Heaven’s Prisoners

3

IF, AS A child, I had been asked to describe the world I lived in, I'm sure my response would have been in terms of images that in general left me with a sense of well-being about myself and my family. Because even though my mother died when I was young and we were poor and my father sometimes brawled in bars and got locked in the parish jail, he and my little brother and I had a home-actually a world-on the bayou that was always safe, warm in the winter from the woodstove, cool in the summer under the shade of the pecan trees, a place that was ours and had belonged to our people and a way of life since the Acadians came to Louisiana in 1755. In describing that world I would have told my questioner about my pet three-legged coon, my pirogue tied to a cypress into which was driven a rusty spike with a chain supposedly used by jean Lafitte, the big, black iron pot in the backyard where my father fried us sac-a-lait and bream almost every night in the summer, the orange and purple sunsets in the fall when the ducks would cover the sky from horizon to horizon, the red leaves spinning out of the trees onto the water in that peculiar gold October light that was both warm and cold at the same time, and the dark, wet layers of leaves deep in the woods where we dug for night-crawlers, the smokehouse in back that glistened in the morning frost and always smelled of pork dripping into smoldering ash, and most of all my father-a big, dark, laughing Cajun who could break boards into kindling with his bare hands, throw a washtub full of bricks over a fence, or pull a six-foot 'gator out of the water by his tail.

But what images would you find if you unlocked the mind of a six-year-old child who had been flown out of a virtual Stone Age, a Central American village, where the twentieth century intruded itself in the form of the most sophisticated and destructive infantry weapons in the world?

The only Spanish-speaking person I knew in New Iberia was a pari-mutuel window seller named Felix who worked at Evangeline Downs in Lafayette and the Fairgrounds in New Orleans. He had been a casino card dealer in Havana during the Batista era, and his lavender shirts and white French cuffs, crinkling seersucker suits and pomade-scented hair gave him the appearance of a man who still aspired to a jaded opulence in his life. But like most people I knew around the track, his chief defect was that he didn't like regular work or the world of ordinary people.

The skies had cleared almost completely of rain clouds an hour after I had returned from Lafayette and my visit to the DEA, and now the western horizon was aflame with the sunset, cicadas droned in the trees, and fireflies were starting to light in the dusk. We sat in the living room while Felix spoke quietly to Alafair in Spanish about her parents, her village, the small geographic, tropical postage stamp that constituted the only world she had ever known but that sent my own mind back across the seas, back across two decades, to other villages that smelled of fish heads, animal dung, chicken yards, sour mud, stagnant water, human feces, ulcerated children with no pants on who urinated in the road; and then there was that other smell, the reek of soldiers who hadn't bathed for days, who lived enclosed in their own fetid envelope, whose fantasies vacillated from rut to dissolving their enemies and the source of their discomfort into a bloody mist.

But I digress into my own historical myopia. Her story is more important than mine because I chose to be a participant and she did not. I chose to help bring the technology of napalm and the M-16 and AK-47 meat-cutters to people who harvested rice with their hands. Others elected Alafair and her family to be the recipients of our industrial gifts to the Third World.

She spoke as though she were describing the contents of a bad picture show of which she understood only parts, and Annie and I had trouble looking at each other's eyes lest we see reflected there the recognition of the simian creature that was still alive and thriving in the human race. Felix translated:

– The soldiers carry knives and pliers to steal the faces of the people in the village. My uncle ran away into the cane, and the next day we found him where they had left him. My mother tried to hide my eyes but I saw anyway. His thumbs were tied together with wire, and they had taken away his face. It was hot in the cane and we could hear the flies buzzing. Some of the people got sick because of the smell and vomited on themselves.

– That was when my father ran away, too. My mother said he went into the hills with the other men from the village. The helicopters chased them sometimes, I think, because we saw the shadows go across our house and then across the road and the fields, then they would stop in the air and begin shooting. They had tubes on their sides that made puffs of smoke, and the rocks and trees on the hillside would fly in the air. The grass and bushes were dry and caught fire, and at night we could see them burning high up in the darkness and smell the smoke in the wind-

"Ask her what happened to her father," I said to Felix. "Dondé está tu padre ahora?"

– Maybe he went away with the trucks. The trucks went into the hills, then came back with many men from the village. They took them to a place where the soldiers live, and we did not see them again. My cousin said the soldiers have a prison far away and they keep many people there. Maybe my father is with them. The American priest said he would try to find out but that we had to leave the village. He said they would hurt my mother the way they hurt the other lady because of the clinic-

She went silent on the couch and stared out the screen door at the fireflies' lightning in the dusk. Her tan face was now discolored with the same pale, bloodless spots it had had when I pulled her out of the water. Annie stroked her close-cropped hair with her palm and squeezed her around the shoulders.

"Dave, maybe that's enough," she said.

"No, she's got to tell it all. She's too little a kid to carry that kind of stuff around by herself," I said. Then, to Felix, "What other lady?"

"Quién es la otra señora?" he asked.

– She worked at the clinic with my mother. Her stomach was big and it made her walk like a duck. One day the soldiers came and pulled her out in the road by her arms. She was calling the names of her friends to help her, but the people were afraid and tried to hide. Then the soldiers made us go outside and watch the thing they did to her in the road-

Her eyes were wide and had the empty, dry, glazed expression of someone who might be staring into a furnace. "Qué hicieron los soldados?" Felix said softly.

– They went to the woodcutter's house and came back with his machete. They were chopping and the machete was wet and red in the sunlight. A soldier put his hands in her stomach and took out her baby. The people were crying now and covering their faces. The priest ran to us from the church, but they knocked him down and beat him in the road. The fat lady and her baby stayed out there by themselves in the sun. The smell was like the smell in the cane when we found my uncle. It was in all the houses, and when we woke up in the morning it was still there but worse-

The cicadas were loud in the trees. There was nothing we could say. How do you explain evil to a child, particularly when the child's experience with it is perhaps greater than your own? I had seen children in a Saigon burn ward whose eyes rendered you mute before you could even attempt to apologise for the calamity that adults had imposed upon them. My condolence became a box of Hershey bars.

We drove to Mulate's in Breaux Bridge for pecan pie and listened to the Acadian string band, then took a ride down Bayou Teche on the paddle-wheel pleasure boat that operated up and down the bayou for tourists. It was dark now, and the trees on some of the lawns were hung with Japanese lanterns, and you could smell barbecue fires and crabs boiling in the lighted and screened summerhouses beyond the cane that grew along the bayou's banks. The baseball diamond in the park looked as if it were lit by an enormous white flare, and people were cheering on an American Legion game that had all the innocent and provincial intensity of a scene clipped from the summer of 1941. Alafair sat on a wooden bench between Annie and me and watched the cypress trees and shadowy lawns and the scrolled nineteenth-century homes slip past us. Maybe it wasn't much to offer in recompense, but it was all we had.

The air was cool and the eastern sky plum-colored and striped with low-hanging red clouds when I opened up the bait shop the next morning. I worked until about nine o'clock, then left it with Batist and walked back up to the house for breakfast. I was just having my last cup of coffee when he called me on the phone.

"Dave, you 'member that colored man that rent from us this morning?" he said.

"No."

"He talked funny. He not from around here, no."

"I don't remember him, Batist. What is it?"

"He said he run the boat up on the bar and bust off the propeller. He ax if you want to come get it."

"Where is he?"

"Sout' of the four-corners. You want me go after him?"

"That's all right. I'll go in a few minutes. Did you give him an extra shearing pin?"

"Mais sure. He say that ain't it."

"Okay, Batist. Don't worry about it."

"Ax him where he's from he don't know how to keep the boat in the bayou, no."

A few minutes later I headed down the bayou in an out-board to pick up the damaged rental. It wasn't unusual for me to go after one of our boats. With some regularity, drunks ran them over sandbars and floating logs, bashed them against cypress stumps, or flipped them over while turning across their own wakes. The sun was bright on the water, and dragonflies hung in the still air over the lily pads along the banks. The V-shaped wake from the Evinrude slapped against the cypress roots and made the lily pads suddenly swell and undulate as though a cushion of air were rippling by underneath them. I passed the old clapboard general store at the four-corners where the black man must have used the phone to call Batist. A rusted Hadacol sign was still nailed to one wall, and a spreading oak shaded the front gallery where some Negro men in overalls were drinking soda pop and eating sandwiches. Then the cypress trees and cane along the banks became thicker, and farther down I could see my rental boat tied to a pine sapling, swinging empty in the brown current.

I cut my engine and drifted into the bank on top of my wake and tied up next to the rental. The small waves slapped against the sides of both aluminium hulls. Back in a clearing a tall black man sat on a sawed oak stump, drinking from a fifth of apricot brandy. By his foot were an opened loaf of bread and a can of Vienna sausages. He wore Adidas running shoes, soiled white cotton trousers, and an orange undershirt, and his chest and shoulders were covered with tiny coils of wiry black hair. He was much blacker than most south Louisiana people of color, and he must have had a half-dozen gold rings on his long fingers. He put two fingers of snuff under his lip and looked at me without speaking. His eyes were red in the sun-spotted shade of the oak trees. I stepped up onto the bank and walked into the clearing.

"What's the trouble, podna?" I said.

He took another sip of the brandy and didn't reply.

"Batist said you ran over the sandbar."

He still didn't answer.

"Do you hear me okay, podna?" I said, and smiled at him.

But he wasn't going to talk to me.

"Well, let's have a look," I said. "If it's just the shearing pin, I'll fix it and you can be on your way. But if you bent the propeller, I'll have to tow you back and I'm afraid I won't be able to give you another boat."

I looked once more at him, then turned around and started back toward the water's edge. I heard him stand up and brush crumbs off his clothes, then I heard the brandy gurgle in the bottle as though it were being held upside down, and just as I turned with that terrible and futile recognition that something was wrong, out of time and place, I saw his narrowed red eyes again and the bottle ripping down murderously in his long, black hand.

He caught me on the edge of the skull cap, I felt the bottle rake down off my shoulder, and I went down on all fours as though my legs had suddenly been kicked out from under me. My mouth hung open, my eyes wouldn't focus, and my ears were roaring with sound. I could feel blood running down the side of my face.

Then, with a casual, almost contemptuous movement of his body, he straddled me from behind, held my chin up with one hand so I could see the open, pearl-handled barber's razor he held before my eyes, then inserted the razor's edge between the back of my ear and my scalp. He smelled of alcohol and snuff. I saw the legs of another man walk out of the trees.

"Don't look up, my friend," the other man said, in what was either a Brooklyn or Irish Channel accent. "That'd change everything for us. Make it real bad for you. Toot's serious about his razor. He'll sculpt your ears off. Make your head look like a mannequin."

He lit a cigarette with a lighter and clicked it shut. The smoke smelled like a Picayune. Out of the corner of my eye I could see his purple suede cowboy boots, gray slacks, and one gold-braceleted white hand.

"Eyes forward, asshole. I won't say it again," he said. "You can get out of this easy or Toot can cut you right across the nipples. He'd love to do it for you. He was a tonton macoute down in Haiti. He sleeps in a grave one night a month to stay in touch with the spirits. Tell him what you did to the broad, Toot."

"You talk too much. Get finished. I want to eat," the black man said.

"Toot had a whole bunch of surprises for her," the white man said. "He's an imaginative guy. He's got a bunch of Polaroids from Haiti. You ought to see them. Guess what he did to her."

I watched a drop of my blood run off my eyelash and fall and break like a small red star in the dirt.

"Guess!" he said again, and kicked me hard in the right buttock.

I clenched my teeth and felt the clods of dirt bite into my palms.

"You got dirty ears, huh?" he said, and kicked me in the thigh with the toe of his boot.

"Fuck you, buddy."

"What?"

"You heard me. Whatever you do to me today I'm going to square. If I can't do it, I've got friends who will."

"I've got news for you. You're still talking now because I'm in a good mood. Second, you brought this down on yourself, asshole. When you start talking to somebody else's whores, when you poke your nose into other people's shit, you got to pay the man. That's the rules. An old-time homicide roach ought to know that. Here's the last news flash. The chippy got off easy. Toot wanted to turn her face into one of his Polaroids. But that broad is money on the hoof, got people depending on her, so sometimes you got to let it slide, you know what I mean? So he put her finger in the door and broke it for her."

"Hey," he said in an almost happy fashion, "don't look sad. I'm telling you, she didn't mind. She was glad. She's a smart girl, she knows the rules. It's too bad, though, you don't have a pussy between your legs, 'cause you ain't money on the hoof."

"Get finished," the black man said.

"You ain't in a hurry, are you, Robicheaux? Huh?" he said, and nudged me in the genitals with his boot.

The blood dripped off my eyelash and speckled the dirt.

"Okay, I'll make it quick, since you're starting to remind me of a dog down there," he said. "You got a house, you got a boat business, you got a wife, you got a lot to be thankful for. So don't get in nobody else's shit. Stay home and play with mama and your worms. If you don't know what I'm talking about, think about screwing a wife that don't have a nose."

"Now let the man pay his tab, Toot."

I felt the weight of the razor lift from behind my ear, then the white man's pointed boot ripped between my thighs and exploded in my scrotum. A furnace door opened in my bowels, a piece of angle iron twisted inside me, and a sound unlike my own voice roared from my throat. Then, for good measure, as I shuddered on my knees and elbows, heaving like a gutted animal, the black man stepped back and drop-kicked me across the mouth with the long-legged grace of a ballet dancer.

I lay in an embryonic ball on my side, blood stringing from my mouth, and saw them walk off through the trees like two friends whose sunny day had been only temporarily interrupted by an insignificant task.

I look out of the door of the dustoff into the hot, bright morning as we lift clear of the banyan trees, and the elephant grass dents and flattens under us as though it were being bruised by a giant thumb. Then the air suddenly becomes cooler, no longer like steam off an oven, and we're racing over the countryside, our shadow' streaking ahead of us across rice paddies and earthen dikes and yellow dirt roads with bicyclists and carts on them. The medic, an Italian kid from New York, hits me with a syrette of morphine and washes my face from his canteen. He's barechested and sweaty, and his pot is strung with rubber spiders. Say goodbye to Shitsville, Lieutenant, he says. You're going back alive in '65. I smell the foulness of my wounds, the dried urine in my pants, as I watch the geographic history of my last ten months sweep by under us: the burnt-out ville where the ash rises and powders in the hot wind; a ditch that gapes like a ragged incision in the earth, where we pinned them down and then broiled them alive with Zippo-tracks; the ruptured dike and dried-out and baked rice paddy still pocked with mortar rounds where they locked down on us from both flanks and marched it right through us like a firestorm. Hey, Lieutenant, don't touch yourself there, the medic is saying. I mean it, it's a mess down there. You can't lose no more blood. You want I should tie your hands? They got refrigeration at the aid station. Plasma. Hey, hold his goddamn wrists. He's torn it open.

"That's an ice bag you feel down there," the doctor was saying. He was a gray, thick-bodied man who wore rimless glasses, greens, and a T-shirt. "It'll take the swelling down quite a bit. It looks like you slept well. That shot I gave you is pretty strong stuff. Did you have dreams?"

I could tell from the sunlight on the oak trees outside that it was late afternoon. The wisteria and blooming myrtle on the hospital lawn moved in the breeze. The drawbridge was up over Bayou Teche, and the two-deck pleasure boat was going through, its paddle wheel streaming water and light.

My mouth was dry, and the inside of my lip felt as though it were filled with wire.

"I had to put stitches in your scalp and six in your mouth. Don't eat any peanut brittle for a while," he said, and smiled.

"Where's Annie?" I asked thickly.

"I sent her for a cup of coffee. She'll be back in a minute. The colored man's outside, too. He's a big fellow, isn't he? How far did he carry you?"

I had to wet the row of stiches inside my lip before I could talk again.

"About five hundred yards, up to the four-corners. How bad am I down below, Doc?"

"You're not ruptured, if that's what you mean. Keep it in your pajamas a couple of nights and you'll be all right. Where'd you get those scars around your thighs?"

"In the service."

"I thought I recognised the handiwork. It looks like some of it is still in there."

"I set off metal detectors at the airport sometimes."

"Well, we're going to keep you with us tonight, but you can go home in the morning. You want to talk with the sheriff now, or later?"

I hadn't seen the other man, who was sitting in a leather chair in the corner. He wore a brown departmental uniform, held his lacquered campaign hat on his knee, and leaned forward deferentially. He used to own a dry-cleaning business in town before someone talked him into running for sheriff. The rural cops had changed a lot in the last twenty years. When I was a boy the sheriff wore a blue suit with a vest and a big railroad watch and chain and carried a heavy revolver in his coat pocket. He was not bothered by the bordellos on Railroad Avenue and the slot machines all over Iberia Parish, nor was he greatly troubled when white kids went nigger-knocking on Saturday nights. He'd tip his John B. Stetson hat to a white lady on Main, and talk to an elderly Negro woman as though she were a post. This one was president of the Downtown Merchants Association.

"You know who they were, Dave?" he said. He had the soft, downturned lines in his face of most Acadian men in their late middle age. His cheeks were flecked with tiny blue and red veins.

"A white guy named Eddie Keats. He owns some bars in Lafayette and New Orleans. The other guy is black. His name's Toot." I swallowed from the water glass on the table. "Maybe he's a Haitian. You know anybody like that around here?"

"No."

"You know Eddie Keats?"

"No. But we can cut a warrant for him."

"It won't do any good. I never saw his face. I couldn't make him in a lineup."

"I don't understand. How do you know it was this guy Keats?"

"He was messing around my house yesterday. Call the DEA agent in Lafayette. He's got a sheet on him. The guy works for Bubba Rocque sometimes."

"Oh boy."

"Look, you can pick up Keats on suspicion. He's supposed to be a low-level hit man. Roust him in his automobile, and maybe you'll turn something. Some weed, a concealed weapon, hot credit cards. These fuckers always have spaghetti hanging off the place somewhere." I drank from the water again and laid my head back on the pillow. My scrotum, with the ice bag under it, felt as big as a bowling ball.

"I don't know about that. That's Lafayette Parish. It's a little like going on a fishing trip in somebody else's pond." He looked at me quietly, as though I should understand.

"You want him back here again?" I said. "Because unless you send him a hard telegram, he will be."

He was silent a moment, then he wrote in a pad and put the pad and pencil back in his shirt pocket and buttoned it.

"Well, I'll give the DEA and the Lafayette sheriff's office a call," he said. "We'll see what happens."

Then he asked some more questions, most of which were the formless and irrelevant afterthoughts of a well-meaning amateur who did not want to seem unsympathetic. I didn't reply when he said good-bye.

But what did I expect? I couldn't be sure myself that the white man was Eddie Keats. New Orleans was full of people with the same Italian-Irish background that produced the accent you would normally associate with Brooklyn. I had admitted I couldn't make him in a lineup and I didn't know anything about the black man except that his name was Toot and he slept in a grave. What is an ex-dry cleaner who dresses like a Fritos delivery man supposed to do with that one? I asked myself.

But maybe there was a darker strain at work inside me that I didn't want to recognise. I knew how local cops would have dealt with Eddie Keats and his kind twenty years ago.

A couple of truly vicious coonass plainclothes (they usually wore J. C. Higgins suits that looked like clothes on a duck) would have gone to his bar, thrown his framed liquor license in the toilet, broken out all his car windows with a baton, then pointed a revolver between his eyes and snapped the hammer on an empty chamber.

No, I didn't like them then; I didn't like them now. But it was a temptation.

Batist came in smelling of wine and fish, with some flowers I suspected he had taken from a hall vase and put in a Coca-Cola bottle. When I told him that the black man named Toot was possibly a tonton macoute from Haiti who practiced black magic, Batist got him confused with the loup-garou, the bayou equivalent of the lamia or werewolf, and was convinced that we should see a traiteur in order to find this loup-garou and fill his mouth and nostrils with dirt from a witch's grave. He saw my eyes light on the pint wine bottle, with the paper bag twisted around its neck, that protruded from the back pocket of his overalls, and he shifted sideways in the chair to block my vision, but the bottle clanked loudly against the chair's arm. His face was transfused with guilt.

"Hey, podna, since when did you have to hide things from me?" I said.

"I shouldn't drink, me, when I got to look after Miss Annie and that little girl."

"I trust you, Batist."

His eyes averted mine and his big hands were awkward in his lap. Even though I had known him since I was a child, he was still uncomfortable when I, a white man, spoke to him in a personal way.

"Where's Alafair now?" I said.

"Wit' my wife and girl. She all right, you ain't got to worry, no. You know she talk French, her? We fixing po'-boys, I say pain, she know that mean 'bread,' yeah. I say sauce piquante, she know that mean 'hot sauce.' How come she know that, Dave?"

"The Spanish language has a lot of words like ours."

"Oh," he said, and was thoughtful a moment. Then, "How come that?"

Annie came through the door and saved me from an impossible discussion. Batist was absolutely obsessive about understanding any information that was foreign to his world, but as a rule he would have to hack and hew it into pieces until it would assimilate into that strange Afro-Creole-Acadian frame of reference that was as natural to him as wearing a dime on a string around his ankle to ward off the gris-gris, an evil spell cast by a traiteur, or conjuror.

Annie stayed with me through the evening while the light softened on the trees outside and the shadows deepened on the lawn, the western sky turned russet and orange like a chemical flame, and high school kids strolled down the sidewalks to the American Legion baseball game in the park. Through the open window I could smell barbecue fifes and water sprinklers, magnolia blossoms and night-blooming jasmine. Then the sky darkened, and the rain clouds in the south pulsated with white streaks of lightning like networks of veins.

Annie lay next to me and rubbed my chest and touched my face with her fingers and kissed me on the eyes.

"Take away the ice bag and push the chair in front of the door," I said.

"No, Dave."

"Yes, it's all right. The doctor said there was no problem."

She kissed me on the ear, then whispered, "Not tonight, baby love."

I felt myself swallow.

"Annie, please," I said.

She raised up on one elbow and looked curiously into my face.

"What is it?" she said.

"I need you. You're my wife."

She frowned and her eyes went back and forth into mine.

"Tell me what it is," she said.

"You want to know?"

"Dave, you're my whole life. How could I not want to know?"

"Those sonsofbitches put me on my hands and knees and worked me over like they would a dog."

I could see the pain in her eyes. Her hand went to my cheek, then to my throat.

"Somebody will catch them. You know that," she said.

"No, they're hunting on the game reserve. They're mainline badasses, and they don't have anybody more serious to deal with than a dry cleaner in a sheriff's suit."

"You gave it up. We have a good life now. This is the place you've always wanted to come back to. Everybody in town likes you and respects you, and the people up and down the bayou are the best friends anyone could have. Now we have Alafair, too. How can you let a couple of criminals hurt all that?"

"It doesn't work that way."

"Yes, it does, if you look at what's right with your life instead of what's wrong with it."

"Are you going to push the chair in front of the door?"

She paused. Her face was quiet and purposeful. She turned off the light on the bedstand and pushed the heavy leather chair until it caught under the doorknob. In the moonlight through the window her curly gold hair looked as if it were flecked with silver. She pulled back the sheet and took away the ice bag, then touched me with her hand. The pain made both my knees jump.

I heard her sigh as she sat back down on the side of the bed.

"Are we going to fight with each other when we have a problem?" she said.

"I'm not fighting with you, kiddo."

"Yes, you are. You can't turn loose of the past, Dave. You get hurt, or you see something that's wrong in the world, and all the old ways come back to you."

"I can't help that."

"Maybe not. But you don't live alone anymore." She took my hand and lay down beside me again. "There's me, and now there's Alafair, too."

"I'll tell you what it feels like, and I won't say any more. You remember when I told you about how those North Vietnamese regulars overran us and the captain surrendered to them? They tied our hands around trees with piano wire, then took turns urinating on us. That's what it feels like."

She was quiet a long time. I could hear breathing in the dark. Then she took a deep breath and let it out and put her arm across my chest.

"I have a very bad feeling inside me, Dave," she said.

There was nothing more to say. How could there be? Even the most sympathetic friends and relatives of a battery or assault victim could not understand what that individual experiences. Over the years I had questioned people who had been molested by degenerates, mugged by street punks, shanked and shot by psychopaths, gang-banged and sodomised by outlaw bikers. They all had the same numb expression, the same drowning eyes, the same knowledge that they somehow deserved their fate and that they were absolutely alone in the world. And often we made their grief and humiliation even greater by ascribing the responsibility for their suffering to their own incaution, so that we could remain psychologically invulnerable ourselves.

I wasn't being fair to Annie. She had paid her share of dues, but there are times when you are very alone in the world and your own thoughts flay your skin an inch at a time. This was one of them.

I didn't sleep that night. But then insomnia and I were old companions.

Two days later the swelling between my legs had gone down and I could walk without looking like I was straddling a fence. The sheriff came out to see me at the boat dock and told me he had talked to the Lafayette city police and Minos P. Dautrieve at the DEA. Lafayette had sent a couple of detectives to question Eddie Keats at his bar, but he claimed that he had taken two of his dancers sailing on the day I was beaten up, and the two dancers corroborated his story.

"Are they going to accept that?" I said.

"What are they supposed to do?"

"Do some work and find out where those girls were two days ago."

"Do you know how many cases those guys probably have?"

"I'm not sympathetic, Sheriff. People like Keats come into our area because they think they have a free pass. What did Minos P. Dautrieve have to say?"

The sheriff's face colored and the skin at the corner of his mouth tugged slightly in a smile.

"I think he said you'd better get your ass into his office," the sheriff replied.

"Those were his words?"

"I believe so."

"Why's he mad at me?"

"I get the impression he thinks you're messing around in federal business."

"Does he know anything about a Haitian named Toot?"

"No. I went through Baton Rouge and the National Crime Information Center in Washington and couldn't find out anything, either."

"He's probably an illegal. There's no paper on him," I said.

"That's what Dautrieve said."

"He's a smart cop."

I saw a look of faint embarrassment in the sheriff's eyes, and I felt instantly sorry for my remark.

"Well, I promise you I'll give it my best, Dave," he said.

"I appreciate what you've done."

"I'm afraid I haven't done very much."

"Look, these guys are hard to put away," I said. "I worked two years on the case of a syndicate hit man who pushed his wife off a fourth-floor balcony into a dry swimming pool. He even told me he did it. He walked right out of it because we took her diary out of the condo without a warrant. How about that for first-rate detective work? Every time I'd see him in a bar, he'd send a drink over to my table. It really felt good."

He smiled and shook hands.

"One more thing before I go," he said. "A man named Monroe from Immigration was in my office yesterday. He was asking questions about you."

The sunlight was bright on the bayou. The oaks and cypress on the far side made deep shadows on the bank.

"He was out here the day after that plane went down at Southwest Pass," I said.

"He asked if you had a little girl staying with you."

"What'd you tell him?"

"I told him I didn't know. I also told him it wasn't my business. But I got the feeling he wasn't really interested in some little girl. You bother him for some reason."

"I gave him a bad time."

"I don't know those federal people that well, but I don't think they drive up from New Orleans just because a man with a fish dock gives them a bad time. What's that fellow after, Dave?"

"I don't know."

"Look, I don't want to tell you what to do, but if you and Annie are helping out a little girl that doesn't have any parents, why don't you let other folks help you, too? People around here aren't going to let anybody take her away."

"My father used to say that a catfish had whiskers so he'd never go into a hollow leg he couldn't turn around in. I don't trust those people at Immigration, Sheriff. Play on their terms and you'll lose."

"I think maybe you got a dark view sometimes, Dave."

"You better believe it," I said.

I watched him drive away on the dirt road under the canopy of oak trees. I clicked my fingers on the warm board rail that edged my dock, then walked up to the house and had lunch with Annie and Alafair.

An hour later I took the.45 automatic and the full clip of hollow-points from the dresser drawer and walked with them inside the folded towel to the pickup truck and put them in the glove box. Annie watched me from the front porch, her arm leaned against a paintless wood post. I could see her breasts rise and fall under her denim shirt.

"I'm going to New Orleans. I'll be back tonight," I said.

She didn't answer.

"It's not going to take care of itself," I said. "The sheriff is a nice guy who should be cleaning stains out of somebody's sports coat. The feds don't have jurisdiction in an assault case. The Lafayette cops don't have time to solve crimes in Iberia Parish. That means we fall through the cracks. Screw that."

"I'm sure that somehow that makes sense. You know, rah, rah for the penis and all that. But I wonder if Dave is giving Dave a shuck so we can march off to the wars again."

Her face was cheerless and empty.

I watched the wind flatten the leaves in the pecan trees, then I opened the door of the pickup.

"I need to take some money out of savings to help somebody," I said. "I'll put it back next month."

"What can I say? Like your first wife told you, 'Keep it high and hard, podjo," she said, and went back inside the house.

The sweep of wind in the pecan trees seemed deafening.

I gassed up the truck at the dock, then as an afterthought I went inside the bait shop, sat at the wooden counter with a Dr. Pepper, and called Minos P. Dautrieve at the DEA in Lafayette. While the phone rang I gazed out the window at the green leaves floating on the bayou.

"I understand you want my ass in your office," I said.

"Yeah, what the fuck's going on over there?"

"Why don't you drive over and find out?"

"You sound funny."

"I have stitches in my mouth."

"They bounced you around pretty good, huh?"

"What's this about you wanting my ass in your office?"

"I'm curious. Why are a bunch of farts who deal dope and whores so interested in you? I think maybe you're on to something we don't know about."

"I'm not."

"I think also you may have the delusion you're still a police officer."

"You've got things turned around a little bit. When a guy gets his cojones and his face kicked in, he becomes the victim. The guys who kick in his cojones and face are the criminals. These are the guys you get mad at. The object is to put them in jail."

"The sheriff said you can't identify Keats."

"I didn't see his face."

"And you never saw the Zulu before?"

"Keats, or whoever the white guy was, said he was one of Baby Doc's tontons macoute."

"What do you want us to do, then?"

"If I remember our earlier conversation right, y'all were going to handle it."

"It's after the fact now. And I don't have authority in this kind of assault case. You know that."

I looked out the window at the leaves floating on the brown current.

"Do you all ever salt the mine shaft?" I said.

"You mean plant dope on a suspect? Are you serious?"

"Save the Boy Scout stuff. I've got a wife and another person in my home who are in jeopardy. You said you were going to handle things. You're not handling anything. Instead I get this ongoing lecture that somehow I'm the problem in this situation."

"I never said that."

"You don't have to. A collection of moral retards runs millions in drugs through the bayous, and you probably don't nail one of them in fifty. It's frustrating. It looks bad on the monthly report. You wonder if you're going to be transferred to Fargo soon. So you make noise about civilians meddling in your business."

"I don't like the way you're talking to me, Robicheaux."

"Too bad. I'm the guy with the stitches. If you want to do something for me, figure out a way to pick up Keats."

"I'm sorry you got beat up. I'm sorry we can't do more. I understand your anger. But you were a cop and you know our limits. So how about easing off the Purple Heart routine?"

"You told me Keats's bars have hookers in them. Get the local heat to park patrol cars in front of his bars a few nights. You'll bring his own people down on him."

"We don't operate that way."

"I had a feeling you'd say that. See you around, partner. Don't hang on the rim too long. Everybody will forget you're in the game."

"You think that's clever?"

I hung up on him, finished my Dr. Pepper, and drove down the dirt road in the warm wind that thrashed the tree limbs overhead. The bayou was covered with leaves now, and back in the shadows on the far bank I could see cottonmouths sleeping on the lower branches of the willow trees, just above the water's languid surface. I rumbled across the drawbridge into town, withdrew three hundred dollars from the bank, then took the back road through the sugarcane fields to St. Martinville and caught the interstate to New Orleans.

The wind was still blowing hard as I drove down the long concrete causeway over the Atchafalaya swamp. The sky was still a soft blue and filled with tumbling white clouds, but a good storm was building out on the Gulf and I knew that by evening the southern horizon would be black and streaked with rain and lightning. I watched the flooded willow trees bend in the wind, and the moss on the dead cypress in the bays straighten and fall, and the way the sunlight danced and shattered on the water when the surface suddenly wrinkled from one shore to the next. The Atchafalaya basin encompasses hundreds of square miles of bayous, willow islands, sand bogs, green leaves covered with buttercups, wide bays dotted with dead cypress and oil-well platforms, and flooded woods filled with cottonmouths, alligators, and black clouds of mosquitoes. My father and I had fished and hunted all over the Atchafalaya when I was a boy, and even on a breezy spring day like this we knew how to catch bull bream and goggle-eye perch when nobody else would catch them. In the late afternoon we'd anchor the pirogue on the lee side of a willow island, when the mosquitoes would start to swarm out of the trees, and cast our bobbers back into the quiet water, right against the line of lilly pads, and wait for the bream and goggle-eye to start feeding on the insects. In an hour we'd fill our ice chest with fish.

But my reverie about boyhood moments with my father could not get rid of the words Annie had said to me. She had wanted to raise a red welt across the heart, and she had done a good job of it. But maybe what bothered me worse was the fact that I knew she had hurt me only because she had an unrelieved hurt inside herself. Her reference to a statement made by my first wife was an admission that maybe there was a fundamental difference in me, a deeply ingrained character flaw, that neither Annie nor my ex-wife nor perhaps any sane woman would ever be able to accept. I was not simply a drunk; I was drawn to a violent and aberrant world the way a vampire bat seeks a black recess within the earth.

My first wife's name was Niccole, and she was a dark-haired, beautiful girl from Martinique who loved horse racing almost as much as I. But unfortunately she loved money and clubhouse society even more. I could have almost forgiven her infidelities in our marriage, until we both discovered that her love affairs were not motivated by lust for other men but rather contempt for me and loathing for the dark, alcoholic energies that governed my life.

We had been at a lawn party out by Lake Pontchartrain, and I had been drinking all afternoon at Jefferson Downs and now I had reached the point where I didn't even bother to leave the small bar under the mimosa trees at the lawn party and make a pretense of interest at the conversation around me. The wind was balmy and it rattled the dry palm fronds on the lakeshore, and I watched the red sun set on the horizon and reflect on the green, capping surface of the water. In the distance, white sailboats lurched in fountains of spray toward the Southern Yacht Club. I could feel the whiskey in my face, the omiscient sense of control that alcohol always brought me, the bright flame of metaphysical insight burning behind my eyes.

But my seersucker sleeve was damp from the bar, and my words were thick and apart from me when I asked for another Black Jack and water.

Then Niccole was standing next to me with her current lover, a geologist from Houston. He was a summer mountain climber, and he had a rugged, handsome profile like a Roman's and a chest that looked as hard as a barrel. Like all the other men there, he wore the soft tropical colors of the season-a pastel shirt, a white linen suit, a purple knit tie casually loose at the throat, he ordered Manhattans for both of them, then while he waited for the Negro bartender to fix their drinks he stroked the down on top of Nicole's arm as though I were not there.

Later, I would not be able to describe accurately any series of feelings or events after that moment. I felt something rip like wet newspaper in the back of my head; I saw his startled face look suddenly into mine; I saw it twist and convulse as my fist came across his mouth; I felt his hands try to grab my coat as he went down; I saw the genuine fear in his eyes as I rained my fists down on him and then caught his throat between my hands.

When they pulled me off him, his tongue was stuck in his throat, his skin was the color of ash, and his cheeks were covered with strings of pink spittle. My wife was sobbing uncontrollably on the host's shoulder.

When I awoke on our houseboat the next morning, my eyes shuddering in the hard light refracting off the lake, I found the note she had left me:

Dear Dave,

I don't know what it is you're looking for, but three years of marriage to you have convinced me I don't want to be there when you find it. Sorry about that. As your pitcher-bartender friend says, Keep it high and hard, podjo.

Niccole

I followed the highway through the eastern end of the Atchafalaya basin. White cranes rose above the dead cypress in the sunlight just as the first drops of rain began to dimple the water below the causeway. I could smell the wet sand, the moss, the four-o'clock flowers, the toadstools, the odor of dead fish and sour mud blowing on the wind out of the marsh. A big willow tree by the water's edge looked like a woman's hair in the wind.