At this point a lone state trooper on his weekly road check rolled into the parking lot. He saw the fight spill out of the door of Toot’s Sweet Lounge, and he pulled his nightstick. But as soon as he walked up to the building, half the crowd fell on him like a wave, took away his gun and gas, dragged him across the road to the bayou, and handcuffed him hugging a cypress. The man with the wet pants started the flashers on the cruiser and put it in neutral before a gang pushed it into the bayou. For a while it looked as though the brawl might end, but then some men wanted to take the policeman’s clothes off. “If you want to do that, you got to be queer,” an Indian shouted, and another fight kindled in the road between the Indian’s relatives and neighbors and a band of Halliburton cementers from the Smoke Bend oil field. Some men ran back inside, where fighters were still bumping about like maniac children in an oversized cardboard box. Two young men wearing white shrimper boots fell out of a window and began limping up the road toward the north. Etienne, his white shirt looking as if it had been chewed by tigers, appeared in the doorway, Paul slung over one shoulder. He jogged for the truck and got in as Colette gunned the engine, heading south for the ferry.

Etienne looked back over the truck bed. “Let’s get the hell out of here before they eat the fuckin’ truck. I never seen people so hard to knock out.”

She looked at Paul. Blood streamed from a cut in the middle of his forehead, and his lower lip was split. “He was right,” she said. “It wasn’t worth it.”

Etienne wiped the blood from his big nose with a handkerchief. “Oh yas, it was.” He pulled a cabbage wad of bills from his pants. I made nine hundred thirty, and I don’t know how much dogmeat got.”

“Eleven hundred twenty-five,” Paul mumbled, a rill of blood running from the corner of his mouth.

Colette watched her rearview as she sang around a curve. She saw the ferryboat guard with his hand on the gate and gunned the engine, blowing the old truck’s sour horn. The guard backed away when she hit the brakes and skidded through the loose bed of shells on the landing, over the steel ramp, and onto the ferry’s deck, where the truck bottomed out, bounced once, and subsided against the safety chains on the boat’s starboard side.

Once she was off the ferry, Colette kept the truck humming along the asphalt at twenty miles above the limit. Paul wiped his face and fell asleep. A mile from his house, Etienne the giant’s huge cow face broke into a grin. “Hey, Miss America. You sorry you moved back from California?”