On the far side of the four-lane street were a drawbridge, a church, a pecan orchard, and a pasture with horses in it. The evening star was winking in the west, the light in the trees as bright as a flame, the wind smelling of distant rain. Pookie and JuJu ordered big bleeding slices of rattlesnake melon served on paper plates with plastic forks and a roll of paper towels for napkins. They sprinkled their melon with salt and dug in, chewing with their mouths open, enjoying the grandeur of the evening.
Opposite the stand was a huge sugarcane field where the cane was hardly more than green tentacles waving in the wind. In the distance, a solitary truck was parked on a dirt road.
“There was some kind of battle here?” JuJu said.
“Nothing like the battles at Vicksburg or places like that,” Pookie said.
“That was in the Civil War?”
“Yeah, between the Nort’ and the Sout’,” Pookie said.
“Back in the 1960s, over civil rights and shit?”
Pookie stared at the side of JuJu’s face. JuJu had been scratching at his scalp and was looking at his nails.
“Where’d you go to school?” Pookie asked.
“After the fourt’ grade, I didn’t go nowhere.”
“You could fool me,” Pookie said.
A black kid was unloading melons and cantaloupes from a flatbed trailer behind their table. Behind the truck on the dirt road, there was a flash of light and a puff of smoke, then a sound like the pop of a wet firecracker. JuJu touched his forehead. “What’s with this?”
“What’s what?” Pookie said.
“I got watermelon in my hair.”
Pookie looked over his shoulder. “The kid was t’rowing melons around. Hey, kid! Ease up on t’rowing them melons.”
“I wasn’t t’rowing no melons,” the kid said.
“Then why is slop running down your pile?” Pookie said to JuJu.
“Is there somewhere around here we can get laid?” JuJu said.
“Your friend Maximo gets clipped by a guy with a birdcage for a brain and you’re talking about cooze?”
“I got the creeps,” JuJu said.
“What you got is a walking nervous breakdown you came out of the womb wit’.”
The wind changed, and Pookie thought he heard another solitary pop. He felt something wet on his face. JuJu’s head was teetering on his shoulders, then it sank in his plate. Pookie stared across the field at the truck and at the early cane bending in the wind and at the amber-tinged twilight glinting on the train tracks, as though he were being drawn against his will into a historical photograph that would have no importance to anyone except him. For a brief moment, he wanted desperately to relive his life and change every thought and deed and event in it, even the ones that were good, in order to alter the sequence of events that had placed him near a site where ragged specters in gray and butternut took their revenge upon the quick.
THE SUN WAS low in the west, flooding the crime scene with a red glow, when I arrived. Helen arrived minutes later. Someone had pulled a polyethylene tarp over the two bodies that sat slumped at the picnic table. An ambulance, three cruisers, and a fire truck had pulled onto the grass. The crime scene tape was already up. Cars were slowing at the intersection, people gawking from the windows. Spade Labiche was waiting for us. “Better take a look,” he said.
I lifted up a corner of the tarp, high enough to see both victims without exposing their state to people on the other side of the tape.
“Jesus,” Helen said.
I lowered the tarp. “The entry wounds are in the front.”
“There’s splatter on the flatbed behind them,” Labiche said. “One guy says he thought he heard a backfire. A woman says she heard firecrackers.”
“From where?” I said.
“Across the road,” he said.
The sugarcane field was empty, the sky lavender and full of birds. A dust devil spun across the rows, wobbling, then broke apart.