Free Heaven's Prisoners by James Lee Burke

Don’t worry about it.”
    “Ax him where he’s from he don’t know how to keep the boat in the bayou, no.”
    A few minutes later I headed down the bayou in an out-board to pick up the damaged rental. It wasn’t unusual for me to go after one of our boats. With some regularity, drunks ran them over sandbars and floating logs, bashed them against cypress stumps, or flipped them over while turning across their own wakes. The sun was bright on the water, and dragonflies hung in the still air over the lily pads along the banks. The V-shaped wake from the Evinrude slapped against the cypress roots and made the lily pads suddenly swell and undulate as though a cushion of air were rippling by underneath them. I passed the old clapboard general store at the four-corners where the black man must have used the phone to call Batist. A rusted Hadacol sign was still nailed to one wall, and a spreading oak shaded the front gallery where some Negro men in overalls were drinking soda pop and eating sandwiches. Then the cypress trees and cane along the banks became thicker, and farther down I could see my rental boat tied to a pine sapling, swinging empty in the brown current.
    I cut my engine and drifted into the bank on top of my wake and tied up next to the rental. The small waves slapped against the sides of both aluminium hulls. Back in a clearing a tall black man sat on a sawed oak stump, drinking from a fifth of apricot brandy. By his foot were an opened loaf of bread and a can of Vienna sausages. He wore Adidas running shoes, soiled white cotton trousers, and an orange undershirt, and his chest and shoulders were covered with tiny coils of wiry black hair. He was much blacker than most south Louisiana people of color, and he must have had a half-dozen gold rings on his long fingers. He put two fingers of snuff under his lip and looked at me without speaking. His eyes were red in the sun-spotted shade of the oak trees. I stepped up onto the bank and walked into the clearing.
    “What’s the trouble, podna?” I said.
    He took another sip of the brandy and didn’t reply.
    “Batist said you ran over the sandbar.”
    He still didn’t answer.
    “Do you hear me okay, podna?” I said, and smiled at him.
    But he wasn’t going to talk to me.
    “Well, let’s have a look,” I said. “If it’s just the shearing pin, I’ll fix it and you can be on your way. But if you bent the propeller, I’ll have to tow you back and I’m afraid I won’t be able to give you another boat.”
    I looked once more at him, then turned around and started back toward the water’s edge. I heard him stand up and brush crumbs off his clothes, then I heard the brandy gurgle in the bottle as though it were being held upside down, and just as I turned with that terrible and futile recognition that something was wrong, out of time and place, I saw his narrowed red eyes again and the bottle ripping down murderously in his long, black hand.
    He caught me on the edge of the skull cap, I felt the bottle rake down off my shoulder, and I went down on all fours as though my legs had suddenly been kicked out from under me. My mouth hung open, my eyes wouldn’t focus, and my ears were roaring with sound. I could feel blood running down the side of my face.
    Then, with a casual, almost contemptuous movement of his body, he straddled me from behind, held my chin up with one hand so I could see the open, pearl-handled barber’s razor he held before my eyes, then inserted the razor’s edge between the back of my ear and my scalp. He smelled of alcohol and snuff. I saw the legs of another man walk out of the trees.
    “Don’t look up, my friend,” the other man said, in what was either a Brooklyn or Irish Channel accent. “That’d change everything for us. Make it real bad for you. Toot’s serious about his razor. He’ll sculpt your ears off. Make your head look like a mannequin.”
    He lit a cigarette with a lighter and clicked it shut. The smoke smelled like