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teeter-tottered up the path to the house in one sock foot and one heeled boot, heeled to make him appear taller. He moved into the trees, hissing “ . . . sicka this small town.”
    Jesse hadn’t come back after dinner, and Dixie Clay couldn’t stop thinking about the agents. What if Jesse’s bribe wasn’t big enough? What if they came back when she was in the still, alone? She’d taken her Winchester with her everywhere.
    But the agents wouldn’t be coming back. They hadn’t been seen in two weeks. Last seen in Hobnob. By her and then by Jesse.
    “Ouch!” Amity dropped the branch that had pricked her and stuck her plump pointer in her mouth. She studied Dixie Clay, then withdrew her finger and seemed to address it. “Jesse might not be too keen on you being here. He’s getting his sugar today. He phoned from the store yesterday. It’s coming from New Orleans by tug.”
    “New Orleans,” said Dixie Clay, and shook her head. Even now, he wasn’t slowing down.
    “Woman on the phone said, ‘What you need five hundred pounds of sugar for? Cotton candy?’ ”
    Both women gave a low chuckle. Amity continued, “Tugs have been coming along the river too fast, sending waves against the sandbags.” She selected a willow branch and began to weave it. “Randy Yates and them are all worked up about it. They telegrammed the Port of New Orleans saying tell the barge line that if they can’t control their speed, we will. Saying the next boat that comes through at thirty-five miles per hour better have two pilots, as they intend to shoot the first one.”
    “Lord God. They sent that?”
    “Anonymous they did.” Amity lifted a willow branch, found a kink in it, then discarded it by her feet. “So Randy Yates and Jim Dees and some others have spread a few miles down the levee.”
    “Amity, won’t the sugar go to you first, for the store?”
    She smiled wryly, carding the woven branches with her fingers. “Whiskey before cake.” She angled her backside on the chair to rejoin the larger conversation.
    When the mattress was finished, two women lifted one end, and Dixie Clay took the other. She was twenty-two and just over five feet tall but strong from lifting twenty-five-pound sacks at the still. The three women half hoisted, half dragged the mattress to the wall to stack it with the others, then stood brushing their hands against their skirts.
    Dixie Clay was the first to hear the rifle fire and she held her hand up and the women stopped chatting and then they all heard the shots. With a grunt, Amity heaved from her chair and bustled to the river-side door. The others followed, funneling onto the loading dock. By the time they’d gotten outside, the shooting had stopped, the tug just coming into sight as it sloshed around the horseshoe bend with an angry blast of its horn.
    “But it’s not even going that fast,” said Amity. “Thirty, at the most.”
    They watched the tug slow even more as it exited the horseshoe, muscling down the river, dragging two parabolas of smoke. It sounded its horn again as it drew abreast, the captain in profile red and jerky, very much alive. The tug passed them, blasting its horn a third time to warn small craft that it approached the Hobnob dock.
    “Don’t know why they fired,” Amity said, “but they fired above it. I guess Randy and Jim were just feeling ornery. Or maybe having a pissing contest, you know.” She shrugged.
    The dock trembled beneath them. It abutted the levee, the giant wall of earth thirty feet high, with another few feet of sandbags on top. In normal times, the river’s natural banks were almost a mile from this levee, so when you climbed to the levee top, you looked down to see the berm, then the barrow, which functioned as a dry moat fifteen feet deep, a pit from which the red earth had been excavated and carted in wheelbarrows to build the levee. Then you gazed over the wide flat batture, planted with willows, and a few separate channels that