They rode past the cypress-weatherboard shotgun houses and their postcard vegetable gardens, rode to where the blacktop ended and the shell road began. Colette could not believe what she saw. Where the Big Gator had stood was a freshly graded plain a quarter mile long. A bulldozer squatted where the dance floor had been. Farther down, where there had been other clubs, the roadside was bare.

“It’s all gone,” Colette said. “It’s really all gone.”

“You ought to be glad.”

“What happened?”

Bucky pushed a button and a tinted window rolled down. “The guy who owned the Big Gator couldn’t make it. People in town think he burned the place. Those bars farther down folded up when that trailer town full of welders and boat builders moved away.” He looked at her and arched an eyebrow. She liked the movement. “There ain’t a lot of beer and barmaid money left in south Louisiana these days.”

Colette squinted one eye, remembering the hot boiled crabs soaked in red pepper and bay leaf, the buckets of angry red crawfish, smoking like little devils, heaped high on the table. She thought of the chattering music, the two-steps, Paul’s arms arching over her hair during the waltz turns.

Next they rode out to the main highway on the other side of town, a place where at one time, day and night, shell dust hung in the air above the movement of flatbeds, mobile cranes, and hotshot trucks. Colette studied a succession of empty construction bays and boat slips, sheds as big as aircraft hangars behind weed-woven chain link, a mud boat turned turtle at the dock because no one was left to pump her out.

Back in town, he showed her stores that had died on the vine. Gagliano’s meat market was empty, its porcelain display case on the sidewalk, the building’s windows dull like the eyes of a dead fish. She had worked there one summer when she was fifteen, trimming fat from the chops, cutting up chickens.

The Rexall had burned; the King Hotel could afford only one drunk out front; the liquor store kept only a few bottles in the windows. Colette felt as if she had been away for ten years. “You just didn’t know how far the oil money went,” she said.

Bucky snorted. “Half the sons a bitches left in town are thinking about all the green stuff they had and pissed away.”

She didn’t look at him. “You did your share.”

“That’s a very fact,” he said. “You want to find a place and get a drink?”

She put a hand on her stomach and looked at him.

“Oh yeah.”

“I better get home. My father is starting to wander nowadays.” As the car rolled through the streets like a big drop of black oil, she stored its motions in her, remembering her Mercedes, her mahogany desk at the bank in California.