The black man behind the counter, Antoine, wore a crisp white jacket, a tall chef’s hat, and a smile. We took the only empty table in front and a waitress, a skinny gal took our order even before we were seated, Jo on the inside, me on the aisle, and Pretty Boy across from us.

“Three Dixie Blackened Voodoo Lagers, three colas, three waters, a serving of everything fried and a couple buckets of crawfish,” I said. Jo raised her brows and I shrugged. “It’s good. I’m buying.” The waitress nodded and wove her way through the crowd clotting the doorway. We had just beat the next rush. Lucky us. Less than a minute later she slid six red plastic baskets lined with newspaper to soak up the grease, onto the table, followed by the nine glasses. There wasn’t room to eat but I did anyway. A lot. Hot onion rings, hush puppies, and boudin—round fried balls of meat and spices and rice the size of golf balls; it tasted like heaven. Beer-batter crust that crunched like God Himself had made them in His own kitchen. Highly spiced, sizzling with oil. I drank one beer fast to cool my mouth and kept eating. At some point, Pretty Boy Laz started eating too.

“Boudin, dat is, right dere,” he said. “Good, yes?”

I nodded. “The cook is Antoine, and according to someone I knew here, he knows everything there is to know about this town.”

“Handy,” Jo said. Which was exactly the word I had used when I was introduced to him.

The waitress was back and set two steel garden buckets of crawfish on the table, beer- and sea-flavored steam curling up, hot with pepper and spices. I drew out a crawfish, its red shell curled, pretty sure the crustacean had been tossed alive into boiling beer. I bent the back, hearing the shell crack, and pulled the meat out of the tail, eating, fingers messy and greasy and stinky, loving it all. I saluted my dinner companions with the two pieces of mudbug shell. “Suck de head,” I said, just like Rick when brought me here on our first .