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rearview mirrors. Ragged tatters of bolls left behind by mechanical pickers clung to the sepia-black skeletons of last year's cotton crop and raced past her on both sides. In every direction, the fields gave way only to rows of winter-bare trees bordering water and marshy areas too wet to farm. The land was flat as a still pond, owing to the Yazoo and Tallahatchie rivers, the Big Sunflower and the Little Sunflower and the Yalobusha and a score of other tributaries of the Mississippi, which had meandered across the Delta for thousands of years, leaving behind countless oxbow lakes like Roebuck and depositing layer after layer of rich, black soil that still made for the best cotton growing in the world. The Delta's fetidly omnipresent moist smells were absent on this day, frozen to sleep by the winter cold.
    There were unseen and mostly unimagined hills beyond the cinched-down horizon. That much she knew: southeast of her at Yazoo City and east at Carroll County. But here, a lid of haze squatted atop the land, creating an artificially close horizon cutting off visions of what might exist a few miles beyond. The grinding flat sameness threw a blanket of myopia over Delta culture. Geography became destiny as the flat topographic conformity imposed its two-dimensional will on the people, rolling their ambitions as flat and thin as cheap grits.
    Some found the Delta inspirational in its adversity, especially those who had found their way to the hills and beyond.
In moments, she had left behind the last of the mobile homes and pedestrians, then began to slow as she strained to discern the overgrown dirt ruts leading down to the lake where she had left her truck. She downshifted as the road made a gentle arc toward the gray-green canopies of the cypress trees she knew grew only submerged in the silty waters of the old Yazoo River oxbow.
She found the frozen mud ruts easily enough, but less than twenty yards off the main road, the first complication of the day arose. Calmly, she rolled to a stop, stretched her left leg, and killed the engine. Options ran through her head as she took in the rusting Chevy Monte Carlo with a missing rear bumper and cardboard taped over one rear passenger-side window. The fabric of the landau roof had almost finished peeling off; a coat hanger emerged from a broken antenna. The loud, clear tones of a black gospel station reverberated from the car's radio. Her older, tan Ford 150 pickup truck sat less than ten feet away.
She dismounted, rested the bike on its kickstand, and made her way down the path on foot, unslinging the M25 sniper rifle as she walked. The gospel music masked her steps as she made her way down a steep slope ending at the edge of the brown, still water where a stooped, gray-haired black woman stood patiently holding on to a long bamboo fishing pole, which had been patched with gray duct tape. In the water, a large red-and-white float bobbed with the faint movement of the water. Nearby, two small children, warmly bundled into roughly the same shape as two tan hush puppies, played with some sort of yellow, blue, and red plastic toy. Grandma and her daughter's kids, the motorcyclist assumed.
Nailed high on a tree right next to the grandmother, a brilliant white sign with bright red letters warned of pesticide runoff from the adjacent cotton fields. The sign prohibited commercial fishing and cautioned individuals not to eat more than two meals per month of carp, gar, catfish longer than twenty-two inches, and no buffalo fish at all.
The cyclist thought about this neutrally as she raised the M25 and squeezed off two quick rounds, neatly taking out the two mobile targets first. Grandma dropped her fishing pole and turned, her face wide with fear and confusion. Then the cyclist shot her too. The slug went neatly through the round O of the grandmother's surprised lips and showered fragments of her cervical vertebrae into the water. The woman staggered and fell backward into the lake.
With quick,