My legs were in the water, my back covered with mud, the side of my face matted with black leaves. I felt the warmness from the wound spread from under my palm into my shirt.

"Get in there, you sonofabitch," Boggs said up in the darkness.

"Mr. Boggs," I heard Tee Beau say.

"Get the car keys and open the trunk," Boggs said.

"Mr. Boggs, they ain't no need to do that. That boy too scared to hurt us."

"Shut up and get the guns out of the trunk."

"Mr. Boggs…"

I heard a sound like someone being shoved hard into a wall, then once again the report of the pistol, like a small, dry firecracker popping.

I swallowed and tried to roll on my side and crawl farther down the coulee. A bone-grinding, red-black pain ripped from my neck all the way down to my scrotum, and I rolled back into the ferns and the thick layer of black leaves and the mud that smelled as sour as sewage.

Then I heard the unmistakable roar of a shotgun.

"Try some Pepto Bismol for it," Boggs said, and laughed in a way that I had never heard a human being laugh before.

I slipped my palm away from my chest, put both of my hands behind me in the mud, dug the heels of my shoes into the silt bottom of the stream, and began to push myself toward a rotted log webbed with dried flotsam and morning glory vines. I could breathe all right now; my fears of a sucking chest wound had been groundless, but it seemed that all my life's energies had been siphoned out of me. I saw both Tee Beau and Boggs silhouetted on the rim of the coulee. Boggs held the pistol-grip twelve-gauge from the car trunk at port arms across his chest.