Robicheaux 03 – Burke, James Lee

 

Her hair is curly and gold on the pillow, her skin white in the heat lightning that trembles beyond the pecan trees outside the bedroom window. The night is hot and breathless, the clouds painted like horsetails against the sky; a peal of thunder rumbles out on the Gulf like an apple rolling around in the bottom of a wood barrel, and the first raindrops ping against the window fan. She sleeps on her side, and the sheet molds her thigh, the curve of her hip, her breast. In the flicker of the heat lightning the sun freckles on her bare shoulder look like brown flaws in sculpted marble.

Then a prizing bar splinters the front door out of the jamb, and two men burst inside the house in heavy shoes, their pump shotguns at port arms. One is a tall Haitian, the other a Latin whose hair hangs off his head in oiled ringlets. They stand at the foot of the double bed in which she sleeps alone, and do not speak. She awakes with her mouth open, her eyes wide and empty of meaning. Her face is still warm from a dream, and she cannot separate sleep from the two men who stare at her without speaking. Then she sees them looking at each other and aim their shotguns point-blank at her chest. Her eyes film and she calls out my name like a wet bubble bursting in her throat.

The sheet is twisted in her hands; she holds it against her breasts as though it could protect her from twelve-gauge deer slugs and double-aught buckshot.

They begin shooting, and the room seems to explode with smoke and flame from their shotgun barrels, with shell wadding, mattress stuffing, splinters gouged out of the bedstead, torn lampshades, flying glass. The two killers are methodical. They have taken out the sportsman’s plug in their shotguns so they can load five rounds in the magazine, and they keep firing and ejecting the smoking hulls on the floor until their firing pins snap empty. Then they reload with the calmness of men who might have just stood up in a blind and fired at a formation of ducks overhead.

The sheet is torn, drenched with her blood, embedded in her wounds. The men have gone now, and I sink to my knees by my wife and kiss her sightless eyes, run my hands over her hair and wan face, put her fingers in my mouth. A solitary drop of her blood runs down the shattered headboard and pools on my skin. A bolt of lightning explodes in an empty field behind the house. The inside of my head is filled with a wet, sulphurous smell, and again I hear my name rise like muffled, trapped air released from the sandy bottom of a pond.

It was four in the morning on a Saturday and raining hard when I awoke from the dream in a West Baton Rouge motel. I sat on the side of the bed in my underwear and tried to rub the dream out of my face, then I used the bathroom and came back and sat on the side of the bed again in the dark.

First light was still two hours away, but I knew I would not sleep again. I put on my raincoat and hat and drove in my pickup truck to an all-night cafe that occupied one side of a clapboard roadhouse. The rain clattered on my truck cab, and the wind was blowing strong out of the southwest, across the Atchafalaya swamp, whipping the palm and oak trees by the highway. West Baton Rouge, which begins at the Mississippi River, has always been a seedy area of truck stops, marginal gambling joints, Negro and blue-collar bars. To the east you can see the lighted girders of the Earl K. Long Bridge, plumes of smoke rising from the oil refineries, the state capitol building silhouetted in the rain. Baton Rouge is a green town full of oak trees, parks, and lakes, and the thousands of lights on the refineries and chemical plants are regarded as a testimony to financial security rather than a sign of industrial blight. But once you drive west across the metal grid of the bridge and thump down on the old cracked four-lane, you’re in a world that caters to the people of the Atchafalaya basin Cajuns, red bones roustabouts, pipe lingers rednecks whose shrinking piece of American geography is identified only by a battered pickup, a tape deck playing Waylon, and a twelve-pack of Jax.

The rain spun in the yellow arc lights over the cafe parking lot. It was empty inside, except for a fat Negro woman whom I could see through the service window in the kitchen, and a pretty, redheaded waitress in her early twenties, dressed in a pink uniform with her hair tied up on her freckled neck. She was obviously tired, but she was polite and smiled at me when she took my order, and I felt a sense of guilt, almost shame, at my susceptibility and easy fondness for a young woman’s smile. Because if you’re forty-nine and unmarried or a widower or if you’ve simply chosen to live alone, you’re easily flattered by a young woman’s seeming attention to you, and you forget that it is often simply a deference to your age.

I ordered a chicken-fried steak and a cup of coffee and listened to Jimmy Clanton’s recording of “Just a Dream” that came from the jukebox next door. Through the open doorway that gave onto the empty dance floor, I could see a half-dozen people at the bar against the far wall. I watched a man my age, with waved blond hair, drink his whiskey down to the ice, point to the glass for the bartender to refill it, then rise from his stool and walk across the dance floor into the cafe.

He wore gray slacks, a green sport shirt with blue flowers on it, shined loafers, white socks, a gold watch, and gold clip-on ballpoint pens in his shirt pocket. He wore his shirt outside his slacks to hide his paunch and love handles.

“Hey, hon, let me have a cheeseburger and bring it up to the bar, will you?” he said.

Then his eyes adjusted to the light and he looked at me more carefully.

“Great God Almighty,” he said.

“Dave Robicheaux. You son of a buck.”

A voice and a face out of the past, not simply mine but from an era. Dixie Lee Pugh, my freshman roommate at Southwestern Louisiana Institute in 1956: a pecker wood kid from a river town north of Baton Rouge, with an accent more Mississippi than Louisiana, who flunked out his first semester, then went to Memphis and cut ajUk two records at the same studio where Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Elvis began their careers. The second record put him on New York television, and we watched in awe while he played his sunburst rhythm-and-blues guitar or hammered his fingers on the piano keyboard while an audience of thousands went insane and danced in the aisles.

He was one of the biggest in the early rock ‘n’ roll era. But he had something more going for him than many of the others did. He was the real article, an honest-to-God white blues singer. He learned his music in the Baptist church, but somebody in that little cotton and pecan-orchard town rubbed a lot of pain into him, too, because it was in everything he sang and it wasn’t manufactured for the moment, either.

Then we read and heard other stories about him: the four or five failed marriages, the death of one of his children in a fire, a hit-and-run accident and DWI in Texas that put him in Huntsville pen.

“Dave, I don’t believe it,” he said, grinning.

“I saw you ten or twelve years ago in New Orleans. You were a cop.”

I remembered it. It had been in a low-rent bar off Canal, the kind of place that featured yesterday’s celebrities, where the clientele made noise during the performances and insulted the entertainers.

He sat down next to me and shook hands, almost as an afterthought.

“We got to drink some mash and talk some trash,” he said, then told the waitress to bring me a beer or a highball.

“No, thanks, Dixie,” I said.

“You mean like it’s too late or too early in the day or like you’re off the jug?” he said.

“I go to meetings now. You know what I mean?”

“Heck yeah. That takes guts, man. I admire it.” His eyes were green and filled with an alcohol shine. He looked at me directly a moment, then his eyes blinked and he looked momentarily embarrassed.

“I read in the newspaper about your wife, man. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you.”

“They caught the guys that did it?”

“More or less.”

“Huh,” he said, and studied me for a moment. I could see that he was becoming uncomfortable with the knowledge that a chance meeting with an old friend is no guarantee that you can reclaim pleasant moments out of the past. Then he smiled again.

“You still a cop?” he asked.

“I own a bait and boat-rental business south of New Iberia. I came up here last night to pick up some refrigeration equipment and got stuck in the storm.”

He nodded. We were both silent.

“Are you playing here, Dixie?” I said.

Mistake.

“No, I don’t do that anymore. I never really got back to it after that trouble in Texas.”

He cleared his throat and took a cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket.

“Say, hon, how about getting me my drink out of the bar?”

The waitress smiled, put down the rag she had been using to clean the counter, and went into the nightclub next door.

“You know about that stuff in Texas?” he asked.

“Yes, I think so.”

“I was DWI, all right, and I ran away from the accident. But the guy run that stop sign. There wasn’t no way I could have avoided it. But it killed his little boy, man. That’s some hard shit to live with. I got out in eighteen months with good time.” He made lines on a napkin with his thumbnail.

“A lot of people just don’t want to forget, though.”

I didn’t know what to say. I felt sorry for him. He seemed little different from the kid I used to know, except he was probably ninety-proof most of the time now. I remembered a quote in a Newsweek story about Dixie Lee that seemed to define him better than anything else I had ever seen written about him. The reporter had asked him if any of his band members could read music. He replied, “Yeah, some of them can, but it don’t hurt their playing any.”

So I asked him what he was doing now, because I had to say something.

“Leaseman,” he said.

“Like Hank Snow used to say, “From old Montana down to Alabama.” I cover it all. Anyplace there’s oil and coal. The money’s right, too, podna.”

The waitress put his bourbon and water down in front of him. He drank from it and winked at her over his glass.

“I’m glad you’re doing okay, Dixie,” I said.

“Yeah, it’s a good life. A Caddy convertible, a new address every week, it beats collard greens and grits.” He hit me on the arm.

“Heck, it’s all rock ‘n’ roll, anyway, man.”

I nodded good-naturedly and looked through the service window at the Negro woman who was scraping my hash browns and chicken-fried steak onto a plate. I was about to tell the waitress that I had meant the order to go.

“Well, I got some people waiting on me,” Dixie Lee said.

“Like, some of the sweet young things still come around, you know what I mean? Take it easy, buddy. You look good.”

I shook hands with him, ate my steak, bought a second cup of coffee for the road, and walked out into the rain.

The wind buffeted my truck all the way across the Atchafalaya basin. When the sun came up the light was gray and wet, and ducks and herons were flying low over the dead cypress in the marsh. The water in the bays was the color of lead and capping in the wind. A gas flare burned on a drilling rig set back in a flooded stand of willow trees. Each morning I began the day with a prayer, thanking my Higher Power for my sobriety of yesterday and asking Him to help me keep it today. This morning I included Dixie Lee in my prayer.

I drove back to New Iberia through St. Martinville. The sun was above the oaks on Bayou Teche now, but in the deep, early morning shadows the mist still hung like clouds of smoke among the cattails and damp tree trunks. It was only March, but spring was roaring into southern Louisiana, as it always does after the long gray rains of February. Along East Main in New Iberia the yards were filled with blooming azalea, roses, and yellow and red hibiscus, and the trellises and gazebos were covered with trumpet vine and clumps of purple wisteria. I rumbled over the drawbridge and followed the dirt road along the bayou south of town, where I operated a fish dock and lived with a six-year-old El Salvadoran refugee girl named Alafair in the old home my father had built out of cypress and oak during the Depression.

The wood had never been painted, was dark and hard as iron, and the beams had been notched and joined with pegs. The pecan trees in my front yard were thick with leaf and still dripping with rainwater, which tinked on the tin roof of the gallery. The yard always stayed in shadow and was covered with layers of blackened leaves. The elderly mulatto woman who baby-sat Alafair for me was in the side yard, pulling the vinyl storm covers off my rabbit hutches. She was the color of a copper penny and had turquoise eyes, like many South Louisiana Negroes who are part French. Her body looked put together out of sticks, and her skin was covered with serpentine lines. She dipped snuff and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes constantly, and bossed me around in my own home, but she could work harder than anyone I had ever known, and she had been fiercely loyal to my family since I was a child.

My boat dock was in full sunlight now, and I could see Batist, the other black person who worked for me, loading an ice chest for two white men in their outboard. He was shirtless and bald, and the weight of the ice chest made his wide back and shoulders ridge with muscle. He broke up kindling for my barbecue pit with his bare hands, and once I saw him jerk a six-foot alligator out of the water by its tail and throw it up on a sandbar.

I stepped around the puddles in the yard to the gallery.

“What you gonna do this coon?” Clarise, the mulatto woman, said.

She had put my three-legged raccoon, Tripod, on his chain, which was attached to a wire clothesline so he could run up and down in the side yard. She pulled him up in the air by the chain. His body danced and curled as though he were being garroted.

“Clarise, don’t do that.”

“Ax him what he done, him,” she said.

“Go look my wash basket. Go look your shirts. They blue yesterday. They brown now. Go smell, you.”

“I’ll take him down to the dock.”

“Tell Batist not to bring him back, no.” She dropped Tripod, half strangled, to the ground.

“He come in my house again, you gonna see him cooking with the sweet potato.”

I unsnapped his chain from the clothesline and walked him down to the bait shop and cafe on the dock. I was always amazed at the illusion of white supremacy in southern society, since more often than not our homes were dominated and run by people of color.

Batist and I bailed the rainwater from the previous night’s storm out of my rental boats, filled the cigarette and candy machines, seined dead shiners out of the live-bait tanks, drained the water out of the ice bins and put fresh ice on top of the soda pop and beer, and started the barbecue fire for the lunch that we prepared for midday fishermen. Then I opened up the beach umbrellas that were set in the holes of the huge wooden telephone spools that I used as tables, and went back up to the house.

It had turned out to be a beautiful morning. The sky was blue, the grass in the fields a deeper green from the rain; the wind was cool on the gallery, the backyard still deep in shadow under the mimosa tree, and my redwood flower boxes were streaked with water and thick with petunias and Indian paintbrush. Alafair was at the kitchen table in her pajama bottoms, coloring in the Mickey Mouse book I had bought her the day before. Her black hair was cut in bangs; her eyes were big and brown, her face as round as a pie plate, and her skin had already started to grow darker with tan. If there was any physical imperfection in her, it was her wide-set front teeth, which only made her smile look larger than it actually was. It was hard to believe that less than a year ago I had pulled her from a downed plane out at Southwest Pass just off the Gulf, a drowning little girl whose bones had felt hollow as a bird’s, whose gasping mouth had looked like a guppy’s in my wife’s lap.

I brushed her fine black hair under my palm.

“How you doing, little guy?” I said.

“Where you went, Dave?”

“I got caught in the storm and had to stay in Baton Rouge.”

“Oh.”

Her hand went back to coloring. Then she stopped and grinned at me, full of glee.

“Tripod went ca-ca in Clarise basket,” she said.

“I heard about it. Look, don’t say ‘ca-ca.’ Say ‘He went to the bathroom.’ “

“No ca-ca?”

“That’s right. ‘He went to the bathroom.’ ” She repeated it after me, both of our heads nodding up and down.

She was in the first grade at the Catholic school in New Iberia, but she seemed to learn more English from Clarise and Batist and his wife than she did from me and the nuns. (A few lines you might hear from those three on any particular day: “What time it is?”

“For how come you burn them leafs under my window, you?”

“While I was driving your truck, me, somebody pass a nail under the wheel and give it a big flat.” I hugged Alafair, kissed her on top of the head, and went into the bedroom to undress and take a shower. The breeze through the window smelled of wet earth and trees and the gentle hint of four-o’clocks that were still open in the shade. I should have been bursting with the spring morning, but I felt listless and spent, traveling on the outer edge of my envelope, and it wasn’t simply because of bad dreams and insomnia the previous night. These moments would descend upon me at peculiar times, as though my heart’s blood were fouled, and suddenly my mind would light with images and ring with sounds I wasn’t ready to deal with.

It could happen anywhere. But right now it was happening in my bedroom. I had replaced several boards in the wall, or filled the twelve-gauge buckshot and deer-slug holes with liquid wood, and sanded them smooth. The gouged and splintered headboard, stained brown with my wife’s blood as though it had been flung there by a paintbrush, lay in a corner of the old collapsed barn at the foot of my property. But when I closed my eyes I saw the streaks of shotgun fire in the darkness, heard the explosions that were as loud as the lightning outside, heard her screams as she cowered under a sheet and tried to shield herself with her hands while I ran frantically toward the house in the rain, my own screams lost in the thunder rolling across the land.

As always when these moments of dark reverie occurred in my waking day, there was no way I could think my way out of them.

Instead, I put on my gym trunks and running shoes and pumped iron in the backyard. I did dead lifts, curls, and military presses with a ninety-pound bar in sets of ten and repeated the sets six times. Then I ran four miles along the dirt road by the bayou, the sunlight spinning like smoke through the canopy of oak and cypress trees overhead. Bream were still feeding on insects among the cattails and lily pads, and sometimes in a shady cut between two cypress trees I would see the back of a largemouth bass roll just under the surface.

I turned around at the drawbridge, waved to the bridge tender and hit it hard all the way home. My wind was good, the blood sang in my chest, my stomach felt flat and hard, yet I wondered how long I would keep mortality and memory at bay.

Always the racetrack gambler, trying to intuit and control the future with only the morning line to operate on.

Three days later I was using a broomstick to push the rainwater out of the folds of the canvas awning over my dock when the telephone rang inside the bait shop. It was Dixie Lee Pugh.

“I’ll take you to lunch,” he said.

“Thanks but I’m working.”

“I want to talk to you.”

“Go ahead.”

“I want to talk to you alone.”

“Where are you?”

“Lafayette.”

“Drive on over. Go out East Main, then take the bayou road south of town. You’ll run right into my place.”

“Give me an hour.”

“You sound a little gray, podna.”

“Yeah, I probably need to get married again or something. Dangle loose.”

Every morning Batist and I grilled chickens and links on the barbecue pit that I had made by splitting an oil drum horizontally with an acetylene torch and welding hinges and metal legs on it. I sold paper-plate lunches of barbecue and dirty rice for three-fifty apiece, and I usually cleared thirty dollars or so from the fishermen who were either coming in for the day or about to go out. Then after we had cleaned the cable-spool tables, Batist and I would fix ourselves plates and open bottles of Dr. Pepper and eat under one of the umbrellas by the water’s edge.

It was a warm, bright afternoon, and the wind was lifting the moss on the dead cypress trees in the marsh. The sky was as blue and perfect as the inside of a teacup.

“That man drive like he don’t know the road got holes in it,” Batist said. His sun-faded denim shirt was open on his chest. He wore a dime on a string around his neck to keep away the gris-gris, an evil spell, and his black chest looked like it was made of boilerplate.

The pink Cadillac convertible, with its top down, was streaked with mud and rippled and dented along the fenders. I watched the front end dip into a chuckhole and shower yellow water all over the windshield.

“Dixie Lee never did things in moderation,” I said.

“You ain’t renting him our boat?”

“He’s just coming out to talk about something. He used to be a famous country and rock ‘n’ roll star.”

Batist kept chewing and looked at me flatly, obviously unimpressed.

“I’m serious. He used to be big stuff up in Nashville,” I said.

His eyes narrowed, as they always did when he heard words that he didn’t recognize.

“It’s in Tennessee. That’s where they make a lot of country records.”

No help.

“I’ll get us another Dr. Pepper. Did you feed Tripod?” I said.

“You t’ink that coon don’t know where the food at?”

I didn’t understand.

“He ain’t lost his nose, no.”

“What are you saying, Batist?”

“He eat all your fried pies. Go look your fried pies.”

Dixie Lee cut his engine, slammed the car door behind him, and lumbered down the dock into the bait shop, flipping one hand at us in recognition. His face was bloodless, the skin stretched tight on the bone, beaded with perspiration like drops of water on a pumpkin. His charcoal shirt, which was covered with roses, was damp along the buttons and under the armpits.

I followed him inside the bait shop. He dropped a five-dollar bill on the counter, opened a long-necked Jax on the side of the beer box, and upended it into his mouth. He kept swallowing until it was almost empty, then he took a breath of air and opened and closed his eyes.

“Boy, do I got one,” he said.

“I mean wicked, son, like somebody screwed a brace and bit through both temples.”

He tilted the bottle up again, one hand on his hip, and emptied it.

“A mellow start, but it don’t keep the snakes in their basket very long, do it?”

“Nope.”

“What we’re talking about here is the need for more serious fluids. You got any JD or Beam lying around?”

“I’m afraid not, Dixie.” I rang up his sale and put his change on the counter.

“These babies will have to do, then.” He opened another Jax, took a long pull, and blew out his breath.

“A preacher once asked me, “Son, can you take two drinks and walk away from it?” I said, “I can’t tell you the answer to that, sir, ’cause I never tried.” That ought to be funny, but I guess it’s downright pathetic, ain’t it?”

“What’s up, partner?”

He looked around the empty bait shop.

“How about taking me for a boat ride?” he said.

“I’m kind of tied up right now.”

“I’ll pay you for your time. It’s important, man.”

His green eyes looked directly into mine. I walked to the bait-shop door.

“I’ll be back in a half hour,” I called to Batist, who was still eating his lunch under the umbrella.

“I appreciate it, Dave. You’re righteous people.” Dixie Lee popped open a paper bag and put four bottles of Jax inside.

I took him in an outboard down the bayou, past the four-corners, where the old flaking general store with its wide gallery sat in the shade of an enormous oak tree. Some old men and several Negroes from a road-maintenance crew were drinking soda pop on the gallery.

The wake from the outboard swelled up through the lily pads and cattails and slapped against the cypress roots along the bank. Dixie Lee lay back against the bow, the beer bottle in his hand filled with amber sunlight, his eyes narrowing wistfully in the sun’s refraction off the brown water. I cut the engine and let us float on our own wake into an overhang of willow trees. In the sudden quiet we could hear a car radio playing an old Hank Williams song in the shell parking lot of the general store.

“Good God Almighty, is that inside my head or outside it?” he asked.

“It’s from the four-corners,” I said, and smiled at him. I took out my Puma pocketknife and shaved the bark off a wet willow stick.

“Boy, it takes me back, though. When I started out, they said if you don’t play it like Hank or Lefty, it ain’t worth diddly-squat on a rock. They were right, too. Hey, you know the biggest moment I ever had in my career? It wasn’t them two gold records, and it sure wasn’t marrying some movie actress with douche water for brains. It was when I got to cut a live album with the Fat Man down in New Orleans. I was the only white artist he ever recorded with. Man, he was beautiful. He looked like a little fat baby pig up on that piano bench, with a silver shirt on and rhinestone coat and rings all over his fingers. He was grinning and rocking and pounding the keys with those little sausage fingers, sweat flying off his face, and the whole auditorium going ape shit I mean with white broads trying to climb on the stage and people doing the dirty boogie in front of the cops. I mean it was his show, he owned them, man, but each time he finished a ride he’d point at me so the spotlight would swing over on my guitar and I’d get half of all that yelling out there. That cat had a generous heart, man.”

Dixie Lee shook his head and opened another Jax with his Pocketknife. I looked at my watch.

“Yeah, I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s a problem I got, getting wrapped up in yesterday’s scrapbook. Look, I got something bad on my mind. In fact, it’s crazy. I don’t even know how to explain it. Maybe there’s nothing to it. Hell, I don’t know.”

“How about just telling me?”

“Star Drilling sent me and a couple of other lea semen up to Montana. On the eastern slope of the Rockies, what they call the East Front up there. Big gas domes, son. Virgin country. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars. Except there’s a problem with some wilderness areas and the Blackfeet Indian Reservation.

“But that don’t concern me. I’m just a lease man right? Fooling around with the Forest Service or Indians or these crazy bastards spiking trees”

“Doing what?”

“A bunch of cult people or something don’t want anybody cutting down trees, so they hammer nails and railroad spikes way down in the trunk. Then some lumberjack comes along with a McCul-lough and almost rips his face off. But I don’t have any beef with these people. Everybody’s got their own scene, right? Let Star Drilling take care of the PR and the politics, and Dixie Lee will get through the day with a little JD and God’s good grace.

“But we came back for six weeks of deals and meetings at the Oil Center in Lafayette. So I’m staying at the motel with these two other lease guys. The company picks up all the bills, the bar’s always open, and a black guy serves us Bloody Marys and chilled shrimp by the pool every morning. It should have been a nice vacation before I go back to wheeling and dealing among the Indians and the crazies.

“Except two nights ago one of the other lease guys has a party in his rooms. Actually it’s more like a geek show. Broads ripping off their bras, people spitting ice and tonic on each other. Then I guess I got romantic and went into the bedroom with this big blond gal that looked like she could throw a hog over a fence.”

His eyes shifted away from me, and his cheeks colored slightly. He drank again from the Jax without looking back at me.

“But I was deep into the jug that night, definitely not up to her level of bumping uglies,” he said.

“I must have passed out and rolled off the side of the bed between the bed and the wall, because that’s where I woke up about five in the morning. The snakes were starting to clatter around in their basket, then I heard the two other lease guys talking by themselves in the other room.

“One guy I ain’t using his name says, “Don’t worry about it. We did what we had to do.” Then the other guy says, “Yeah, but we should have taken more time. We should have put rocks on top of them or something. Animals are always digging up stuff in the woods, then a hunter comes along.”

“Then the first guy says, “Nobody’s going to find them. Nobody cares about them. They were both troublemakers. Right or wrong?”

“Then the second guy says, “I guess you’re right.”

“And the first guy says, “It’s like a war. You make up the rules when it’s over.”

“I stayed quiet in the bedroom till I heard them call room service for breakfast and a couple of bottles of Champale, then I walked into the living room in my skivvies, looking like I’d just popped out of my momma’s womb. I thought both of them was going to brown their britches right there.”

“You think they killed some people?”

He touched his fingers nervously to his forehead.

“Good God, man, I don’t know,” he said.

“What’s it sound like to you?”

“It sounds bad.”

“What d’you think I ought to do?”

I rubbed my palm on the knee of my khaki work trousers, then clicked my nails on the metal housing of the outboard engine. The dappled sunlight fell through the willows on Dixie’s flushed face.

“I can introduce you to the Iberia sheriff or a pretty good DEA agent over in Lafayette,” I said.

“Are you kidding, man? I need a drug agent in my life like a henhouse needs an egg-sucking dog.”

“Well, there’s still the sheriff.”

He drank the foam out of the Jax bottle and looked at me with one eye squinted shut against the light.

“I’m getting the impression you think I’d just be playing with my swizzle stick,” he said.

I raised my eyebrows and didn’t answer.

“Come on, Dave. I need some help. I can’t handle worry. It eats my lunch.”

“Where do you think this happened?”

“Up in Montana, I guess. That’s where we been the last three months.”

“We can talk to the FBI, but I don’t think it’s going anywhere. You just don’t have enough information, Dixie.” I paused for a moment.

“There’s another bump in the road, too.”

He looked at me as a child might if he was about to be brought to task.

“When I was on the grog, I had a hard time convincing people about some things I heard and saw,” I said.

“It’s unfair, but it goes with the territory.”

He stared at the water and pinched his eyes with his fingers.

“My advice is to get away from these guys,” I said.

“I work with them.”

“There’re other companies.”

“Be serious. I was in Huntsville. The Texas parole office don’t give you the best letters of recommendation.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, then.”

“It’s a mess of grief, huh?”

I began pulling in the anchor rope.

“You’re gonna turn to stone on me?” he said.

“I wish I could help. I don’t think I can. That’s the way it is.”

“Before you crank that engine, let me ask you a question. Your father was killed on a rig out in the Gulf, wasn’t he?”

“That’s right.”

“It was a Star rig, wasn’t it?”

“Yep.”

“They didn’t have a blowout preventer on. It killed a couple of dozen guys when it blew.”

“You’ve got a good memory, Dixie.” I twisted the throttle to open the gas feed and yanked the starter rope. It didn’t catch.

“It don’t matter to you that I’m talking about Star Drilling Company?” he said.

I kept yanking the rope while oil and gas bled away from the engine into the water. Then I put one knee on the plank seat, held the engine housing firm with my palm, and ripped the starter handle past my ear. The engine roared, the propeller churned a cloud of yellow mud and dead hyacinth vines out of the bottom, and I turned us back into the full sunlight, the slap of water under the bow, the wind that smelled of jasmine and wisteria. On the way back Dixie sat on the bow with his forearms lying loosely between his legs, his face listless and empty now, his rose-emblazoned shirt puffing with warm air.

Late that afternoon the wind shifted out of the south and you could smell the wetlands and just a hint of salt in the air. Then a bank of thunderheads slid across the sky from the Gulf, tumbling across the sun like cannon smoke, and the light gathered in the oaks and cypress and willow trees and took on a strange green cast as though you were looking at the world through water. It rained hard, dancing on the bayou and the lily pads in the shallows, clattering on my gallery and rabbit hutches, lighting the freshly plowed fields with a black sheen.

Then suddenly it was over, and the sky cleared and the western horizon was streaked with fire. Usually on a spring evening like this, when the breeze was cool and flecked with rain, Batist and I headed for Evangeline Downs in Lafayette. But the bottom had dropped out of the oil business in Louisiana, the state had the highest rate of unemployment in the country and the worst credit rating, and the racetrack had closed.

I boiled crawfish for supper, and Alafair and I shelled and ate them on the redwood picnic table under the mimosa tree in the backyard. That night I dreamed of a bubble of fire burning under the Gulf’s green surface. The water boiled and hissed, geysers of steam and dirty smoke rose into air, and an enormous blue-green oil slick floated all the way to the western horizon. Somewhere far down below among the twisted spars and drill pipe and cables and the flooded wreckage of the quarter boat were the bodies of my father and nineteen other men who went down with the rig when the drill bit punched into a pay sand and the wellhead blew.

The company’s public relations men said that they didn’t have a blowout preventer on because they had never hit an oil sand at that depth in that part of the Gulf before. I wondered what my father thought in those last moments of his life. I never saw fear in him. No matter how badly he was hurt by circumstances or my mother’s unfaithfulness, and eventually by drunken brawls in bars and the times he was locked up in the parish jail, he could always grin and wink at me and my brother and convincingly pretend to us that misfortune was not even worthy of mention.

But what did he feel in those last moments, high up on the mon keyboard in the dark, when the rig started to shake and groan and he saw the roughnecks on the platform floor dropping tongs and chain and running from the eruption of sand, salt water, gas, oil, and cascading drill pipe that in seconds would explode into an orange and yellow flame that melted steel spars like licorice? Did he think of me and my brother, Jimmie?

I bet he did. Even when he clipped his safety belt onto the Geronimo wire and jumped into the black, even as the rig caved with him on top of the quarter boat, I bet his thoughts were of us.

They never found his body, but even now, almost twenty-two years later, he visited me in my sleep and sometimes I thought he spoke to me during my waking day. In my dream I saw him walking out of the surf, the green waves and foam sliding around the knees of his overalls, his powerful body strung with rust-colored seaweed. His wind-burned skin was as dark as a mulatto’s, his teeth white, his thick, curly hair black as an Indian’s. His tin hat was cocked at an angle on his head, and when he popped a wet kitchen match on his thumbnail and lit a cigar stub in the corner of his mouth and then crinkled his eyes at me, a shaft of morning sunlight struck his hat and flashed as bright as a heliograph. I could feel the salt water surge over my legs as I walked toward him.

But it’s the stuff of dreams. My father was dead. My wife was, too. The false dawn, with its illusions and mist-wrapped softness, can be as inadequate and fleeting as Morpheus’ gifts.

The days became warmer the first week in April, and on some mornings I went out on the salt at dawn and seined for shrimp in the red sunrise. In the afternoon I helped Batist in the bait shop, then worked in my flower beds, pruning the trellises of purple and yellow roses that I grew on the south side of the house. I pumped iron and did three miles along the dirt road by the bayou. At four o’clock I would hear the school bus stop, and five minutes later I would hear Alafair’s lunch box clatter on the kitchen table, the icebox open; then she would come looking for me in the backyard.

I sometimes wondered if perhaps she were simply fascinated with me as she would be by a strange and interesting animal that had come unexpectedly into her life. Her mother had drowned while holding her up in a wobbling bubble of air inside a crashed and sunken plane flown out of El Salvador by a Sanctuary priest. Her father had either been killed by the army in the mountains or he had been “disappeared” inside a military prison. Now through chance and accident she bed with me in my rural Cajun world on the edge of the Louisiana wetlands.

One afternoon I had moved the picnic table out in the sunlight and had gone to sleep on top of it in my running shorts. I heard her bang the screen door, then when I didn’t open my eyes she found a duck feather by the pond and began to touch peculiar places on my body with it: the white patch in my hair, my mustache, the curled Pungi-stick scar on my stomach. Then I felt her tickle the thick, raised welts on my thigh, which looked like small arrowheads embedded under the skin, where I still carried shrapnel from a mine and sometimes set off airport metal detectors.

When I still refused to respond I heard her walk across the grass to the clothesline, unsnap Tripod from his chain, and suddenly he was sitting on my chest, his whiskers and wet nose and masked beady eyes pointed into my face. Alafair’s giggles soared into the mimosa tree.

That evening while I was closing the bait shop and folding up the umbrellas over the tables on the dock, a man parked a new Plymouth that looked like a rental or a company car by my shale boat ramp and walked down the dock toward me. Because of his erect, almost fierce posture, he looked taller than he actually was. In reality he probably wasn’t over five and a half feet tall, but his neck was thick and corded with vein, his shoulders wide and sloping like a weight lifter’s, his eyebrows one dark, uninterrupted line. His muscles seemed so tightly strung together that one muscular motion seemed to activate a half-dozen others, like pulling on the center of a cobweb with your finger. If anything, he reminded me of a pile of bricks.

He wore his slacks high up on his hips, and the collar of his short-sleeved white shirt was unbuttoned and his tie pulled loose. He didn’t smile. Instead, his eyes flicked over the bait shop and the empty tables, then he opened a badge on me.

“I’m Special Agent Dan Nygurski, Mr. Robicheaux,” he said.

“Drug Enforcement Administration. Do you mind if I talk with you a little bit?”

The accent didn’t go with the name or the man. It was hillbilly, nasal, southern mountains, a bobby pin twanging in your ear.

“I’m closing up for the day and we’re about to go to a crawfish boil in the park,” I said.

“This won’t take long. I talked with the sheriff in New Iberia and he said you could probably help me out. You used to be a deputy in his department, didn’t you?”

“For a little while.”

His face was seamed and coarse, the eyes slightly red around the rims. He flexed his mouth in a peculiar way when he talked, and it caused the muscles to jump in his neck, as though they were attached to a string. ‘ “Before that you were on the force in New Orleans a long time? A lieutenant in homicide?”

“That’s right.”

“I’ll be,” he said, and looked at the red sun through the cypress trees and the empty boats tied to the dock.

My experience with federal agents of any kind has always been the same. They take a long time to get to it.

“Could I rent a boat from you? Or maybe could you go with me and show me some of these canals that lead into Vermilion Bay?” he asked. His thinning dark hair was cut GI, and he brushed his fingers back through it and widened his eyes and looked around again.

“I’ll rent you a boat in the morning. But you’ll have to go out by yourself. What is it exactly I can help you with, Mr. Nygurski?”

“I’m just messing around, really.” He flexed his mouth again.

“I heard some guys were off-loading some bales down around Vermilion Bay. I just like to check out the geography sometimes.”

“Are you out of New Orleans?”

“No, no, this is my first trip down here. It’s nice country. I’ve got to try some of this crawfish while I’m here.”

“Wait a minute. I’m not following you. You’re interested in some dope smugglers operating around Vermilion Bay but you’re from somewhere else?”

“It’s just an idle interest. I think they might be the same guys I was after a few years ago in Florida. They were unloading a cigarette boat at night outside of Fort Myers, and some neckers out in the dunes stumbled right into the middle of the operation. These guys killed all four of them. The girls were both nineteen. It’s not my case anymore, though.”

The twang, the high-pitched voice, just would not go with the subject matter nor the short, thick-bodied dark man who I now noticed was slew-footed and walked a bit sideways like a crab.

“So you’re out of Florida?” I said.

“No, no, you got me all wrong. I’m out of Great Falls, Montana, now, and I wanted to talk with you about”

I shook my head.

“Dixie Lee Pugh,” I said.

We walked up the dock, across the dirt road and through the shadows of the pecan trees in my front yard. When I asked him how he had connected me with Dixie Lee, he said that one of his people had written down my tag number the morning I had met Dixie in the cafe outside Baton Rouge. But I also guessed that the DEA had a tap on his motel phone. I went inside the house, brought out two cold cans of Dr. Pepper, and we sat on the porch steps. Through the trunks of the pecan trees I could see the shadows lengthening on the bayou.

“I don’t mean any disrespect toward your investigation, Mr. Nygurski, but I don’t think he’s a major drug dealer. I think y’all are firing in the well.”

“Why?”

“I believe he has a conscience. He might be a user, but that doesn’t mean he’s dealing.”

“You want to tell me why he came out to see you?”

“He’s in some trouble. But it doesn’t have anything to do with drugs, and he’ll have to be the one to tell you about it.”

“Did he tell you he celled with Sal the Duck in Huntsville?”

“With who?”

“Sal the Duck. Also known as Sally Dio or Sally Dee. You think that’s funny?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I wiped my mouth with my hand.

“But am I supposed to be impressed?”

“A lot of people would be. His family used to run Galveston. Slots, whores, every floating crap game, dope, you name it. Then they moved out to Vegas and Tahoe and about two years ago they showed up in Montana. Sal came back to visit his cousins in Galveston and got nailed with some hot credit cards. I hear he didn’t like Huntsville at all.”

“I bet he didn’t. It’s worse than Angola.”

“But he still managed to turn a dollar or two. He was the connection for the whole joint, and I think he was piecing off part of his action to Pugh.”

“Well, you have your opinion. But I think Dixie’s basically an alcoholic and a sick man.”

Nygurski took a newspaper clipping out of his shirt pocket and handed it to me.

“Read this,” he said.

“I guess the reporters thought this was funny.”

The headline read “CURIOSITY KILLED THE BEAR.” The dateline was Poison, Montana, and the lead paragraph described how a duffel bag containing forty packages of cocaine had been dropped by parachute into a heavily wooded area east of Flathead Lake and was then found by a black bear who strung powder and wrappers all over a hillside before he OD’d.

“That parachute came down on national forestland. But guess who has a hunting lease right next door?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sally Dio and his old man. Guess who acted as their leasing agent?”

“Dixie Lee.”

“But maybe he’s just a sick guy.”

I looked away at the softness of the light on the bayou. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the knuckles on his hand as he clenched the soda can.

“Come on, what do you think?” he said.

“I think you’re in overdrive.”

“You’re right. I don’t like these cocksuckers”

“Nobody does. But I’m out of the business. You’re tilting with the wrong windmill.”

“I don’t think killing bears is funny, either. I don’t like to see these guys bring their dirt and greed into a beautiful country. Your friend Pugh is standing up to his bottom lip in a lake of shit and the motorboat is just about to pass.”

“Then tell him that,” I said, and looked at my watch. The breeze dented the leaves in the pecan trees.

“Believe me, I will. But right now I’m frig mo here.”

“What?”

“It means “Fuck it, I got my orders.” In three days I go back to Great Falls.” He drained his soda can, crushed it in his palm, and set it gently on the porch step. He stood up and handed me his card.

“My motel number in Lafayette is on the back. Or later you can call me collect in Montana if you ever want to share any of your thoughts.”

“I’ve got nothing worth sharing.”

“It sounds depressing.” His mouth made that peculiar jerking motion again.

“Tell me, do you find something strange about my face?”

“No, I wouldn’t say that.”

“Come on, I’m not sensitive.”

“I meant you no offense,” I said.

“Boy, you’re a careful one. A woman once told me my face looked like soil erosion. I think it was my wife. Watch out for Dixie Pugh, Robicheaux. He’ll sell you a bowl of rat turds and call it chocolate chip.”

“I changed my mind. I’ll share one thought with you, Mr. Nygurski. You didn’t come all the way down here to follow a guy like Dixie Lee around. No matter how you cut it, he’s not a long-ball hitter.”

“Maybe he is, maybe he isn’t.”

“What’s really going on up there?”

“Everything that’s going on in the rest of the country, except accelerated. It’s a real zoo story. All the big players are there, nosing up to the trough. Keep fooling around with that rock ‘n’ roller and you’ll meet some of them.”

He walked off through the trees, his feet loud on the dead leaves and dried pecan husks. si The moon was down that night, the sky black, and trees of lightning trembled on the southern horizon. At four in the morning I was awakened by the rumble of dry thunder and the flickering patterns of light on the wall. A tuning fork was vibrating in my chest, but I couldn’t explain why, and my skin was hot and dry to the touch even though the breeze was cool through the window. I heard sounds that were not there: a car engine dying on the road, the footsteps of two men coming through the trees, a board squeaking on the porch, the scrape of a prizing bar being inserted between the front door and the jamb. They were the sounds of ghosts, because one man had been electrocuted in his bathtub with his radio in his lap and the other had died in an attic off St. Charles when five hollow-point rounds from my .45 had exploded up through the floor into the middle of his life.

But fear is an irrational emotion that floats from object to object like a helium balloon that you touch with your fingertips. I opened my dresser drawer, took my .45 from under my work shirts, slipped the heavy clip into the magazine, and lay back down in the dark. The flat of the barrel felt hot against my thigh. I put my arm across my eyes and tried to fall asleep again. It was no use.

I put on my sandals and khakis and walked through the dark trunks of the pecan trees in the front yard, across the road and down to the dock and the bait shop. Then the moon rose from behind a cloud and turned the willow trees to silver and illuminated the black shape of a nutria swimming across the bayou toward the cattails. What was I doing here? I told myself that I would get a head start on the day. Yes, yes, certainly that was it.

I opened the cooler in which I kept the soda pop and the long-necked bottles of Jax, Dixie, and Pearl beer. Yesterday’s ice had melted, and some of the beer labels floated in the water. I propped my arms on the lip of the cooler and shut my eyes. In the marsh I heard a nutria cry out to its mate, which always sounds like the hysterical scream of a woman. I plunged my hands into the water, dipped it into my face, and breathed deeply with the shock of the cold. Then I wiped my face on a towel and flung it across the counter onto the duckboards.

I went back up to the house, sat at the kitchen table in the dark, and put my head on my forearms.

Annie, Annie.

I heard bare feet shuffle on the linoleum behind me. I raised my head and looked up at Alafair, who was standing in a square of moonlight, dressed in her pajamas that were covered with smiling clocks. Her face was filled with sleep and puzzlement. She kept blinking at me as though she were waking from a dream, then she walked to me, put her arms around my neck, and pressed her head against my chest. I could smell baby shampoo in her hair. Her hand touched my eyes.

“Why your face wet, Dave?” she said.

“I just washed it, little guy.”

“Oh.” Then, “Something ain’t wrong?”

“Not ‘ain’t.” Don’t say ‘ain’t.”

” She didn’t answer. She just held me more tightly. I stroked her hair and kissed her, then picked her up and carried her back into her bedroom. I laid her down on the bed and pulled the sheet over her feet. Her stuffed animals were scattered on the floor. The yard and the trees were turning gray, and I could hear Tripod running up and down on his clothesline.

She looked up at me from the pillow. Her face was round, and I could see the spaces between her teeth.

“Dave, is bad people coming back?”

“No. They’ll never be back. I promise.”

And I had to look away from her lest she see my eyes.

One week later I took Alafair for breakfast in New Iberia, and when I unfolded a discarded copy of the Daily Iberian I saw Dixie Lee’s picture on the front page. It was a file photo, many years old, and it showed him onstage in boat like suede shoes, pegged and pleated slacks, a sequined white sport coat, a sunburst guitar hanging from his neck.

He had been burned in a fire in a fish camp out in Henderson swamp. A twenty-two-year-old waitress, his “female companion,” as the story called her, had died in the flames. Dixie Lee had been pulled from the water when the cabin, built on stilts, had exploded in a fireball and crashed into the bayou. He was listed in serious condition at Our Lady of Lourdes in Lafayette.

He was also under arrest. The St. Martin Parish sheriffs department had found a dental floss container of cocaine under the front seat of his Cadillac convertible.

I am not going to get involved with his troubles, I told myself. When you use, you lose. A mean lesson, but when you become involved with an addict or a drunk, you simply become an actor in a script that they’ve written for you as well as themselves.

That afternoon Alafair and I made two bird feeders out of coffee cans and hung them in the mimosa tree in the backyard, then we restrung Tripod’s clothesline out in the pecan trees so he wouldn’t have access to Clarise’s wash. We moved his doghouse to the base of a tree, put bricks under it to keep it dry and free of mud, and set his food bowl and water pans in front of the door. Alafair always beamed with fascination while Tripod washed his food before eating, then washed his muzzle and paws afterward.

I fixed etouffee for our supper, and we had just started to eat on the picnic table in the backyard when the phone rang in the kitchen. It was a nun who worked on Dixie Lee’s floor at Lourdes. She said he wanted to see me.

“I can’t come, Sister. I’m sorry,” I said.

She paused.

“Is that all you want me to tell him?” she asked.

“He needs a lawyer. I can give you a couple of names in Lafayette or St. Martinville.”

She paused again. They must teach it in the convent, I thought. It’s an electric silence that makes you feel you’re sliding down the sides of the universe.

“I don’t think he has many friends, Mr. Robicheaux,” she said.

“No one has been to see him. And he asked for you, not an attorney.”

“I’m sorry.”

“To be frank, so am I,” she said, and hung up.

When Alafair and I were washing the dishes, and the plowed and empty sugarcane fields darkened in the twilight outside the window, the telephone rang again.

His voice was thick, coated with phlegm, a whisper into the receiver.

“Son, I really need to see you. They got me gauzed up, doped up, you name it, an enema tube stuck up my ring us He stopped and let out his breath into the phone.

“I need you to listen to me.”

“You need legal help, Dixie. I won’t be much help to you.”

“I got a lawyer. I can hire a bagful of his kind. It won’t do no good. They’re going to send me back to the joint, boy.”

I watched my hand open and close on top of the counter.

“I don’t like to tell you this, podna, but you were holding,” I said.

“That fact’s not going away. You’re going to have to deal with it.”

“It’s a lie, Dave.” I heard the saliva click in his throat.

“I don’t do flake, anymore. It already messed up my life way back there. Maybe sometimes a little reefer. But that’s all.”

I pinched my fingers on my brow.

“Dixie, I just don’t know what I can do for you.”

“Come over. Listen to me for five minutes. I ain’t got anybody else.”

I stared out the screen at the shadows on the lawn, the sweep of night birds against the red sky.

It was windy the next morning and the sky was light blue and filled with tumbling white clouds that caused pools of shadow to move across the cane fields and cow pastures as I drove along the old highway through Broussard into Lafayette. Dixie Lee’s room was on the second floor at Lourdes, and a uniformed sheriffs deputy was playing checkers with him on the edge of the bed. Dixie Lee lay on his side, his head, chest, right shoulder, and right thigh wrapped in bandages. His face looked as though it were crimped inside a white helmet. There was mucus in his eyes, and a clear salve oozed from the edges of his bandages. An IV was hooked into his arm.

He looked at me and said something to the deputy, who set the checkerboard on the nightstand and walked past me, working his cigarette pack out of his shirt pocket.

“I’ll be right in the hall. The door stays open, too,” he said.

I sat down next to the bed. There were oaks hung with moss outside the window. The pressure of Dixie’s head against the pillow made him squint one eye at me.

“I knew you’d come. There’s some guys that can’t be any other way,” he said.

“You sound better,” I said.

“I’m on the edge of my high and about ready to slide down the other side of it. When the centipedes start crawling under these bandages, they’ll be back with the morphine. Dave, I got to get some help. The cops don’t believe me. My own lawyer don’t believe me. They’re going to send my butt to Angola. I can’t do no more time, man. I ain’t good at it. They tore me up over there in Texas. You get in thin cotton, you don’t pick your quota, the boss stands you up on an oil barrel with three other guys. Hot and dirty and hungry, and you stand there all night.”

“They don’t believe what?”

“This” He tried to touch his fingers behind his head.

“Reach around back and feel on them bandages.”

“Dixie, what are”

“Don’t.”

I reached across him and touched my fingertips across the tape.

“It feels like a roll of pennies under there, don’t it?” he said.

“That’s because I woke up just before some guy with a tire iron or a jack handle came down on my head. He was going to bust me right across the lamps, but I twisted away from him just before he swung. The next thing I knew I was in the water. You ever wake up drowning and on fire at the same time? That’s what it was like. There was a gas tank for the outboards under the cabin, and it must have blown and dumped the whole thing in the bayou. Burning boards was hanging off the stilts, the water was full of hot ash, steam hissing all over the fucking place. I thought I’d gone to hell, man.”

He stopped talking and his lips made a tight line. I saw water well up in his green eyes.

“Then I seen something awful. It was the girl, you remember, that redheaded waitress from the cafe in West Baton Rouge. She was on fire, like a big candle burning all over, hung in all them boards and burning against the sky.

“I can’t clean it out of my head, not even when they hit me with the joy juice. Maybe they hit her in the head like they done me. Maybe she was already dead. God, I hope so. I can’t stand thinking about it, man. She didn’t do nothing to anybody.”

I wiped my palms on my slacks and blew out my breath. I wanted to walk back out into the sunshine, into the windy morning, into the oak trees that were hung with moss.

“Who was the guy with the tire iron?” I said.

“One of those fuckers I work with.”

“You saw his face?”

“I didn’t have to. They knew I was going to drop the dime on them. For all the damn good it would do.”

“You told them that?”

“Sure. I got fed up with both of them. No, wait a minute. I got fed up being afraid. I was a little swacked when I stuck it in their face, but I done it just the same. Dalton Vidrine and Harry Mapes. One’s a coon ass and the other’s a stump-jumper from East Texas.”

“I’m having one problem with all this. There’s some people who think you’re mixed up in dope. Up in Montana.”

His green eyes closed and opened like a bird’s.

“They’re wrong,” he said.

“-that maybe you’re mixed up with a trafficker named Dio.”

His mouth smiled slightly.

“You been talking to the DEA,” he said.

“But they’re sniffing up the wrong guy’s leg.”

“You didn’t lease land for him in Montana?”

“I leased and bought a bunch of land for him. But it don’t have anything to do with dope. Sally Dee was my cell partner. Some guys were going to cut me up in the shower. Till Sally Dee told them they treat me just like they treat him. Which means they light my cigarettes, they pick in my sack when we get in thin cotton. The cat’s half crazy, man, but he saved my butt.”

“What was the land deal about, Dixie?”

“I didn’t ask. He’s not the kind of guy you ask those things to. He’s got a lot of holdings. He hires people to act as his agents. He likes me for some reason. He paid me a lot of bread. What’s the big deal?”

“As an old friend, Dixie, I’m going to ask you to save the Little Orphan Annie routine for the DEA.”

“You believe what you want.”

“What’s your bond?”

“Fifteen thou.”

“That’s not too bad.”

“They know I ain’t going anywhere. Except maybe to Angola. Dave, I ain’t giving you a shuck. I can’t take another fall, and I don’t see no way out of it.”

I looked out the window at the treetops, the way their leaves ruffled in the breeze, the whiteness of the clouds against the dome of blue sky.

“I’ll come back and visit you later,” I said.

“I think maybe you have too much faith in one guy.”

“I’ll tell you a story I heard Minnie Pearl tell about Hank. This was right after he brought the whole auditorium down singing ‘I Saw the Light’ at the Opry. Backstage he turned to her and said, “But, Minnie, they ain’t no light. They just ain’t no light.” That’s when your soul is hanging on a spider’s web right over the fire, son. That’s right where I’m at now.”

That afternoon I stood on the levee and looked down at the collapsed and blackened remains of the fish camp that, according to Dixie Lee, had belonged to Star Drilling Company. Mattress springs, charred boards, a metal table, a scorched toilet seat, half the shingle roof lay in the shallows at the bottom of the stilt supports. A paste of gray ash floated among the cattails and lily pads.

I walked down to the water’s edge. I found what was left of a Coleman stove and a pump twelve-gauge shotgun whose shells had exploded in the magazine. The gasoline drum that had been used to fuel outboard engines was ripped outward and twisted like a beer can.

The fire had made a large black circle from the water to halfway up the levee. Extending out from the circle were trails of ash through the buttercups and new grass like the legs of a spider. One of them led up to the road at the top of the levee.

I dug the soil loose from around the trail with my pocketknife and smelled it. It smelled like burnt grass and dirt.

I knew little about arson investigation, but I saw nothing on the levee that would help Dixie Lee’s case.

I drove to St. Martinville and parked across from the old church where Evangeline and her lover are buried under an enormous spreading oak. The wind blew the moss in the trees along Bayou Teche, and the four-o’clocks were opening in the shade along the banks. I was told by the dispatcher in the sheriff’s department that the sheriff was out for a few minutes but that a detective would talk to me.

The detective was penciling in a form of some kind and smoking a cigarette when I walked into his office. He affected politeness but his eyes kept going to the clock on the wall while I talked. A side door opened onto the sheriff’s office, and I could see his desk and empty chair inside. I told the detective the story that Dixie had told me. I told him about the lea semen Dalton Vidrine and Harry Mapes.

“We know all about that,” he said.

“That’s why the sheriff been talking to them. But I tell you right now, podna, he don’t believe that fella.”

“What do you mean he’s been talking with them?”

He smiled at me.

“They in his office right now. He went down to the bat’ room he said. Then he got up and closed the door to the sheriff’s office.

I looked at him, stunned.

“They’re sitting in there now?” My voice was incredulous.

“He called them up and ax them to come in and make a statement.”

I stood up, took a piece of paper off his desk, and wrote my name and telephone number on it.

“Ask the sheriff to call me,” I said.

“What’s your name again?”

“Benoit.”

“Get into another line of work.”

I walked back outside to my pickup truck. The shadows were purple on the bayou and the church lawn. An elderly Negro was taking down the flag from the pole in front of the courthouse and a white man was closing and locking the side doors. Then two men came out the front entrance and walked hurriedly across the grass toward me, one slightly ahead of the other.

The first was a tall, angular man, dressed in brown slacks, shined loafers, a yellow sport shirt with a purple fleur-delis on the pocket, a thin western belt with a silver buckle and tongue. I could hear the change in his pocket when he walked. On his bottom lip was a triangular scar that looked like wet plastic.

The man behind him was shorter, dark, thick across the middle, the kind of man who wore his slacks below the navel to affect size and strength and disguise his advancing years. His eyebrows dipped down and met over his nose. Even though it was warm, he wore a long-sleeved white shirt, the pocket filled with a notebook and clip-on ballpoint pens.

Both men had the agitated look of people who might have seen their bus pass them by at their stop.

“Just a minute there, buddy,” the tall man said.

I turned and looked at him with my hand on the open truck door.

“You were using our names in there. Where the hell do you get off making those remarks?” he said. His eyes narrowed and he ran his tongue over the triangular scar on his lip.

“I was just passing on some information. It didn’t originate with me, partner.”

“I don’t give a goddamn where it came from. I won’t put up with it. Particularly from some guy I never saw before,” he said.

“Then don’t listen to it.”

“It’s called libel.”

“It’s called filing a police report,” I said.

“Who the fuck are you?” the other man said.

“My name’s Dave Robicheaux.”

“You’re an ex-cop or some kind of local bird dog?” he said.

“I’m going to ask you guys to disengage,” I said.

“You’re asking us! You’re unbelievable, man,” the tall man said.

I started to get in my truck. He put his hand around the window jamb and held it.

“You’re not running out of this,” he said. The accent was East Texas, all right, piney woods, red hills, and sawmills.

“Pugh’s a pathetic man. He melted his brains a long time ago. The company gave him a break when nobody else would. Obviously it didn’t work out. He gets souped up with whiskey and dope and has delusions.” He took his hand from the window jamb and pointed his finger an inch from my chest.

“Now, if you want to spend your time talking to somebody like that, that’s your damn business. But if you spread rumors about me and I hear about it, I’m going to look you up.”

I got in my truck and closed the door. I breathed through my nose, looked out at the shadows on the church, the stone statue of Evangeline under the spreading oak. Then I clicked my key ring on the steering wheel. The faces of the two men were framed through my truck window.

Then I yielded to the temptations of anger and pride, two serpentine heads of the Hydra of character defects that made up my alcoholism.

“It was the Coleman fuel for the stove, wasn’t it?” I said.

“You spread it around the inside of the cabin, then strung it down the steps and up the levee. As an added feature maybe you opened the drain on the gas drum, too. You didn’t expect the explosion to blow Dixie Lee out into the water, though, did you?”

It was a guess, but the mouth of the short man parted in disbelief. I started the engine, turned out into the traffic, and drove past the old storefronts and wood colonnades toward the edge of town and the back road to New Iberia.

In my dreams is a watery place where my wife and some of my friends live. I think it’s below the Mekong River or perhaps deep under the Gulf. The people who live there undulate in the tidal currents and are covered with a green-gold light. I can’t visit them there, but sometimes they call me up. In my mind’s eye I can see them clearly. The men from my platoon still wear their pots and their rent and salt-caked fatigues. Smoke rises in bubbles from their wounds.

Annie hasn’t changed much. Her eyes are electric blue, her hair gold and curly. Her shoulders are still covered with sun freckles. She wears red flowers on the front of her nightgown where they shot her with deer slugs. On the top of her left breast is a strawberry birthmark that always turned crimson with blood when we made love.

How you doing, baby lovel she asks.

Hello, sweetheart.

Your father’s here.

How is he?

He says to tell you not to get sucked in. What’s he mean? You’re not in trouble again, are you, baby love? We talked a long time about that before.

It’s just the way I am, I guess.

It’s still rah-rah for the penis, huh? I’ve got to go, Dave. There’s a big line. Are you coming to see me?

Sure.

You promise?

You bet. I won’t let you down, kiddo.

“You really want me to tell you what it means?” the psychologist in Lafayette said.

“Dreams are your province.”

“You’re an intelligent man. You tell me.”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Sometimes alcoholics go on dry drunks. Sometimes we have drunk dreams.”

“It’s a death wish. I’d get a lot of distance between myself and those kinds of thoughts.”

I stared silently at the whorls of purple and red in his carpet.

The day after I visited the St. Martin Parish courthouse I talked with the sheriff there on the phone. I had met him several times when I was a detective with the Iberia Parish sheriff’s office, and I had always gotten along well with him. He said there was nothing in the coroner’s report that would indicate the girl had been struck with a tire iron or a jack handle before the fish camp burned.

“So they did an autopsy?” I said.

“Dave, there wasn’t hardly anything left of that poor girl to autopsy. From what Pugh says and what we found, she was right over the gas drum.”

“What are you going to do with those two clowns you had in your office yesterday?”

“Nothing. What can I do?”

“Pugh says they killed some people up in Montana.”

“I made some calls up there,” the sheriff said.

“Nobody has anything on these guys. Not even a traffic citation. Their office in Lafayette says they’re good men. Look, it’s Pugh that’s got the record, that’s been in trouble since they ran him out of that shithole he comes from.”

“I had an encounter with those two guys after I left your department yesterday. I think Pugh’s telling the truth. I think they did it.”

“Then you ought to get a badge again, Dave. Is it about lunch-time over there?”

“What?”

“Because that’s what time it is here. Come on by and have coffee sometime. We’ll see you, podna.”

I drove into New Iberia to buy some chickens and sausage links from my wholesaler. It was raining when I got back home. I put “La Jolie Blonde” by Iry Lejeune on the record player, changed into my gym shorts, and pumped iron in the kitchen for a half hour. The wind was cool through the window and smelled of rain and damp earth and flowers and trees. My chest and arms were swollen with blood and exertion, and when the rain slacked off and the sun cracked through the mauve-colored sky, I ran three miles along the bayou, jumping across puddles, boxing with raindrops that dripped from the oak limbs overhead.

Back at the house I showered, changed into a fresh denim shirt and khakis, and called Dan Nygurski collect, in Great Falls, Montana. He couldn’t accept the collect call, but he took the number and called me back on his line.

“You know about Dixie Lee?” I said.

“Yep.”

“Do you know about the waitress who died in the fire?”

“Yes.”

“Did y’all have a tail on him that night?”

“Yeah, we did but he got off it. It’s too bad. Our people might have saved the girl’s life.”

“He lost them?”

“I don’t think it was deliberate. He took the girl to a colored place in Breaux Bridge, I guess it was, a zydeco place or something like that. What is that, anyway?”

“It’s Negro-Cajun music. It means ‘vegetables,” all mixed up.”

“Anyway, our people had some trouble with a big buck who thought it was all right for Pugh to come in the club but not other white folks. In the meantime Pugh, who was thoroughly juiced, wandered out the side door with the girl and took off.”

“Have you heard his story?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you believe it?”

“What difference does it make? It’s between him and the locals now. I’ll be square with you, Robicheaux. I don’t give a damn about Pugh. I want that lunatic Sally Dio in a cage. I don’t care how I get him there, either. You can tell Dixie Lee for me I’ll always listen when he’s on the subject of Sally Dee. Otherwise, he’s not in a seller’s market.”

“Why would he be buying and leasing land for this character Dio? Is it related to the oil business?”

“Hey, that’s good, Robicheaux. The mob hooking up with the oil business.” He was laughing out loud now.

“That’s like Frankenstein making it with the wife of Dracula. I’m not kidding you, that’s great. The guys in the office’ll love this. You got any other theories?”

Then he started laughing again.

I quietly replaced the telephone receiver in the cradle, then walked down to the dock in the wet afternoon sunlight to help Batist close up the bait shop.

That evening Alafair and I drove down to Cypremort Point for boiled crabs at the pavilion. We sat at one of the checker-cloth tables on the screened porch by the bay, a big bib with a red crawfish on it tied around Alafair’s neck, and looked out at the sun setting across the miles of dead cypress, saw grass, the sandy inlets, the wetlands that stretched all the way to Texas. The tide was out, and the jetties were black and stark against the flat gray expanse of the bay and the strips of purple and crimson cloud that had flattened on the western horizon. Seagulls dipped and wheeled over the water’s edge, and a solitary blue heron stood among the saw grass in an inlet pool, his long body and slender legs like a painting on the air.

Alafair always set about eating bluepoint crabs with a devastating clumsiness. She smashed them in the center with the wood mallet, snapped off the claws, and cracked back the shell hinge with slippery hands and an earnest innocence that sent juice and pulp flying all over the table. When we finished eating I had to take her into the washroom and wipe off her hair, face, and arms with wet paper towels.

On the way back home I stopped in New Iberia and rented a Walt Disney movie, then I called up Batist and asked him and his wife to watch it with us. Batist was always fascinated by the VCR and never could quite understand how it worked.

“Them people that make the movie, they put it in that box, huh, Dave?” he said.

“That’s right.”

“It just like at the show, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“Then how it get up to the antenna and in the set?”

“It doesn’t go up to”

“And how come it don’t go in nobody else’s set?” he said.

“It don’t go out the house,” Alafair said.

“Not ‘It don’t.’ Say ‘It doesn’t,’ ” I said.

“Why you telling her that? She talk English good as us,” Batist said.

I decided to heat up some boudin and make some Kool-Aid.

I rented a lot of Disney and other films for children because I didn’t like Alafair to watch ordinary television in the evening or at least when I was not there. Maybe I was overly protective and cautious. But the celluloid facsimile of violence and the news footage of wars in the Middle East and Central America would sometimes cause the light to go out of her face and leave her mouth parted and her eyes wide, as though she had been slapped.

Disney films, Kool-Aid, boudin, bluepoint crabs on a breezy porch by the side of the bay were probably poor compensation for the losses she had known. But you offer what you have, perhaps even bless it with a prayer, and maybe somewhere down the line affection grows into faith and replaces memory. I can’t say. I’m not good at the mysteries, and I have few solutions even for my own problems. But I was determined that Alafair would never again be hurt unnecessarily, not while she was in my care, not while she was in this country.

“This is our turf, right, Batist?” I said as I gave him a paper plate with slices of boudin on it.

“What?” His and Alafair’s attention was focused on the image of Donald Duck on the television screen. Outside, the fireflies were lighting in the pecan trees.

“This is our Cajun land, right, podna?” I said.

“We make the rules, we’ve got our own flag.”

He gave me a quizzical look, then turned back to the television screen. Alafair, who was sitting on the floor, slapped her thighs and squealed uproariously while Donald Duck raged at his nephews.

The next day I visited Dixie Lee again at Lourdes and took him a couple of magazines. The sunlight was bright in his room, and someone had placed a green vase of roses in the window. The deputy left us alone, and Dixie lay on his side and looked at me from his pillow. His eyes were clear, and his cheeks were shaved and pink.

“You’re looking better,” I said.

“For the first time in years I’m not full of whiskey. It feels weird, I’m here to tell you. In fact, it feels so good I’d like to cut out the needle, too. But the centipedes start waking up for a snack.”

I nodded at the roses in the window and smiled.

“You have an admirer,” I said.

He didn’t answer. He traced a design on the bed with his index finger, as though he were pushing a penny around on the sheet.

“You grew up Catholic, didn’t you?” he said.

“Yes.”

“You still go to church?”

“Sure.”

“You think God punishes us right here, that it ain’t just in the next world?”

“I think those are bad ideas.”

“My little boy died in a fire. A bare electric cord under a rug started it. If I hadn’t been careless, it wouldn’t have happened. Then I killed that man’s little boy over in Fort Worth, and now I been in a fire myself and a young girl’s dead.”

I looked at the confusion and pain in his face.

“I had preachers back home tell me where all that drinking and doping was going to lead me. I wouldn’t pay them no mind,” he said.

“Come on, don’t try to see God’s hand in what’s bad. Look outside. It’s a beautiful day, you’re alive, you’re feeling better, maybe you’ve got alternatives now that you didn’t have before. Think about what’s right with your life, Dixie.”

“They’re going to try and pop me.”

“Who?”

“Vidrine and Mapes. Or some other butthole the company hires.”

“These kinds of guys don’t come up the middle.”

He looked back at me silently, as if I were someone on the other side of a wire fence.

“There’re too many people looking at them now,” I said.

“You don’t know how much money’s involved. You couldn’t guess. You don’t have any idea what these bastards will do for money.”

“You’re in custody.”

“Save the dog shit, Dave. Last night Willie out there said he was going for some smokes. It was eleven o’clock. He handcuffed my wrist to the bed rail and came back at one in the morning, chewing on a toothpick and smelling like hamburger and onions.”

“I’ll talk to the sheriff.”

“The same guy that thinks I’ve got fried grits for brains? You think like a cop, Dave. You’ve probably locked a lot of guys up, but you don’t know what it’s like inside all that clanging iron. A couple of swinging dicks want a kid brought to their cell, that’s where he gets delivered. A guy wants you whacked out because you owe for a couple of decks of cigarettes, you get a shank in your spleen somewhere between the mess hall and lockup. Guys like Willie out there are a. joke.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing. You tried. Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m not going to leave you on your own. Give me a little credit.”

“I ain’t on my own. I called Sally Dee.”

I looked again at the roses in the green vase.

“Floral telegram. He’s a thoughtful guy, man,” Dixie Lee said.

“It’s your butt.”

“Don’t ever do time. You won’t hack it inside.”

“What you’re doing is not only stupid, you’re starting to piss me off, Dixie.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You want to be on these guys’ leash the rest of your life? What’s the matter with you?”

“Everything. My whole fucking life. You want to pour yourself some iced tea? I got to use the bedpan.”

“I think I’ve been jerked around here, partner.”

“Maybe you been jerking yourself around.”

“What?”

“Ask yourself how much you’re interested in me and how much you’re interested in the drilling company that killed your old man.”

I watched him work the stainless steel bedpan out from the rack under the mattress.

“I guess you have dimensions I haven’t quite probed,” I said.

“I flunked out my freshman year, remember? You’re talking way above my league.”

“No, I don’t think so. We’ll see you around, Dixie.”

“I don’t blame you for walking out mad. But you don’t understand. You can’t, man. It was big back then. The Paramount Theater in Brooklyn with Allan Freed, on stage with guys like Berry and Eddie Cochran. I wasn’t no drunk, either. I had a wife and a kid, people thought I was decent. Look at me today. I’m a fucking ex-convict, the stink on shit. I killed a child, for God’s sake. You come in here talking an AA shuck about the beautiful weather outside when maybe I’m looking at a five-spot on Angola farm. Get real, son. It’s the dirty boogie out there. “and all the cats are humping to it in three-four time.”

I stood up from my chair.

“I’ll speak with the sheriff about the deputy. He won’t leave you alone again. I’ll see you, Dixie,” I said.

I left him and walked outside into the sunlight. The breeze was cool and scented with flowers, and across the street in a grove of oak trees a Negro was selling rattlesnake watermelons off the back of a truck. He had lopped open one melon on the tailgate as an advertisement, and the meat was dark red in the shade. I looked back up at Dixie Lee’s room on the corner of the second floor and saw a nun close the Venetian blinds on the sunlight.

I had never liked the Lafayette Oil Center. My attitude was probably romantic and unreasonable. As chambers of commerce everywhere are fond of saying, it provided jobs and an expanded economy, it meant progress. It was also ugly. It was low and squat and sprawling, treeless, utilitarian, built with glazed brick and flat roofs, tinted and mirrored windows that gave onto parking lots that in summer radiated the heat like a stove.

And to accommodate the Oil Center traffic the city had widened Pinhook Road, which ran down to the Vermilion River and became the highway to New Iberia. The oak and pecan trees along the road had been cut down, the rural acreage subdivided and filled with businesses and fast-food restaurants, the banks around the Vermilion Bridge paved with asphalt parking lots and dotted with more oil-related businesses whose cinder-block architecture had all the aesthetic design of a sewage-treatment works.

But there was still one cafe on Pinhook left over from my college days at Southwestern in the 1950s. The parking lot was oyster shell the now-defunct speakers from the jukebox were still ensconced in the forks of the spreading oak trees, the pink and blue and green neon tubing around the windows still looked like a wet kiss in the rain.

The owner served fried chicken and dirty rice that could break your heart. I finished eating lunch and drinking coffee and looked out at the rain blowing through the oaks, at the sheen it made on the bamboo that grew by the edge of the parking lot. The owner propped open the front door with a board, and the mist and cool air and the smell of the trees blew inside. Then a Honda stopped in a rain puddle out front, the windshield wipers slapping, and an Indian girl with olive skin and thick black hair jumped out and ran inside. She wore designer jeans, which people had stopped wearing, a yellow shirt tied across her middle, and yellow tennis shoes. She touched the raindrops out of her eyes with her fingers and glanced around the restaurant until she saw the sign over the women’s room. She walked right past my table, her damp wrist almost brushing my shoulder, and I tried not to look at her back, her thighs, the way her hips creased and her posterior moved when she walked; but that kind of resolution and dignity seemed to be more and more wanting in my life.

I paid my check, put on my rain hat, draped my seersucker coat over my arm, and ran past the idling Honda to my truck. Just as I started the engine the girl ran from the restaurant and got into the Honda with a package of cigarettes in her hand. The driver backed around so that he was only ten feet from my cab and rolled his window down.

I felt my mouth drop open. I stared dumbfounded at the boiled pigskin face, the stitched scar that ran from the bridge of his nose up through one eyebrow, the sandy hair and intelligent green eyes, the big shoulders that made his shirt look as though it were about to rip.

Cletus Purcel.

He grinned and winked at me.

“What’s happening, Streak?” he said into the rain, then rolled up the window, and splashed out onto Pinhook Road.

My old homicide partner from the First District in the French Quarter. Bust ’em or smoke ’em, he used to say. Bury your fist in their stomachs, leave them puking on their knees, click off their light switch with a slapjack if they still want to play.

He had hated the pimps, the Nicaraguan and Colombian dealers, the outlaw bikers, the dirty-movie operators, the contract killers jl the mob brought in from Miami, and if left alone with him, they would gladly cut any deal they could get from the prosecutor’s office.

But with time he became everything that he despised. He took freebies from whores, borrowed money from shylocks, fought the shakes every morning with cigarettes, aspirin, and speed, and finally took ten thousand dollars to blow away a potential government witness in a hog lot.

Then he had cleaned out his and his wife’s bank account, roared the wrong way down a one-way street into the New Orleans airport, bounced over a concrete island, and abandoned his car with both doors open in front of the main entrance. He just made the flight to Guatemala.

A month later I received a card from him that had been postmarked in Honduras.

Dear Streak,

Greetings from Bongo-Bongo Land. I’d like to tell you I’m off the sauce and working for the Maryknolls. I’m not. Guess what skill is in big demand down here? A guy that can run through the manual of arms is an automatic captain. They’re all kids. Somebody with a case of Clearasil could take the whole country.

See you in the next incarnation,

C.

P.S. If you run into Lois, tell her I’m sorry for ripping her off. I left my toothbrush in the bathroom. I want her to have it.

I watched his taillights glimmer and fade in the rain. As far as I knew, there was still a warrant on him. What was Cletus doing back in the States? And in Lafayette?

But he was somebody else’s charge now, not mine. So good luck, partner, I thought. Whatever you’re operating on, I hope it’s as pure and clean as white gas and bears you aloft over the places where the carrion bircis clatter.

I drove across the street and parked in front of the Star Drilling Company’s regional office. Confronting them probably seems a foolish thing to do, particularly in the capacity of a citizen rather than that of a law officer. But my experience as a policeman investigating white-collar criminals always led me to the same conclusion about them: they might envision a time when they’ll have to deal with the law, but in their minds the problem will be handled by attorneys, in a court proceeding that becomes almost a gentlemen’s abstraction. They tremble with both outrage and fear when a plainclothes cop, perhaps with an IQ of ninety-five, a .357 showing under his coat, a braided blackjack in his pocket, steps into the middle of their lives as unexpectedly as an iron door slamming shut and indicates that he thinks habeas corpus is a Latin term for a disease.

I put on my coat and ran through the rain and into the building. The outer offices of Star Drilling, which were separated by half-glass partitions, were occupied by draftsmen and men who looked like geologists or lease people. The indirect lighting glowed on the pine paneling, and the air-conditioning was turned so high that I felt my skin constrict inside my damp seersucker. The geologists, or whatever they were, walked from desk to desk, rattling topography maps between their outstretched hands, their faces totally absorbed in their own frame of reference or a finger moving back and forth on the numbers of a township and range.

The only person who looked at me was the receptionist. I told her I wanted to see the supervisor about a mineral lease in Montana.

His desk was big, made of oak, his chair covered with maroon leather, the pine walls hung with deer’s heads, a marlin, two flintlock rifles. On a side table was a stuffed lynx, mounted on a platform, the teeth bared, the yellow glass eyes filled with anger.

His name was Hollister. He was a big man, his thick, graying hair cut military, his pale blue eyes unblinking. Like those of most managerial people in the Oil Center, his accent was Texas or Oklahoma and his dress eccentric. His gray Oshman coat hung on a rack, his cuff links were the size of quarters and embossed with oil derricks. His bolo tie was fastened with a brown and silver brooch.

He listened to me talk a moment, his square hands motionless on the desk, his face like that of a man staring into an ice storm.

“Wait a minute. You came to my office to question me about my employees? About a murder?” ( I could see tiny stretched white lines in the skin around the corners of his eyes.”

“It’s more than one, Mr. Hollister. The girl in the fire and maybe some people in Montana.”

“Tell me, who do you think you are?”

“I already did.”

“No, you didn’t. You lied to my receptionist to get in here.”

“You’ve got a problem with your lea semen It won’t go away because I walk out the door.”

His pale eyes looked steadily at me. He lifted one finger off his desk and aimed it at me.

“You’re not here about Dixie Pugh,” he said.

“You’ve got something else bugging you. I don’t know what it is, but you’re not a truthful man.”

I touched the ball of my thumb to the corner of my mouth, looked away from him a moment, and tapped my fingers on the leather arm of my chair.

“You evidently thought well enough of Dixie Lee to give him a job,” I said.

“Do you think he made all this up and then set himself on fire?”

“I think you’re on your way out of here.”

“Let me tell you a couple of things about the law. Foreknowledge of a crime can make you a coconspirator. Knowledge after the fact can put you into an area known as aiding and abetting. These guys aren’t worth it, Mr. Hollister.”

“This discussion is over. There’s the door.”

“It looks like your company has made stonewalling an art form.”

“What?”

“Does the name Aldous Robicheaux mean anything to you?”

“No. Who is he?”

“He was my father. He was killed on one of your rigs.”

“When?”

“Twenty-two years ago. They didn’t have a blowout preventer on. Your company tried to deny it, since almost everybody on the rig went down with it. A shrimper pulled a floor man out of the water two days later. He cost you guys a lot of money.”

“So you got a grudge that’s twenty-two years old? I don’t know what to tell you, Robicheaux, except I wasn’t with the company then and I probably feel sorry for you.”

I took my rain hat off my knee and stood up.

“Tell Mapes and Vidrine to stay away from Dixie Lee,” I said.

“You come in here again, I’ll have you arrested.”

I walked back outside into the rain, got in my truck, and drove out of the maze of flat, uniform brick buildings that composed the Oil Center. On Pinhook Road I passed the restaurant where I had seen Cletus an hour before. The spreading oak trees were dark green, the pink and blue neon like smoke in the blowing mist. The wind blew hard when I crossed the Vermilion River, ruffling the yellow current below and shuddering the sides of my truck.

“I don’t buy that stuff about a death wish. I believe some guys in Vienna had too much time to think,” I said to the therapist.

“You don’t have to be defensive about your feelings. Facile attitudes have their place in therapy, too. For example, I don’t think there’s anything complex about depression. It’s often a matter of anger turned inward. What do you have to say about that, Dave?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. How did you feel in Vietnam when the man next to you was hit?”

“What do you think I felt?”

“At some point you were glad it was him and not you. And then you felt guilty. And that was very dangerous, wasn’t it?”

“All alcoholics feel guilt. Go to an open meeting sometime. Learn something about it.”

“Cut loose from the past. She wouldn’t want you to carry a burden like this.”, “I can’t. I don’t want to.”

“Say it again.”

“I don’t want to.”

He was bald and his rimless glasses were full of light. He turned!; his palms up toward me and was silent.

I visited Dixie Lee one more time and found him distant, taciturn perhaps even casually indifferent to my presence in the room. I wasn’t pleased with his attitude. I didn’t know whether to ascribe it to the morphine-laced IV hooked into his arm, or possibly his own morose awareness of what it meant to throw in his lot with his old cell partner.

“You want me to bring you anything else before I leave?” I asked.

“I’m all right.”

“I probably won’t be back, Dixie. I’m pretty tied up at the dock these days.”

“Sure, I understand.”

“Do you think maybe you used me a little bit?” I grinned at him and held up my thumb and forefinger slightly apart in the air.

“Maybe just a little?”

His voice was languid, as though he were resting on the comfortable edge of sleep.

“Me use somebody else? Are you kidding?” he said.

“You’re looking at the dildo of the planet.”

“See you around, Dixie.”

“Hell, yes. They’re kicking me out of here soon, anyway. It’s only second-degree stuff. I’ve had worse hangovers. We’re in tall cotton, son.”

And so I left him to his own menagerie of snapping dogs and hungry snakes.

That Saturday I woke Alafair early, told her nothing about the purpose of our trip, and drove in the cool, rose-stippled dawn to the Texas side of Sabine Pass, where the Sabine River empties into the Gulf. A friend of mine from the army owned a small, sandy, salt-flecked farm not far from the hard-packed gray strip of sandbar that tried to be a beach. It was a strange, isolated place, filled with the mismatched flora of two states: stagnant lakes dotted with dead cypress, solitary oaks in the middle of flat pasture, tangles of blackjack along the edges of coulees, an alluvial fan of sand dunes that were crested with salt grass and from which protruded tall palm trees silhouetted blackly against the sun. Glinting through the pines on the back of my friend’s farm were the long roll and pitch of the Gulf itself, and a cascade of waves that broke against the beach in an iridescent spray of foam.

It was a place of salt-poisoned grass, alligators, insects, magpies, turkey buzzards, drowned cows whose odor reached a half mile into the sky, tropical storms that could sand the paint off a water tower, and people like my friend who had decided to slip through a hole in the dimension and live on their own terms. He had a bad-conduct discharge from the army, had been locked up in a mental asylum in Galveston, had failed totally at AA, and as a farmer couldn’t grow thorns in a briar patch.

But he bred and raised some of the most beautiful Appaloosa horses I had ever seen. He and I had coffee in his kitchen while Alafair drank a Coke, then I picked up several sugar cubes in my palm and we walked out to his back lot.

“What we doing, Dave?” Alafair said. She looked up at me in the sunlight that shone through the pine trees. She wore a yellow T-shirt, baggy blue jeans, and pink tennis shoes. The wind off the water ruffled her bangs.

My friend winked and went inside the barn. I “You can’t ride Tripod, can you, little guy?” I said.

“What? Ride Tripod?” she said, her face confused, then suddenly lighting, breaking into an enormous grin as she looked past me and saw my friend leading a three-year-old gelding out of the barn.

The Appaloosa was steel gray, with white stockings and a spray of black and white spots across his rump. He snorted and pitched his head against the bridle, and Alafair’s brown eyes went back and forth between the horse and me, her face filled with delight.

“You think you can take care of him and Tripod and your rabbits, too?” I said.

“Me? He’s for me, Dave?”

“You bet he is. He called me up yesterday and said he wanted to come live with us.”

“What? Horse call up?”

I picked her up and set her on top of the fence rail, then let the Appaloosa take the sugar cubes out of my palm.

“He’s like you, he’s got a sweet tooth,” I said.

“But when you feed him something, let him take it out of your palm so he doesn’t bite your fingers by mistake.”

Then I climbed over the fence, slipped bareback onto the horse; and lifted Alafair up in front of me. My friend had trimmed thef horse’s mane, and Alafair ran her hand up and down it as though it | were a giant shoe brush. I touched my right heel against the horse’s f flank, and we turned in a slow circle around the lot.

“What his name?” Alafair said.

“How about Tex?”

“How come that?”

“Because he’s from Texas.”

“What?”

“Texas.”

“This where?”

“Nevermind.”

I nodded for my friend to open the gate, and we rode out through | the sandy stretch of pines onto the beach. The waves were slate green and full of kelp, and they made a loud smack against the sand and slid in a wet line up to a higher, dry area where the salt grass and the pine needles began. It was windy and cool and warm at the same time, and we rode a mile or so along the edge of the surf to a place where a sandbar and jetty had created a shallow lagoon, in the middle of which a wrecked shrimp boat lay gray and paint less on its side, a cacophony of seagulls thick in the air above it. Behind us the horse’s solitary tracks were scalloped deep in the wet sand.

I gave my friend four hundred for the Appaloosa, and for another three hundred he threw in the tack and a homemade trailer. Almost all the way home Alafair stayed propped on her knees on the front seat, either looking backward through the cab glass or out the window at the horse trailer tracking behind us, her fine hair flattening in white lines against her scalp.

On Monday I walked up to the house for lunch, then stopped at the mailbox on the road before I went back to the dock. The sun was warm, the oak trees along the road were full of mockingbirds and blue jays, and the mist from my neighbor’s water sprinkler drifted in a wet sheen over his hydrangea beds and rows of blooming azalea and myrtle bushes. In the back of the mailbox was a narrow package no more than ten inches long. It had been postmarked in New Orleans. I put my other mail in my back pocket, slipped the twine off the corners of the package, and cracked away the brown wrapping paper with my thumb.

I lifted off the cardboard top. Inside on a strip of cotton was a hypodermic needle with a photograph and a sheet of lined paper wrapped around it. The inside of the syringe was clouded with a dried brown-red residue. The photograph was cracked across the surface, yellowed around the edges, but the obscene nature of the details had the violent clarity of a sliver of glass in the eye. A pajama-clad Vietcong woman lay in a clearing by the tread of a tank, her severed head resting on her stomach. Someone had stuffed a C-ration box in her mouth.

The lined paper looked like the kind that comes in a Big Chief notebook. The words were printed large, in black ink.

Dear Sir,

The guy that took this picture is one fucked up dude. He liked it over there and didn’t want to come back. He says he used this needle in a snuff flick out in Oakland. I don’t know if I’d believe him or not. But your little pinto bean gets on the bus at 7:45.

She arrives at school at 8:30. She’s on the playground at 10 and back out there at noon. She waits on the south corner for the bus home at 3:05. Sometimes she gets off before her stop and walks down the road with a colored kid. It’s hardball. Don’t fuck with it. It’s going to really mess up your day. Check the zipperhead in the pic. Now there’s somebody who really had a hard time getting her C’s down.

“For what your face like that? What it is, Dave?”

Batist was standing behind me, dressed in a pair of navy bell bottoms and an unbuttoned sleeveless khaki shirt. There were drops of sweat on his bald head, and the backs of his hands and wrists were spotted with blood from cleaning fish.

I put the photograph, letter, and torn package back in the mailbox and walked hurriedly down to the dock. I called the elementary school, asked the principal to make sure that Alafair was in her classroom, then told her not to let Alafair board the school bus that afternoon, that I would be there to pick her up. When I walked back toward the house Batist was still at the mailbox. He was illiterate and so the letter inside meant nothing to him, but he had the photograph cupped in his big palm, an unlit cigar in the corner of his mouth, and there was an ugly glaze in his eyes.

“Que qa veut dire, Dave? What that needle mean, too?” he said.

“Somebody’s threatening Alafair.”

“They say they gonna hurt that little girl?”

“Yes.” The word created a hollow feeling in my chest.

“Who they are? Where they at, them people that do something like this?”

“I believe it’s a couple of guys in Lafayette. They’re oil people. Have you seen any guys around here who look like they don’t belong here?”

“I ain’t paid it no mind, Dave. I didn’t have no reason, me.”

“It’s all right.”

“What we gonna do?”

“I’m going to pick up Alafair, then I’ll talk to the sheriff.” I picked the photograph out of his palm by the edges and set it back inside the mailbox.

“I’m going to leave this stuff in there, then take it in later and see if we can find fingerprints on it. So we shouldn’t handle it anymore.”

“No, I mean what we gonna do?” he said. His brown eyes looked intently into mine. There was no question about his meaning.

“I’m going to pick up Alafair now. Watch the store and I’ll be back soon.”

Batist’s mouth closed on his dry cigar. His eyes went away from me, stared into the shade of the pecan trees and moved back and forth in his head with a private thought. His voice was quiet when he spoke.

“Dave, in that picture, that’s where you was at in the war?”

“Yes.”

“They done them kind of things?”

“Some did. Not many.”

“In that letter, it say that about Alafair?”

I swallowed and couldn’t answer him. The hollow feeling in my chest would not go away. It was like fear but not of a kind that I had ever experienced before. It was an obscene feeling, as though a man’s hand had slipped lewdly inside my shirt and now rested sweatily on my breastbone. The sunlight shimmered on the bayou, and the trees and blooming hyacinths on the far side seemed to go in and out of focus. I saw a cottonmouth coiled fatly on a barkless, sun-bleached log, its triangular head the color of tarnished copper in the hard yellow light. Sweat ran out of my hair, and I felt my heart beating against my rib cage. I snicked the mailbox door shut, got into my truck, and headed down the dirt road toward New Iberia. When I bounced across the drawbridge over Bayou Teche, my knuckles were white and as round as quarters on the steering wheel.

On the way back from the school the spotted patterns of light and shadow fell through the canopy of oaks overhead and raced over Alafair’s tan face as she sat next to me in the truck. Her knees and white socks and patent leather shoes were dusty from play on the school ground. She kept looking curiously at the side of my face.

“Something wrong, Dave?” she said.

“No, not at all.”

“Something bad happen, ain’t it?”

“Don’t say ‘ain’t.’ “

“Why you mad?”

“Listen, little guy, I’m going to run some errands this afternoon and I want you to stay down at the dock with Batist. You stay in the store and help him run things, okay?”

“What’s going on, Dave?”

“There’s nothing to worry about. But I want you to stay away from people you don’t know. Keep close around Batist and Clarise and me, okay? You see, there’re a couple of men I’ve had some trouble with. If they come around here, Batist and I will chase them off. But I don’t want them bothering you or Clarise or Tripod or any of our friends, see.” I winked at her.

“These bad men?” Her face looked up at me. Her eyes were round and unblinking.

“Yes, they are.”

“What they do?”

I took a breath and let it out.

“I don’t know for sure. But we just need to be a little careful. That’s all, little guy. We don’t worry about stuff like that. We’re kind of like Tripod. What’s he do when the dog chases him?”

She looked into space, then I saw her eyes smile.

“He gets up on the rabbit hutch,” she said.

“Then what’s he do?”

“He stick his claw in the dog’s nose.”

“That’s right. Because he’s smart. And because he’s smart and careful, he doesn’t have to worry about that dog. And we’re the same way and we don’t worry about things, do we?”

She smiled up at me, and I pulled her against my side and kissed the top of her head. I could smell the sun’s heat in her hair.

I parked the truck in the shade of the pecan trees, and she took her lunch kit into the kitchen, washed out her thermos, and changed into her play clothes We walked down to the dock, and I put her in charge of soda pop and worm sales. In the corner behind the beer cases I saw Batist’s old automatic Winchester twelve-gauge propped against the wall.

“I put some number sixes in it for that cottonmouth been eating fish off my stringer,” he said.

“Come see tonight. You gonna have to clean that snake off the tree.”

“I’ll be back before dark. Take her up to the house for her supper,” I said.

“I’ll close up when I get back.”

“You don’t be worry, you,” he said, dragged a kitchen match on a wood post, lit his cigar, and let the smoke drift out through his teeth.

Alafair rang up a sale on the cash register and beamed when the drawer clanged open.

I put everything from the mailbox in a large paper bag and drove to the Iberia Parish sheriff’s office. I had worked a short while for the sheriff as a plainclothes detective the previous year, and I knew him to be a decent and trustworthy man. But when he ran for the office his only qualification was the fact that he had been president of the Lions Club and owned a successful dry cleaning business. He was slightly overweight, his face soft around the edges, and in his green uniform he looked like the manager of a garden-supply store. We talked in his office while a deputy processed the wrapping paper, box, note, and hypodermic needle for fingerprints in another room.

Finally the deputy rapped on the sheriff’s door glass with one knuckle and opened the door.

“Two identifiable sets,” he said.

“One’s Dave’s, one’s from that colored man, what’s his name?”

“Batist,” I said.

“Yeah, we have his set on file from the other time” His eyes flicked away from me and his face colored.

“We had his prints from when we were out to Dave’s place before. Then there’s some smeared stuff on the outside of the wrapping paper.”

“The mailman?” the sheriff said.

“That’s what I figure,” the deputy said.

“I wish I could tell you something else, Dave.”

“It’s all right.”

The deputy nodded and closed the door.

“You want to take it to the FBI in Lafayette?” the sheriff said.

“Maybe.”

“A threat in the mails is in a federal area. Why not make use of them?”

I looked back at him without answering.

“Why is it that I always feel you’re not a man of great faith in our system?” he said.

“Probably because I worked for it too long.”

“We can question these two guys, what’s their names again?”

“Vidrine and Mapes.”

“Vidrine and Mapes, we can let them know somebody’s looking over their shoulder.”

“They’re too far into it.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Dave, back off of this one. Let other people handle it.”

“Are you going to keep a deputy out at my house? Will one watchf Alafair on the playground or while she waits for the bus?”

He let out his breath, then looked out the window at a clump of oak trees in a bright, empty pasture.

“Something else bothers me here,” he said.

“Wasn’t your daddy killed on a Star rig?”

“Yes.”

“You think there’s a chance you want to twist these guys, no matter what happens?”

“I don’t know what I think. That box didn’t mail itself to me, though, did it?”

I saw the injury in his eyes, but I was past the point of caring about his feelings. Maybe you’ve been there. You go into a police or sheriff’s station after a gang of black kids forced you to stop your car while they smashed out your windows with garbage cans; a strung-out addict made you kneel at gunpoint on the floor of a grocery store, and before you knew it the begging words rose uncontrollably in your throat; some bikers pulled you from the back of a bar and sat on your arms while one of them un zippered his blue jeans. Your body is still hot with shame, your voice full of thumbtacks and strange to your own ears, your eyes full of guilt and self-loathing while uniformed people walk casually by you with Styrofoam cups of coffee in their hands. Then somebody types your words on a report and you realize that this is all you will get. Investigators will not be out at your house, you will probably not be called to pull somebody out of a lineup, a sympathetic female attorney from the prosecutor’s office will not take a large interest in your life.

Then you will look around at the walls and cabinets and lockers in that police or sheriff’s station, the gun belts worn by the officers with the Styrofoam coffee cups, perhaps the interior of the squad cars in the parking lot, and you will make an ironic realization. The racks of M-16 rifles, scoped Mausers, twelve-gauge pumps loaded with double-aught buckshot, .38 specials and .357 Magnums, stun guns, slap jacks batons, tear gas canisters, the drawers that contain cattle prods, handcuffs, Mace, wrist and leg chains, hundreds of rounds of ammunition, all have nothing to do with your safety or the outrage against your person. You’re an increase in somebody’s work load.

“You’ve been on this side of the desk, Dave. We do what we can,” the sheriff said “But it’s not enough most of the time. Is it?”

He stirred a paper clip on the desk blotter with his finger.

“Have you got an alternative?” he said.

“Thanks for your time, Sheriff. I’ll think about the FBI.”

“I wish you’d do that.”

The sky had turned purple and red in the west and rain clouds were building on the southern horizon when I drove home. I bought some ice cream in town, then stopped at a fruit stand under an oak tree by the bayou and bought a lug of strawberries. The thunder-heads off the Gulf slid across the sun, and the cicadas were loud in the trees and the fireflies were lighting in the shadows along the road. A solitary raindrop splashed on my windshield as I turned into my dirt yard.

It rained hard that night. It clattered on the shingles and the tin roof of the gallery, sluiced out of the gutters and ran in streams down to the coulee. The pecan trees in the yard beat in the wind and trembled whitely when lightning leapt across the black sky. I had the attic fan on, and the house was cool, and I dreamed all night. Annie came to me about four A.M.” as she often did, when the night was about to give way to the softness of the false dawn. In my dream I could look through my bedroom window into the rain, past the shining trunks of the pecan trees, deep into the marsh and the clouds of steam that eventually bleed into the saw grass and the Gulf of Mexico, and see her and her companions inside a wobbling green bubble of air. She smiled at me.

Hi, sailor, she said.

How you doing, sweetheart? You know I don’t like it when it rains. Bad memories and all that. So we found a dry place for a while.

“Your buddies from your platoon don’t like the rain, either. They say it used to give them jungle sores. Can you hear me with all that thunder? It sounds like cannon!”

Sure.

It’s lightning up on top of the water. That night I couldn’t tell the lightning from the gun flashes. I wish you hadn’t left me alone. I tried to hide under the bed sheet. It was a silly thing to do. Don’t talk about it.

It was like electricity dancing off the walls, you’re not drinking, are you?

No, not really.

Not really?

Only in my dreams.

But I bet you still get high on those dry drunks, don’t you? You know, fantasies about kicking butt, ‘fronting the lowlifes, all that stuff swinging dicks like to do.

A guy has to do something for kicks. Annie?

What is it, baby love?

I want Tell me.

I want to It’s not your time. There’s Alafair to take care of, too.

It wasn’t your time, either.

She made a kiss against the air. Her mouth was red.

So long, sailor. Don’t sleep on your stomach. It’ll make you hard in the morning. I miss you.

Annie She winked at me through the rain, and in my dream I was sure I felt her fingers touch my lips.

It continued to rain most of the next day. At three o’clock I picked up Alafair at the school and kept her with me in the bait shop. The sky and the marsh were gray; my rental boats were half full of water, the dock shiny and empty in the weak light. Alafair was restless and hard to keep occupied in the shop, and I let Batist take her with him on an errand in town. At five-thirty they were back, the rain slacked off, and the sun broke through the clouds in the west. It was the time of day when the bream and bass should have been feeding around the lily pads, but the bayou was high and the water remained smooth and brown and un dented along the banks and in the coves. A couple of fishermen came in and drank beer for a while, and I leaned on the window jamb and stared out at the mauve- and red-streaked sky, the trees dripping rain into the water, the wet moss trying to lift in the evening breeze.

“Them men ain’t gonna do nothing. They just blowing they horn,” Batist said beside me. Alafair was watching a cartoon on the old black-and-white television set that I kept on the snack shelf. She held Tripod on her lap while she stared raptly up at the set.

“Maybe so. But they’ll let us wonder where they are and when they’re coming,” I said.

“That’s the way it works.”

“You call them FBI in Lafayette?”

“No.”

“How come?”

“It’s a waste of time.”

“Sometime you gotta try, yeah.”

“There weren’t any identifiable prints on the package except yours and mine.”

I could see in his face that he didn’t understand.

“There’s nothing to tell the FBI,” I said.

“I would only create paperwork for them and irritate them. It wouldn’t accomplish anything. There’s nothing I can do.”

“So you want get mad at me?”

“I’m not mad at you. Listen”

“What?”

“I want her to stay with you tonight. I’ll pick her up in the morning and take her to school.”

“What you gonna do, you?”

“I don’t know.”

“I been knowing you a long time, Dave. Don’t tell me that.”

“I’ll tell Clarise to pack her school clothes and her pajamas and toothbrush. There’s still one boat out. Lock up as soon as it comes in.”

“Dave-” But I was already walking up toward the house in the light, sun-spangled rain, in the purple shadows, in the breeze that smelled . of wet moss and blooming four-o’clocks.

It was cool and still light when I stopped on the outskirts of Lafayette and called Dixie Lee at the hospital from a pay phone. I asked him where Vidrine and Mapes were staying.

“What for?” he said.

“It doesn’t matter what for. Where are they?”

“It matters to me.”

“Listen, Dixie, you brought me into this. It’s gotten real serious in the last two days. Don’t start being clever with me.”

“All right, the Magnolia. It’s off Pinhook, down toward the river. Look, Dave, don’t mess with them. I’m about to go bond and get out of here. It’s time to ease off.”

“You sound like you’ve found a new confidence.”

“So I got friends. So I got alternatives. Fuck Vidrine and Mapes.”

The sun was red and swollen on the western horizon. Far to the south I could see rain falling.

“How far out are these guys willing to go?” I said.

He was quiet a moment.

“What are you talking about?” he said.

“You heard me.”

“Yeah, I did. They burn a girl to death and you ask me a question like that? These guys got no bottom, if that’s what you mean. They’ll go down where it’s so dark the lizards don’t have eyes.”

I drove down Pinhook Road toward the Vermilion River and parked under a spreading oak tree by the motel, a rambling white stucco building with a blue tile roof. Rainwater dripped from the tree onto my truck cab, and the bamboo and palm trees planted along the walks bent in the wind off the river and the flagstones in the courtyard were wet and red in the sun’s last light. A white and blue neon sign in the shape of a flower glowed against the sky over the entrance of the motel, an electrical short in it buzzing as loud as the cicadas in the trees. I stared at the front of the motel a moment, clicking my keys on the steering wheel, then I opened the truck door and started inside.

Just as I did the glass door of a motel room slid open and two men and women in bathing suits with drinks in their hands walked out on the flagstones and sat at a table by the pool. Vidrine and Mapes were both laughing at something one of the women had said. I stepped back in the shadows and watched Mapes signal a Negro waiter. A moment later the waiter brought them big silver shrimp-cocktail bowls and a platter of fried crawfish. Mapes wore sandals and a bikini swimming suit, and his body was as lean and tan as a long-distance runner’s. But Vidrine wasn’t as confident of his physique; he wore a Hawaiian shirt with his trunks, the top button undone to show his chest hair, but he kept crossing and recrossing his legs as though he could reshape the protruding contour of his stomach. The two women looked like hookers. One had a braying laugh; the other wore her hair pulled back on her head like copper wire, and she squeezed Mapes’s thigh under the table whenever she leaned forward to say something.

I got back in the truck, took my World War II Japanese field glasses out of the glove box, and watched them out of the shadows for an hour. The underwater lights in the swimming pool were smoky green, and a thin slick of suntan oil floated on the surface. The waiter took away their dishes, brought them more rounds of tropical drinks, and their gaiety seemed unrelenting. They left the table periodically and went back through the sliding glass door into the motel room, and at first I thought they were simply using the bathroom, but then one of the women came back out touching one nostril with her knuckle, sniffing as though a grain of sand were caught in her breathing passage. At ten o’clock the waiter began dipping leaves out of the pool with a long-handled screen, and I saw Mapes signal for more drinks and the waiter look at his watch and shake his head negatively. They sat outside for another half hour, smoking cigarettes, laughing more quietly now, sucking on pieces of ice from the bottoms of their glasses, the women’s faces pleasant with a nocturnal lassitude.

Then a sudden rain shower rattled across the motel’s tile roof, clattered on the bamboo and palm fronds, and danced in the swimming pool’s underwater lights. Vidrine, Mapes, and the women ran laughing for the sliding door of the room. I waited until midnight, and they still had not come back out.

I put on my rain hat and went into the motel bar. It was almost deserted, and raindrops ran down the windows. Outside, I could see the white and blue neon flower against the dark sky. The bartertder smiled at me. He wore black trousers, a white shirt that glowed almost purple in the bar light, and a black string tie sprinkled with sequins. He was a strange-looking man. His eyes were close-set and small as dimes, and he smoked a Pall Mall with three fingers along the barrel of the cigarette. I sat at the corner of the bar, where I could see the front door of Vidrine and Mapes’s rooms, and ordered a 7-Up.

“It’s pretty empty tonight,” I said.

“It sure is. You by yourself tonight?” he said.

“Right now I am. I was sort of looking for some company.” I smiled at him.

He nodded good-naturedly and began rinsing glasses in a tin sink. Finally he said, “You staying at the motel?”

“Yeah, for a couple of days. Boy, I tell you I got one.” I blew out my breath and touched my forehead with my fingertips.

“I met this lady last night, a schoolteacher, would you believe it, and she came up to my room and we started hitting the JD pretty hard. But I’m not kidding you, before we got serious about anything she drank me under the table and I woke up at noon like a ball of fire.” I laughed.

“And with another problem, too. You know what I mean?”

He ducked his head and grinned.

“Yeah, that can be a tough problem,” he said.

“You want another 7-Up?”

“Sure.”

He went back to his work in the sink, his small eyes masked, and a moment later he dried his hands absently on a towel, turned on a radio that was set among the liquor bottles on the counter, and walked into a back hallway, where he picked up a house phone. He spoke into the receiver with his back turned toward me so that I could not hear him above the music on the radio. Outside the window, the trees were black against the sky and the blue tile of the motel roof glistened in the rain.

The girl came through the side door ten minutes later and sat one stool down from me. She wore spiked heels, Levi’s, a backless brown sweater, and hoop earrings. She shook her wet hair loose, lit a cigarette, ordered a drink, then had another, and didn’t pay for either of them. She talked as though she and I and the bartender were somehow old friends. In the neon glow she was pretty in a rough way. I wondered where she came from, what kind of trade-off was worth her present situation.

I wasn’t making it easy for her, either. I hadn’t offered to pay for either of her drinks, and I had made no overture toward her. I saw her look at her watch, then glance directly into the bartender’s eyes. He lit a cigarette and stepped out the door as though he were getting a breath of fresh air.

“I hate lounges, don’t you? They’re all dull,” she said.

“It’s a pretty slow place, all right.”

“I’d rather have drinks with a friend in my room.”

“What if I buy a bottle?”

“I think that would be just wonderful,” she said, and smiled as much to herself as to me. Then she bit down on her lip, leaned toward me, and touched my thigh.

“I’ve got a little trouble with Don, though. Like a seventy-five-dollar bar tab. Could you lend it to me so they don’t eighty-six me out of this place?”

“It’s time to take off, kiddo.”

“What?”

I took my sheriff’s deputy badge out of my back pocket and opened it in front of her. It was just an honorary one, and I kept it only because it got me free parking at Evangeline Downs and the Fairgrounds in New Orleans, but she didn’t know that.

“Don’s in deep shit. Go home and watch television,” I said.

“You bastard.”

“I told you you’re not busted. You want to hang around and have some of his problems?”

Her eyes went from my face to the bartender, who was coming back through the side door. Her decision didn’t take long. She took her car keys out of her purse, threw her cigarettes inside, snapped it shut, and walked quickly on her spiked heels out the opposite door into the rain. I held up the badge in front of the bartender’s smalj, close-set eyes.

“It’s Iberia Parish, but what do you care?” I said.

“You’re going to do something for me, right? Because you don’t want Lafayette vice down here, do you? You’re a reasonable guy, Don.”

He bit down on the corner of his lip and looked away from my face.

“I got a. number I can call,” he said.. “Not tonight you don’t.”

I could see his lip discolor where his tooth continued to chew on it. He blew air out his nose as though he had a cold.

“I don’t want trouble.”

“You shouldn’t pimp.”

“How about lightening up a bit?” He looked at the two remaining customers in the bar. They were young and they sat at a table in the far corner. Behind them, through the opened blinds, headlights passed on the wet street.

“Two of your girls are in room six. You need to get them out,” I said.

“Wait a minute …”

“Let’s get it done, Don. No more messing around.”

“That’s Mr. Mapes. I can’t do that.”

“Time’s running out, partner.”

“Look, you got a beef here or something, that’s your business. I can’t get mixed up in this. Those broads don’t listen to me, anyway.”

“Well, I guess you’re a stand-up guy. Your boss won’t mind you getting busted, will he? Or having heat all over the place? You think one of those girls might have some flake up her nose? Maybe it’s just sinus trouble.”

“All right,” he said, and held his palms upward.

“I got to tell these people I’m closing. Then I’ll call the room. Then I’m gone, out of it, right?”

I didn’t answer.

“Hey, I’m out of it, right?” he said.

“I’m already having trouble remembering your face.”

Five minutes after the bartender phoned Mapes’s room the two prostitutes came out the front door, a man’s angry voice resounding out of the room behind them, and got into a convertible and drove away. I opened the wooden toolbox in the bed of my pickup truck and took out a five-foot length of chain that I sometimes used to pull stumps. I folded it in half and wrapped the two loose ends around my hand. The links were rusted and made an orange smear across my palm. I walked across the gravel under the dripping trees toward the door of room 6. The chain clinked against my leg; the heat lightning jumped in white spiderwebs all over the black sky.

Vidrine must have thought the women had come back because he was smiling when he opened the door in his boxer undershorts. Behind him Mapes was eating a sandwich in his robe at a wet bar. The linen and covers on the king-sized bed were in disarray, and the hallway that led into another bedroom was littered with towels, wet bathing suits, and beer cups.

Vidrine’s smile collapsed, and his face suddenly looked rigid and glazed. Mapes set his sandwich in his plate, wet the scar on his lower lip as though he were contemplating an abstract equation, and moved toward a suitcase that was opened on a folding luggage holder.

I heard the chain clink and sing through the air, felt it come back over my head again and again, felt their hands rake against the side of my face; my ears roared with sound a rumble deep under the Gulf, the drilling-rig floor trembling and clattering violently, the drill pipe exploding out of the wellhead in a red-black fireball. My hand was bitten and streaked with rust; it was the color of dried blood inside a hypodermic needle used to threaten a six-year-old child; it was like the patterns that I streaked across the walls, the bedclothes, the sliding glass doors that gave onto the courtyard where azalea (petals floated on the surface of a lighted turquoise pool.