Colette could imagine her aunt accelerating toward Beewick, shaking her head. She yelled into the phone. “He’s done a lot of things, but not that.” Her aunt was gone in a stuttering crackle of static, and Colette looked around at the paneling and the dusty venetian blinds. She’d been married a year and a half and had hoped to do better than this by now. Paul, her husband, worked like a mule, but he also thought like a mule and pulled his plow in a straight line. He was a machinist and wanted to be a machinist. Ambition was not his long suit. His picture grinned from the top of the television, a big face, not bad-looking, the best fish in the pond, people said. But Colette read Cosmopolitan and Woman’s World and had begun to think that Tiger Island was a small, muddy pond. She put her shoes back on and got into her little brown Toyota to buzz down River Street to where it became a thin strand of blacktop plunging through a sugarcane field. Two miles southeast of town, she saw the broad clamshell entrance of the Silver Bayou Drive-In, the back of the screen an expanse of corrugated tin disappearing into the misty night sky. Russell LaBat handed her a ticket with a bony, pale hand and gave her a long look.

“Russell, is Paul inside?”

“Paul who?”

She arched an eyebrow. “Pope John Paul.”

“Ask me no secrets, I’ll tell you no lies.” He put her three dollars into a cigar box and went back to reading a copy of News on Wheels.

She cruised the dim shell lanes in front of the viewing humps, her parking lights glowering, and in their jaundiced beams she saw people she knew, cousins even. Working the grassy lot from back to front, she finally spotted her husband’s ten-year-old pickup in the front row, where the grass hadn’t been cut in weeks and jonc cupon and thistle sprang hood-high. The movie was a colorful rectangle rising out of a grassy plain. She backed onto an earthen ramp behind him. Her husband was turned toward a woman she did not recognize, and before she could stop herself, she sprang out into the grass. Her high heels buckled under her as she crossed the shell lane and jerked open the truck’s door, banging it into the metal pole that held the speaker.

“What the hell are you doing with her?”

Her husband seemed drowsy and only mildly surprised. He opened his mouth but managed only a sleepy smile. His hand went up as if to support something he would say, but he said nothing. The young woman with him put an elbow on her armrest and lowered her forehead into a palm. Finally, Paul Thibodeaux said, “This is Lanelle. She said she couldn’t find anyone to come watch this movie with her.”

Colette squinted at the screen. “This is The Train. It’s about a million years old, you fool.” She thrust a vicious chin at Lanelle. “She can rent it for a dollar if that’s what she’s so hot to see.”