouched on one knee when he pulled the trigger. The pistol went off ten inches from my face, and I felt the burnt powder scald my skin, the dirt explode next to my ear. My heart twisted in my chest.
I heard Tee Beau rise to his feet and brush his knees.
“I done it, Mr. Boggs,” he said.
“Then get up here.”
“Yes suh, I’m moving.”
I remained motionless, my hands turned palm upward in the stream. The night was filled with sound: the crickets in the grass, the rumble of thunder out on the Gulf, the cry of a nutria farther up the coulee, Tee Beau laboring up through the wet brush.
Then I heard the car doors slam, the engine start, and the tires crunching over the gravel out onto the two-lane road.
It rained hard once more during the night. Just before dawn the sky cleared, and the stars were bright through the oak branches overhead. The sun came up red and hot above the tree line in the east, and the fog that clung to the bottom of the coulee was as pink as blood diffused in water. My mouth was dry, my breath foul in my own nostrils. I felt dead inside, disconnected from all the ordinary events in my life, my body trembling with spasmodic waves of shock and nausea, as though I lay once again on the side of a trail in Vietnam after a bouncing Betty had filled my head with the roar of freight trains and left me disbelieving and voiceless in the scorched grass. I heard early morning traffic on the road and car tires cutting into the gravel; then a car door opened and someone walked slowly along the side of the filling station.
“Oh Lawd God, what somebody done done,” a Negro man said.
I tried to speak, but no sound would come out of my voice box.
A small Negro boy in tattered overalls, with the straps hanging by his sides, stared down at me from the lip of the coulee. I raised my fingers off my chest and fluttered them at him. I felt one side of my mouth try to smile and the web of dried mud crack across my cheek. He backed away from the coulee and clattered through the cane, his voice ringing in the hot morning air.