"Pack the s.h.i.t," Junior said even though Nina had already begun to roll the blankets. Motion stirred the beer in her blood, a welcome feeling. Her veins felt half-asleep and she would take all the sleep she could get.

In their yellow pickup, Nina hung her head back against the seat and let her eyes pretend they could shut. Her neck wouldn't set; kept rolling her head toward Junior's shoulder. She had set it there all during their dances at their wedding, as rice crackled under their soft-floored shoes and Dixieland played. She had kissed that shoulder with crawfish and b.u.t.ter on her lips during their dinners at the Pelican in Pa.s.s-Christian. Junior had smiled like his face would never have cause to stop.

Now he was unsmiling and the only times her head found his shoulder was in the beds of a succession of motels. He gripped the steering wheel, knuckles bloodless, a man about to make a sharp turn. They waited for Atticus to get back to his Forerunner as baby Bug babbled in the back.

Nina spoke up after a while rather than go on listening to the mosquitoes beat the gla.s.s, tired of hearing the anxious hunger for blood and nothing else.

"Bug's going to have his first word soon, at the rate he's going through sounds."

"Reckon so. He got the brains from his Mama."

Nina looked at Junior for the grin that should've gone with those words. There was none. She didn't frown. She was all out of those too.

"And his mouth," Nina said.

"Yes indeed."

"What do you think his first will be, Junior?"

Junior reached across Nina to open the glove box. His bicep brushed her nipple. She tingled. He tensed.

He saw the Ruger .44 inside there and only then settled. His hands flew back to the wheel.

"No," Nina said.

"No?"

"No. Baby's first word is usually 'no'."

"Not my boy."

"How do you figure?"

"It's in the blood." Junior's eyes had been hollow, watching Atticus' Forerunner. Now they cluttered with ghosts. "I never said 'no' to my Pa."

Nina rubbed her arms as if the bruises were in her and not Junior. She wanted another beer worse than she wanted to hear Bug prove Junior wrong. When the pickup ignition barked to life, she startled.

The Forerunner was pulling out. Junior put the truck in gear to follow Atticus to where he'd been hiding hiding out since Junior started seeking those faces in the wadded photograph.

"Daddy," Junior drove glancing from road to glove box to smoking black road.

"What?"

"His first word will be 'Daddy'."

Nina feared that Junior, for the first time since this all began, would be right.

Nina tidied the motel room, making s.p.a.ce for the ghosts. Junior cleaned the Ruger and watched the s.p.a.ce between Nina's legs as she floated through the swelter of the room. Insects tapped l.u.s.t on the shaded window.

Nina wore only her underwear because this was the only time Junior would stare at her truly look at her; not just glare or sulk or glance to check she was there, as if she were slight enough to misplace. He cleaned the gun every night and he made Nina feel clean with his attention.

Attention gave her a sense of purpose. It made them have a purpose. It meant what they were doing had a purpose.

Otherwise, there were only ghosts to make s.p.a.ce for. Nina straightened the s.p.a.ce on the dresser where a bottle of Wild Turkey should have sat for them to sip from while they listened to music like they had every night in New Orleans. Its ghost was vivid in the sullenness of the room. The ghost of their CD player was vivid in the silence. Nina dusted the place where it should have set.

In the closet, Nina hung Junior's shirt next to where her dancing gown, with its flare of crimson taffeta, should have hung. Right beside it would hang Junior's suede suit, impregnated with his scent. Memories of musk and cologne and cigar smoke suffocated there under the antiseptic fact of mothb.a.l.l.s.

Nina moved on, back into the bedroom, a dance cadence stirring up from her ankles a two-step, a waltz, a tango and then it dried up, unborn. She walked to the table where Junior had the pieces of the gun spread out. There, she would make a s.p.a.ce where their dinner should have gone the kind of dinner they had every weekday night in their two-room Treme apartment, with candles and plastic dishes and too few napkins.

The photograph set there. Nina stared at it. She would not touch it. The nine faces in it stared back.

Three of the faces had black crosses carved in them by ballpoint: Kip. Natty. Elijah. Six remained. All were smiling. None were entirely recognizable, even though one was hers, one Junior's and one his father's, Burl Senior's.

All were smiling as if they could not even imagine what the photograph would become.

Now Nina smiled, and bitterly.

"I'm getting a drink from the machine," she said, because she needed a taste of outside air if she would be able to breathe again. "Want one?"

"Yeah," Junior stopped staring at her. He went sullen as a child sent to early bedtime. She would no longer be nearly nude and so Nina could feel his shoulders sag from the end of their game.

She could not care, not nearly so much as she cared to be away from the photograph. She slid into her dress, its fabric sticky with what the wilderness had sucked from her pores during the day hunting Atticus. The feeling brought back the day of the photograph.

It had been Hunting Day. Her first and last hunt with Burl Senior. She had drunk with the disgusted enthusiasm of the sixteen-year-old she was. The eyes of the men Burl Senior's "a.s.sociates"; his go-to good old boys had their hands all over her, but only Junior touched her.

She gathered Bug to her, wanting to remove him from that spoiled s.p.a.ce too.

Nina stepped out of the motel room and shivered despite the heat. The deer hunt that had followed the taking of the photo was visible, crisp against the blue haze of the night. The men had gone out in their trucks, into the nature reserve. They had no rifles. They only needed the darkness.

They hunted by floodlight shining a 120-watt hand lamp fixed to the driver's side doors into the woods. A deer had been caught in it. Nina, frozen, and the deer, frozen.

As the deer stared, fixed by the light, the men had left their trucks with baseball bats and beat it to death. The deer went down fast and took a long time to die.

Nina's gorge rose at the memory and she stepped unsteadily toward the drink machine. The concrete sidewalk before the rooms tilted under her bare feet. She clutched Bug as memory clutched her.

She recalled a feeling of transformation that day. Burl Senior, a man she had danced with and talked the Bible with and shared a table with was, suddenly, shown to have a brutality in him: Something animal and fierce that Nina could not have conjured before and could not dispel since.

Junior had not beaten the deer. He had shared the tense s.p.a.ce of the truck with Nina. But his eyes had inhabited the vision of his father and his father's friends, beating, laughing, kicking.

Nina balanced her head against the machine. She exhaled. The Hunting Day still stained her, impossible to exhale.

She shut her eyes. Bug cooed. Nina answered by trying to pull deeper into herself, even if it meant away from her baby.

She wanted away from Burl Senior's world. Away from what had been frozen in her by that floodlight. And away from what had begun nine months ago, when Burl Senior had been found in eight pieces, each stuffed in a Hefty bag, crammed in a tree trunk.

Junior and she had fled that world, after all after Hunting Day, after they got married, they had escaped Burl Senior's shadow. They had left Junior's father's backwoods business and made for the bright and bustling business of New Orleans. And, for a time, they had escaped the kind of world where it could be so dark, to a place where night was brighter than day.

Nina tried to taste that kind of place: Its sweet food, its light beer, its music. She ended up open mouthed, only the putrefaction of Mississippi forest filling it.

Nina lowered her head and made to close her lips around the taste of decay and asphalt.

A hard, chill feeling at the back of her neck froze them open.

A gun's steel mouth pressed to her spine. Now Nina could taste only the saccharine of adrenaline.

"Well, well," Atticus said. "Miss Nina Teena Teeny-Bopper. Back at last."

Fixed to the metal chair with electrical tape, Nina felt freer than she had in nine months. The tape held her wrists and ankles to the chair, which teetered on the curled plastic tiling of Atticus' den. But it secured her flesh in the definite possibility that soon, this would all be over. Soon, she might be dead.

Only Bug's wails bound Nina to familiar misery. Atticus had set Bug in the tub and closed him into the bathroom. He'd made Nina watch. She knew her baby's prison was a place that swarmed with rust and mold and fat-bulked flies. Its dry disease smell stuffed Nina's nostrils. Her stare was fixed to the bathroom's peeling door as if by a hook.

Atticus was never one for conversation and paced instead of talking. But he could only glance out the curtained front window so many times, could only pace the lightless room, could only stare at the gun hanging heavier with disuse in his hand.

When he broke the silence, it was with the high-tone of a trip-wire. "Can you shut him up?"

Nina remembered Atticus as the coolest head of Burl Senior's boys. The one who stared at his boss like a trained falcon. The one who, Nina later heard from Junior, would be sent to do "bone work" on reluctant debtors. Atticus had been cool as a cartridge in a chamber. Now he twitched right to the hairs on his neck.

"Talk baby talk to him or something?" Atticus waved the gun to give it something to do. Nina sighed and stared at him with contempt.

"Baby talk?"

"Say his name all hushed or some s.h.i.t. What is his name anyhow?"

"Bug."

"Bug? Why the f.u.c.k you name your boy 'Bug'?"

"He's Burl Slater the Third. Little Burl. Little Bug. Bug."

Atticus twitched, every bit of new knowledge adding to the hive nervous inside him.

Nina had nothing but contempt for nervous men. Even though Atticus had every right to be nervous, Nina despised her captor all the more for being out of control. He had surely heard what Junior had done to Kip, Natty and Elijah but, instead of going about vengeance mechanically like her husband, Atticus was acting like his head was already cut off like the three of them.

"Bring him in here," Nina was not surprised to find her voice calm, "and I can settle him down."

She expected calm because power, she knew, was a zero-sum equation: You were either the one in power or the powerless. Burl Senior told her that. Junior, fastening her to him with love and then leading her down a path of hate, had proved it. And in this equation, Atticus was clearly not the one in power.

"Nuh uh." Atticus spat. Another brown stain joined a nebula of them on the floor.

"Why not?"

"To confuse him."

"Confuse him?"

"Confuse your f.u.c.king mad dog husband, Neener." Atticus glanced everywhere at once, saw nothing he liked, moved the gun more. "So when he gets here, he don't find y'all in one place. He'll get to questioning. He'll wonder where his r.e.t.a.r.d boy is and won't know what to do. I'll take advantage of that."

"You're wrong."

"Huh?"

"You're wrong and you should know better," Nina said. "Junior's not like you. He doesn't wonder."

"He'll wonder all right."

"He doesn't question, Atticus." Nina smiled. Affection for Junior flowered from her heart into her face. It felt good, that old blush, stirred up from memories of how Junior moved their bodies together on the Bourbon Blues Company dance floor. Junior had known all the places to touch when the lights were down. Junior had been was always Nina's voyage to the woman she had to become.

"You're thinking of Burl. Burl Senior." Atticus dropped his voice. "He was the man with the plan. That dude could turn blood into money like no other. Not his d.i.c.kweed son."

"You don't think Junior learned from him?"

"Junior learned one thing." Atticus lifted a soiled finger. "To ask nicely for seconds of whatever his Daddy gave him, whether it was on a plate or from his belt. He learned to be Burl's dog."

"Burl's dead now, Atty."

"I know!" Atticus swept his arms wide like a man caught in a sudden flood. "And I didn't kill him!"

"I reckon you couldn't even think of how."

"I didn't and neither did any of them men your husband killed! So why's he doing this?"

"Because somebody did." Nina went back to looking at the door welling over with Bug's cries. "And if Junior learned one thing from his Pa, it was what he's doing now."

A bang hit the back door. Nina could hear the splinters born. Only Atticus startled. Bug went quiet.

"That would be Junior." Nina did not sag with disappointment until Atticus tore his aim away from her head. For a moment, he looked like he was going to use the gun. Something had sung as clear and pure as sunshine inside her. Now there was just tar, like she had swallowed many roads.

Atticus went to the back door.

"f.u.c.k," he said. Nina heard him trying to bang it shut time and again. She heard a click of a light switch and yellow light from the back cast her shadow before her.

Nina watched it and saw Atticus' shoes stalk into the room. They circled. They stopped. They paced.

"f.u.c.k all."

"Confused?"

"f.u.c.k you, Nina." He was whining and excitement flooded her bad and liquid and electric all the way to her teeth. Atticus' eyes caught hers.

Nina felt all this excitement trying to unlock her jaw and press words from her mouth words that had been wrapped tight since she'd fled to New Orleans. Atticus snapped on the light. His silhouette cast on the front window curtain.

Shots rang. Gla.s.s shattered from the front window. The curtain flapped with three new holes.

Atticus fell, crushed like a used can.