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you think they’d go?” I asked Kendell.
    “Give them a week or two. They’ll turn up.”
    That’s when I acquainted Kendell with the calypso coral Ranchero that was keeping me from sitting by and waiting for them to surface again.
    “I swore,” I told him, “I’d bring it back just like I drove it off.”
    Kendell, to his credit, just said, “All right,” and then turned and informed Desmond, “I stopped him two or three weeks ago with Luther in the car.”
    Desmond’s hand moved automatically to the scar on his left shoulder.
    “You might find him and that wife of his down around Yazoo,” Kendell said. “Even those two might have the sense to stay off the roads in a pink Ranchero.”
    The whole time we’d been standing there talking, the drivers up on Highway 7 had been trying to slow from ninety to sixty immediately and at once. The sight of the cruiser was all it took, as a general rule, anyway, until a boy in a beat-up Dodge pickup shot by us without braking.
    Kendell tended to take that sort of behavior as a provocation, so he told me and Desmond, “Watch out,” and jumped into his car. He went sailing up onto the pavement with his grille lights strobing and raced out of sight.
    “New Sonic down at Yazoo,” Desmond told me. “Haven’t tried it yet.”
    “Aren’t they all the same?”
    Desmond glared at me like the pope himself might stare down Satan’s minion.
    We waited for Kendell to come back because it seemed the courteous thing to do, but we were a good half hour standing around before he eased down off of the roadway.
    “These damn people,” Kendell said once he’d backed into his slot.
    He climbed out of his cruiser and circled around to open his trunk. Kendell lifted out a feed sack and set it on the ground. It was so alive with movement that me and Desmond were retreating before Kendell had even begun to unknot the neck.
    “Taking them to his ex-wife’s boyfriend’s house. Going to put them in his bathtub or somewhere.”
    With that, Kendell dumped probably eight or ten writhing cottonmouths onto the ground. Somehow Desmond levitated onto the cruiser hood, and his bulk transformed an upswept contour into a sizable divot. I perched on the quarter panel and lifted my feet off of the ground.
    I don’t care for snakes as a rule, but moccasins are particularly unnerving because there’s no sign of the Lord’s work about them to admire. They’re silt-colored and unpatterned, plump and short; seem like ungainly, venomous miscalculations.
    Desmond’s objections were more in the vein that they were simply loose reptiles. The panicked noises he made while scaling the windshield were like nothing I’d ever heard from a human.
    Kendell tried everything short of pulling his service revolver to get us down and ended up having to ferry us to a patch of snakeless hardpan, where I hopped off the fender while Desmond lingered near the roof.
    “They’re just snakes,” Kendell told us, which might as well have been, “Hell, boys, it’s only plutonium,” for all the good it did us to hear it said.
    Even once we’d lured him down on the hardpan, Desmond couldn’t keep from watching the ground, which prompted Kendell to ask us both, with a touch of wonderment, “So you two are going after a Dubois?”
    Then Desmond tapped me on the arm and pointed at his Geo, down between the sorghum patch and Kendell’s cyprus trees, where the grass was ripe with reptiles and about knee deep.
    “Key’s in it,” he told me.

FIVE
     
    I’d not yet made it down to Yazoo City, so this was a fresh trip for me, but it tracked pretty close to all of my other excursions in the Delta. Lots of crops, a few shacks and trailers, the occasional brick villa in a pasture, and every now and again an authentic plantation left from olden days.
    There wasn’t much cotton under cultivation. Desmond said there was a glut and the price was ungodly low, but we passed almost no end of soybeans and staggering fields of