“Money,” I said, looking out the window, maybe a little bitter. “Everybody’s reason.”

“To tell you the truth, it bothers me to think you’d do it just for money,” he said. “Mercenaries tend to be

unreliable.” He sounded as if he knew.

“I wouldn’t do it just to have money, but in this country, today, money is freedom. Anybody who tells you different is bullshitting you,” I said, looking over at him. “Freedom’s worth chasing.”

He nodded. “So you’ll do it?”

“Lots of money?”

“Could be,” he said.

“I’ll talk about it,” I said.

The uneasy half dream was shattered when we bounced across a set of railroad tracks. I opened my eyes on a dark town of unpainted shacks, huddled in a grove of dense, overbearing pin oaks. Here and there the ghostly moonlight broke through the canopy of leaves, etching web forms on the shacks, like the work of an enormous spider. We were through the place in less than a minute. If I hadn’t later gone through it in daylight - REZIN, POP. 240 - I might have remembered the town as a hallucination, a dreamed remembrance of an Edgar Allan Poe story.

“Nightmare place, probably red-eyed incestuous children with crosses carved on their foreheads, creeping through the cotton with choppin’ knives,” John said, echoing my thoughts. He’d seen me come awake.

“Yeah.” I looked back at the town, a dark hole with a ribbon of moonlighted concrete running into it. Then we were around a curve, and it was gone, just another piece of the Delta. I turned to the front and ran my tongue over my teeth. Moss had sprouted during the nap. When I couldn’t dislodge it with my tongue, I leaned over the seat for a beer. I’d kill it with alcohol.

“You want one?” I asked.

“Yeah. Another Coke.”

I popped the top off a Coke and a beer, handed him the Coke, and said, “So tell me about Longstreet.”

Twenty thousand people lived in the town, he said. Nine thousand were white; eleven thousand were black. The city council districts had been drawn to put three whites and one black on the council.

“They fixed the districts so there’d be five thousand people in each one - one man, one vote, just like it’s laid down by the law,” John said. “One district covers the heart of the black side of town, five thousand people. Hardly a white among them. That district will always elect a black councilman. But when you take out those five thousand black votes, in one bloc, the whites are a majority in all the rest of the districts. There’s about two thousand whites in each, and about fifteen hundred blacks.”

“That’s common enough,” I said.

“It’s still a son of a bitch,” John said.

“These friends in Longstreet

are they reliable?”