Etienne cleared a path to the rear door and leaned out. The fat trapper with the wet pants cranked the bolt of his old Moss-berg ten times and knocked down ten cans, most of them falling into a skiff five feet below the two-by-four rail. A balding, bony kid picked them up and reset them, an unpunctured side facing the building. Cans blown off into the water were replaced with fresh ones. As the kid scampered into a pirogue on the left, another rifle popped. Colette looked behind her. Nearly forty men had entered the contest. She watched the tall, clean-shaven fisherman with the new Browning automatic knock all the cans down in fifteen seconds, and someone behind her cursed. The next man missed the first can and was disqualified. The next missed on his last shot, began screaming, and threw his rifle like a spear at the tenth can. The kid sullenly watched it arc and hit the water but did not try to retrieve it. In a general cry of “Asshole,” four men grabbed the shooter and threw him into the parking lot, where he landed on his butt in a cloud of shell dust.

Over the next hour, shooter after shooter qualified. One of the experts was a dark, skinny man who said he was from Cayenne but who had an exotic northern accent. He wore a Marine Corps camouflage cap and shot a heavy-barreled bolt-action military training rifle. He took his time with the cans, ticking them off the board with neatly placed center shots. An old Partian everyone called Gris-Gris shot all ten while seated in a chair pumping an octagon-barreled Remington, a cold beer held in his crotch. More men came in through the front door. A gang of oilfield workers pulled up outside in their red cement-pumping truck.

Colette made the qualifying round, but at the end of the cut, only seven shooters had been eliminated. The next stage of competition involved hitting ten tomato sauce cans that were lying down, their bottoms toward the shooter. An entire skiffload of small cans floated alongside the wharf, saved from a month of Bloody Marys from three bars. This new set of targets gave more shooters trouble. Colette took her time and tried to relax, all her shots finding the targets, though one bullet struck a rim. At the end of the round, twenty shooters remained. Those who fell out of competition drifted back to the bar to drink and tell lies, and the overall commotion level increased, voices racketing off the plain wood walls. Colette watched the boy place a slotted four-foot-long flat bar of steel on the target rail.

Behind her she heard Etienne guffaw. “Heeey, girl, that’s your pretty little ass. I know what that thing is.” She watched as the kid carefully lined up ten bottle caps in the slot. Colette put her head down and rested her eyes, trying to figure how many catfish made up five hundred dollars.