“You mean how she lured him into an adulterous affair?”

“Lured him?” Boom said. “Shit. You think that’s how it worked?”

“How are you for money?” Caddy said.

“Fine.”

“No, you’re not,” Caddy said. “You haven’t worked since your accident.”

“Accident?” Boom said. “Shit. Now who’s the one not talking straight. Ain’t a damn thing accidental about what happened to my ass. What happened to me was pure goddamn stupidity. I walked right into that shit.”

“That’s crap.”

“No it ain’t,” Boom said. “I replayed this thing in my mind a thousand times. I didn’t have to walk toward those men, seeing what I had coming to me. Both of them cocky motherfuckers standing there with baseball bats and my ignorant ass thinking I could take them both. I look like Luke Cage to you?”

“Who’s Luke Cage?”

“A big, mean black man made out of steel.”

“Is he bulletproof?”

“Oh, yeah,” Boom said, sliding across the seat and into the window. “Damn. Watch those curves. Ain’t no rush.”

“Maybe I want to get home.”

“To Bentley,” Boom said, kind of laughing. “Bentley Vandeven. Now there’s a goddamn name for him. Might be the whitest damn name I heard in my life.”

“Are you jealous?”

“Oh, hell no,” Boom said. “Just suspicious.”

Caddy drove a while, taking the turn off the main highway, heading down the gravel road through the endless cotton fields, dark and stretching out forever beyond the forked creek. “What bothers you most about getting hit?”

“That I can’t do shit.”

“What do you mean?”

“One of those motherfuckers is dead,” Boom said. “And the other one is under lock and key. I wish Quinn would’ve given me five minutes with the man. But you know it won’t happen. So what I got?”

“That stuff will eat up your soul,” Caddy said, both hands on the wheel, hitting a bad pothole and rocking the old truck. “Hate. Revenge. I’m not trying to preach. But hand it over to Jesus, Brother Boom. You know?”

“I wasn’t raised like that,” Boom said. “What’s getting to me is the not doing.”

“You can’t live your life that way,” Caddy said. “Revenge will eat you alive.”

Boom kept quiet, knowing damn well Caddy Colson knew what she was talking about. Caddy stared straight ahead, seeing Boom’s little shack, set back from the road and lit up with a string of Christmas lights.

“It’ll be better when I’m back on the road,” Boom said. “I feel like a million bucks behind the wheel, shiftin’ them gears. Nothing but the long white line, leaving all this bullshit behind. Ain’t that something? Ain’t that purpose?”

*   *   *