Well, this chick wasn’t bad. She was hard. But I could see that she could be soft. Money softened her. She’d smelled money on me and right away she’d softened. Maybe she’d take me home. I didn’t know. But I was so damn lonely, and horny, that I was willing to take a chance on almost anything. Plus, I was drunk.

For a minute there I sort of got the big picture. You back off from anything and get the big picture, you can figure out almost anything if you figure on it long enough. I looked at myself and I thought: Now listen, you got all this money belongs to all these people and you’re supposed to take care of it. Now what the hell’s gonna happen if you show up without the money or the shrimp either one? What if you just blow all the money, and don’t buy the shrimp, and go back home to all those people who’ve already bought their crab boil and crackers and cocktail sauce? Well, you’re gonna have some people pissed at you, that’s what.

But, now, think about them. Think about Ed, that son of a bitch, think about him in the first place. Did that son of a bitch ask you if you wanted some shrimp last year when he went off to Pensacola and went deep-sea fishing and didn’t catch shit? When he puked in a bar that Milos López once actually got thrown out of? Did that s.o.b. ask you if you wanted him to bring you some shrimp? Hell naw. Fuck him.

And who’s the other one? Ted. That fucking Ted. That bastard. You ought to whip his ass just on general principle. Son of a bitch. Did he ever invite you over to his private bass lake when they were jerking those ten-pound lunkers out of there? Hell naw. The son of a bitch even called the law on some kids.

Now I had to consider all that stuff. I couldn’t deal very well with it. She was smiling in my face and I had all that money in my pocket and I wasn’t too fond of these fuckers who’d sent me down there to the Gulf to get all their shrimp for them. And all I was trying to do originally was buy a beer for a girl who shook her ass naked in a dark bar where dark people like me stalked their lusts.

“She can’t drink a beer,” this chick said.

“Why?” I said. “Listen, goddamnit, I’m getting pissed off at the way y’all treat these girls. What? Y’all own em?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” she said. “We own em. They dumb enough to come in here and work, we own em. Buy em and sell em if we get ready to.”