THE RESIDUE OF THE NIGHTTIME SLUGS GLEAMED LIKE VEINS OF quartz in the sidewalk as Jonah walked out to the truck. He had determined that they’d stop to see Dex at the camp, and as Jonah turned the ignition he contended with memory. He had truly been a little boy then. It was the day Dex had been booted from the high school basketball team. Bill was still alive, but war was suddenly imminent; they would see him maybe once more before he deployed, and that would be the final time they’d ever see him. Dex had been fighting at school. Now he’d been caught smoking pot in the school washroom, too, and it was more than likely that he’d be expelled. Dex and Pop were screaming at each other. Jonah stood by and watched the old man drop Dex, felt the thump of his brother’s back against the floor. Dex ran out, and Jonah followed. Dex sat behind the wheel of the truck, blood trickling over his lip. The same truck Jonah now brought to rattling life. They drove to the camp, Jonah and his brother, and in the morning they boated out to a blind and hid with their shotguns. Jonah had shot a duck—the first of his life—and it crumpled and fell out of the fog, splashing dead in the water, and Dex had clapped him on the back. The words Dex had said branded themselves into some secret place and Jonah could still hear them: You crunched it!
Colby came out of his house with a gym bag under his arm and jogged to the truck. “She was still asleep,” he said. “I left her a note.”
“You okay with that?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d you say to her?”
“That we was going on a road trip, I’d be back soon.” Colby pulled a roll of rubber-banded bills from his pocket. He shrugged at Jonah’s look. “We might as well use it for gas.”
They lifted out of downtown on the interstate. The tall buildings and gigantic sun-drenched bulb of the Superdome. Next came the concrete suburbs, then soon enough the second-growth cypress swamp. Limbless trees, gray and dead looking. Far off, the spines of a chemical plant bristled. The massive bridge over the river assembled in the haze ahead, rising up and up out of the low-lying pastures. Colby remarked that the bridge was weird and scary out here in the country, without a city around it. At the apex they saw ships chugging upriver or unloading containers onto barges. The truck descended to sugarcane fields. The two-lane highway seemed unchanged. Jonah pulled off into a half gas station, half casino.
While he pumped gas he asked Colby if he’d ever been to a duck camp.
“Big-screen TV and sexy serving chicks, right?”
“You got it.”
“What’s your bro like?”
“Dex,” Jonah said. “He’s kinda tough, right. I mean, he lives alone in a swamp and makes his living hunting all year. Gator, duck, deer. Whatever.”
“What he say about us coming?”
Jonah shrugged. “He doesn’t know we are.”
Driving again, Colby scrolled through radio stations. He settled on a zydeco channel and danced in the passenger seat. Jonah knew his friend was trying to make him laugh, so he laughed. Colby paused.
“You think Luz will be happy to see me?”
“Yeah.” Jonah glanced at him. “Course she will.”
“I mean, she won’t be bummed it ain’t you alone?”
“Nah, man. She loves you.”
Jonah recalled Mardi Gras day. Luz must already have known she was pregnant. Colby had knocked down that coconut that was going to hit her, and then she had kissed him on the cheek. Jonah watched Colby place a hand along his face, as if to hold the feeling there. Jonah had waited for Colby to start teasing him, but his friend never said a word.