Heaven’s Prisoners

5

ANNIE AND ALAFAIR were wrapping fried chicken in wax paper and fixing lemonade in a thermos when I got back home. I sat at the kitchen table with a glass of iced tea and mint leaves and looked out the window at the blue jays swooping over the mimosa tree in the backyard. The ducks in my pond were shaking water off their backs and waddling onto the bank in the shade created by the cattails.

"I feel foolish about something," I said.

"We'll take care of that tonight," she said, and smiled.

"Something else."

"Oh."

"Years ago when I was a patrolman there was a notorious street character in the Quarter named Dock Stratton. The welfare officer would give him a meal-and-lodging ticket at one of their contract hotels, and he'd check into the place, then throw all the furniture out the window-tables, chairs, dresser drawers, lamps, mattresses, everything he could squeeze through the window, it would all come crashing down on the sidewalk. Then he'd run downstairs before anybody could call the heat and haul everything to the secondhand store. But no matter what this guy did, we never busted him. I was new and didn't understand. The other guys told me it was because Dock was a barfer. If he got a finger loose in the back of the car, he'd stick it down his throat and puke all over the seats. He'd do it in a lineup, in a holding cell, in a courtroom. He was always cocked and ready to fire. This guy was so bad a guard at the jail threatened to quit rather than take him on the chain to morning court. So Dock was allowed to drive welfare workers and skid-row hotel managers crazy for years, and when rookies like me asked why, we got treated to a good story.

"Except I discovered there was another reason why Dock stayed on the street. He not only knew every hustler and thief in downtown New Orleans, but he'd been a locksmith before he melted his head with Thunderbird, and he could get into a place faster than a professional house creep. So there were a couple of detectives in robbery and homicide who would use him when things weren't working right in a case. One time they knew a hit man from Miami was in town to take out a labor union agent. They told Dock they were making him a special agent with the New Orleans police department and got him to open up the guy's motel room, steal his gun, his suitcase, all his clothes and traveler's checks, then they picked up the guy on suspicion-it was a Friday, so they could hold him until Monday morning-and kept him in a small cell for two days with three drag queens."

"What's the point?" Annie said. Her voice was flat, and her eyes looked at the sunlight in the trees when she spoke.

"Cops leave certain things and people in place for a reason."

"I know these people you talk about are funny and unusual and interesting and all that, Dave, but why not leave them in the past?"

"You remember that guy from Immigration that came around here? He's never been back to the house, has he? He could make a lot of trouble for us if he wanted to, but he hasn't. I told myself that was because I'd given him reason to avoid us."

"Maybe he has other things to do. I just don't think the government is going to be interested in one little girl." She wore a pair of wash-faded Levi's and a white sun halter, and I could see the brown spray of sun freckles on her back. Her hips creased softly above her belt line while she filled the picnic hamper at the drainboard.

"The government is interested in what they choose to be interested in," I said. "Right now I think they've got us on hold. They sent me a signal, but I didn't see it."

"To tell you honestly, this sounds like something of your own creation."

"That guy from Immigration, Monroe, was asking questions about us at the sheriff's office. He didn't need to do that. He could have cut a warrant, come out here, and done anything he wanted. Instead, he or somebody above him wanted me to know their potential in case I thought I could make problems for them about Johnny Dartez."

"Who cares what they do?" Annie said.

"I don't think you appreciate the nature of bureaucratic machinery once it's set in motion."

"I'm sorry. I'm just not going to invest my life in speculating about what people can do to me."

Alafair was looking back and forth between the two of us, her face clouded with the tone of our voices. Annie had dressed her in pink shorts, a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, and pink tennis shoes with the words left and right stamped boldly on the rubber tip of each shoe. Annie rubbed her hand over Alafair's head and gave her the plastic draw bag in which we kept the old bread.

"Go feed the ducks," she said. "We'll leave in a minute."

"Feed ducks?"

"Yes."

"Feed ducks now?"

"That's right."

"Dave viene al parque?"

"Sure, he's coming," Annie said.

Alafair grinned at me and went out the back screen to the pond. The sunlight through the trees made patterns on her brown legs.

"I'll tell you one thing, Dave. No matter what those people from Immigration do, they're not going to take her away. She's ours, just as if we had conceived her."

"I didn't tell you the rest of the story about Dock Stratton. After he finished blowing out his wiring with synthetic wine and wasn't any good to anybody, they shipped him off to the asylum at Mandeville."

"So what does this mean? Are you going to become the knight-errant, tilting with the U.S. government?"

"No."

"Do you still want to go to the park?"

"That's the reason I came home, kiddo."

"I wonder. I really do," she said.

"I'd appreciate it if you'd explain that."

"Don't you see it, Dave? It's like you want to taint every moment in our lives with this conspiratorial vision of yours. It's become an obsession. We don't talk about anything else. Either that or you stare into space. How do you think I feel?"

"I'll try to be different."

"I know."

"I really will."

Her eyes were wet. She sat down across the table from me.

"We haven't been able to have our own child. Now one's been given to us," she said. "That should make us the happiest people in the world. Instead, we fight and worry about what hasn't happened yet. Our conversation at home is filled with the names of people who shouldn't have anything to do with our lives. It's like deliberately inviting an obscene presence into your home. Dave, you say at AA they teach you to give it all up to your Higher Power. Can't you try that? Just give it up, cut it out of your life? There's not a problem in the world that time can't help in some way."

"That's like saying a black tumor on your brain will get better if you don't think about it."

The kitchen was silent. I could hear the blue jays in the mimosa tree and the wings of the ducks beating across the pond as Alafair showered bread crumbs down on their heads. Annie turned away, finished wrapping the fried chicken, closed the picnic hamper, and walked out to the pond. The screen door banged on the jamb after her.

That evening there was a big crowd in the park for the baseball game, and the firemen were having a crawfish boil in the open-air pavilion. The twilight sky was streaked with lilac and pink, and the wind was cool out of the south with the promise of rain. We ate our picnic supper on a wooden table under the oak trees and watched the American Legion game and the groups of high school and college kids who drifted back and forth between the bleachers and the tailgates of pickup trucks where they kept beer in washtubs of ice. Out on the bayou the paddle-wheel pleasure boat with its lighted decks slid by against the dark outline of cypress and the antebellum homes on the far bank. The trees were full of barbecue smoke, and you could smell the crawfish from the pavilion and the hot boudin that a Negro sold from a handcart. Then I heard a French string band play "Jolie Blonde" in the pavilion, and I felt as though once again I were looking through a hole in the dimension at the south Louisiana in which I had grown up.

Jolie blonde, gardez done e'est t'as fait.

Ta m'as quit-té pour t'en aller,

Pour t'en aller avec un autre que moi.

Jolie blonde, pretty girl,

Flower of my heart,

I'll love you forever

My jolie blonde.

But seldom did Annie and I speak directly to each other. Instead we talked brightly to Alafair, walked her to the swing sets and seesaws, bought snowcones, and avoided one another's eyes. That night in the almost anonymous darkness of our bedroom we made love. We did it in need, with our eyes closed, without words, with a kiss only at the end. As I lay on my back, arms across my eyes, I felt her fingers leave the top of my hand, felt her turn on her side toward the opposite wall, and I wondered if her heart was as heavy as mine.

I woke up a half hour later. The room was cool from the wind sucked through the window by the attic fan, but my skin was hot as though I had a sunburn, the stitches in my scalp itched, my palms were damp on my thighs when I sat on the side of the bed.

Without waking Annie, I washed my face, put on a pair of khakis and an old Hawaiian shirt, and went down to the bait shop. The moon was up, and the willows along the bank of the bayou looked silver in the light. I sat in the darkness at the counter and stared out the window at the water and the outboard boats and pirogues knocking gently against the posts on my dock. Then I got up, opened the beer cooler, and took out a handful of partly melted ice and rubbed it on my face and neck. The amber necks of the beer bottles glinted in the moon's glow. The smooth aluminum caps, the wet and shining labels, the brassy beads inside the bottles were like an illuminated nocturnal still life. I closed the box, turned on the lightbulb over the counter, and called Lafayette information for Minos P. Dautrieve's home number.

A moment later I had him on the phone. I looked at the clock. It was midnight.

"What's happening, Dunkenstein?" I said.

"Oh boy," he said.

"Sorry about the hour."

"What do you want, Robicheaux?"

"Where are these clubs that Eddie Keats owns?"

"You called me up to ask me that?"

I didn't answer, and I heard him take a breath.

"The last time we talked, you hung up the phone in my ear," he said. "I didn't appreciate that. I think you have a problem with manners."

"All right, I apologise. Will you tell me where these clubs are?"

"I'll be frank about something else, too. Are you drinking?"

"No. How about the clubs?"

"I guess things never work fast enough for you, do they? So you're going to cowboy our Brooklyn friend?"

"Give me some credit."

"I try to. Believe me," he said.

"There are a dozen people I can call in Lafayette who'll give me the same information."

"Yeah, which makes me wonder why you had to wake me up."

"You ought to know the answer to that."

"I don't. I'm really at a loss. You're truly a mystery to us. You don't hear what you're told, you make up your own rules, you think your past experience as a police officer allows you to mess around in federal business."

"I'm talking to you because you're the only guy around here with the brains and juice to put these people away," I said.

"I'm not flattered."

"So it's no dice, huh?"

He paused.

"Look, Robicheaux, I think you have a cinder block for a head, but basically you're a decent guy," he said. "That means we don't want you hurt anymore. Stay out of it. Have some faith in us. I don't know why you went out to Bubba Rocque's house this afternoon, but I don't think it was smart. You don't-"

"How'd you know I was out there?"

"We have somebody who writes down licence tags for us. You don't flush these guys by flipping lighted matches at them. If you do, they pick the time and the place and you lose. Anyway, go to bed and forget Eddie Keats, at least for tonight."

"Does he have a family?"

"No, he's a gash-hound."

"Thanks, Minos. I'm sorry I woke you up."

"It's all right. By the way, how'd you like Bubba Rocque's wife?"

"I suspect she's ambitious more than anything else."

"What a romantic. She's a switch-hitter, podna. Five years ago she did a three-spot for shanking another dyke. That Bubba can really pick them, can't he?"

I called an old bartender friend in Lafayette. Minos had given me more information than he thought. The bartender told me Keats owned two bars, one in a hotel off Canal in New Orleans, the other on the Breaux Bridge highway outside of Lafayette. If he was at either bar, and if what Minos had said about him was correct, I knew which one he would probably be in.

When I was in college, the Breaux Bridge highway contained a string of all-night lowlife bars, oilfield supply yards, roadhouses, a quarter horse track, gambling joints, and one Negro brothel. You could find the pimps, hoods, whores, ex-cons, and white-knuckle crazies of your choice there every Saturday night. Emergency flares burned next to the wrecked automobiles and shattered glass on the two-lane blacktop, the dance floors roared with electronic noise and fistfights. You could get laid, beat up, shanked, and dosed with clap, all in one night and for less than five dollars.

I parked across the road from the Jungle Room. Eddie Keats had kept up the tradition. His bar was a flat, wide building constructed of cinder blocks that were painted purple and then overprinted with green coconut palms that were illuminated by the floodlights that were hung in the oak trees in front. But I could see two house trailers in the back parking lot, which was kept dark, that were obviously being used by Keat's hot-pillow action. I waited a half hour and did not see the white Corvette.

I had no plan, really, and I knew that I should have listened to Minos's advice. But I still had the same hot flush to my skin, my breath was quicker than it should have been, my back teeth ground together without my being aware of it. At 1:30 a.m. I stuck the.45 down in the front of my khakis, pulled my Hawaiian shirt over the butt, and walked across the road.

The front door, which was painted fingernail-polish red, was partly open to let out the smoke from inside. Only the bar area and a pool table in a side room were lighted, and the dance floor in back that was enclosed by a wooden rail, where a red-headed girl who had powdered her body heavily to cover her freckles was grinning and taking off her clothes while the rockabilly band in the corner pounded it out. The men at the bar were mostly pipeliners and oilfield roughnecks and roustabouts. The white-collar Johns stayed in the darkness at the tables and booths. The waitresses wore black cutoff blouses that exposed the midriff, black high heels, and pink shorts so tight that every anatomical line was etched through the cloth.

A couple of full-time hookers were at the bar, and with a sideways flick of their eyes, in the middle of their conversation with the oilfield workers, they took my inventory as I walked past them to one of the booths. Above the bar a monkey in a small cage sat listlessly on a toy trapeze among a litter of peanut shells and his own droppings.

I knew I was going to have to order a drink. This wasn't a place where I could order a 7-Up without either telling them I was a cop or some other kind of bad news. I just wasn't going to drink it. I wasn't going to drink it. The waitress brought me a Jax that cost three dollars. She was pretty, and she smiled at me and poured from the bottle into my glass.

"There's a two-drink minimum for the floor show," she said. "I'll come back when you're ready for your second."

"Has Toot been in?" I said.

"Who?"

"Eddie's friend, the black guy."

"I'm new. I don't guess I know him," she said, and went away.

A few minutes later three of the oilfield workers went out and left one of the hookers alone at the bar. She finished her drink, picked up her cigarette from the ashtray, and walked toward my booth. She wore white shorts with a dark blue blouse, and her black hair was tied off her neck with a blue bandanna. Her face was round and she was slightly overweight, and when she sat next to me I could smell her hair spray, her perfume, and a nicotine odor that went deep into the lungs. In the glow of the light from the bar, her facial hair was stiff with makeup. Her eyes, which never quite focused on my face, were glazed with alcohol, and her lips seemed to constantly suppress a smile that had nothing to do with either of us.

The waitress arrived right behind her. She ordered a champagne cocktail. Her accent was northern. I watched her light a cigarette and blow smoke up into the air as though it were a stylised art.

"Has Toot been around lately?" I said.

"You mean the space-o boon?" she said. Her eyes had a smile in them while she looked abstractly at the bar.

"That sounds like him."

"What are you interested in him for?"

"I just haven't seen him or Eddie for a while."

"You interested in girls?"

"Sometimes."

"I bet you'd like a little piece in your life, wouldn't you?"

"Maybe."

"It you don't get a little piece, it really messes you up inside, doesn't it? It makes everything real hard for you." She put her hand on my thigh and worked her fingers on my knee.

"What time is Eddie going to be in?"

"You're trying to pump me, hon. That's going to give me bad thoughts about you."

"It's just a question."

Her lips made an exaggerated pout, and she raised her hand, touched my cheek, and slid it down my chest.

"I'm going to think maybe you're not interested in girls, that maybe you're here for the wrong reasons," she said.

Then her hand went lower and hit the butt of the.45. Her eyes looked straight into mine. She started to get up, and I put my hand on top of her arm.

"You're a cop," she said.

"It doesn't matter what I am. Not to you, anyway. You're not in trouble. Do you understand that?"

The alcohol shine had gone from her eyes, and her face had the look of someone caught between fear and an old anger.

"Where's Eddie?" I said.

"He goes to dogfights sometimes in Breaux Bridge, then comes in here and counts the receipts. You want some real trouble, get in his face, and see what happens."

"But that doesn't concern you, does it? You've got nothing to gain by concerning yourself with other people's problems, do you? Do you have a car?"

"What?"

"A car." I pressed her arm slightly.

"Yeah, what d'you think?"

"When I take my hand off your arm you're going on your break. You're going out the door for some fresh air, and you're not going to talk to anybody, and you're going to drive your car down the road and have a late supper somewhere, and that phone on the bar is not going to ring, either."

"You're full of shit."

"Make your choice, hon. I think this place is going to be full of cops tonight. You want to be part of it, that's cool." I took my hand away from her arm.

"You sonofabitch."

I looked at the front door. Her eyes went angrily over my face again, then she slid off the vinyl seat and walked to the bar, the backs of her legs creased from sitting in the booth, and asked the bartender for her purse. He handed it to her, then went back to washing glasses, and she went out a side door into the parking lot.

Ten minutes later the phone did ring, but the bartender never looked in my direction while he talked, and after he hung up he fixed himself a scotch and milk and then started emptying ashtrays along the bar. I knew, however, that I didn't have long before her nerves broke. She was afraid of me or of cops in general, but she was also afraid of Eddie Keats, and eventually she would call to see if a bust or a shooting had gone down and try to make the best of her situation.

I had another problem, too. The next floor show was about to start, and the waitress was circling through the tables, making sure everyone had had his two-drink minimum. I turned in the booth and let my elbow knock the beer bottle off the table.

"I'm sorry," I said when she came over. "Let me have another one, will you?"

She picked up the bottle from the floor and started to wipe down the table. The glow from the bar made highlights in her blond hair. Her body had the firm lines of somebody who had done a lot of physical work in her life.

"You didn't want company?" she said.

"Not now."

"Expensive booze for a dry run."

"It's not so bad." I looked at the side of her face as she wiped the rag in front of me.

"It's the wrong place for trouble, sugar," she said quietly.

"Do I look like bad news?"

"A lot of people do. But the guy that owns this place really is. For kicks, he heats up the wires in that monkey's cage with a cigarette lighter."

"Why do you work here?"

"I couldn't get into the convent," she said, and walked away with her drink tray as though a door were closing behind her.

Later a muscular, powerful man came in, sat at the bar, had the bartender bring him a collins, and began shelling peanuts from a bowl and eating them while he talked to one of the hookers. He wore purple suede cowboy boots, expensive cream-colored slacks, a maroon V-necked terry-cloth shirt, and gold chains and medallions around his neck. His long hair was dyed blond and combed straight back like a professional wrestler's. He took his package of Picayune cigarettes from his pants pocket and set it on the bar while he shelled peanuts from the bowl. He couldn't see me because I was sitting far back in the gloom and he had no reason to look in my direction, but I could see his face clearly, and even though I had never seen it before, its details had the familiarity of a forgotten dream.

His head was big, the neck as thick as a stump, the eyes green and full of energy; a piece of cartilage flexed behind the jawbone while he ground peanuts between his back teeth. The tanned skin around his mouth was so taut that it looked as if you could strike a kitchen match on it. His hands were big, too-the fingers like sausages, the wrists corded with veins. The hooker smoked a cigarette and tried to look cool while he talked to her, watching the red tracings of her cigarette in the bar mirror, but whenever she replied to him her voice seemed to come out in a whisper.

However, I had no trouble hearing his voice. It sounded like there was a blockage in the nasal passages; it was a voice that didn't say but told things to people. In this case he was telling the hooker that she had to square her tab, that she was juicing too much, that the Jungle Room wasn't a trough where a broad got free soda straws.

I said earlier I didn't have a plan. That wasn't true. Every drunk always has a plan. The script is written in the unconscious. We recognise it when the moment is convenient.

I slipped sideways out of the vinyl booth. I almost drank from the filled beer glass before I did. In my years as a practicing alcoholic I never left an unemptied glass or bottle on a table, and I always got down that last shot before I made a hard left turn down a one-way street. Old habits die hard.

I took down one of the cues from the wall rack by the entrance to the poolroom. It was tapered and made of smooth-sanded ash and weighted heavily at the butt end. He didn't pay attention to me as I walked toward him. He was talking to the bartender now, snapping peanut shells apart with his thick thumb and popping the nuts into his mouth. Then his green eyes turned on me, focused in the dim light, his glance concentrating as though there were a stitch across the bridge of his nose, then he brushed his hands clean and swivelled the stool casually so that he was facing me directly.

"You're on my turf, butthole," he said. "Start it and you'll lose. Walk on out the door and you're home free."

I kept walking toward him and didn't answer. I saw the expression in his eyes change, the way green water can suddenly cloud with a groundswell. He reached over the bar for a collins bottle, the change rattling in his slacks, one boot twisted inside the brass foot rail. But he knew it was too late, and his left arm was already rising to shield his head.

Most people think of violence as an abstraction. It never is. It's always ugly, it always demeans and dehumanises, it always shocks and repels and leaves the witnesses to it sick and shaken. It's meant to do all these things.

I held the pool cue by the tapered end with both hands and whipped it sideways through the air as I would a baseball bat, with the same force and energy and snap of the wrists, and broke the weighted end across his left eye and the bridge of his nose. I felt the wood knock into bone, saw the skin split, saw the green eye almost come out of its socket, heard him clatter against the bar and go down on the brass rail with his hands cupped to his nose and the blood roaring between his fingers.

He pulled his knees up to his chin in the litter of cigarette butts and peanut hulls. He couldn't talk and instead trembled all over. The bar was absolutely silent. The bartender, the hookers, the oilfield workers in their hardhats, the waitresses in their pink shorts and cut-off black blouses, the rockabilly musicians, the half-undressed mulatto stripper on the dance floor, all stood like statues in the floating layers of cigarette smoke.

I heard someone dial a telephone as I walked out into the night air.

The next morning I drove into New Iberia and picked up a supply of red worms, nightcrawlers, and shiners. It was a clear, warm day with little wind, and I rented out almost all my boats. While I worked behind the counter in the bait shop and, later, started the fire in the barbecue pit for the lunch customers, I kept looking down the dirt road for a sheriff's car. But none came. At noon I called Minos Dautrieve at the DEA in Lafayette.

"I need to come in and talk to you," I said.

"No, I'll come over there. Stay out of Lafayette."

"Why's that?"

"I don't think the town's ready for Wyatt Earp this morning."

An hour later he came down the dirt road under the oak trees in a government car, parked by the dock, and walked into the shop. He stooped automatically as he came through the door. He wore a pair of seersucker slacks, shined loafers, a light blue sports shirt, and a red and gray striped tie pulled loose at the collar. His scalp and crewcut blond hair shone in the light. He looked around the shop and nodded with a smile on his face.

"You've got a nice business here," he said.

"Thanks."

"It's too bad you're not content to just run it and stop over-extending yourself."

"You want a soft drink or a cup of coffee?"

"Don't be defensive. You're a legend this morning. I came into the office late, because somebody woke me up last night, and everybody was having a big laugh about the floor show at the Jungle Room. I told you we don't get to have that kind of fun. We just fill out forms, advise the slime-o's of their rights, and make sure they have adequate counsel to stay on the street. I heard they had to use a mop to soak up all the blood."

"Are they cutting a warrant?"

"He wouldn't sign the complaint. A sheriff's detective took it to the hospital on a clipboard."

"But he identified me?"

"He didn't have to. One of his hookers got your license number. Eddie Keats doesn't like courtrooms. But don't mess with the Lafayette cops anymore. They get provoked when somebody comes into their parish and thinks he can start strumming heads with a pool cue."

"Too bad. They should have rousted him when I got my face kicked in."

"I'm worried about you. You don't hear well."

"I haven't been sleeping a lot lately. Save it for another time, all right?"

"I'm perplexed, too. I know you've been into some heavy-metal shit before, but I didn't figure you for a cowboy. You know, you could have put out that guy's light."

Two fishermen came in and bought a carton of worms and a dozen bottles of beer for their ice chest. I rang up their money on my old brass cash register and watched them walk out into the bright sunlight.

"Let's take a ride," I said.

I left Batist in charge of the shop, and Minos and I rode down the dirt lane in my pickup. The sunlight seemed to click through the thick green leaves overhead.

"I called you up for a specific reason this morning," I said. "If you don't like the way I do things, I'm sorry. You're not in the hotbox, partner. I didn't invite any of this bullshit into my life, but I got it just the same. So I don't think it's too cool when you start making your observations in the middle of my shop, in front of my help and my customers."

"Okay. You've got your point."

"I never busted up a guy like that before. I don't feel good about it."

"It's always dumb to play on the wiseguys' terms. But if you needed to scramble somebody's eggs, Keats was a fine selection. But believe it or not, we have a couple of things in his file that are even worse. The kid of a federal witness disappeared a year ago. We found him in a-"

"Then why don't you put the fucker away?"

He didn't answer. He turned the wind vane in his face and looked out at the Negro families fishing in the shade of the cypress trees.

"Is he feeding you guys?" I said.

"We don't use hit men as informants."

"Don't jerk me around, Minos. You use whatever works."

"Not hit men. Never. Not in my office." He turned and looked me directly in the face. There was color in his cheeks.

"Then give him a priority and weld the door shut on him."

"You think you're twisting in the wind while we play pocket pool. But maybe we're doing things you don't know about. Look, we never go for just one guy. You know that. We throw a net over a whole bunch of these shitheads at once. That's the only way we get them to testify against each other. Try learning some patience."

"You want Bubba Rocque. You've got a file on everybody around him. In the meantime his clowns are running loose with baseball bats."

"I think you're unteachable. Why did you call me up, anyway?"

"About Immigration."

"I didn't eat breakfast this morning. Stop up here somewhere."

"You know this guy Monroe that was sniffing around New Iberia?"

"Yeah, I know him. Are you worried about the little girl you have in your house?"

I looked at him.

"You have a way of constantly earning our attention," he said. "Stop there. I'm really hungry. You can pay for it, too. I left my wallet on the dresser this morning."

I stopped at a small wooden lunch stand run by a Negro, set back in a grove of oak trees. We sat at one of the tables in the shade and ordered pork chop sandwiches and dirty rice. The smoke from the stove hung in the sunlit branches of the trees.

"What's this about Immigration?" Minos said.

"I heard they busted both Johnny Dartez and Victor Romero."

"Where'd you get that?" He watched some black children playing pitch-and-catch next to the lunch stand. But I could see that his eyes were troubled.

"From a bartender in New Orleans."

"Sounds like a crummy source."

"No games. You knew that a government agency of some kind had a connection with Dartez or his body wouldn't have disappeared. You just weren't sure about Victor Romero."

"So?"

"I think Immigration was using these guys to infiltrate the sanctuary movement."

He put his hand on his chin and watched the children throwing the baseball.

"What does your bartender friend know about Romero now?" he said.

"Nothing."

"What's this guy's name? We'd like to chat with him."

"So would Bubba Rocque. That means that Jerry-that's his name, and he works at Smiling Jack's on Bourbon-is probably looking for a summer home in Afghanistan."

"You never disappoint me. So you've managed to help scare an informant out of town. Just out of curiosity, how is it that people tell you these things they don't care to share with us?"

"I stuck a cocked.45 up his nose."

"That's right, I forgot. You learned a lot of constitutional procedure from the New Orleans police department."

"I'm correct, though, aren't I? Somehow Immigration got these two characters into the underground railway, or whatever the sanctuary people call it."

"That's what they call it. And no matter what you might have figured out, it's still not your business. Of course, that doesn't make any difference to you. So I'll put it another way. We're nice guys at the DEA. We try to lodge as many lowlifes as we can in our gray-bar hotel chain. And we respect guys like you who are well intended but who have their brains encased in cement. But my advice to you is not to fuck with Immigration, particularly when you have an illegal in your home."

"You don't like them."

"I don't think about them. But you should. I once met a regional INS commissioner, an important man wired right into the White House. He said, 'If you catch 'em, you ought to clean 'em yourself.' I wouldn't want somebody like that on my case."

"It sounds like folksy bullshit to me," I said.

"You're a delight, Robicheaux."

"I don't want to mess up your lunch, but aren't you bothered by the fact that maybe a bomb sent that plane down at Southwest Pass, that somebody murdered a Catholic priest and two women who were fleeing a butcher shop we helped create in El Salvador?"

"Are you an expert on Central American politics?"

"No."

"Have you been down there?"

"No."

"But you give me that impression just the same. Like you've got the franchise on empathy."

"I think you need a whiff of a ville that's been worked over with Zippo-tracks."

"Don't give me that righteous dogshit. I was there, too, podna." The bread in the side of his mouth made an angry lump along his jaw.

"Then don't let those farts at Immigration jerk you around."

He put his sandwich in his plate, drank from his iced tea, and looked away reflectively at the children playing under the trees.

"Have you ever thought that maybe you'd be better off drunk than sober?" he said. "I'm sorry. I really didn't mean that. What I meant to say is I just remembered that I have a check in my shirt pocket. I'll pay for my own lunch today. No, don't argue. It's just been a real pleasure being out with you."

The inside of the church was cool and dark and smelled of stone, burning candles, water, and incense. Through the side door I could see the enclosed garden where, as a child, I used to line up with the other children before we made the Stations of the Cross on Good Friday. It was sunny in the garden, and the St. Augustine grass was green and clipped, and the flower beds were full of yellow and purple roses. At the head of the garden, shaded by a rain tree with bloodred blooms on it, was a rock grotto with a waterfall at the bottom and a stone statue of the crucified Christ set back in the recess.

I walked into the confessional and waited for the priest to slide back the small wooden door in the partition. I had known him for twenty-five years, and I trusted his working-class instincts and forgave him his excess of charity and lack of admonition, just as he forgave me my sins. He slid back the door, and I looked through the wire screen at the round head, the bull neck, the big shoulders in silhouette. He had a small, rubber-bladed fan in the box with him, and his crewcut gray hair moved slightly in the breeze.

I told him about Eddie Keats. Everything. The beating I took, the humiliation, the pool cue shattered across his face, the blood stringing from the fingers cupped over his nose.

The priest was quiet a moment.

"Did you want to kill this man?" he said.

"No."

"Are you sure of that?"

"Yes."

"Do you plan to hurt him again?"

"Not if he leaves me alone."

"Then put it behind you."

I didn't reply. We were both quiet in the gloom of the box.

"Are you still bothered?" he said.

"Yes."

"Dave, you've made your confession. Don't try to judge the right and wrong of what you did. Let it go. Perhaps what you did was wrong, but you acted with provocation. This man threatened your wife. Don't you think the Lord can understand your feelings in a situation like that?"

"That's not why I did it."

"I'm sorry, I don't understand."

"I did it because I want to drink. I burn inside to drink. I want to drink all the time."

"I don't know what to say."

I walked out the side door of the church into the garden. I could hear the waterfall in the grotto, and the odor of the yellow and purple roses and the red flowers on the rain tree was heavy and sweet in the warm, enclosed air. I sat on the stone bench by the grotto and stared at the tops of my shoes.

Later I found Annie weeding the vegetable garden behind our old smokehouse. She was barefoot and wore blue jeans and a denim shirt with no sleeves. She was on her hands and knees in the row, and she pulled the weeds from between the tomato plants and dropped them into a bucket. Her face was hot with her work. I had told her that morning in bed about Eddie Keats. She had said nothing in reply, but had merely gone into the kitchen and started breakfast.

"I think maybe you should go visit your family in Kansas and take Alafair along," I said. I had a glass of iced tea in my hand.

"Why?" She didn't look up.

"That guy Keats."

"You think he's going to come around?"

"I don't know. Sometimes when you bash his kind hard enough, they stay away from you. But then sometimes you can't tell. There's no point in taking chances."

She dropped a handful of weeds into the bucket and stood up from her work. There was a smear of dirt and perspiration on her forehead. I could smell the hot, dusky odor of the tomato plants in the sunlight.

"Why didn't you think of that earlier?" she said. She looked straight ahead.

"Maybe I made a mistake. I still want you and Alafair to go to Kansas."

"I don't want to sound melodramatic, Dave. But I don't make decisions in my life or my family's because of people like this."

"Annie, this is serious."

"Of course it is. You're trying to be a rogue cop of some kind, and at the same time you have a family. So you'd like to get one part of the problem out of Louisiana."

"At least give it some thought."

"I already did. This morning, for about five seconds. Forget it," she said, and walked to the coulee with the weed-filled bucket and shook the weeds down the bank.

When she came back she continued to look at me seriously, then suddenly she laughed.

"Dave, you're just too much," she said. "At least you could offer us Biloxi or Galveston. You remember what you said about Kansas when you visited there? 'This is probably the only place in the United States that would be improved by nuclear war.' And now you'd like to ship me back there?"

"All right, Biloxi."

"No deal, baby love." She walked toward the shade of the backyard, the bucket brushing back and forth against her pants leg.

That evening we went to a fais dodo in St. Martinville. The main street was blocked off for the dancers, and an Acadian string band and a rock 'n' roll group took turns playing on a wooden platform set back against Bayou Teche. The tops of the trees were green against the lavender and pink light in the sky, and the evening breeze blew through the oaks in the churchyard where Evangeline and her lover were buried. For some reason the rock 'n' roll music in southern Louisiana has never changed since the 1950s. It still sounds like Jimmie Reed, Fats Domino, Clifton Chenier, and Albert Amnions. I sat at a wooden table not far from the bandstand, with a paper plate of rice and red beans and fried sac-a-lait, and watched the dancers and listened to the music while Annie took Alafair down the street to find a rest room.

Then rain clouds blackened the western sun temporarily and the wind came up strong and blew leaves, newspapers, beer cups, and paper plates through the streets. But the band kept playing, as though the threat of rain or even an electric storm were no more important a consideration than time and mortality, and for some reason I began to muse on why any of us are what we are, either for good or bad. I didn't choose to be an alcoholic, to have the oral weakness of a child for a bottle, but nevertheless that self-destructive passion, that genetic or environmental wound festered every day at the center of my life. Then I thought about a sergeant in my platoon who was perhaps the finest man I ever knew. If environment was the shaping and determining factor in our lives, his made no sense.

He grew up in a soot-covered foundry town in Illinois, one of those places where the sky is forever seared with smoke and cluttered with the blackened tops of factories and the river so polluted with chemicals and sludge that once it actually caught fire. He lived with his mother in a block of row houses, a world that was bordered on one end by a Saturday-night beer joint and pool hall and on the other by his job as a switchman in the train yard. By all odds he should have been one of those people who live out their lives in a gray and undistinguished way with never a bolder ambition than a joyless marriage and a cost-of-living raise. Instead, he was both brave and compassionate, caring about his men and uncompromising in his loyalties; his intelligence and courage carried both of us through when mine sometimes failed. But even though we served together for seven months, I'll always retain one essential image of him that seemed to define both him and what is best in our country's people.

We had just gotten back to a hot, windblown firebase after two days out in Indian country and a firefight in which the Viet Cong were sometimes five feet from us. We had lost four men and we were drained and sick and exhausted the way you are when even in sleep you feel that you're curled inside a wooden box of your own pain and your soul twitches like a rubber band. I had taken my platoon down a trail at night, a stupid and reckless act, had walked into their ambush, lost our point man immediately, and had gotten flanked, and there was only one person to blame for it-me. Although it was now noon and the sun was as hot and bright as a welder's arc overhead, in my mind's eye I still saw the flash of the AK-47s against the black-green of the jungle.

Then I looked at Dale, my sergeant, wringing out his shirt in a metal water drum. His back was brown, ridged with vertebrae, his ribs like sticks against his skin, the points of his black hair shiny with sweat. Then his lean Czechoslovakian face smiled at me, with more tenderness and affection in his eyes than I had yet seen in a woman's.

He was killed eight days later when a Huey tipped the treetops by an LZ and suddenly dipped sideways into the clearing.

But my point about the origins of the personality and the mysteries of the soul concerns someone else and not my dead friend. A half-dozen stripped-down Harleys, mounted by women in pairs, pulled to the edge of the street barricade, and Claudette Rocque and her friends strolled into the crowd. They wore greasy jeans and black Harley T-shirts without bras, wide studded belts, bandannas around their foreheads like Indians, chains, tattoos, half-topped boots with metal taps. They had six-packs of beer hooked in their fingers, folders of Zig-Zag cigarette papers protruding from their T-shirt pockets. They wore their strange form of sexuality like Visigoth warriors in leather and mail.

But not Bubba's wife. Her breasts hung heavy in a black sun halter that was covered with red hearts, and her jeans were pulled low on her soft, tanned stomach to expose an orange and purple butterfly tattooed by her navel. She saw me through the dancers and walked toward my table, a smile at the edge of her mouth, her hips creasing and undulating with her movement, the top of her blue jeans damp with perspiration against her skin.

She leaned down on the table and smiled into my eyes. There were sun freckles on the tops of her breasts. I could smell beer on her breath and the faint odor of marijuana in her hair. Her eyes were indolent and merry at the same time, and she bit down on her lip as though she had come to a sensuous conclusion for both of us.

"Where's the wifey?" she said.

"Down the street."

"Will she let you dance with me?"

"I'm not a good dancer, Mrs. Rocque."

"I bet you're good at other things, then. Everybody has their special talent." She bit down on her lip again.

"I think maybe I'm one of those people who was born without any. Some of us don't have to seek humility."

She smiled sleepily.

"The sun went behind the clouds," she said. "I wanted to get some more tan. Do you think I'm dark enough?"

I ate from my paper plate and tried to grin good-naturedly.

"Some people say my family has colored and Indian blood in it," she said. "I don't care, though. Like my mother's colored girls used to say, 'The black berry got the sweet juice.'"

Then she touched away a drop of sweat on my forehead with her finger and put it in her mouth. I felt my face redden in the stares from the people on each side of me.

"Last chance to dance," she said, then put her hands behind her head and started to sway her hips to a Jimmy Clanton song the rock 'n' roll band was playing on the stage. She flexed her breasts and rolled her stomach and her eyes looked directly into mine. Her tongue moved around the edges of her mouth as though she were eating an ice cream cone. A family seated next to me got up and moved. She bent her knees so her rear came tight against her jeans, and held her elbows close against the sides of her breasts with her fingers pointed outward, her wet mouth pouting, and went lower and lower toward the ground with the pale tops of her breasts exposed to everyone at the table. I looked away at the bandstand, then saw Annie walk through the crowd with Alafair's hand in hers.

Claudette Rocque and Annie looked at each other with that private knowledge and recognition of intention that women seem to have between one another. But there was no embarrassment in Claudette's face, only that indolent, merry light in her reddish brown eyes. Then she smiled at both of us, put her hand idly on a man's shoulder, and in a moment had moved off with him into the center of the street.

"What was that?" Annie said.

"Bubba Rocque's wife."

"She seems to have enjoyed entertaining you."

"I think she's been hitting on the muta this afternoon."

"The what?"

"The reefer."

"I loved the dancing butterfly. She wiggles it around so well."

"She learned it at Juilliard. Come on, Annie, no screws today."

"Butterfly? Butterfly dance?" Alafair said. She wore a Donald Duck cap with a yellow bill that quacked when you squeezed it. I picked her up on my knee and quacked the cap's bill, happy to be distracted from Annie's inquiring eye. Out of the corner of my vision, I saw Claudette Rocque dancing with the man she had found in the crowd, her stomach pressed tightly against his loins.

The next day the doctor snipped the stitches out of my scalp and mouth. When I ran my tongue along the inside of my lip, the skin felt like a rubber bicycle patch with welts in it. Later that afternoon I went to an AA meeting. The air conditioner was broken, and the room was hot and smoky. My mind wandered constantly.

It was almost summer now, and the afternoon seemed to grow hotter as the day wore on. We ate supper on the redwood table in the backyard amid the drone of the cicadas and the dry rumble of distant thunder. I tried to read the newspaper on the porch, but I couldn't concentrate on the words for more than a paragraph. I went down to the dock to see how many boats were still out, then went back up to the house and closed myself in the back room where I kept my weight set and historical jazz collection. I put on an old Bunk Johnson 78, and as the clear, bell-like quality of his horn lifted out of the static and mire of sound around him, I started a series of curls with ninety pounds on the bar, my biceps and chest swelling with blood and tension and power each time I brought the bar from my thighs up to my chin.

In fifteen minutes I was dripping sweat on the wooden floor. I took off my shirt, put on my gym trunks and running shoes, and did three miles on the dirt road along the bayou, the soreness was almost completely gone from my genitals, where I had been kicked by Eddie Keats, and my wind was good and my heartbeat steady all the way down the road. I could have done another two miles. Normally, I would have felt good about all the energy and resilience in my middle-aged body, but I well knew the machinery that was working inside me, and it had nothing to do with health or the breathless twilit evening or the fireflies sparkling in the black-green trees or the bream popping the water's surface along the lily pads. Summer in south Louisiana has always been, to me, part of an eternal song. Tonight I simply saw the fading red spark of sun on the horizon as the end of spring.

It was a strange night. The stars looked hot in the black sky. There was absolutely no wind, and each leaf on the pecan trees looked as though it were etched out of metal. The surface of the bayou was flat and still, the willows and cattails along the banks motionless. When the moon rose, the clouds looked like silver horsetails against the sky.

I showered with cold water and lay in my underwear on top of the sheets in the dark. Annie traced her fingers on my shoulder. Her head lay facing me on the pillow, and I could feel her breath on my skin.

"We can work through it, Dave. Every marriage has a few bad moments," she said. "We don't have to let them dominate us."

"All right."

"Maybe I've been selfish. Maybe I've wanted too much on my terms."

"What do you mean?"

"I've wanted you to be something you're not. I've tried to pretend for both of us that you're finished with police work and all that world back in New Orleans."

"I left it on my own. You didn't have anything to do with it."

"You turned in a resignation, but you didn't leave it, Dave. You never will."

I looked up into the darkness and waited. The moonlight made patterns on our bodies through the turning window fan.

"If you want to go back to it, maybe that's what we should do," she said.

"Nope."

"Because you don't think I can handle it?"

"Because it's a toilet."

"You say that, but I don't think that's the way you feel."

"My first partner was a man I admired a great deal. He had honest-to-God guts and integrity. One time on Canal a little girl was thrown through a windshield and had her arm cut off. He ran into a bar, filled his coat with ice, and wrapped the arm in it, and they sewed it back on. But before that same guy retired he took juice, he-"

"What?"

"He took bribes. He shook down whores for freebies. He blew away a fourteen-year-old black kid on the roof of the welfare project."

"Listen to the anger in your voice. It's like a fire inside you."

"It's not anger. It's a statement of fact. You stay in it and you start to talk and think like a lowlife, and one day you find yourself doing something that you didn't think yourself capable of, and that's when you know you're really home. It's not a good moment."

"You were never like that, and you never will be." She put her arm across my chest and her knee across my thigh.

"Because I got out of it."

"You thought you did, but you didn't." She rubbed her knee and the inside of her thigh up and down my leg and moved the flat of her hand down my chest and stomach. "I know an officer whose physical condition needs some attention."

"Tomorrow I want to talk with the nuns about enrolling Alafair in kindergarten."

"That's a good idea, skipper."

"Then we'll go to the swimming pool and have lunch in St. Martinville."

"Whatever you say." She pressed tightly against me, blew her breath in my hair, and hooked her leg across both my thighs. "What other plans do you have?"

"There's an American Legion game tomorrow night, too. Maybe we'll just take the whole day off."

"Can I touch you here? Oh my, and I thought you were so stoic, couldn't be swayed by a girl's charms. My baby-love is a big actor, isn't he?"

She kissed my cheek, then my mouth, then got on top of me in her maternal way, as she always did, and stroked my face and smiled into my eyes. The moonlight fell on her tan skin and heavy white breasts, and she raised herself slightly on her knees, took me in her hand, and pressed me inside her, her mouth forming a sudden O, her eyes suddenly looking inward upon herself. I kissed her hair, her ear, the tops of her breasts, I ran my hands along her back and her shaking, hard thighs, and finally I felt all the day's anger and heat, which seemed to live in me like hot sunlight trapped in a bottle of whiskey, disappear in her rhythmic breathing against my cheek and her hands and arms that pressed and caressed me all over as though I could escape from under her love that was as warm, unrelenting, and encompassing as the sea.

My dreams took me many places. Sometimes I would be in a pirogue with my father, deep in the Atchafalaya swamp, the fog thick in the black trees, and just as the sun broke on the earth's rim, I'd troll my Mepps spinner next to the cypress stumps and a largemouth bass would sock into it and burst from the quiet water, rattling with green-gold light. But tonight I dreamed of Hueys flying low over jungle canopy and milky-brown rivers. In the dream they made no sound. They looked like insects against the lavender sky, and as they drew closer I could see the door-gunners firing into the trees. The downdrafts from the helicopter blades churned the tree-tops into a frenzy, and the machine-gun bullets blew water out of the rivers, raked through empty fishing villages, danced in geometrical lines across dikes and rice paddies. But there was no sound and there were no people down below. I saw a door-gunner's face, and it was stretched tight with fear, whipped with wind, throbbing with the action of the gun. I could see only one of his eyes-squinted, cordite-bitten, liquid with the reflected images of dead water buffalo in the heat, smoking villages, and glassy countryside, where the people had scurried into the earth like mice. His hands were swollen and red, his finger wrapped in a knot around the trigger, the flying brass cartridge casings kaleidoscopic in the light. There were no people to shoot at anymore, but no matter-his charter was clear. He was forever wedded and addicted to this piece of earth that he'd helped make desolate, this land that was his drug and nemesis. The silence in the dream was like a scream.

I woke to the sounds of dry lightning, a car passing on the dirt road by the bayou, the bullfrogs croaking down by the duck pond. I had no analytical interest in the interpretation of dreams. The strange feelings and mechanisms they represented always went away at dawn, and that was all that mattered. I hoped that one day they would go away altogether. I once read that Audie Murphy, the most decorated U.S. soldier of World War II, slept with a.45. I believe he was a brave and good man, but for some the nocturnal landscape is haunted by creatures forged in a devil's furnace. The Greeks called upon Morpheus to abate the Furies. I simply waited on the false dawn, and sometimes with luck I fell asleep again before it arrived.

But this night was alive with too many sounds, too many shards of memory that worked on the edge of the mind like rat's teeth, for me to regain sleep easily. I put on my clack sandals, poured a glass of milk in the kitchen, and walked down to the duck pond in my skivvies. The ducks were bunched in the shadows of the cattails, and the moon and lighted clouds were reflected as perfectly in the still water as though they had been trapped under dark glass. I sat on a bench by the collapsed barn that marked the end of my property, and looked out over my neighbor's pasture and sugarcane field in the moonlight. On the barn wall behind me, whose red paint had long since flaked away, was a tin Hadacol sign from thirty-five years ago. Hadacol had been manufactured by a state senator from Abbeville, and it not only contained enough vitamins and alcohol to make you get up from your deathbed, but the boxtop would allow you admission to the traveling Hadacol show, which one year had featured Jack Dempsey, Rudy Vallee, and an eight-foot Canadian giant. I marveled at the innocence of the era in which I had grown up.

Then I saw the heat lightning flash brightly in the south, and a breeze came up suddenly and broke the moonlight apart in the water and dented the leaves of the pecan trees in my front yard. The cows in the pasture were already bunched, and I could smell rain and sulfur in the air and feel the barometric pressure dropping. I finished the milk in my glass, leaned back against the barn wall with my eyes closed, breathed the wet coolness on the wind, and realised that without even trying I was going to overcome my insomnia that night and go back to bed and sleep by my wife while the rain tinked on the window fan.

But when I opened my eyes I saw two dark silhouettes move as quickly and silently as deer out of the pecan trees in the front yard, past my line of vision, onto my front porch. Even as I rose to my feet, widening my eyes in the futile wish that I had seen only shadows, my heart sank with a terrible knowledge that I had experienced only once before, and that was when I had heard the klatch of the mine under my foot in Vietnam. Even as I started to run toward the darkened house, even before I heard the crowbar bite into the door-jamb, before the words burst out of my throat, I knew that my nocturnal fears would have their realisation tonight and not be dispelled by a false dawn that only fools waited upon. I tripped on my sandals, kicked them from my feet, and ran barefoot over the hard ground, the litter of broken boards and rusty nails from the barn roof, the cattails that grew up the bank from the pond, shouting. "I'm out here! I'm out here!" like a hysterical man lost on a piece of moonscape.

But my words were lost in the thunder, the wind, the splatter of raindrops on the tin roof, the crowbar that splintered the door jamb, sprung the hinges, snapped the deadbolt, ripped the door open into the living room. Then I heard my own voice again, a sound like an animal's cry breaking out of a wet bubble, and I heard the shotguns roar and saw the flashes leap in the bedroom like heat lightning in the sky. They fired and fired, the pump-actions clacking loudly back into place with each fresh shell, the explosions of flame dissecting the darkness where my wife lay alone under a sheet. Their buckshot blew window glass and curtain material out into the yard, tore divots of wood from the outside wall, rang off the window fan blades. A bolt of lightning struck somewhere behind me, and my own skin looked white and dead in the illumination.

They had stopped shooting. I stood breathless and barefoot in my underwear in the rain and looked through the broken window and ragged curtains at the outline of a man who stared back at me, motionless, his shotgun held at an angle across his chest. Then I heard the pump clack back to feed another shell into the chamber.

I ran to the side of the house, pressed myself against the cypress boards, moved under the windows toward the front, and crouched in the darkness. I heard one of them knock into a wall or door in the dark, trip over the telephone extension, rip the phone from its jack, and throw it down the hall. There was blood on the tops of my feet, a ragged tear in my ankle, but my body had no feeling. My head reeled as though it had been slapped hard with a rolled newspaper, and I could taste the bile rising uncontrollably from my stomach. I had no weapon; my neighbors were away; there was nothing I could do to help Annie. Sweat and rainwater ran out of my hair like insects.

There was nothing else to do but run for the phone in the bait shop. Then I heard the front screen fly back against the wall and both of them come out on the gallery. Their feet were loud on the wood, their steps going in one direction, then another. I pressed against the side of the house and waited. All one of them had to do was jump over the side railing of the gallery, and he would have me at point-blank range. Then their feet stopped, and I realised that their attention was focused on something else. A pickup truck was banging down the dirt road toward the dock, the rain slanting in the beam of a single headlight that bounced off the trees. I knew it must be Batist. He lived a quarter-mile down the road, slept on his screened gallery in the summer, and would have heard and recognised the gunfire, even in the thunder.

"Shit on it. Let's get out of here," one man said.

The other man spoke, but his voice was lost in the rain on the tin roof and a peal of thunder.

"So you come back and do him. It's a lousy hit, anyway. You didn't say nothing about a broad," the first man said. "Sonofabitch, the truck's turning in here. I'm gone. Clean up your own mess next time."

I heard one man jump off the steps and start running. The second man paused, his feet scraped hesitantly on the wood planks, then I heard the step bend under his weight, and a moment later I could see the two of them running at an angle through the trees toward a car parked down by the bayou. With their shotguns at port-arms, they looked like infantry fleeing through a forest at night.

I raced through the front door into the bedroom and hit the light switch, my heart thundering in my chest. Red shotgun shells littered the doorway area; the mahogany foot and headboards of the bed were gouged and splintered with buckshot and deer slugs; the flowered wallpaper above the bed was covered with holes like black dimes. The sheet, which still lay over her, was drenched with her blood, the torn cloth embedded in wounds that wolves might have chewed. Her curly blond head was turned away from me on the pillow. One immaculate white hand hung over the side of the mattress.

I touched her foot. I touched her blood-flecked ankle. I put my hands around her fingers. I brushed my palm across her curly hair. I knelt like a child by the bed and kissed her eyes. I picked her hand up and put her fingers in my mouth. Then the shaking started, like sinew and bone separating inside me, and I pressed my face tightly into the pillow with my wet hair against her forehead.

I don't know how long I knelt there. I don't remember getting up from my knees. I know that my skin burned as though someone had painted it with acid, that I couldn't draw enough air into my lungs, that the room's yellow light was like a flame to my eyes, that all my joints seemed atrophied with age, that my hands were blocks of wood when I fumbled in the dresser drawer, found the.45, and pushed the heavy clip into the magazine. In my mind's eye I was already running through the yard, across my neighbor's pasture, through the sloping woods of oak and pine on the far side where the dirt road passed before it reached the drawbridge over the bayou. I heard a black kid from my platoon yell, Charlie don't want to boogie no more. He running for the tunnel. Blow up their shit, Lieutenant. I saw parts of men dissolve in my fire, and when the breech locked open and I had to reload, my hands shook with anticipation.

But the voice was not a black kid's from my platoon, and I was not the young lieutenant who could make small yellow men in black pajamas hide in their earthen holes. Batist had his big hands on each of my arms, his bare chest like a piece of boilerplate, his brown eyes level and unblinking and staring into mine.

"They gone, Dave. You can't do no good with that gun, you," he said.

"The drawbridge. We can cut across."

"C'est pas bon. lis sont pa'tis."

"We'll take the truck."

He shook his head to say no, then slipped his huge hand down my arm and took the automatic from my palm. Then he put his arm around my shoulders and walked me into the living room.

"You sit here. You don't got to do nothing, you," he said. The.45 stuck up out of the back pocket of his blue jeans. "Where Alafair at?"

I looked at him dumbly. He breathed through his mouth and wet his lips.

"You stay here. Don't you move, no. T'comprends, Dave?"

"Yes."

He walked into Alafair's room. The pecan trees in the yard flickered whitely when lightning jumped across the sky, and the wind swept the rain across the gallery and through my shattered front door. When I closed my eyes I saw light dancing inside a dark window frame like electricity trapped inside a black box.

I rose woodenly from the couch and walked to the doorway of Alafair's room. I paused with one hand on the door-jamb, almost as though I had become a stranger in my preoccupation with my own grief. Batist sat on the side of the bed with Alafair in his lap, his powerful arms wrapped around her. Her face was white and jerking with sobs against his black chest.

"She all right. You gonna be all right, too, Dave. Batist gonna take care of y'all. You'll see," he said. "Lord, Lord, what the world done to this little child."

He shook his head from side to side, an unmasked sadness in his eyes.