“Promise her you’ll stop fighting, at least.”

Colette looked away as they sat next to her. She was frowning. “You two have a nice time?”

Paul put his elbows on the table and clasped his hands. “You ready to talk with me?”

Her eyes were dark and hard. “You think we need to talk.” She shook her head once. “We’ve gone over this already.”

“Come on. We’re married. The priest married us.” He put a hand palm-up on the table. “We didn’t just jump over a broomstick. Donne-moi une autre ’tite chance?”

“You can’t speak French worth a damn. You stole that line from an old song.”

He watched her bite her cheek, trying, he thought, to avoid giving him a smile. “I promise I’ll never get in a fistfight as long as I live.”

She passed her eyes over him quickly, from side to side, pretending to look at something across the room. “I’m scared you’ll bring home some disease from a whore you pick up at Scadlock’s.”

He leaned back in the wooden chair and looked toward the dance floor. “You won’t believe this, but I never cheated on you.”

She turned her head, giving him the white landscape of her face, moonlight on still sand. “You’re out of control,” she told him, but the electrical snap had gone from her voice. He decided then not to push things, hoping that the broken pieces of their marriage could be welded together. He knew that Colette wanted to leave Tiger Island to do what other people with good looks and brains would do—which is to say, examine at least one other place in the world. Tiger Island was dragging her down in its humid, sun-blistered way. She was a local girl to the bone, related to half the town, and it would be hard to leave the ceremonies of kinship, her food and dance and the cemetery where her people had been buried for two hundred years.

She leaned toward Clarisse, who was buffing her press-on nails. “I wish they’d hurry with the crabs.”

“You hungry?” Paul asked his wife.

“I know I am,” Clarisse said, uncrossing her legs and scooting closer to the table.

“The sooner we eat, the better,” Colette said to the wall. “I want to get out of here before it gets too busy.” She ignored two men walking past slowly, taking her in.

Paul knew she wanted to get out before the fighting started. Friday nights were when a few high-school dropouts from Pierre Part, or Partians, as they were called locally, would stroll in, looking for Tiger Island men to fight. Sometimes combatants would roll around in the parking lot, grunting and hugging to the shouts of the spectators, but once or twice a year a general punching match would break out among most all the men at the dance, and the Big Gator would take a pounding, a type of internal hurricane, leaving broken doors and overturned tables in its wake.

But the Big Gator was the least dangerous of a group of levee-road honky-tonks that included T-Man’s, Black Alice’s, Scadlock’s Boiler Room, and, down the road in the white-trash section called Tonga Bend, the Machine Gun Inn. Like the rest, the Big Gator was built above the swamp on creosote-soaked stubs and made of scrap material—some weatherboard, some plywood, some tin, all painted the color of stolen paint, like Louisiana Department of Highways orange or Exxon blue. It catered to a mixed crowd of Cajun trappers and fishermen, outlander river men, and oil-field roughnecks, plus a few third-generation Tiger Island Protestants.