Heaven’s Prisoners

6

IT RAINED THE day of Annie's funeral. In fact, it rained all that week. The water dripped from the trees, ran in rivulets off the eaves, formed brown pools filled with floating leaves in the yard, covered the fields and canebrakes with a dull, gray-green light. Her parents flew down from Kansas, and I picked them up at the airport in Lafayette and drove them in the rain to a motel in New Iberia. Her father was a big, sandy-haired wheat farmer with square, callused hands and thick wrists, and he looked out the car window silently at the sopping countryside and smoked a cigar and spoke only enough to be polite. Her mother was a thick-bodied Mennonite country woman with sun-bright blond hair, blue eyes, and red cheeks. She tried to compensate for her husband's distance by talking about the flight from Wichita, her first experience in an airplane, but she couldn't concentrate on her words and she swallowed often and her eyes constantly flicked away from my face.

They had had reservations about me when I married Annie. I was a divorced older man with an alcoholic history, and as a homicide detective I had lived in a violent world that was even more foreign to rural Kansas than my Cajun accent and French name. I felt they blamed me for Annie's death. At least her father did, I was sure of that. And I didn't have the strength to argue against that unspoken accusation even with myself.

"The funeral is at four o'clock," I said. "I'll let you all rest up at the motel, then I'll be back for you at three-thirty."

"Where's she at now?" her father said.

"The funeral home."

"I want to go there."

I paused a moment and looked at his big, intent face and his wide-set gray eyes.

"The casket's closed, Mr. Ballard," I said.

"You take us there now," he said.

We buried Annie in my family's plot in the old cemetery by St. Peter's Church in New Iberia. The crypts were made of brick and covered with white plaster, and the oldest ones had cracked and sunk into the earth and had become enwrapped with green vines that rooted into the mortar. The rain fell out of the gray sky and danced on the brick street by the cemetery and drummed on the canvas canopy over our heads. Before the attendants from the funeral home slid Annie's coffin into the crypt and sealed it with an inscribed marble slab, one of them unscrewed the metal crucifix from the top and put it in my hands.

I don't remember walking back to the limousine. I remember the people under the canopy-her parents, Batist and his wife, the sheriff, my friends from town-but I don't remember leaving the cemetery. I saw the rain swirling out of the sky, saw it glisten on the red bricks of the street and the black spiked fence that surrounded the cemetery, felt it run out of my hair and into my eyes, heard a train whistle blow somewhere and freight cars clicking on the tracks that ran through town, and then I was standing in the middle of the manicured lawn of the funeral home, with its hollow wooden columns and false antebellum facade looking the color of cardboard in the dull light, and cars were driving away from me in the rain.

"The truck over here, Dave," Batist was saying. "Come on, we got supper already fixed. You ain't eat all day."

"We've got to take her folks back to the motel."

"They done already gone. Hey, put this coat over your head. You wanta stand out here and be a duck, you?"

He smiled at me, his cannonball head beaded with raindrops, his big teeth like pieces of carved whalebone. I felt his hand go around my arm, squeeze into the muscle, and lead me to the pickup truck, where his wife stood by the open door in a cotton print dress with an umbrella over her head. I sat quietly between them on the way back to the house. They stopped trying to speak to me, and I stared out the windshield at the muddy pools on the dirt road, the wet sheen on the trunks of the oak trees, the water that rattled down from the limbs overhead, the clouds of mist that hung on the bayou and broke across the truck's hood like the offering of sleep. In the gray light, the row of trees along the road looked like a tunnel that I could safely fall through until I reached a cold, enclosed room beneath the earth where wounds healed themselves, where the flesh did not yield to the worm, where a sealed casket could be opened to reveal a radiant face.

I went back to work at the dock. I rented boats, filled people's minnow cans with shiners, fixed barbecue lunches, opened bottles of pop and beer with the mechanical smile and motions of a man in a dream. As always, when one unexpectedly loses someone close, I discovered how kind people could be. But after a while I almost wanted to hide from their well-meaning words of condolence, their handshakes and pats on the back. I learned that grief was a private and consuming emotion, and once it chose you as its vessel it didn't share itself easily with others.

And maybe I didn't want to share it, either. After the scene investigators from the sheriff's department had bagged the bloody sheets from the bed and dug the buckshot out of the bedstead and walls, I closed and locked the door as though I were sealing up a mausoleum filled with pain, which I could resurrect simply by the turn of a key. When I saw Batist's wife heading for the house with scrub brushes and buckets to clean the bloodstains out of the splintered wood, I ran from the bait shop, yelled at her in French with the sharpness of a white man speaking to a Negro woman, and watched her turn back toward her pickup truck, her face hurt and confused.

That night I was awakened by the sound of bare feet on the wooden floor and a door handle turning. I sat up from the couch where I had fallen asleep with the television on, and saw Alafair sitting by the locked bedroom door. She wore her pajama bottoms without a top, and in her hands was the plastic draw bag in which we kept the stale bread. Her eyes were open, but her face was opaque with sleep. I walked toward her in the moonlight that fell through the front windows. Her brown eyes looked at me emptily.

"Feed ducks with Annie," she said.

"You're having a dream, little guy," I said.

I started to pull the plastic bag gently from her hands. But her eyes and hands were locked inside the dream. I touched her hair and cheek.

"Let's take you back to bed," I said.

"Feed ducks with Annie?"

"We'll feed them in the morning. En la mañana." I tried to smile into her face, then I raised her to her feet. She put one hand on the doorknob and twisted it from side to side.

"Dónde está?"

"She's gone away, little guy."

There was nothing for it. I lifted her up on my hip and carried her back into her room. I lay her down on her bed, put the sheet over her feet, sat down beside her, and brushed her soft, downlike hair with my hand. Her bare chest looked small in the moonlight through the window. Then I saw her mouth begin to tremble, as it had in the church, her eyes look into mine with the realisation that I could not help, that no one could, that the world into which she had been born was a far more terrible one than any of her nightmares.

"Los soldados llegaron en la lluvia y le hicieron daño a Annie?"

The only Spanish words that I understood in her question were "soldiers" and "rain." But even if I had understood it all, I could not have answered her anyway. I was more lost than she, caught forever in the knowledge that when my wife had needed me most, I had left the house to sit by a duck pond in the dark and dwell on the past and my alcoholic neurosis.

I lay down beside Alafair and pulled her against me. I felt the wetness of her eyelash against my face.

Then, one hot, bright afternoon, exactly a week after I had buried Annie, with no dramatic cause at work, with fleecy clouds blowing across the blue sky, I snapped the cap off a bottle of Jax, watched the foam slide over the amber bottle and drip flatly on the wooden floor of the bait shop, and drank it empty in less than a minute.

Two fisherman friends of mine at a table looked briefly at me with dead expressions on their faces, and in the silence of the room I heard Batist drag a kitchen match on wood and light a cigar. When I looked at his face, he flicked the match out the open window and I heard it hiss in the water. He turned away from me and stared out into the sunlight, a curl of smoke rising from his wide-spaced teeth.

I popped open a double-paper bag, put two cartons of Jax inside, poured a small bucked of crushed ice on top of the bottles, and hefted the bag under my arm.

"I'm going to take an outboard down the bayou," I said. "Close it up in a couple of hours and keep Alafair with you till I get back."

He didn't answer and continued to look out at the sunlight on the lily pads and the cane growing along the bank.

"Did you hear me?" I asked.

"Do what you gotta do, you. You ain't got to tell me how to take care of that little girl." He walked up toward the house, where Alafair was coloring a book on the porch, and didn't look back at me.

I opened the throttle on the outboard and watched my yellow-white wake slap against the cypress roots on the bank. Each time I tilted a bottle of Jax to my mouth the sunlight danced like brown fire inside the glass. I had no destination, no place of completion for all the energy that throbbed through my palm, no plan for the day, my life, or even the next five minutes. What was the great value in plans, anyway? I thought. A forest fire didn't have one, or a flood that buried a Kentucky town in mud, or lightning that splintered down into a sodden field and blew a farmer out of his shoes. Those things happened and the world went on. Why did Dave Robicheaux have to impose all this order and form on his life? So you lose control and total out for a while, I thought. The U.S. Army certainly understood that. You declare a difficult geographical and political area a free-fire zone, then you stand up later in the drifting ash and the smell of napalm and define with much more clarity the past nature of the problem.

The gas tank went empty toward evening, and at the bottom of my feet was a melted pile of ice, soggy brown paper, and empty Jax bottles. I rowed the boat to shore, threw the iron anchor weight up on the bank, and walked in the dusk down a dirt road to a Negro juke joint and bought another six-pack of beer and a half-pint of Jim Beam. Then I pushed the boat back out into the center of the bayou and drifted in the current among the trailings of fireflies and the dark tracings of alligator gar just below the water's surface. I sipped from the lip of the whiskey bottle, chased it with the beer, and waited. Sometimes whiskey kicked open a furnace door that could consume me like a piece of cellophane. Other times I could operate for days with a quiet euphoria and kind of control that would pass for sobriety. Then sometimes I looked into memory and saw forgotten moments that I wished I could burn away like film negatives dissolving on a hot coal.

I remembered a duck-hunting trip with my father when I was thirteen years old. We were in a blind on a cold, gray, windswept day, just off Sabine Pass where it dumped into the Gulf, and the mallards and poules d'eau had been coming in low all morning since dawn, and we had busted them like dirty smudges all over the sky. Then my father had gotten careless, maybe because he had been drunk the night before, had gotten mud in the barrel of the automatic twelve-gauge, and when three Canadian honkers went over, really too high for a good shot, he stood up quickly, turned with the shotgun at an angle over my head, and blew the barrel into a spray of wadding, cordite, birdshot, and steel needles all over the water's surface. My ears rang with the explosion, and bits of hot powder covered my face like grains of black pepper. I saw the shame in his eyes and smelled the stale beer on his breath as he washed my skin with his wet handkerchief. He tried to make light of it, said that's what he got for not going to Mass yesterday, but there was a troubled realisation in his eyes as well as shame, and it was the same look he had whenever he'd been locked up in the parish jail for brawling in a bar.

It was only a quarter-mile back to the camp; it was right across the bay, up a canal that cut back through the sawgrass and cane, a shack built on stilts that looked out on the Gulf. He would be gone only a short time and bring back the sixteen-gauge. I could start shucking out the ducks, which lay in a soft green and blue pile on the flattened yellow grass at the bottom of the blind. Besides, them honker coming back, yeah, he said.

But back in the canal he ran the outboard across a submerged log and snapped off the propeller shaft like a stick.

I waited for him for two hours, my knife bloody from the warm entrails of the ducks. The wind picked up from the south, small waves chucked against the blind, the sky was the color of incinerator smoke. On the Texas side of the shore I heard the dull popping of another hunter's shotgun.

A pirogue was tied to the back of the blind. I broke open my dogleg twenty-gauge, picked up the string of decoys we had set out in a J-formation, filled the canvas game bag with the stiffening, gutted bodies of the ducks, loaded it all in the pirogue's bow, and shoved off toward the canal and the long expanse of sawgrass.

But the wind had shifted and was now blowing hard out of the northeast, and no matter how strongly I rowed on both sides of the pirogue, I drifted toward the mouth of the Pass and the slate-green water of the Gulf of Mexico. I paddled until blisters formed on my hands and broke against the grain of the wood, then I threw the anchor weight overboard, realised when the rope hung straight down that the bottom was too deep to catch, and looked desperately at the Louisiana wetlands sliding farther away from me.

Foam blew off the waves in my face, and I could taste salt water in my mouth. The pirogue dipped with such force into the troughs that I had to hold on to the gunwales, and my buttocks constricted with fear each time the wooden bottom slammed up into my tailbone. I tried to bail with a tin can, lost the paddle, and watched it float away from me like a yellow stick between the waves. The string of decoys, my shotgun, and the canvas bag of ducks were awash in the bow; uprooted cypress trees and an upside-down wooden shack revolved in the dark current just under the surface beside me. The shack had a small porch, and it broke through the waves into the winter light like a gigantic mouth streaming water.

The state fish-and-game boat with my father on board picked me up that afternoon. They dried me off and gave me warm clothes, and fixed me fried Spam sandwiches and hot Ovaltine in the galley. But I wouldn't talk to my father until the next day, and I talked with him only then because sleep gave me back the familiar relationship that his explanation about the sheared propeller shaft would not.

"It's because you was alone out there," he said. "When somebody make you alone, it don't matter why. You suppose to be mad at them. When your mama run off with a bourée man, I didn't care I made her do it, no. I knocked him down on the barroom floor in front of her. When he got up, I knocked him down again. Later I found out he had a pistol in his coat. He could have killed me right there, him. But she didn't let him do it, 'cause she knew I gonna get over it. That's why, me, I ain't mad at you, 'cause I know you suppose to be disappoint with me.

"The bad thing is when you make yourself alone. Don't never do that, Dave, 'cause it's like that coon chewing off its own foot when he stick it in the trap."

As I sat in the outboard on the bayou and looked at the red sky and the purple clouds in the west, the breathless air as warm as the whiskey that I raised to my lips, I knew what my father had meant.

A coon can chew through sinew and bone in a few minutes. I had a whole night to work on dismantling myself. I found a good place to do it, too-a Negro bar made of Montgomery Ward brick, set back from a dusty yellow road in a grove of oak trees, a place where they carried barber's razors, mixed bourbon in Thunderbird, and played zydeco music so loud it shook the cracked and taped glass windows in front.

Two days later a big-breasted Negro woman in a purple dress picked up my head from a puddle of beer. The sun was low in the east and shining through the window like a white flame.

"Your face ain't no mop, honey," she said, looking down at me with her hand on her hip, a lighted cigarette between her fingers.

Then her other hand went into my back pocket and took out my wallet. I reached for it impotently while she splayed it open.

"I ain't got to steal white men's money," she said. "I just waits for y'all to give it to me. But it's trick, trade, or travel, honey, and it looks like you got to travel."

She put my wallet in my shirt pocket, mashed out her cigarette in the ashtray in front of me, and dialed the phone on the bar while I remained slumped in the chair, the side of my face wet with beer, red balls of light dancing in my brain. Ten minutes later a St. Martin Parish sheriff's car drove me back to the bayou where I had tied my boat and left me standing sick and alone, like a solitary statue, in the wet weeds on the bank.

After I finally got back to the boat dock that afternoon, I asked Batist to keep Alafair until that evening and I slept for three hours on the couch under an electric fan, then got up and shaved and showered and thought I could return a degree of normalcy to my day. Instead, I went into the shakes and the dry heaves and ended up on my knees in front of the wash basin.

I got back into the shower again, sat under the cold water for fifteen minutes, brushed my teeth, dressed in a pair of clean khakis and a denim shirt, and forced myself to eat a bowl of Grape-Nuts. Even in the breeze from the electric fan, my denim shirt was spotted with sweat.

I picked up Alafair at Batist's house and took her to the home of my cousin, a retired schoolteacher, in New Iberia. I had already deserted Alafair for two days while I was on a drunk, and I felt bad about moving her again to another home, but both Batist and his wife worked and could not watch her full-time, and at that moment I wasn't in sufficient physical or emotional condition to be responsible even for myself, much less anyone else, and also the possibility existed that the killers would come back to my house again.

I asked my cousin to keep Alafair for the next two days, then I drove to the courthouse to find the sheriff. But when I parked my truck I was sweating heavily, my hands left wet prints on the steering wheel, the veins in my brain felt like twisted pieces of cord. I drove to the poolroom on Main Street, sat in the coolness of the bar under the wood-bladed fans, and drank three vodka Collinses until I felt the rawness of yesterday's whiskey go out of my chest and the tuning fork stop trembling inside me.

But I was mortgaging today for tomorrow, and tomorrow I would probably postpone the debt again, and the next day and the next, until I would be very far in arrears with a debt that would eventually present itself like an unfed snake given its choice of a wounded rabbit's parts. But at that point I guess I didn't care. Annie was dead because I couldn't leave things alone. I had quit the New Orleans police department, the bourbon-scented knight-errant who said he couldn't abide any longer the political hypocrisy and the addictive, brutal ugliness of metropolitan law enforcement, but the truth was that I enjoyed it, that I got high on my knowledge of man's iniquity, that I disdained the boredom and predictability of the normal world as much as my strange alcoholic metabolism loved the adrenaline rush of danger and my feeling of power over an evil world that in many ways was mirrored in microcosm in my own soul.

I bought a bottle of vodka to take home and didn't touch it again until the next morning.

The four inches I drank for breakfast sat in my stomach like canned heat. I had to keep wiping my face with a towel for a half hour, until I stopped sweating, then I brushed my teeth, showered, put on my cream-colored slacks, charcoal sports shirt, and gray and red striped tie, and an hour later I was sitting in the sheriff's office while he listened indecisively to what I had to say and looked peculiarly at my face.

"Are you hot? You look flushed," he said.

"Go outside. It must be ninety-five already."

He nodded absently. He scratched the blue and red lines in his soft cheek with a fingernail and pushed a paper clip around on his desk blotter. Through the glass window of the closed office door I could see his deputies doing paperwork at their desks. The building was new and had the cool, neutral, refrigerated smell of a modern office, which was the image it was intended to convey, but the deputies still looked like the raw-boned rednecks and coonasses of an earlier time and they still kept cuspidors by their desks.

"How'd you know the department had an opening?" the sheriff said.

"It was in the paper."

"It's detective rank, Dave, but eighteen thousand isn't near what you made in New Orleans. It seems to me you'd be going back to the minor leagues."

"I don't need a lot of money. I've got the boat-and-bait business, and I own my house free and clear."

"There's a couple of deputies out there who want that job. They'd resent you."

"That's their problem."

He opened his desk drawer, dropped the paper clip in it, and looked at me. The soft edges of his face flexed with the thought that had been troubling him since I had told him I wanted the job.

"I'm not going to give a man a badge so he can be an executioner," he said.

"I wouldn't need a badge for that."

"The hell you wouldn't."

"I was a good cop. I never popped a cap unless they dealt the play."

"You don't have to convince me about your past record. We're talking about now. Are you going to tell me you can investigate your own wife's murder with any objectivity?"

I licked my tongue across my lips. I could feel the vodka humming in my blood. Ease up, ease up, ease up, you're almost home, I thought.

"I was never objective in any homicide investigation," I said. "You see the handiwork and you hunt the bastards down. Then, as my old partner used to say, 'You bust 'em or grease 'em.' But I didn't cool them out, Sheriff. I brought them in when I could have left them on the sidewalk and sailed right through Internal Affairs. Look, you've got some deputies out there who probably give you the cold sweats sometimes. It's because they're amateurs. One day they'll own bars or drive trucks or just go on beating up their wives. But they're not really cops."

His eyes blinked.

"They tell you a guy resisted arrest or fell down when they put him in the car," I said. "They're supposed to bring in a hooker, but they can't ever seem to find her. You send them into a Negro neighborhood and you wonder if the town is going to be burning by midnight."

"There's another problem, too. It comes in bottles."

"If I go out of control, fire me."

"Everybody around here likes and respects you, Dave. I don't like to see a man go back to his old ways because he's trying to fly with an overload."

"I'm doing all right, Sheriff." I looked him steadily in the eyes. I didn't like to run a con on a decent man, but most of the cards in my hands were blanks.

"You look like you've been out in the sun too long," he said.

"I'm dealing with it. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose. If I come in here blowing fumes in your face, pull my plug. That's all I can tell you. Where do you think those killers are now?"

"I don't know."

"They're doing a few lines, getting laid, maybe sipping juleps at the track. They feel power right now that you and I can't even guess at. I've heard them describe it as being like a heroin rush."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because I know how they think. I don't believe you do. Those other guys out there don't, either. You know what they did after they murdered Annie? They drove to a bar. Not the first or the second one they saw, but one way down the road where they felt safe, where they could drink Jack Daniel's and smoke cigarettes without speaking to one another, until that moment when their blood slowed and they looked in each other's eyes and started laughing."

"Look at it another way. What evidence do you have in hand?"

"The lead we dug out of the walls, the shotgun shells off the floor, the pry bar they dropped on the porch," he said.

"But not a print."

"No."

"Which means you have almost nothing. Except me. They were out to kill me, not Annie. Every aspect of the investigation will eventually center around that fact. You'll end up interviewing me every other day."

He lit a cigarette and smoked it with his elbow on the desk blotter. He looked through the door glass at the deputies in the outer office. One of them leaned to the side of his desk and spit tobacco juice into a cuspidor.

"I'll have to run it by a couple of other people, but I don't think there'll be any trouble," he said. "But you don't work on just this one case, Dave. You carry a regular load just like the other detectives and you go by the same rules."

"All right."

He puffed on his cigarette and widened his eyes in the smoke, as though dismissing some private concerns from his mind, then he watched my expression closely and said, "Who do you think did it?"

"I don't know."

"You told me that the day after it happened, and I accepted that. But you've had a lot of time to think in the last ten days. I can't believe you haven't come to some conclusion. I wouldn't want to feel you're being less than honest here, and that maybe you're going to try to operate on your own after all."

"Sheriff, I gave motive to any number or combination of people. The bartender at Smiling Jack's is the kind of vicious punk who could blow out your light and drink a beer while he was doing it. I not only ran his head into a window fan and cocked a.45 between his eyes, I turned Bubba Rocque loose on him and made him get out of New Orleans. I messed up Eddie Keats with a pool cue in front of his whores, and I went into Bubba Rocque's house and told him I was going to put my finger in his eye if I found out he sent Keats and the Haitian after me."

"Maybe it was Toot and a guy I don't know. Maybe it was two contract men Bubba or Keats brought in from out of state. Maybe it's somebody out of the past. Once in a while they get out of Angola and keep their promises."

"New Orleans thinks the bartender went to the Islands."

"Maybe, but I doubt it. He's a rat, and a rat goes into a hole. He's more afraid of Bubba than he is of cops. I don't believe he'll be walking around on a beach anywhere. Besides, he's a mama's boy. He probably won't run far from home."

"I'll be truthful with you, Dave. I don't know where to start on this one. We just don't have this kind of crime around here. I sent two deputies to question Keats, and he picked his nose in front of them and told them to bust him or beat feet. His bartender and one of his hookers said he was in the club when Annie was killed."

"Did they question the bartender and the hooker separately?"

He looked away from me. "I don't know," he said.

"That's all right. We can talk to them again."

"I went out to Bubba Rocque's myself. I don't know what to think about a guy like that. You could scratch a match on those eyes and I don't think they'd blink. I remember thirty years ago when he was a kid and he dropped a fly ball in the city park and lost the game for his side. After the game he was eating a snowcone and his daddy slapped it out of his hand and hit him across the ear. His eyes didn't show any more feeling than a couple of zinc pennies."

"What did he tell you?"

"He was home asleep."

"What'd his wife say?"

"She said she was in New Orleans that night. So Bubba doesn't have an alibi."

"He knows he doesn't need one yet. Bubba's a lot smarter than Eddie Keats."

"He said he was sorry about Annie. I think maybe he meant it, Dave."

"Maybe."

"You think he's bad through and through, don't you?"

"Yep."

"I guess I just don't have your mileage."

I started to tell him that any cop who gave the likes of Bubba Rocque an even break would probably not earn much mileage, but fortunately I kept my own counsel and simply asked when I could get a badge.

"Two or three days," he answered. "In the meantime, take it easy. We'll get these guys sooner or later."

As I said, he was a decent man, but the Rotary Club had a larger claim on his soul than the sheriff's department. The fact is that most criminals are not punished for their crimes. In New York City only around two percent of the crimes are punished, and in Miami the figure is about four percent. If you want to meet a group of people who have a profound distrust of, and hostility toward, our legal system, don't waste your time on political radicals; interview a random selection of crime victims, and you'll probably find that they make the former group look like Utopian idealists by comparison.

I shook hands with him and walked out into the hazy noon-day heat and humidity. In the meadows along the road, cattle were bunched in the hot shade of the oak trees, and white egrets were pecking in the dried cow flop out in the grass. I pulled my tie loose, wiped my forehead on my shirt sleeve, and looked at the long wet streaks on the cloth.

Fifteen minutes later I was in a dark, cool bar south of town, a cold, napkin-wrapped collins glass in my hand. But I couldn't stop perspiring.

Vodka is an old friend to most clandestine drunks. It has neither odor nor color, and it can be mixed with virtually anything without the drinker being detected. But its disadvantage for a whiskey drinker like me was that it went down so smoothly, so innocuously, in glasses filled with crushed ice and fruit slices and syrup and candied cherries, that I could drink almost a fifth of it before I realised that I had gone numb from my hairline to the soles of my feet.

"Didn't you say you had to leave here at four?" the bartender asked.

"Sure."

He glanced up at the illuminated clock on the wall above the bar. I tried to focus my eyes on the hands and numbers. I pressed my palm absently to my shirt pocket.

"I guess I left my glasses in my truck," I said.

"It's five after."

"Call me a cab, will you? You mind if I leave my truck in your lot awhile?"

"How long?" He was washing glasses, and he didn't look at me when he spoke and his voice had the neutral tone that bartenders use to suppress the disdain they feel for some of the people whom they serve.

"I'll probably get it tomorrow."

He didn't bother to answer. He called a cab and went back to washing glasses in the aluminum sink.

Ten minutes later my cab arrived. I finished my drink and set it on the bar.

"I'll send somebody for my truck, podna," I said to the bartender.

I rode back to my house in the cab, packed two changes of clothes in my suitcase, got Batist to drive me to the airport in Lafayette, and by six-thirty I was aboard a commercial flight to Key West, by way of Miami, the late red sun reflecting like pools of fire among the clouds.

I sipped from my second double Beam and soda and looked down at the dark blue and turquoise expanse of water off the western tip of the island, where the Gulf and the Atlantic met, and at the waves sliding across the coral reefs below the surface and breaking against the beaches that were as white as ground diamond. The four-engine plane dipped, made a wide turn out over the water, then flattened out for its approach to the airport, and I could see the narrow strip of highway that ran from Key West to Miami, the coconut palms along the beaches, the lagoons full of sailboats and yachts, the kelp rising in the groundswell, the waves bursting in geysers of foam at the ends of the jetties, and then suddenly the tree-lined and neon-lit streets of Key West in the last red wash of sunset.

It was a town of ficus, sea grape, mahogany and umbrella trees, coconut and royal palms, hanging geraniums, Confederate jasmine, and bougainvillea that bloomed as brightly as blood. The town was built on sand and coral, surrounded by water, the wooden buildings eventually made paintless and gray by salt air. At one time or another it has been home to Indians, Jean Lafitte's pirates, salvagers who deliberately lured commercial ships onto the reefs so they could gut the wrecks, James Audubon, rum runners, Cuban political exiles, painters, homosexuals, dope smugglers, and burnt-out street people who had been pushed so far down in the continent now that they had absolutely no place else to go.

It was a town of clapboard and screened-in beer joints, raw-oyster bars, restaurants that smelled of conch fritters and boiled shrimp and deep-fried red snapper, clearings in the pine trees where fishermen stacked their lobster traps, nineteenth-century brick warehouses and government armories, and shady streets lined with paintless shotgun houses with wooden shutters and sagging galleries. The tourists were gone now because of the summer heat, and the streets were almost empty in the twilight; the town had gone back into itself. The cabdriver had to buy gas on the way to the motel, and I looked out the window at some elderly Negro men sitting on crates in front of a tiny grocery store, at the ficus roots that cracked the sidewalks into concrete peaks, at the dusky purple light on the brick streets and the darkening trees overhead, and for just a moment it was as though I had not left New Iberia, had not taken another step deeper into my problems.

But I had.

I checked into a motel on the southern tip of the island and had a fifth of Beam and a small bucket of ice sent to the room. I had a couple of hits with water, then showered and dressed. Through my window I could see the palm trees thrashing on the deserted beach and the light dying on the horizon. The water had turned as dark as burgundy, and waves were pitching upward against a coral reef that formed a small harbor for a half-dozen sailboats. I opened the glass jalousies wide to let the cool breeze into the room, then I walked downtown to Duval Street and my friend's restaurant where Robin worked as a waitress.

But my metabolism was on empty before I made it to the foot of Duval. I stopped in at Sloppy Joe's and had a drink at the bar and tried to examine all the vague thoughts and strange movements of my day. True, not everything I had done had been impetuous. Robin was still the best connection I had to the collection of brain-fried New Orleans people who served Bubba Rocque, and I had called my friend longdistance to make sure she was working at the restaurant, but I could have questioned her on the phone, or at least tried, before deciding I would have to fly to Key West.

Which made me confront, at least temporarily, the real reason I was there: it's lousy to be alone, particularly when you're not handling anything properly. Particularly when you're drunk and starting to fuck up your life again on an enormous scale. And because somebody was playing "Baby Love" on the jukebox.

"Why don't you put some records on that jukebox that aren't twenty years old?" I said to the bartender.

"What?"

"Put some new music on there. It's 1987."

"The jukebox is broken, pal. You better slip your transmission into neutral."

I walked back out onto the street, my face warm with bourbon in the wind blowing off the backside of the island. On the dock by the restaurant I watched the waves slide through pilings, small incandescent fish moving about like smoky green lights below the surface. The restaurant was crowded with customers, and the bar was a well-lighted and orderly place where people had two drinks before dinner. When I walked inside I felt like a diver stepping out of a bathysphere into a hostile and glaring brilliance.

The maitre d' looked at me carefully. I had fixed my tie and tried to smooth the wrinkles in my seersucker coat, but I should have put on sunglasses.

"Do you have a reservation, sir?" he said.

"Tell Robin Dave Robicheaux's here. I'll wait in the bar."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Tell her Dave from New Orleans. The last name's hard to pronounce sometimes."

"Sir, I think you'd better see her outside of working hours."

"Say, you're probably a good judge of people. Do I look like I'm going away?"

I ordered a drink at the bar, and five minutes later I saw her come through the door. She wore a short black dress with a white lace apron over it, and her figure and the way she walked, as though she were still on a burlesque runway, made every man at the bar glance sideways at her. She was smiling at me, but there was a perplexed light in her eyes, too.

"Wow, you come a long way to check up on a girl," she said.

"How you doing, kiddo?"

"Not bad. It's turned out to be a pretty good gig. Hey, don't get up."

"How long till you're off?"

"Three hours. Come on and sit in the booth with me. You're listing pretty heavy to port."

"A drunk front came through New Iberia this morning."

"Well, walk over here with mommy and let's order something to eat."

"I ate on the plane."

"Yeah, I can tell," she said.

We sat in a tan leather booth against the back wall of the bar. She blew out little puffs of air with her lips.

"Dave, what are you doing?" she said.

"What?"

"Like, this." She flicked her fingernail against my highball glass.

"Sometimes I clean out my head."

"You bust up with your old lady or something?"

"I'm going to get another Beam. You want a cup of coffee or a Coke?"

"Do I want coffee? God, that's great, Dave. Look, after the dinner rush I can get off early. Take the key to my apartment and I'll meet you there in about an hour. It's right around the corner."

"You got any hooch?"

"Some beer is all. I've been doing good, Dave. No little white pills, no glug-glug before I go to work. I can't believe how good I feel in the mornings."

"Pick me up at Sloppy Joe's."

"What do you want to go there for? It's full of college dopes who think Ernest Hemingway wrote on the bathroom walls or something."

"See you in an hour, kiddo. You're a sweet girl."

"Yeah, the guys at Smiling Jack's used to tell me that all the time. While they were trying to cop a feel under the table. I think you got hit in the head by lightning this morning."

When she came for me later at Sloppy Joe's, I was by myself at a table in the back, the breeze from a floor fan rising up my trouser leg, fluttering the wet sleeve of my seersucker coat that hung over the side of the table. The big sliding doors on two sides of the building were rolled wide open, and the neon light shone purple on the sidewalk. On the corner, two cops were rousting a drunk. They weren't cutting him any slack, either. He was going to the bag.

"Let's go, Lieutenant," Robin said.

"Wait till the Man leaves. My horizon keeps tilting. Key West is a bad town to have trouble in."

"All I do is flex my boobs and they tip their hats. Such gentlemen. No more booze, honey pie."

"I need to tell you some things. About my wife. Then you have to tell me some more about those people in New Orleans."

"Tomorrow morning. Mommy's going to fix you a steak tonight."

"They killed her."

"What?"

"They blew her to pieces with shotguns. That's what they did, all right."

She stared at me with her mouth parted. I could see the edges of her nostrils discolor.

"You mean Bubba Rocque killed your wife?" she said.

"Maybe it was him. Maybe not. Ole Bubba's a hard guy to second-guess."

"Dave, I'm sorry. Jesus Christ. Did it have something to do with me? God, I don't believe it."

"No."

"It does, though, because you're here."

"I just want to see if you can remember some things, Maybe I just wanted to see you, too."

"I guess that's why you had the hots for me when you were single. Tell me about it when your head's not ninety-proof." She looked around the bar. The floor fan ruffled her short black hair. "This place's a drag. The whole town's a drag. It's full of low-rent dykes and man-eaters that drift down from New York. Why'd you send me over here?"

"You told me you were doing well here."

"Who's doing well when people are out there killing a guy's wife? You messed with them, didn't you, Dave? You wouldn't listen to me."

I didn't answer, but instead picked up my highball glass.

"Forget it. Your milk cow has gone dry for tonight," she said, then took the glass out of my hand and poured it in a pool of whiskey and ice on the table.

She lived on the first floor of an old two-story stucco building with a red tile roof just off Duval Street. A huge banyan tree had cracked one wall, and the tiny yard was overgrown with weeds and untrimmed banana trees. Her apartment had a small kitchen, a bedroom separated by a sliding curtain, and a couch, breakfast table, and chairs that looked like they had come from a Goodwill store.

Robin had a good heart, and she wanted to be kind, but her cooking was truly a challenge, particularly to someone on a bender. She turned the steak black on one side, fried the potatoes in a half-inch of grease, and filled the apartment with smoke and the smell of burned onions. I tried to eat but couldn't. I'd reached the bottom of my drunk. The cogs on my wheels were sheared smooth, all my wiring was blown, and the skin of my face was thick and dead to the touch. I suddenly felt that I had aged a century, that someone had slipped a knife along my breastbone and scooped out all my vital organs.

"Are you going to be sick?" she said.

"No, I just need to go to bed."

She looked at me a moment in the light of the unshaded bulb that hung from the ceiling. Her eyes were green, and unlike most of the strippers on Bourbon, she had never needed to wear false eyelashes. She brought two sheets from her dresser in the bedroom and spread them on the couch. I sat down heavily, took off my shoes, and rubbed my hand in my face. I was already starting to dehydrate, and I could smell the alcohol against my palm like an odor climbing out of a dark well. She carried a pillow back to the couch.

"Robin?" I said.

"What are you up to, Lieutenant?" She looked down at me with the light behind her head.

I put my hand on her wrist. She sat down beside me and looked straight ahead. Her hands were folded, and her knees were close together under her black waitress uniform.

"Are you sure this is what you want?" she said.

"Yes."

"Did you come all the way over here just to get laid? There must be somebody available closer to home."

"You know that's not the way I feel about you."

"No, I don't. I don't know anything of the sort, Dave. But you're a friend, and I wouldn't turn away from you. I just don't want you to lie about it."

She turned off the light and undressed. Her breasts were round and soft against me, her skin tan and smooth in the dark. She hooked one leg in mine, ran her hands over my back, kissed my cheek and breathed in my ear and made love to me as she might to an emotional child. But I didn't care. I was used up, finished, as dead inside as I was the day they slid Annie's casket inside the crypt. The street light made shadows on the banyan and banana trees outside the window. Inside my head was a sound like the roar of the ocean in a conch shell.

The next morning the early light was gray in the streets, then the sun came up red on the eastern horizon, and the banana leaves clicking against the screen window were beaded with humidity. I filled a quart jar with tap water, drank it down, then threw up in the toilet. My hands shook, the backs of my legs quivered, flashes of color popped like lesions behind my eyes. I stood in my underwear in front of the washbasin, cupped water into my face, brushed my teeth with toothpaste and my finger, then threw up again and went into a series of stomach spasms so severe that finally my saliva was pink with blood in the bottom of the basin. My eyes were watering uncontrollably, my face cold and twitching; there was a pressure band across one side of my head as though I had been slapped with a thick book, and my breath was sour and trembled in my throat each time I tried to breathe.

I wiped the sweat and water off my face with a towel and headed for the icebox.

"No help there, hon," Robin said from the stove, where she was soft-boiling eggs. "I poured the beer out at four this morning."

"Have you got any ups?"

"I told you mommy's clean." She was barefoot and wearing a pair of black shorts and a denim shirt that was unbuttoned over her bra.

"Some of those PMS pills. Come on, Robin. I'm not a junkie. I've just got a hangover."

"You shouldn't try to run a shuck on another juicer. I took your wallet, too. You got rolled, Lieutenant."

It was going to be a long morning. And she was right about trying to con a pro. Normally an alcoholic can jerk just about anybody around except another drunk. And Robin knew every ploy that I might use to get another drink.

"Get in the shower, Dave," she said. "I'll have breakfast ready when you come out. You like bacon with soft-boiled eggs?"

I turned on the water as hot as I could stand it, pointed my face with my mouth open into the shower head, washed the cigarette smoke from the bar out of my hair, scrubbed my skin until it was red. Then I turned on the cold water full blast, propped my arms against the tin walls of the stall, and held on while I counted slowly to sixty.

"The bacon's kind of crisp, I guess," she said after I had dressed and we were sitting at the table.

The bacon looked like strips torn out of a rubber tire. And she had hard-boiled the eggs and mashed them up with a spoon.

"You don't have to eat it," she said.

"No, it's really good, Robin."

"Do you feel a lot of remorse this morning? That's what your AA buddies call it, don't they?"

"No, I don't feel remorse." But my eyes went away from her face.

"I was turning tricks when I was seventeen. So you got a free one. Deal me out of your guilt, Dave."

"Don't talk about yourself like that."

"I don't like morning-after bullshit."

"You listen to me, Robin. I came to you last night because I felt more alone than I've ever felt in my life."

She drank from her coffee and set the cup in her saucer.

"You're a sweet guy, but I've got too much experience at it. It's all right."

"Why don't you give yourself some credit? I don't know another person in the world who would have taken me in the way you did last night."

She put the dishes in the sink, then walked up behind me and kissed my hair.

"Just get through your hangover, Streak. Mommy's been fighting her own dragons for a long time," she said.

It wasn't simply a hangover, however. This slip had blown a year of sobriety for me, and in that year of health and sunshine and lifting weights and jogging for miles in the late evening, my system had lost all its tolerance for alcohol. It was similar to pouring a five-pound bag of sugar in an automobile gas tank and opening up the engine full-bore. In a short time your rings and valves are reduced to slag.

"Can I have my wallet?" I said.

"It's under the cushion on the couch."

I found it and put it in my back pocket, then slipped on my loafers.

"You headed for a beer joint?" she said.

"It's a thought."

"You're on your own, then. I'm not going to help you mess yourself up anymore."

"That's because you're the best, Robin."

"Save the baby oil for yourself. I don't need it."

"You've got it wrong, kiddo. I'm going to buy a bathing suit and we're going down to the beach. Then I'm going to take you out to lunch."

"It sounds like a good way to ease yourself back into the bar and keep mommy along."

"No bars. I promise."

Her eyes searched mine, and I saw her face brighten.

"I can fix food for us here. You don't have to spend your money," she said.

I smiled at her.

"I would really like to take you to lunch," I said.

It was a morning of abstinence in which I tried to think in terms of five minutes at a time. I felt like a piece of cracked ceramic. In the clothing store my hands were still trembling, and I saw the salesman step back from my breath. In an open-air food stand on the beach, I drank a glass of iced coffee and ate four aspirins. I squinted upward at the sunlight shining through the branches of the palm tree overhead. I would have swallowed a razor blade for a shuddering rush of Jim Beam through my system.

The snakes were out of their baskets, but I hoped they would have only a light meal and be on their way. I paid a Cuban kid a dollar to borrow his mask and snorkel, then I waded through the warm waves of the lagoon and swam out to open deep water over a coral reef. The water was as clear as green Jell-O, and thirty feet down I could see the fire coral in the reef, schools of clown fish, bluepoint crabs drifting across the sand, a nurse shark as motionless as a log in the reef's shadow, gossamer plants that bent with the current, black sea urchins whose spikes could go all the way through your foot. I held my breath and dove as deep as I could, dropping into a layer of cold water where a barracuda looked directly into my mask with his bony, hooked snout, then zipped past my ear like a silver arrow fired from an archer's bow.

I felt better when I swam back in and walked up on the sand where Robin was lying on a towel among a stand of coconut palms. Also, I had already invested too much of the day in my own misery. It was time to go to work again, although I knew she wasn't going to like it.

"The New Orleans cops think Jerry's in the Islands," I said.

She unsnapped her purse, took out a cigarette and lit it. She pulled her leg up in front of her and brushed sand off her knee.

"Come on, Robin," I said.

"I closed the door on all those dipshits."

"No, I'm going to close the door on them. And like we used to say in the First District, 'weld it shut and burn their birth certificates.'"

"You're a barrel of laughs, Dave."

"Where is he?" I smiled at her and ticked some grains of sand off her knee with my fingernail.

"I don't know. Forget the Islands, though. He used to have a mulatto chick in Bimini. That was the only reason he went over there. Then he got stoned on ganja and dropped her baby on its head. On concrete. He said they've got a coral-rock jail over there that's so black it'd turn a nigger into a white man."

"Where's his mother go when she's not in New Orleans?"

"She's got some relatives in north Louisiana. They used to come in the bar and ask for Styrofoam spit cups."

"Where in north Louisiana?"

"How should I know?"

"I want you to tell me everything Eddie Keats and the Haitian said when they were in your apartment."

Her face darkened, and she looked out toward the surf where some high school kids were sailing a frisbee back and forth over the waves. Out beyond the opening of the lagoon, pelicans were diving into a patch of blue water that was as dark as ink.

"You think my head's a tape deck?" she asked. "Like I should be collecting what these people say while they break my finger in a door? You know what it feels like for a woman to have their hands on her?"

Her face was still turned away from me, but I could see the shiny film on her eyes.

"What do you care what they say, anyway?" she said. "It never makes any sense. They're morons that went to the ninth grade, and they try to act like wiseguys they see on TV. Like Jerry always saying, 'I ain't no swinging dick. I ain't no swinging dick.' Wow, what an understatement. I bet he was in the bridal suite every night at Angola."

I waited for her to continue. She drew on the cigarette and held the smoke down as though she were taking a hit on a reefer.

"The spade wanted to cut my face up," she said. "What's-his-name, Keats, says to him, 'The man don't want us throwing out his pork chops. You just give her a souvenir on her hand or her foot, and I'll bet she'll wear it to church. Under it all, Robin's a righteous girl.' Then the boogie says, 'You always talk with a mouth full of shit, man.'

"What's-his-name thought that was funny. So he laughs and lights a Picayune and says, 'At least I don't live in a fucking slum so I can be next to a dead witch.'

"How about that for clever conversation? Listening to those guys talk to each other is like drinking out of a spittoon."

"Say that again about the witch."

"The guy lives in a slum around a witch. Or a dead witch or something. Don't try to make sense out of it. These guys buy their brains at a junkyard. Why else would anybody work for Bubba Rocque? They all end up doing time for him. I hear when they get out of Angola he won't give them a job cleaning toilets. What a class guy."

I picked up her hand and squeezed it. It was small and brown in mine. She looked at me in the warm shade, and her mouth parted slightly so I could see her white teeth.

"I have to go back this afternoon."

"Big news flash."

"No cuteness, kiddo. Do you want to go to New Iberia with me?"

"If your conscience bothers you, go to church."

"I have a bait business I could use some help with. I have a little girl living with me, too."

"Life down on the bayou isn't my style, Streak. Come on back here when you're serious."

"You always think I'm running a shuck on you."

"No, you're just a guy that makes impossible rules for himself. That's why you're a mess. Buy a girl lunch, will you?"

Sometimes you leave a person alone. This was one of them.

Out on the ocean a pelican lifted from a green trough and flew by overhead, a bloody fish dripping from its beak.