A Morning for Flamingos

CHAPTER 2

Three months later I spent much of my day out on the gallery at home. The days were cool and warm at the same time, the way they always are during the fall in southern Louisiana, and I liked to put on a pair of khakis, a soft flannel shirt, and my loafers, and sit on the gallery and watch the gold light in my pecan trees, the hard blue ceramic texture of the sky above the marsh, the red leaves floating like rose petals on the bayou, the fishermen on my dock shaking sacks of cracked ice on their catches of sac-á-lait and big-mouth bass.

Sometimes after a couple of hours I would walk down through the grove of pecan trees and across the dirt road to the dock and bait shop and help Batist, the Negro man who worked for me, count the receipts, seine the dead shiners out of the aluminum bait tanks, or paint sauce piquante on the split chickens and links of sausage that we barbecued in an old oil drum I had cut longways with an acetylene torch and welded hinges and metal legs on. It was a good season that year, and I made a lot of money renting boats and selling bait and beer and serving barbecue lunches to the fishermen who came in at noon and sat around my Southern Bell spool tables with beach umbrellas set in the centers. But I would tire of my own business in a short while, and walk back up on the gallery and look out at the round shafts of light in the trees, and the gray squirrels that ran through the piles of leaves around the trunks.

My left shoulder and arm and upper chest didn't hurt me anymore when I moved around, or even when I turned onto my left side in my sleep. I was all right unless I picked up a lot of weight suddenly with my left hand. Sometimes I unbuttoned my shirt and fingered the round scar that was an inch and a half below my collarbone. It was the size of a dime, red, indented, rubbery to the touch. In an almost narcissistic fascination with my own mortality, I could reach over the top of my shoulder and touch the rubbery scar that had grown over the exit wound. The bullet had gone through me as clean and as straight as an arrow shaft.

On some afternoons I unfolded a card table on the gallery and took apart my guns-a double-barrel twelve-gauge, a.25-caliber hide-away Beretta, and the.45 automatic that I had brought home from Vietnam-and oiled and wiped and polished all the springs and screws and tiny mechanisms. Then I'd oil them again and run bore brushes through the barrels before I reassembled them. I liked the heavy weight of the.45 in my palm, the way the clip snugged up inside the handle, the delicate lines of my fingerprints on the freshly oiled metal. One day I loaded the clip with hollow-points, walked down to the duck pond at the back of my property, eased a round into the chamber, and sighted on a broad green hyacinth leaf. But I didn't pull the trigger. I lowered the automatic, then raised it and aimed again. The afternoon was bright and warm, and the grass in my neighbor's pasture was dull green in the sunlight. I lowered the.45 a second time, released the clip from the magazine, slipped it into my back pocket, pulled back the receiver, and ejected the round in the chamber. I told myself that the pistol's report, which was a deafening one, would be unsettling to the neighbors.

I walked back to the house, put the.45 under some shirts in my dresser drawer, and took no more interest in it.

I did not handle the nights well. Sometimes after supper I took Alafair, my adopted daughter, to Vezey's in New Iberia for ice cream; later, we would drive back down the dirt road along the bayou in the waning twilight, the fireflies lighting in the sky, and I would begin to feel a nameless apprehension that seemed to have no cause. I would try to hide my self-absorption from her, but even though she was only in the second grade, she always read my moods accurately and saw through my disguises. She was a beautiful child, with a round, tan face, wide-set Indian teeth, and shiny black hair cut in bangs. When she smiled her eyes would squint almost completely shut, and you would not guess that she had witnessed a massacre in her Salvadoran village, or that I had pulled her from a pocket of air inside a crashed plane, carrying illegal refugees, out on the salt.

One evening on the way home from the ice cream parlor I could feel her eyes watching the side of my face. I looked over at her and winked. We had bought some new Curious George and Baby Squanto Indian books, and she rode with them stacked on her knees.

"Why you always thinking about something, Dave?" she said. She wore her elastic-waisted jeans, pink tennis shoes, a USL T-shirt with the words "Ragin' Cajuns" printed on it, and an oversized Houston Astros ball cap.

"I'm just tired today, little guy."

"A man in Vezey's said hello to us and you didn't say anything."

"I guess I didn't hear him."

"You don't smile or play anymore, Dave. It's like something's always wrong."

"I'm not that bad, am I?"

She looked straight ahead, her cap bouncing with the bumps in the road.

"Alf?" I said.

But she wouldn't turn her head or reply.

"Hey, Baby Squanto, come on."

Then she said in a quiet voice, "Did I do something that made you sad?"

"No, of course not. Don't ever think a thing like that, little guy. You're my partner, right?"

But her face was morose in the purple light, her dark eyes troubled with questions she couldn't answer.

After I said her prayers with her and kissed her goodnight, I read until very late, until my eyes burned and I couldn't register the words on the page and the darkness outside was alive with the cries of night birds and nutrias in the marsh. Then I watched the late show on television, drank a glass of milk, and fell asleep with my head on the kitchen table. I woke during the night to the sound of Alafair's slippered feet shuffling across the linoleum. I looked up bleary-eyed into her face. Her pajamas were covered with smiling clocks. She patted me on top of the head as she would a cat.

He waited for me in my dreams. Not Tee Beau Latiolais or Jimmie Lee Boggs but a metamorphic figure who changed his appearance every night but always managed to perform the same function. Sometimes it was ole Victor Charlie, his black pajamas glued against his body with sweat, his face strung with human feces out of a rice paddy, one bulging walleye aimed along the iron sights of a French bolt-action rifle. When he squeezed the trigger I felt the steel jacketed bullet rip through my throat as easily as it would core a cantaloupe.

Or I would see myself down a narrow, unlighted brick passageway off Dauphine in the French Quarter. I could smell the damp stone, the mint and roses growing in the courtyard, see the shadows of the banana trees waving on the flagstones beyond the piked gate that hung open at the end of the passageway. My hand tightened on the grips of the.45; the mortar between the bricks in the wall felt like claws in my back. I worked my way up to the courtyard entrance, my breath ballooning in my chest; then suddenly the scrolled iron gate swung into my face, broke two of my fingers as if they were sticks, raked the.45 out of my hand, and knocked me backward into a pool of rainwater. An enormous black man in a child's T-shirt, in lavender slacks at least three sizes too small for him, so that his scrotum was outlined like a bag of metal washers, squatted down with a.410 shotgun pistol resting on his thigh and looked at me through the bars of the gate. He was toothless, his lips purple with snuff, his eyes red-rimmed, his breath rank with funk.

"Your turn to beg, motherfucker," he said. "That's right, beg for your worthless shitass life."

Then he smiled, lifted the point of my chin with the shotgun barrel, and cocked the hammer.

I would awake on the couch, my T-shirt and shorts damp with perspiration, and sit in a square of moonlight on the edge of the couch, my head bent down, my jaws clenched tight to keep them from shaking.

I was full pay during my three months' leave, and when I returned to work I was assigned to restricted duty. I stayed in the office most of the time; I interviewed witnesses for other detectives; or sometimes I investigated traffic accidents out in the parish. I did a great deal of paperwork. I was treated with the deference you often see extended to a wounded and recuperating soldier. The attitude is one of kindness, but perhaps a degree of fear is involved also, as though mortality is an infectious condition that must be treated by isolation.

My life became as bland and unremarkable as the season was soft and warm and transitory.

Then, on a windblown afternoon, with leaves flying in the air, I drove to Lafayette in my truck to see Minos P. Dautrieve, an old friend and DEA agent who was now assigned to the Presidential Task Force on Drugs.

He loved to fish, and because I didn't want to talk with him at his house, with his wife or children somewhere on the edge of the conversation, I asked him to bring his spinning rod and drive with me to the levee at Henderson Swamp. I stopped at one of the bait and boat-rental shacks below the levee and bought two poor-boy shrimp sandwiches and a long-necked bottle of Jax for him and a Dr Pepper for me. We walked down to a grassy place on the bank, across from a row of willow islands that acted as a barrier between the channel along the levee and the swamp itself, which was actually an enormous wetlands area of bays, canals, bayous, oil platforms, and flooded stands of cypress and willow trees. He flipped his Rapala out to the edge of the willow pads that grew on the opposite side of the channel.

Minos had been All-American honorable mention when he played forward for LSU, and he still wore his hair in a college-boy crew cut, mowed so close that the scalp glowed. He was as lean, flat-stomached, and tapered-looking as he had been when sportswriters named him Dr. Dunkenstein. He had been a first lieutenant with army intelligence in Vietnam, and although he was often flippant and cynical and defensive about his role as a government agent, he had a good heart and a hard-nosed sense about right and wrong that sometimes got him in trouble with his own bureaucracy.

I sat down on the incline and tore a long-bladed stem of grass along the spine. I told him about the strange sense of ennui that characterized my days. "It's like being in the middle of a dead zone. It's like suddenly there's no sound, like all movement has stopped."

"It'll pass," he said.

"It doesn't feel like it."

"You got two Hearts in ' Nam. You came out of it all right, didn't you?"

"That was different. The first wound was superficial. The second time I didn't see it coming. There's a difference when you see it coming."

"I never got hurt, so maybe you're asking the wrong guy. But I've got a feeling that something else is bothering you."

I dropped the torn grass blade between my knees and wiped my fingers on my pants.

"I feel like I begged," I said.

"I don't understand. You begged Boggs before he shot you?"

"No, when Tee Beau climbed down into the coulee and cocked the.38 in my face." I had to swallow when I said it.

"It sounds to me like you did just fine. What were you supposed to do? You had a round through your chest, you had to lie there in the dark with your own thoughts while a couple of guys talked about killing you, then you had to depend on the mercy of a black kid who'd already been sentenced to the electric chair. I don't think I would have come out of that altogether intact. In fact, I know I wouldn't."

He flipped his lure out again and retrieved it in a zigzag motion just below the water's surface. Then he set the rod down on the bank, took our sandwiches and drinks out of the paper bag, and sat down beside me.

"Listen, podna," he said. "You're a brave man. You proved that a long time ago. Stop trying to convince yourself that you're not. I think what we should be talking about here is nailing Boggs. Like cooling out his action, dig it, like blowing up his shit. How'd he get the gun in the can, anyway?"

"He had a girlfriend in Lafayette, a dancer. She blew town the same day he escaped, but she left her fingerprints all over the towel dispenser."

"Where do y'all think he is now?"

"Who knows? He left the car in Algiers. Maybe he went back to Florida."

"How about the black kid?"

"Disappeared. I thought he'd show up by now. He's never been anywhere, and he's always lived with his grandmother."

"Catch him and he might give you a lead on Boggs."

"He might be dead, too."

Minos opened the bottle of Jax with his pocketknife, put the cap inside the paper bag, and drank out of the bottle, staring out at the long, flat expanse of gray water and dead cypress. The sun was red and low on the western horizon.

"I think it's time to put your transmission into gear and start hunting these guys down," he said. "The rules of the game are kick ass and take names."

I didn't say anything.

"It's pretty damn boring to be a spectator in your own life. What do you think?" he said.

"Nothing."

"Bullshit. What do you think?" He hit me in the arm with his elbow.

I let out my breath.

"I'll give it some thought," I said.

"You want any help from our office, you've got it."

"All right, Minos."

"If the black kid's alive, I bet you nail him in a week."

"Okay."

"You know Boggs'll show up, too. A guy like that can't get through a day without smearing shit on the furniture somewhere."

"I think I'm getting your drift."

"All right, I'm crowding the plate a little bit. But I don't want to see you sitting on your hands anymore. The lowlifes are the losers. They get up every morning knowing that fact. Let's don't ever let them think they're wrong, partner."

He smiled and handed me a poor-boy sandwich. It felt thick and soft in my hand. Across the channel I could see the ridged and knobby head of an alligator, like a wet, brown rock, among the lily pads.

The next day I read all the paperwork on Tee Beau Latiolais and talked to the prosecutor's office and the detective who did the investigation and made the arrest. Nobody seemed to have any doubt about Tee Beau's guilt. He had worked for a redbone named Hipolyte Broussard, a migrant-labor contractor who had ferried his crews on rickety buses from northern Arizona to Dade County, Florida. I remembered him. He was a strange-looking man who had moved about in that nether society of people of color in southern Louisiana -blacks, quadroons, octoroons, and redbones. You would see him unloading his workers at dawn in the fields during the sugarcane harvest, and at night he would be in a Negro bar or poolroom on the south side of town or out in the parish, where he paid off the laborers or lent them money at high interest rates at a table in back. Like all redbones, people who are a mixture of Negro, white, and Indian blood, he had skin the color of burnt brick, and his eyes were turquoise. His arms and long legs were as thin as pipe cleaners, and he wore sideburns, a rust-colored pencil mustache, and a lacquered straw hat at a jaunty angle on his head. He worked his crews hard, and he had as many contracts with corporate farms as he wanted. I had heard stories that workers, or even a whole family, who gave him trouble might be put off the bus at night in the middle of nowhere.

Nobody doubted why Tee Beau had done it, either. In fact, people were sympathetic with his apparent motivation. For one reason or another, Hipolyte Broussard had made Tee Beau's life as miserable as he could. It was the way in which Tee Beau had killed him that had caused the judge to sentence Tee Beau to the electric chair.

It was misting slightly when I drove down the dirt road into the community of Negro shacks out in the parish where Tante Lemon now lived. The shacks were gray and paintless, the galleries sagging, the privies knocked together from tar paper, scrap lumber, and roofing tin. Chickens pecked in the dirt yards, the ditches were littered with garbage, the air reeked of somebody cooking cracklins outside in an iron kettle, which produces an eye-watering stench like sewage. On the corner was a clapboard juke joint, with tape crisscrossed on the cracked windows, and because it was Friday afternoon the oyster-shell parking lot was already full of cars, and the roar of the jukebox inside was so loud it vibrated the front window.

Tante Lemon's house was raised off the ground on short brick columns, and a yellow dog on a rope had dug a depression under the edge of the house from which he looked up at me and flopped his tail in the dirt. Flies buzzed back in the damp shadows beneath the raised floor. I knocked on the screen door, then saw her ironing at a board in the corner of her small living room. She stopped her work, picked up a tin can, held it to her lips, and spit snuff in it.

"They think they send you, I'm gonna tell where that little boy at?" she said. "I ain't seen him, I ain't talk with him, I don't even know Tee Beau alive. That's what y'all done to us, Mr. Dave. Don't be coming round here pretend you our friend, no."

"Will you let me in, Tante Lemon?"

"I done tole them policemens, I tell you, I ain't seen him, me, and I ain't he'ping you, me."

"Listen, Tante Lemon, I don't want to hurt Tee Beau. He saved my life. It's the white man I want. But they're going to catch Tee Beau sooner or later. Wouldn't you rather I find him first, so nobody hurts him?"

She walked to the screen and opened it. Her dress was wash-faded almost colorless, and it flapped on her body and withered breasts as shapelessly as rag.

"You going lie now 'cause I an old nigger?" she said. "You catch that boy, they gonna carry him up to the Red Hat, they gonna strap him down, put that tin cap on his little head, cover up his face with cloth so they ain't got to look his eyes, let all them people watch my little boy suffer, watch the electricity burn up his body. I was on Camp I, Mr. Dave, when they use to keep womens there. I seen them take a white man to the Red Hat. They had to pull him along the ground from the car, pull him along like a dog wrapped up in chains. Then all them people sat down like they was at the ballpark, them, and watch that man die."

She raised the tin cup to her lips and spit snuff in it again, then picked up her iron and began pressing a starched white shirt. She smelled of dry sweat, Copenhagen, and the heat rising from the ironing board. The walls of her house had been pasted with pages from magazines, then overlaid with mismatched strips of water-streaked wallpaper. The floor was covered with a rug whose thread had split like crimped straw, and the few pieces of furniture she owned looked as though they'd been carted home a piece at a time from the junkyard where Tee Beau used to work.

I sat down on a straight-backed chair next to her ironing board.

"I can't promise you anything," I said, "but if I find Tee Beau, I'll try to help him. Maybe we can get the governor to commute his sentence. Tee Beau saved the life of a police officer. That could mean a lot, Tante Lemon."

"The life of that pimp mean a lot."

"What?"

"Hipolyte Broussard a pimp, and he was gonna make Tee Beau do it, too."

"I never heard that Broussard was involved with prostitution."

"White people hear what they want to hear."

"I didn't see anything like that in the case record, either. Who'd you tell this to?"

"I ain't tole nobody. Ain't nobody ax me."

"Where was he pimping, Tante Lemon?"

"Out of the juke, there on the four-corner," she said, and nodded her head toward the outside of the house. "Out in them camps, where them farm worker stay at."

"And he wanted Tee Beau to do it, too?"

"He make Tee Beau drive them girls from the juke down to the camp. Tee Beau say, 'I cain't do that no more, Hipolyte.' Hipolyte say, 'You gonna do it, 'cause you don't, I gonna tell your P.O. you been stealing from me and you going back to jail.' And it don't matter Tee Beau do what he say or not. Hipolyte keep making him feel awful all the time, sticking his thumb in that little boy seat, in front of all them people, shame him till he come home and cry. If that man ain't dead now, I go kill him myself, me."

"Tante Lemon, why didn't you tell this to somebody?"

"I tole you, they ain't ax me. You think them people in that courtroom care what an old nigger woman say?"

"You didn't tell anybody because you thought it would hurt Tee Beau, that people would be sure he did it."

It started raining outside. The hinged flap on the side window was raised with a stick, and in the gray light her skin had the color of a dull penny. She mashed the iron up and down on the shirt she was ironing.

"I can tell lots of things 'bout that juke up the four-corner, 'bout the traiteur woman run that place with Hipolyte, 'bout them crib they got there. Ain't nobody interested, Mr. Dave. Don't be telling me they are, no. Just like when I up in Camp I in Angola. On the Red Hat gang they run them boys up and down the levee with they wheelbarrow, beat them every day with the Black Betty, shoot them and bury them right there in the Miss'sippi levee. Everybody knowed it, nobody care. Ain't nobody care about Tee Beau or what I got to say now."

"You should have talked to somebody. They didn't give Tee Beau the chair because he killed Hipolyte. It was the way he did it."

"Tee Beau in this house, shelling crawfish. Right here," she said, and tapped her finger on the ironing board.

"All right. But somebody drove the bus off the jack on top of Hipolyte. Tee Beau's fingerprints were all over the steering wheel. His muddy shoe prints were all over the floor pedals. Nobody else's. Then while Hipolyte was lying under the brake drum with his back broken, somebody stuffed an oil rag in his mouth so he could spend two hours strangling to death."

"It wasn't long enough."

"Where is Tee Beau?"

"I ain't gonna tell you no more. Waste of time," she said, took a cigarette from a pack on the ironing board, and lit it. She blew the smoke out in the humid air. "You a white man. Colored folk ain't never gonna be your bidness. You come round now 'cause you need Tee Beau catch that white trash shot you. You just see a little colored boy can he'p you now. But you cain't be knowing what he really like, how he hurt inside, how much he love his gran'maman, how much he care for Dorothea and what he willing to do for that little girl. You don't be knowing none of these things, Mr. Dave."

"Who's Dorothea?"

"Go up the juke, ax her who she is. Ax her about Hipolyte, about what Tee Beau do for her. You, that's gonna take him up to the Red Hat."

I said good-bye to her, but she didn't bother to answer. It was raining hard when I stepped off the gallery, and drops of mud danced in the dirt yard. Down the street at the four-corners, the clapboard facade of the juke joint glistened in the gray light, and the scroll of neon over the door, which read big mama goula's, looked like purple smoke in the rain that blew back off the eaves.

The inside was crowded with Negroes, the air thick with cigarette smoke, the smell of dried sweat, muscat, talcum powder, chitlins, gumbo, flat beer, and bathroom disinfectant. The jukebox was deafening, and the pool players rifled the balls into side pockets, shouting and slamming the rack down on the table's slate surface. Beyond the dance floor a zydeco band with an accordion, washboard, thimbles, and an electric bass was setting up on a small stage surrounded by orange lights and chicken wire. Behind the musicians a huge window fan sucked the cigarette smoke out into the rain, and their clothes fluttered in the breeze like bird's feathers. Two deep at the bar, the customers ate boudin and pickled hog's feet off paper plates, drank long-necked Jax and wine spotioti, a mixture of muscat and whiskey that can fry your head for a week.

I stood at the end of the bar, saw the eyes flick momentarily sideways, then heard the conversations resume as though I were not there. I waited for the bartender to reach that moment when he would decide to recognize me. He walked on the duckboards to within three feet of me and began lifting handfuls of beer bottles between his fingers from a cardboard carton, fitting them down into the ice bin. There was a thin, dead cigar in his mouth.

"What you want, man?" he asked, without looking up.

"I'm Detective Dave Robicheaux with the sheriff's department," I said, and opened my badge in my palm.

"What you want?" His eyes looked at me for the first time. They were sullen and flecked with tiny red veins.

"I'd like to talk to Dorothea."

"She's working the tables. She's real busy now."

"I only want a couple of minutes of her time. Call her over, please."

"Look, man, this ain't the place. You understand what I'm talking about?"

"Not really."

He raised up from his work and put his hands flat on the bar.

"That's her out yonder by the band," he said. "You want to go out there and get her? That what you want?"

"Ask her to come over here, please."

"Listen, I ain't did you nothing. Why you giving me this truck?"

The men next to me had stopped talking now and were smoking their cigarettes casually and looking at their own reflections in the bar mirror. One man wore a lavender porkpie hat with a feather in the brim. His sports coat hung heavy on one side.

"Look, man, you got a car outside?" the bartender asked.

"Yes."

"Go sit in it. I'll be sending her," he said, then his voice changed. "Why you be bothering that girl? She ain't did nothing."

"I know she hasn't."

"Then why you bothering her?" he asked.

Before I turned to go outside, I saw a big black woman in a purple dress looking at me from the far end of the duckboards. Her hands were on her hips, her chin pointed upward; she took the cigarette out of her mouth and blew smoke in my direction, her eyes never leaving my face. In the dim light I thought I saw blue tattoos scrolled on the tops of her breasts.

The rain clattered on the roof of my car and streamed down the windows. At the back of the juke joint, beyond the oyster-shell parking lot covered with flattened beer cans, were two battered house trailers. Two men who looked like Latins, in denim work clothes and straw hats, drove up in a pickup truck and knocked at one of the trailers, their bodies pressed up against the door to stay out of the rain. A black woman opened the inside door and spoke to them through the screen. They got back in their truck and left. I saw one of them look back through the rear window as they pulled onto the dirt road.

Five minutes later the bartender appeared in the front door of the juke joint with a small Negro girl at his side and pointed at my car. She ran across the parking lot toward me, with a newspaper spread over her head. When I pushed open the passenger door she jumped inside. She wore black fishnet stockings, a short black waitress's skirt, and a loose white blouse that exposed her lace bra, but she looked both too young and too small for the job she did, and the type of clothes that she wore. It was her hair that caught your attention, black and thick and brushed in soft swirls around her head, almost like a helmet that made her toy face seem even smaller than it was. She was frightened and would not look at me directly.

"You know I'm a police officer?" I said.

"Yes suh."

"Tee Beau saved my life, so I don't want to see him hurt. The man I'm after is named Jimmie Lee Boggs. He killed two people and took Tee Beau with him when he escaped. You know all that, don't you?"

"Yes suh, I knows that."

"You don't have to call me sir. If Tee Beau can help me find this man Boggs, maybe I can help Tee Beau."

She nodded her head. Her hands were motionless on top of the wet newspaper in her lap.

"Did he tell you where Boggs dropped him off?" I said.

"Suh?" Her eyes cut sideways at me, then looked straight ahead again.

"When you talked to him, did he say anything about Jimmie Lee Boggs?"

"I ain't talked to Tee Beau."

"I bet you have," I said, and smiled.

"No suh, I ain't. Nobody know where Tee Beau at. Tante Lemon don't know. Ain't nobody know."

"I see. Look here, Dorothea, I'm going to give you a card. It has my phone number on it. When you talk to Tee Beau, you give him this number. You tell him I appreciate what he did for me, that I want to help him. He can call me collect from a pay phone. I won't know where he's living. All I want to do is find Jimmie Lee Boggs."

She took the card in her small hand. She looked out at the rain, her eyes quiet with thought.

"How you gonna he'p him?" she said.

"We can get his sentence commuted. That means he won't go to the electric chair. Maybe he can even get a new trial. The jury didn't hear everything they should have, did they?"

"What you mean?"

"About Hipolyte Broussard. Was he a pimp?"

"Yes suh."

"Did he try to make Tee Beau a pimp, too?"

"He make him drive the bus with the girls out to the camp."

"What else did Hipolyte do?"

"Suh?"

"Did Hipolyte do something to you?"

Again her eyes cut sideways, then looked straight ahead. I could see her nostrils quiver when she breathed.

"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to," I said. "But maybe Tee Beau had a good reason to kill Hipolyte. Maybe other people might think so, too."

She squeezed her fingers and looked down at her lap.

"He say I got to get on the bus," she said.

"Who?"

"Hipolyte. He say I got to go out to the camp. Tee Beau say I ain't going, even if Hipolyte hit him and knock him down in the dirt. Hipolyte say I going or I ain't working here no more."

"So that's why he killed Hipolyte?"

"I ain't said that. I ain't said that at all. You ax me what Hipolyte done to me."

I looked out at the trailers behind the parking lot.

"Is somebody bothering you now, Dorothea?" I said. "Does anybody try to make you do something you don't want to?"

"Gros Mama's good to me."

"Does she make you do something you don't want to?"

"I wait the table, I pass the mop on the floor 'fore I go home. She don't let no mens bother me. She pass for me in the morning, carry me to work, tell me not be worrying all the time 'bout Tee Beau, he gonna be all right, he coming back one day. Gros Mama know."

"How does she know that?"

"She a traiteur. She got power. That's why Hipolyte scared of her. He got the gris-gris. That man you looking for, Jimmie Lee Boggs? You ain't got to worry about him, no. He got a gris-gris, too. He gonna die, that one."

"Wait a minute, Dorothea. You knew Boggs?"

"I seen him with Hipolyte, back yonder by that trailer. Right there. Gros Mama say they both got the gris-gris, they carry it in them just like a worm. Suh?"

"What?"

"Suh?"

"What is it? And you really don't need to call me sir."

"I wants to ax you something." She looked at me full in the face for the first time. Her lipstick was on crooked. "You ain't lying? You can really he'p Tee Beau?"

"I can try. If he'll let me. Do you know where he is, Dorothea?"

"Gros Mama want me back inside now. Friday a real busy day."

"If you talk to Tee Beau, tell him I said thank you."

"I got to be going now."

"Wait a minute. I have an umbrella," I said.

I popped it open in the rain and walked her to the entrance of the juke joint. Then she walked hurriedly past the men staring at her from the bar, toward her station by the dance floor.

I had promised to take Alafair to the open-air restaurant at Cypremort Point for bluepoint crabs, a weekly ritual whose aftermath made the waitresses cringe: Alafair, in a white bib with a big red crawfish on it, went about disassembling the crabs with wood mallet and nutcrackers and such clumsy intensity that the plank table had to be washed down later with a hose. I tried never to disappoint her, or see her hurt any more than she had already been hurt by the drowning of her real mother in the crashed plane, and the death of Annie, my second wife. But since I had been shot by Jimmie Lee Boggs, I had become an ineffectual caretaker in my own home rather than a parent, and I had no idea when I would put everything back in the proper box and see the worry and uncertainty go out of Alafair's eyes. And I knew absolutely that that moment would not come of its own accord.

So I drove down to a café on the blacktop, called the house, and asked Clarise, my mulatto housekeeper and baby-sitter, to give Alafair her supper and to stay with her until I got home. I talked with Alafair and told her I would take her out for ice cream later and we would go to Cypremort Point for crabs the next night. I sat at the counter and ate a plate of red beans, rice, and breaded pork chops, and drank coffee until over an hour had passed. Then I headed back to the juke joint.

It had stopped raining now, and the air was clear and cool, the sky dark except for a lighted band of purple clouds low on the western horizon. I drove through the parking lot to the back of the building, the flattened beer cans and wet oyster shells crunching under my tires, and through the big fan humming in the back wall I could hear the zydeco band pounding it out:

"Mo mange bien, mo bois bon vin,

Ça pas coute moi à rien.

Ma fille aime gumbo filé

Mo l'aime ma fille aussi."

I parked by one of the trailers and walked up on the wood steps. Back under a solitary spreading oak tree was the pickup truck I had seen earlier: only one man was in the cab now. The trailer was made out of tin and had been covered with thick layers of green paint. Curtains were pulled across the windows, but a light was on inside. The inner door was closed and the screen was latched. I tapped on the screen with my knuckles and looked back over my shoulder at the man in the truck. He looked away from me.

"Sheriff's department," I said, and tapped again.

There was no answer, but I heard movement inside.

"Open up," I said.

Still no answer. I grasped the handle to the screen door firmly and jerked the latch out of the jamb, then opened the inner door, which was unlocked, and stepped into the trailer.

The musky, thick odor of marijuana struck at my face like a fist. The woman whom I had seen at the trailer door earlier lay on a narrow bed in a pink bra and pink panties, her head reclining on a pillow, one arm propped casually behind her head, her free hand holding a joint over an ashtray on a small nightstand. She put the joint to her lips, looked me straight in the face, and took a long, deep hit, ventilating the edges of the paper, until the ash was a bright red coal in the gloom of the trailer.

But the dark-skinned man in denims and work boots, his straw hat clenched against his thigh, his belt buckle still hanging down over his fly, was obviously terrified. His eyes were riveted on the badge in my palm.

"It's not a bust, partner. Rest easy," I said.

He continued to stare wide-eyed at me. His hands were square with calluses, his fingernails half-mooned with dirt.

"Do you speak English?" I said. Then to the woman, "Does your friend speak English?"

"You do it the same way in Mexican or English, honey," she said.

"It's time for you to take off, partner," I said.

But he didn't understand. I folded up my badge and slipped it in my back pocket.

"You can go now. We don't need you for anything. There's no problem. No problema. Your friend is waiting for you," I said.

I took him gently by the arm and opened the door for him.

"Adiós," I said.

This time he realized what he was being offered and he was gone into the darkness like a shot. I closed the door behind him.

"You're a very cool lady," I said.

She took a slow, easy hit on the reefer and let the smoke curl out of her mouth into her nose.

"I guess I just don't scare you too much," I said.

She flexed herself on the bed and drew one knee up before her. Her toenails were painted red.

"You gonna do what you gonna do, ain't you?" she said.

"Possession can be serious stuff in Louisiana."

"Honey, if you was interested in 'resting me, you wouldn't be tapping on no do'."

"You're pretty hip, too."

"Why don't you tell me what you want, sweetheart? Somebody tole you the black berry got the sweet juice?"

"Was Hipolyte Broussard your pimp?"

"That's a bad word. Like it mean I doing something I ain't suppose to."

I turned a straight-backed chair around backward and straddled it.

"Let's understand something," I said. "I don't care what y'all do here. I'm after a white man named Jimmie Lee Boggs. I'll do just about anything to find him. I feel that way about him because he shot me. Are we communicating here?"

She smiled lazily in the smoke.

"So you the one?" she said.

"That's right. And let's get rid of this distraction, too." I took the roach out of her fingers and mashed it out in the ashtray. "Did you know Boggs?"

"I seen him."

"Where?"

"He come see Hipolyte."

"Why?"

"Where you been, honey? You ever see black folks who ain't got to give part their money to white folks? You ain't dumb. You just pretend, you. I think you just here to see me." She smiled again and stretched both her arms over her head.

"Did Boggs come see Gros Mama Goula?"

"That white trash mess with Gros Mama, snakes be crawling out his grave."

I heard the screen open on the spring; then the inside door raked back on the buckled linoleum floor, and the black woman in the purple dress with the scrolled blue tattoos on the tops of her breasts stood in the doorway, one hand on her hip, a flowered kerchief curled in her fingers.

"You taking up too much of people's time," she said. "You got jelly roll oh your mind, or you think bothering my womens gonna clean that man outta your head?"

"What?" I said.

She told the woman on the bed to dress and get up to the juke and help wait tables. She picked up the ashtray with the roach in it and threw it outside into the darkness.

"Wait a minute, what did you say?" I said.

She ignored me.

"And tell that drunk nigger giving Al trouble when I be back up there his skinny ass better be gone," she said to the other woman, who buttoned her jeans, pulled on her blouse, and went out the door.

Gros Mama Goula's face was big and hard-boned, like a man's, her eyes deep-set and dark, so that they had a cavernous quality under the broad forehead and thick brows. I had heard stories about her from other Negroes, the juju woman who could blow the fire out of a burn; stop bleeding by pressing her palm against a wound; charm worms out of a child's stomach; cause a witch to invade the marriage bed, straddle the husband, and fornicate with him until his eyes crossed and he would remain forever discontent with his wife.

"What did you say?" I repeated.

"Po-licemens after jelly roll just like everybody else. You want it, you come ax me first, don't be bothering my womens. That ain't what on your mind, though. You got Jimmie Lee Boggs crawling round in your head. Jelly roll ain't gonna get him out you. He lying there, waiting."

"Is this supposed to impress me?"

She opened a cabinet over the stove, took out a jelly glass and a pint bottle of rum, poured herself three fingers, sat down at a small breakfast table, and lit a cigarette. She drank down the rum, inhaled from the cigarette, blew smoke out over her hand, and studied her knuckles as though I were not there.

"What you want?" she said.

"For openers take a break on the traiteur routine."

"What you mean?"

"You talked with Dorothea. You knew I was looking for Boggs. You'd seen my picture in the newspaper, or you figured out I was one of the men he shot."

"Think what you want. I ain't got the problem."

"What I think is you're operating a place of prostitution."

She smoked and flicked her ashes and waited for me to go on.

"I don't bother you?" I said.

"You want to carry me up to the jail, that's your bidness. They's people pay my bond make sure I stay open."

"Was Jimmie Lee Boggs cutting into Hipolyte's and your action?"

"Darlin', they ain't nobody cutting into my action."

"I don't believe you, Gros Mama. There's not a hot-pillow house in South Louisiana that doesn't have to piece off its action to New Orleans."

She poured rum into her glass again, then as an afterthought looked at me and pointed her finger at the bottle.

"No thanks," I said.

She screwed the top slowly onto the bottle.

"Lookie here," she said. "You don't care 'bout them dagos in New Orleans, 'bout what some niggers be doing down here on Saturday night. You want that man 'cause he hurt you, 'cause he walking round in your sleep at night. You wake up tired in the morning, cain't open and close your hands on the side the bed. You dragging a big chain all day long. Food don't taste no good, women's just something for other mens. You can tell the whole round world I lying, but me and you knows better."

I stared at her woodenly. She continued to smoke idly.

"I ain't seen him since they 'rested him for killing that man with the ball bat," she said. "He in New Orleans, though."

"How do you know?"

"He gonna die over there. In a black room, with lightning jumping all over it. Don't mess with it, darlin'. Come down see Gros Mama when you wake up with that bad feeling. She make you right," she said, and squared her shoulders so that the tattoos on her breasts stretched like a spiderweb.