“You can believe,” he told her, raising his eyebrows. “I want you to stay with me so bad, I might even move out to Pervert City with you.”

“New Orleans is not Pervert City.”

“Whatever.” He spat out a piece of shell.

“Paul, I…” Victor Larousse bumped her chair as he walked over to stand under the Pearl beer clock as Vincent sidled over to the dance floor entrance. Etienne the giant came in from the parking lot dressed in Halliburton coveralls. He walked to the counter and ordered a beer from the barmaid, who looked at him hard, her mouth drawn to a stitched hole as she handed him a Schlitz. Etienne was king of the Partians, famous up and down Highway 71 as the man who had won a fight by tearing a toilet out of the rest room and throwing it at three attackers, bowling them down like pins.

Colette looked at the men with contempt, but Paul was unable to feel one way or another about young men who mostly followed the old codes when they fought for sport. They used only their fists as weapons, not really hating their opponents. They were just bored and restless, healthy from hard work, needing something other than time to age them.

“I want to try to talk with you,” she said between her teeth. “And I appreciate your offer. About not fighting, I mean. It’s a start.”

He looked into the dark wood of her eyes and said nothing, feeling her anger begin to turn from him. He didn’t want to risk even one comment to spoil things. When he had eaten enough, he finished his third beer, got up, and pushed through to the dance floor to wash his hands in the hot, dim rest room, which smelled like an oven full of piss. Turning on the tap, he felt a puny rill of cistern water trickle over his fingers. Five men were lined up at a galvanized trough, relieving themselves. One of them cursed the man next to him and put his fist through the Sheetrock wall. Paul dried his hands on his jeans and wondered if he could get to the door while it was still on its hinges. He went out onto the dance floor, where Nelson Orville was singing “Mon cœur fit mal…” through his nose to thirty couples, mostly men in their fifties pushing their hard, gumbo-fed wives around the dance floor with a stiff, practiced grace, hands clasped and stuck in the air like pump handles. Outside the kitchen door, at the edge of the dance floor, a cook had set up a forty-gallon garbage can and was boiling crawfish over an old water-heater burner. The room was dark with blue light, and Paul could barely see across the wide floor. He heard cursing and beer bottles toppling over a chorus of women’s whining. “Mon cœur est tout cassé,” Orville moaned, and an old gent threw out a leg in a wide waltz turn, giving the smoking garbage can a glancing blow. Paul saw it slowly cascade over, many gallons of foaming juice charging into the dark dance hall. He wanted to get through the swinging doors to Colette before the building came apart at its orange seams.