Three

He slowed the pickup, watching the lawmen fade into the white cloud. He realized that he was panting. “Aw, man. What a mess. Did you get to pay the tab?”

“Bring me home.” She sounded hurt, and he froze for a moment. He pulled onto the white band of shoulder and put his arm around her. “Please take your arm off me.” She grabbed his hand and moved it.

“What?” His arm hovered above her, as though she were a hot stove.

“You told me you weren’t gonna fight. A minute later I look up, and there you are, rolling in cigarette butts with those dredge-boat worms.” Her voice grew big and sharp. “I must have been stark raving nuts to think you could do one thing the way I wanted you to.”

“Aw, come on. I’m sorry.” He leaned toward her.

Clarisse’s puffy face appeared next to Colette’s, and he jumped. He’d forgotten she was in the cab. “Paul was just defending himself,” she sang.

Colette flipped her glossy hair over her shoulders. She wiggled against the seat, willing to grow smaller, concentrating like an unstable element. “How can I trust you if you can’t keep a promise for five minutes? You lied to me. Bring me home now.”

He floored the accelerator, fishtailing shells up into the moonlight like spinning coins. “All right, that’s where your ass is going.” When the truck charged into the drive of the rent house, she hopped over Clarisse and was on the overgrown lawn before the truck stopped moving. His mouth hung open as he watched her narrow back flash through the front door.

Clarisse looked through the windshield at the porch light winking off. She gave her hair a toss. “Well, it’s early yet. Before you drive me all the way past Tonga Bend to home, I could use a highball.” Paul put an elbow on the window ledge and grabbed a fistful of his dark hair. He thought of his wife’s face, as unblemished as the new milling machine he had uncrated that day down at the shop. That’s what she was like, a machine that was trying to shape and mill and saw his raw, unfinished self into something different. It scared him to think this, but what scared him more was next to him now: Clarisse’s cast-iron perfume, her pickup truck of a body with its smooth ride and deep upholstery, and all the open dance halls between where he was and where he ought to go.

* * *

Colette sat on the sofa and got up immediately because it smelled of her husband, not an unpleasant scent, just a mix of Old Spice and a molecule of thread-cutting oil that was his odor alone. Nothing interested her on television and she didn’t feel like staring at the plain wooden doors with their dozen coats of paint, so she got into her little car and drove to her parents’ house, a rambling two-story high up on piers, built before the levee systems kept out the wandering Chieftan. Her father, a retired principal of the little rough-and-tumble high school, was asleep in the glider when she walked up on the porch. Both her parents were old. She had been an afterthought even for them. Before she went into the long, wide hall, she touched her father’s shoulder.