Jimmy Ray Dixon was at a card table in back, by himself, a ledger book, calculator, a filter-tipped cigar inside an ashtray, and a stack of receipts in front of him. He wore a blue suit and starched pink shirt with a high collar, a brown knit tie and gold tie pin with a red stone in it.

"I seen you on TV, still frontin' points for the man killed my brother," he said, without looking up from his work. He picked up a receipt with his steel hook and set it down again.

"I need your help," I said. I waited but he went on with his work. "Sir?" I said.

"What?"

"Can we sit down?"

"Do what you want, man."

Clete went to the bar and got a shot and a beer, then twisted a chair around and sat down next to me.

"Somebody put a hit on Mingo Bloomberg," I said.

"I heard he hung himself from a water pipe in y'all's jail," Jimmy Ray said.

"Word gets around fast."

"A dude like that catch the bus, people have parades."

"He told me a black guy out of Miami had a contract on him. He said a guy who looks like a six-and-a-half-foot stack of apeshit."

Clete scraped a handful of peanuts from a bowl on the next table, his eyes drifting down the bar.

"Maybe you ought to give some thought to where you're at," Jimmy Ray said.

"You heard about a mechanic out of Miami?" I said.

"I tell you how I read this sit'ation. You put a snitch jacket on a guy and jammed him up so he didn't have no place to run. So maybe somebody's conscience bothering him, know what I mean?" he said.

"I think the same hitter popped Lonnie Felton's scriptwriter."

"Could be. But ain't my bidness."

"What is your business?"

"Look, man, this is what it is. A smart man got his finger in lots of pies. Don't mean none of them bad. 'Cause this guy's a brother, you ax me if I know him. I don't like to give you a short answer, but you got a problem with the way you think. It ain't much different than that cracker up at Angola."

Clete leaned forward in his chair, cracked the shell off a peanut, and threw the peanut in his mouth.

"You still pimp, Jimmy Ray?" he asked, his eyes looking at nothing.

"You starting to burn your ticket, Chuck."

"I count eight bail skips in here. I count three who aren't paying the vig to the Shylock who lent them the bail. The guy who went out the door with his hair on fire snuffed one of Dock Green's hookers in Algiers," Clete said.

"You want to use the phone, it's a quarter," Jimmy Ray said.

"No black hitter works the town without permission. Why let him get the rhythm while you got the blues?" Clete said.

"All my blues is on the jukebox, provided to me by Mr. Jerry Joe Plumb, boy you grew up with," Jimmy Ray said to me.

"Crown has to stay down for Buford LaRose to go to Baton Rouge. Tell me you're not part of this, Jimmy Ray," I said.

He looked up at the clock over the bar. "The school kids gonna be out on the street. Y'all got anything in your car you want to keep?… Excuse me, I got to see how much collards I can buy tonight."

He began tapping figures off a receipt onto his calculator.

That evening, under a gray sky, Alafair and I raked out the shed and railed horse lot where she kept her Appaloosa. Then we piled the straw and dried-out green manure in a wheelbarrow and buried it in the compost pile by our vegetable garden. The air was cool, flecked with rain, and smelled like gas and chrysanthemums.

"Who's that man down on the dock, Dave?" Alafair said.

He was squatted down on his haunches, with his back to us. He wore a fedora, dark brown slacks, and a scuffed leather jacket. He was carving a stalk of sugarcane, notching thick plugs out of the stalk between his thumb and the knife blade, feeding them off the blade into his mouth.

"He was in the shop this afternoon. He has a red parachute tattooed on his arm," she said.

I propped my foot on the shovel's blade and rested my arm across the end of the shaft. "Jerry Joe Plumb," I said.

"Is he a bad man?"

"I was never sure, Alf. Tell Bootsie I'll be along in a minute."

I walked down to the end of the dock and leaned my palms on the rail. Jerry Joe continued to look out at the brown current from under the brim of his fedora. He folded his pocketknife against the heel of his hand. The blade was the dull color of an old nickel.

"You figure I owe you?"

"What for?"

"I took something out of your house a long time ago."

"I don't remember it."

"Yeah, you do. I resented you for it."

"What's up, partner?"

The scar at the corner of his eye looked like bunched white string.

"My mom used to clean house for Buford LaRose's parents… The old man could be a rotten bastard, but he gave me a job rough-necking in West Texas when I was just seventeen and later on got me into the airborne. It was the way the old man treated Buford that always bothered me, maybe because I was part responsible for it. You think they won't take you off at the neck because they're rich? It's not enough they win; somebody's got to lose. What I'm saying is, everybody's shit flushes. You're no exception, Dave."

"You're not making any sense."

"They'll grind you up."

What follows is my best reconstruction of Jerry Joe's words.

By San Antone I'd run out of bus and food money as well as confidence in dealing with the Texas highway patrol, who believed patching tar on a country road was a cure for almost anything. So I walked five miles of railroad track before I heard a doubleheader coming up the line and took off running along the gravel next to a string of empty flat wheelers, that's boxcars with no springs, my duffle bag banging me in the back, the cars wobbling across the switches and a passenger train on the next track coming up fast, but I worked the door loose, running full-out, flung my duffle on the floor, and crawled up inside the warm smell of grain sacks and straw blowing in the wind and the whistle screaming down the line.

It was near dawn when I woke up, and I knew we were on a trestle because all you could hear was the wheels pinching and squealing on the rails and there wasn't any echo off the ground or the hillsides. The air was cold and smelled like mesquite and blackjack and sage when it's wet, like no one had ever been there before, no gas-driven machines, no drovers fording the river down below, not even Indians in the gorges that snaked down to the bottoms like broken fingers and were cluttered with yellow rocks as big as cars.

There were sand flats in the middle of the river, with pools of water in them that were as red as blood, and dead deer that turkey buzzards had eaten from the topside down so that the skeletons stuck out of the hides and the buzzards used the ribs for a perch. Then we were on a long plateau, inside an electric storm, and I begin to see cattle pens and loading chutes and busted windmills that were wrapped with tumbleweed, adobe houses with collapsed walls way off in the lightning, a single-track dirt road and wood bridge and a state sign that marked the Pecos, where the bottom was nothing but baked clay that would crack and spiderweb under your boots.

The old man, Jude LaRose, told me the name of the town but not how to get to it. That was his way. He drew lines in the dirt, and if you fit between them, he might be generous to you. Otherwise, you didn't exist. The problem was you never knew where the lines were.

I hadn't realized I'd climbed aboard a hotshot, a straight-through that doesn't stop till it reaches its destination. I dropped off on an upgrade, just before another trestle, hit running, and slid all the way down a hill into a wet sand flat flanged with willows that had once been a riverbed and was pocked with horses hooves and deer tracks that were full of rainwater. I walked all day in the rain, crossed fences with warning signs on them in Spanish and English, saw wild horses flowing like shadows down the face of a ridge, worked my way barefoot across a green river with a soap-rock bottom and came out on a dirt readjust as a flatbed truck boomed down with drill pipe and loaded with Mexicans sleeping under a tarp ground through a flooded dip in the road and stopped so the man leaning against the top of the cab with an M-1 carbine could say, "Where you think you goin', man?"