“Mr. Vickers?” I said.
“What?”
“You’re wrong,” I said.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” he said.
“I think you know the truth,” I said. “I also think you hit your son in the face.”
“What’s your name?” he said.
“Aaron Holland Broussard.”
Vickers chewed on the edge of his lip, nodding. “Stay here, Mr. Broussard.” He went to his car and dipped his arm between the driver’s door and the seat, then marched toward me, a horse quirt in his right hand. Mr. Lowry tried to stand in front of him, but Vickers knocked him aside.
“Don?
?t you hurt that man, Rueben!” Mr. Lowry said at his back, off balance, holding one hand to his chest.
I was standing on a slope. I could hear the other workers stepping away from me. Vickers was coming straight at me, striding out of the sun’s brilliance into the spangled shade under the cottonwood, his face a feral knot. I kept my hands at my sides, my eyes on his. I heard Mr. Lowry cry out, but his voice was lost inside a gust of wind that turned the cottonwood tree into a thousand green butterflies.
Vickers slashed the quirt down across my eye and cheek and mouth. Then he hit me again. And again, each blow taking away the pain from the previous blow. I didn’t move, not even to raise my arms. I could feel blood sliding out of my hair, and taste salt on my lips, and hear a ringing sound inside my left ear where he had backstroked me.
Mr. Lowry tried to pull the quirt from Vickers’s hand, but Vickers shoved him to the ground. “Old man or not, I’ll put it to you, Jude,” Vickers said.
“Don’t touch Mr. Lowry again,” I said. “If you do, your life may be forfeit.”
Vickers’s face was slick with sweat, his breath short, his voice wadded with phlegm. “I can have you in prison for that one remark.”
“Cotton is a recipient of the Silver Star, Mr. Vickers,” I said. “You owe him an apology.”
He backed away from me into full sunlight. His quirt was marbled with my blood. “You won’t talk to me like that.”
“I think you have a black soul, sir,” I said.
He seemed to flinch as if struck by an invisible hand. He turned in a circle, the quirt shaking uncontrollably in his hand. Then he pointed it at me as though he had forgotten where he was. “I can flay you alive.”
“You’re a bully, Mr. Vickers. I also think you carry an incubus, one that will cost you your soul.”
He wasn’t ready for it. His face seemed to crumple, like a sheet of paper curling above a flame. His lips were shaking, the top of his exposed chest printed with green veins. He turned to Mr. Lowry. “You’ll pay for this, Jude!”
“Get off my land, Rueben,” Mr. Lowry said. “Never enter it again.”
“This is not over,” Vickers said. “No one talks to me like that.”
“Aaron is right,” Mr. Lowry said. “What you hear is your own evil speaking to you. Be gone with you.”
Vickers pushed his son toward the car, then got behind the wheel and started the engine. He ground the gears and backed in a circle and crashed over a rock, his wheels fishtailing and scouring dirt and divots of grass in the air. As the dust thinned and the car spun onto the road, his son’s eyes found mine, in the way fellow travelers find each other. I even thought he might show sympathy or offer a kind word. He grinned and mouthed the words “You’re fucked.”
My face and head felt as though they had been attacked by bumblebees. Mr. Lowry was digging a first-aid kit out of his truck. Spud and a black man eased me down on the tailgate of the truck and put a cup of water in my hand.
“Why’d you let him hit you like that?” Spud said.
“Anybody can fight,” I replied.
Spud stared blankly at the blueness of the mountains, the dry creek bed and the white rocks stenciled with dead hellgrammites, the cottonwoods swelling with wind. “What was that stuff about him putting you in prison?” he said.
“Vickers was just making noise.”