“Ray-Ray,” he yelled.

“T-Bub. What’s happenin’, man?” He grinned, showing five upper teeth, widely spaced. Paul ordered a round of drinks as though Ray-Ray were a long-lost friend, though he could remember speaking to him only two or three times in grammar school.

“You, uh, just got out?” Paul asked.

Ray-Ray swung his beer bottle in a wide, slow arc. “Yeah, man. I wore out three hoes in them soybean field with my black brothers.” He took a long draw off his bottle.

“Were you glad to get back to Tiger Island?”

Ray-Ray looked at the girl on the Schlitz clock and stroked his narrow, furry face. “Yeah, man. I was in that place for almos’ three years, and I didn’t know nobody when I got there, and I didn’t know nobody when I left.” He took another long swig. “My people’s here.”

Paul wondered what Colette would think of skinny, sunburned Ray-Ray, whose cotton shirt was burned through in several places by cigarettes, whose polka-dotted welder’s cap was turned backward, its crown rising like the tip of a pistol bullet. What would she think of the fact that her husband was drinking with the wiry, mustachioed parolee in Scadlock’s, buzzy drunk and unhappy that he was now considering his birthplace the way an outsider might. He drew deep on his long-neck and banged it down on the bar, hard. No one looked up.

After an hour, a new face appeared through the cigarette smoke, a man wearing a cowboy hat and a denim vest unbuttoned over a hairy chest. Paul took one look at the man’s pointed boots and thought of the West, where Colette’s train had gone.

“Uh-oh,” Ray-Ray said under his breath. “East Texas white trash.” He turned his cap around and stared with one eye into his beer bottle.

“I’ve seen him in town before. Who is that?” Paul squinted toward the door.

“Name’s Tyler, I think.”

Paul’s mouth fell open slightly. “Bucky Tyler.”

“That’s it, man.”

“He dated my wife.”

Ray-Ray ducked his head. “Whoa.”

The cowboy sat on the next stool and ordered a Pearl. He turned to Paul and smiled like a movie star. “Hey, coon-ass, where can a man get laid around here?”

Paul glanced at him as though he were a piece of machinery that needed to be taken apart quickly. He didn’t look for fistfights, but at the moment he felt a high-pitched keening in his head and a stiff but airy tension in his neck and shoulders, as though he needed a bit of sporting exercise to adjust his mood. He focused on the cowboy hat, a cheap white straw thing bought in a feed store.

“Me, I don’t speak English so good, monsieur,” Paul began. “But if you want a good morceau de chou—how you say, piece of ass—then pass through that back door to Madame LaFont’s.” He directed Bucky Tyler’s attention to the unpainted door. “You got to walk through quick now, so the bouncer, he can’t stop you.”