“Men, my ass,” Alois grumbled. “That driver got himself shot by a rickety old gomer from Texas. I say to hell with those bikers. We don’t need ’em. Didn’t you tell me Uncle Frank always said, ‘If you want something done right, do it yourself’?”

Snake took out a pack of cigarettes, shook one out, and lit it with a Zippo. “Shut up, boy. You never knew Frank.”

“That’s not my fault, is it?”

Snake grunted and blew out a long plume of smoke. “I guess it ain’t.”

“Well?” Alois pressed. “Did Frank say that or not?”

Snake straightened up and rubbed his forehead with his palm as he watched the pushboat pass. Alois felt the ground beneath him vibrating from the torque of those big engines.

“Frank said a lot of things. And he did some big-time shit, back in his prime. But in the end, he drank himself into a stupor, walked under a load of batteries, and let a nigger woman kill him like a damn hog.”

Alois felt his throat knot up with a boy’s anger. He’d always been told that Frank Knox was the toughest and smartest damn soldier ever to come out of Louisiana, which was saying something. Frank was the alpha dog in any group of men who ever got close to him.

“Where were you when he died?” Alois asked, voice quavering with anger and fear.

At last his father turned to him, and what Alois saw in those eyes was something utterly removed from anything he’d seen in them before. Snake’s eyes reminded him of a demonstration he’d seen in his junior college lab. A reckless professor had used a vacuum pump to put cyclohexane into a state where it flirted with the triple point: simultaneously boiling and freezing, cycling through the solid, liquid, and gaseous states. Snake’s eyes told his son that a similar reaction was occurring behind them now. Rage and guilt were bleeding into one another, threatening to explode, and Alois knew that the resulting detonation, when it came, would kill anyone close to it.

“I had just got to Dr. Cage’s office. I’d been holding Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis at the machine shop when Sonny called me. I hauled ass back to town quick as I could, but I was too late. Dr. almighty Cage had told Sonny and Glenn to stay in the waiting room,” Snake said in a guttural voice. “Said there wasn’t room for them in his surgery room.”

Alois nodded, knowing he’d found the proper lever with which to trigger his father. “And now you know why.”

The corner of Snake’s mouth twitched, something Alois had never seen it do before. “Doc come out and told us Frank had expired in spite of his best efforts. Expired. Like a fucking magazine subscription.”