The Neon Rain

SIX

I awoke in an auto garage of some kind. The roof was made of tin and it was raining outside. I was stretched out on a wooden table, my arms handcuffed around a post behind me, my feet tied to another post at the opposite end. The only light came from a mechanic's portable lamp that was hung on one wall among rows of tools, fan belts, grease guns, and clusters of sparkplug wires. The air was close and hot and smelled of oil and rust. When I turned my head, my neck felt as though it would crack like a dry flower stem.

Then I saw Sam Fitzpatrick in a wooden chair four feet from me. His forearms were tied flush to the arms of the chair, wrapped with clothesline from the elbow to the wrist so that his hands stuck out like broken claws; his clothes were torn, streaked with grease and blood, and his battered and bleeding head hung down in the shadow, obscuring his face. By his feet was a telephone crank, the kind that was used on army field phones.

"Sam," I said.

He made a sound and moved his head.

"Sam, it's Dave Robicheaux," I said. "Where are they?"

He raised his head up into the light and I saw his face. His eyes were swollen shut like a beaten prizefighter's, his nose broken, his saliva red in his teeth.

"Where are they, Sam?" I said again.

Then he started breathing hard, rattling down in his throat, as though he were trying to generate enough power to speak a solitary line.

"Elephant walk," he said.

I heard a tin door scrape open on the concrete floor, and the cool smell of the rain blew into the room. Philip Murphy, the little Israeli, and the tall man with the pencil mustache and the kinky reddish hair walked into the light from the mechanic's lamp. They carried paper bags of hamburgers and french fries in their hands.

"You must have a strong constitution," Murphy said. "They shot you up with enough Thorazine to knock out a dinosaur." His wet gray hair was still uncut; he hadn't shaved that day, and stubble grew through the tiny blue and red veins in his cheeks. He took a bite of his hamburger and looked at me while he chewed. His hazel eyes were devoid of either feeling or meaning.

"You're a miserable excuse for a man," I said.

"Why's that, Lieutenant? You don't like the way things have gone? You didn't have warning about the rules? People have been unfair to you, have they?"

"It takes a special kind of degenerate to torture a defenseless man."

"People get hurt in wars. Your friend is one of them. You probably don't like that definition, but your sort never does."

"You're a punk, Murphy. You never fought a war in your life. Guys like you take them off the cattle cars and run the ovens."

For a moment I saw a flash in his eyes.

"Would you like to live in a communist country, Lieutenant?" he said. "Would you like Louisiana run by the Sandinistas the way they run things in Nicaragua? You know the Marxists are puritans, don't you? No casinos or horse tracks, no booze or poontang when you want it, no chance for the big fat score that keeps everybody's genitals aglow. Instead, you wait in a sweaty line with a lot of other mediocre people for whatever the government dole is that day. If you lived down there, you'd put a gun in your mouth from boredom."

"So somehow it's acceptable to tie down a kid and take him apart? What nails me about your kind is that you're always willing to sacrifice half the earth to save the other half. But you're never standing in the half that gets blitzed."

"You're a disingenuous man, Lieutenant. You remember what Patton said? You don't win wars by giving your life for your country. You make the other sonofabitch give his. I think you're just a poor loser. Look at Andres here. You see the little gray scars around his mouth? He has a right to be bitter but he's not, at least not excessively. Say something for us, Andres. Qué hora es?".

"Doce menos veinte," the tall man with the mustache replied. His voice was a wheeze, a rasp, as though his lungs were perforated with small holes.

"Andres used to have a regular puta in one of Somoza's whorehouses. Then one day he talked a little too casually in front of her about the work his firing squad did. They'd shot a Sandinista girl named Isabella whom they'd captured in the hills. He thought it was a good story, because she'd confessed before she died and turned a couple of dozen other Sandinistas. What he didn't say was that his whole firing squad had raped her before they shot her, and what he didn't know was that Isabella was his puta's sister. So the next time he dropped in for a little dirty boogie between the sheets, it was hotter than the devil's skillet and she fixed him a tall, cool Cuba libre with ice and lime slices and he swallowed it straightaway like the lusty fellow he is. Except she loaded it with muriatic acid, and poor old Andres has been spitting up his insides like burnt cork ever since."

"You're a piece of shit, Murphy."

"No, you've got it all wrong, Lieutenant. Some of us serve, others like Fitzpatrick here get in the way, and the majority, such as yourself, go about your games and your self-delusion while we take care of things for you. I don't like to pick on you in your situation, but it's not fair of you to start calling people names, either. Now you're an educated man of some experience, and I want you to answer me something truthfully. You've seen the people who are on the other side of the fence in this country-the peace marchers, the nuke freezers, the out-of-Central-America gang. Who are they?" The down-turned corners of his mouth tugged backwards in a slight smile and his eyes wandered over my face with a sense of merriment. "Some of them are lesbians, aren't they? Not all of them but at least some, you've got to admit that. Then there are others that just don't like men. They didn't like their fathers, their brothers, or their husbands, and finally they zero their sights in on any male authority-the President, congressmen, generals, anything with a cock.

"Now we come to the general malcontents," he continued. "These are your professional losers who couldn't tell a history book from a Sears, Roebuck catalog, but they do love a parade. I'm sure you got to see a lot of them on television while you were in Vietnam. My favorite bunch, though, is the pussy-whipped contingent. Their wives drag them around to endless meetings that are going nowhere, and if they're good little fellows, Mommy will give them a piece every week or so.

"I don't think that's your kind of group, Lieutenant, but maybe I'm wrong about you. I guess the bottom line is you wanted to be a player. Too bad, because now we've got to take a couple of players off the board."

"I'll suggest some reading for you," I said. "Go down to the Picayune morgue and read the clippings on what's happened to people who snuffed New Orleans cops. It's not our finest hour, but the lesson's unmistakable."

He smiled in a self-amused way, and began eating his hamburger again while his eyes glanced expectantly at the back door. Five minutes later, Bobby Joe Starkweather burst in out of the rain with a paper sack under his arm. His T-shirt and blue jeans were soaked through, and his muscles stood out against the wet cloth like intertwined serpents.

"I got it. Let's put the biscuit-eater under and get it on the road," he said. "Did you bring me a hamburger?"

"I didn't think you wanted it cold," Murphy said.

"You're a great guy to work with, Murphy," Starkweather said.

"Would you like mine?" Murphy asked quietly.

"I haven't had my rabies shots."

"Suit yourself, then, and spare us your complaining wit."

"Look, Murphy, I went after the booze, which you owe me twelve dollars for, and I got rainwater running out my crotch while you guys are in the dry, licking your greasy fingers. Don't provoke me."

Murphy chewed on his food and looked at nothing.

Starkweather wiped his face and arms slick, lighted a Lucky Strike from his Zippo, snapped the lighter shut and stuck it in his watch pocket with a thick thumb, and inhaled the smoke without removing the cigarette from his mouth while he took a fifth of Seagram's whiskey, a six-pack of Jax, a capped vial of pills, and a brown medicine bottle from the sack and put them on the table. Then he rummaged around on the workbench until he found a rubber funnel and a glass jar filled with rusty nails. He dumped the nails out on the workbench and walked back to the table with the jar and the funnel. His shaved head was shaped like a question mark.

"You should have been here earlier," he said. "We got some real high notes out of your friend. You remember what they used to say in 'Nam. Call up Charlie on the telephone and he always answers."

He filled the glass jar with beer and whiskey and the liquid from the brown bottle, then poured in the pills and screwed on the cap and shook it all together as though he were making a martini. His saliva was wet on the tip of his cigarette, and he breathed with a mean energy.

"It must be terrible to know you're a lush that can't hold his liquor," he said.

"I've spilled more in a week than you've drunk in your lifetime, asshole," I said.

"I'll bet. My first wife was a juicer," he said. "She'd do anything for it. She screwed a cabdriver once for a quart of beer. I found out about it, cut me a switch as thick as my finger, and whipped the dress off her back. I took her money and clothes away and locked her in the bedroom and she'd drink hair tonic. Finally they come and took her off to a crazyhouse in Montgomery."

"No matter what happens here tonight, I've got some friends who are going to cool out your action, Starkweather," I said.

"Maybe so, maybe so. But in the meantime I've got a drunkard's dream for you. When those 'ludes hit you, I can pull your teeth with pliers and you won't twitch. The castor oil is just to round out your evening, bring back those old three-day benders when you used to shit your pants. If you're a good boy, we'll let you sit up and drink it by yourself."

"Get on with it," Murphy said.

"Stop giving orders for a while, Murphy," Starkweather said. "A lot of this mess is yours. We should have taken these guys out the first time they got in our face. Instead, you had to make an intelligence operation out of it to impress Abshire."

"Why is it in any given situation you never disappoint us?" Murphy said.

"You got a way of letting other people clean the pot after you get off it. Maybe you ought to do some grunt work yourself. You ought to be there when them Indians close off a village and start pulling them out of the huts. The amusement park really lights up. I don't think you'd have the guts for it."

"It's not a matter of guts, my friend," Murphy said. There were small breadcrumbs in the whiskers on his chin. "Some people are adverbs, others are nouns."

"It'd be fun watching you hump it."

"You might not believe this, but I had a role of some minor historical importance at the Bay of Pigs and Dien Bien Phu. The latter was about the time you were trying to figure out the difference between your mother's ovaries and a bowl of grits."

"You got a great record, Murph. If you'd been at Omaha Beach, we'd be speaking German today."

Erik, the little Israeli, snickered, and the Nicaraguan looked back and forth hot-eyed at the joke he didn't understand.

"You idiots, he's burning his wrists with the handcuffs," Murphy said.

"Always the intelligence man," Starkweather said.

"You do your job and shut your mouth, Starkweather. The lieutenant could operate on one brain cell and outwit you. If you screw something up here tonight, or open your face one more time-"

He stopped and breathed hard through his nose.

"I'm going to bring his car in now. You wrap this package up," he said. "We're going to talk later."

"You heard the bossman," Starkweather said to me. "Time to go to work, earn our pay, fetch that barge and tote that bale. Good-bye, fart-breath."

They forced the spout of the rubber funnel past my teeth and into the back of my mouth. I gagged and coughed, my eyes filled with water, and I felt my chest convulse under their hands. Then they held my nose and poured the mixture of beer, castor oil, whiskey, and Quaaludes down my throat. The sudden raw taste of alcohol after four years of abstinence was like a black peal of thunder in my system. My stomach was empty and it licked through me like canned heat, settled heavily into my testicles and phallus, roared darkly into my brain, filled my heart with the rancid, primordial juices of a Viking reveling in his own mortal wound.

The light went out of my mind, and in a few moments' time I was caught again in my drunken world of all-night bars, taxi drivers guiding me through my front door in the false dawn, the delirium tremens that covered me with sweat and filled the inside of my houseboat with spiders and dead Vietnamese. I heard beer-bottle glass break in my head, saw myself pushed out the back door of a wino bar, saw the contempt in a bouncer's face when he stuffed me in my automobile and threw my hat in after me, felt myself heaving my insides into a public toilet, felt the hands of a pimp and a whore turning my trouser pockets inside out.

Then a strange thing happened. Most of my dreams about Vietnam were nightmares that at one time made me fear sleep. Even before I became a full-blown drunk, I used to drink three beers before bed so I would sleep through to the morning. But now somebody was carrying me in the warm rain and I knew that I was once again in the loving care of the soldiers from my platoon. I had heard the klitch under my foot in the dark on the jungle trail; then, as though I were a spectator rather than a participant, I saw myself covered with cobalt light, my body crawl with electricity, my soul light the trees like an enormous candle.

When I awoke, the smoke was still rising from the rent holes in my fatigues and they were carrying me between them on a poncho while the rain ticked on the trees and the shells from an offshore battery ripped through the sky overhead. In the humid darkness I could hear the labored breathing of the four men carrying me. They were running in a half-trot, the tree branches and vines slapping against their faces and steel pots, their expressions stonelike and heedless of the other Claymores that must have been set on the trail. One of the four was a hillbilly boy from north-era Georgia. He had a large American flag tattooed on his flexed, sun-browned arm, and he was so strong and he pulled so hard on his corner of the poncho that he almost tipped me out on the trail. But when a couple of AK-47s went off and they had to set me down suddenly, he crouched close to my face and whispered in his mountain accent, "Don't you worry none, Lieutenant. If they ain't at the LZ, we'll tote you plumb to Saigon if we have to."

They carried me the rest of the night. Their faces were exhausted and beaded with pinpoints of sweat and dirt, their fatigues stiff with their own salt. I should have been afraid but I was not. They never faltered, even though their arms and backs ached miserably and their hands were rubbed raw and blistered. The moon broke through the clouds overhead, the mist hung like strips of wet cotton along the jungle trail, and I fell into a deep morphine dream, a prenatal quietness in which the only sound was my own breathing and the labored breath of the four men carrying me, which finally became a collective hum like blood coursing through an umbilical cord. I heard them stop once and set me down gingerly while they changed my serum albumin bottle, but I didn't wake until morning, when I heard the blades of the medevac roaring over the LZ and I looked up out of my black cocoon and saw the boy from northern Georgia lean down out of the light and touch my face with hands that were as tender as a woman's.

But the hands that lifted me out of the trunk of my own automobile on the third level of a parking garage above the river didn't belong to the men of my platoon. In the darkness and the swirling rain I saw the faces of the little Israeli, the Nicaraguan, Philip Murphy, and Bobby Joe Starkweather staring down at me as though I were a loathsome object whose smell made their nostrils dilate and whiten with shock. They lifted me to my feet, then wedged me behind the steering wheel of my car and slammed the door closed. My head felt as though it had been stunned with Novocain, my mouth hung open uncontrollably, my chin and neck were slick with vomit, the sickening sweet stench of excrement rose from my trousers. Through the windshield I could see the green and red running lights of barges out on the Mississippi and clouds of vapor rising from the rain-dented water like a scene out of purgatory.

They propped Sam Fitzpatrick next to me and splashed whiskey and beer on his clothes. I tried to hold my head up straight, to reach out and touch him, but my chin kept falling on my chest and my words became thick bubbles on my lips. His eyes were rolled upward, and when he breathed, fresh blood drained from his nose onto his shirt-front. My face was numb, dead to the touch, stretched tight across the skull the way skin is over a death's head, and I felt my lips splitting apart in a wicked grin, as though I wanted to share an obscene joke with the world about our execution. Then an awful taste rose out of my stomach, my head pitched forward, and I felt something like wet newspaper rip loose inside my chest and then I heard a splattering through the steering wheel onto the floorboards.

Someone had started the car engine now, and a bare arm ridged with muscle like rolls of nickels reached across me and dropped the transmission into gear. The rain was blowing hard on the river.

The car rolled toward the guardrail, gaining speed, as I slapped limply at the door handle and tried to pull the lock free with fingers that felt sewed together with needle and thread. At first I could see the river levee, a lighted street down below with cars on it, the black tops of one-story warehouses; then as my car neared the guardrail and the end of the concrete shelf I could see only the sky and the rain twisting out of it and a distant airplane with its wing lights flashing against the blackness.

I heard the rail fold under my bumper, then snap loose altogether from its fastenings just as the front wheels dropped over the edge of the concrete and my car tilted forward and slid out into space like it was beginning the first downward rush of a rollercoaster ride. The back end started to roll over, and I was pressed flat against the steering wheel, watching the street below roar up at me through the windshield, my mouth open wide with a sound that would be caught forever in my throat.

The car hit the corner of another building or concrete abutment of some kind, because I heard metal shear, as though the underside of the car had been surgically gutted, smelled a drench of gasoline briefly, then we crashed upside down in the middle of a sidewalk in a thunderous roar of glass, crumpling metal, and doors exploding off the hinges.

I was outside on the pavement, my clothes covered with oil and glass shards. We had beat it, I thought. The bad guys had done their worst and hadn't been able to pull it off. We were painted with magic, Fitzpatrick and I, and after we had recuperated it would be our turn to kick butt and take names.

But only drunkards and fools believe in that kind of poetic simplicity. The fuel tank was gashed open and the car was soaking in gasoline. I saw wisps of smoke rise from the crushed hood like pieces of dirty string, then there was a poof and a burst of light from the engine, and a strip of flame raced along the pavement to the gas tank and the whole car went up in an orange and black ball that snapped against the sky.

I hope he didn't suffer. The inside of the car was a firestorm. I couldn't see anything except flames swirling inside the gutted windows. But in my mind's eye I saw a papier-mache figure, with freckles painted on its face, lying quietly between the roaring yellow walls of a furnace, ridging and popping apart in the heat.

The next morning the sun was bright through the windows of my hospital room, and I could see the green tops of the oak trees against the red brick of the nineteenth-century homes across the street. I was only half a block off St. Charles, and when the nurse cranked up my bed I could see the big dull-green streetcar passing along the esplanade.

I had a concussion and the doctor took seventeen stitches in my scalp, and small pieces of oily glass were embedded in my shoulder and all down one arm, so that the skin felt like alligator hide. But my real problem was with the whiskey and Quaaludes that were still in my system, and the series of people who came through my door.

The first one was Sam Fitzpatrick's supervisor from the Treasury Department. He wasn't a bad guy, I guess, but he didn't like me and I believed he felt it was Fitzpatrick's involvement with me, rather than with Philip Murphy and Central American guns, that had led to his death.

"You keep talking about an elephant walk. There's nothing like that in Fitzpatrick's notes and he never talked about it, either," he said. He was forty, wore a business suit and a deep tan, and his gray hair was cut short like an athlete's. His brown, green-flecked eyes were steady and intent.

"He didn't have a chance to," I said.

"You tell a strange story, Lieutenant."

"Psychopaths and government fuckheads out of control do strange things."

"Philip Murphy isn't government."

"I'm not sure about that."

"Take my word," he said.

"Then why don't you take mine?"

"Because you have a peculiar history. Because you keep meddling in things that aren't your business. Because you killed a potential major government witness and because one of our best agents burned to death in your automobile."

My eyes broke and I had to look away from his face. The trees were green in the sunlight outside and I thought I heard the streetcar clatter on the esplanade.

"Have you heard of a guy named Abshire?" I asked.

"What about him?" he replied.

"I think these guys work for somebody named Abshire." His eyes looked into space, then back at me. But I had seen the recognition in them.

"Who is this guy?" I asked.

"How would I know?"

"You circling up the wagons?"

"We can't afford to have you around," he said.

"Too bad."

"What does it take for you to get the message, Lieutenant?"

"I liked that kid, too."

"Then make a tribute to his memory by staying out of federal business."

He left without saying good-bye and I felt foolish and alone in the sunlit whiteness of my room. I was also starting to shake inside, like a tuning fork that starts to tremble at a discordant sound. There was a bottle of Listerine on my nightstand. I walked stiffly to the bath, rinsed my mouth, and spit into the sink. Then I sucked the juice out of my cheeks and tongue and swallowed it. Then I rinsed again, but this time I didn't spit it out. I could feel the alcohol in my stomach like an old friend.

A half hour later, two detectives from Internal Affairs stood over my bed. It was the same two who had investigated the shooting at Julio Segura's. They wore sports clothes and mustaches, and had their hair cut by a stylist.

"You guys are making me nervous. You look like vultures sitting on my bedposts. How about sitting down?" I said.

"You're a fun guy, Robicheaux, a laugh a minute," the first detective said. His name was Nate Baxter and he had worked for CID in the army before he joined the department. I had always believed that his apparent military attitudes were a disguise for a true fascist mentality. He was a bully, and one night a suspended patrolman punched him headlong into a urinal at Joe Burton's old place on Canal.

"We don't need too much from you, Dave," his partner said. "We're just vague on a couple of points."

"Like what you were doing in that snatch-patch out by the airport," Baxter said.

"I heard about a girl that wanted to turn a couple of Segura's people."

"You didn't find her?"

"No."

"Then why did you have to spend all that time out there watching the gash?" Baxter said.

"I waited to see if she'd come in."

"What'd you have to drink?"

"7-Up."

"I didn't know 7-Up caused people to shit their pants," Baxter said.

"You've read the report. If you don't believe me, that's your problem."

"No, it's your problem. So run through it again."

"Stick it up your butt, Baxter."

"What did you say?"

"You heard me. You get out of my face."

"Slow down, Dave," his partner said. "It's a wild story. People are going to ask questions about it. You got to expect that."

"It's supposed to be a wild story. That's why they did it," I said.

"I don't think there's any mystery here. I think you fell off the wagon, got a snootful, and crashed right on your head," Baxter said. "The paramedics say you smelled like an unflushed toilet with whiskey poured in it."

"I keep defending you. No matter what everybody says, I tell them that under that Mortimer Snerd polyester there's a real cop who can sharpen pencils with the best administrators in the department. But you make it hard for me to keep on being your apologist, Baxter."

"I think your mother must have been knocked up by a crab," he said.

His partner's face went gray.

"I'm going to be out of here by tomorrow," I said. "Maybe I ought to call you up off-duty, meet you someplace, talk over some things. What do you think?"

"You call me up off-duty, you better be asking for bus fare to an AA meeting."

"I've got a feeling it won't make much difference if I go out of control here today."

"I wish you would, wise-ass. I'd love to stomp the shit out of you."

"Get out of here, Baxter, before somebody pours you out with the rest of the bedpans."

"Keep popping those Quaaludes, hotshot, because you're going to need them. It's not me that's dropping the hammer on you, either. You blew out your own doors this time. I hope you enjoy the fall, too, because it's a big one." Then he turned to his partner. "Let's get out in the fresh air. This guy's more depressing every time I see him."

They went out the door, brushing past a young Irish nun in a white habit who was bringing in my lunch on a tray.

"My, what an intense pair," she said.

"That's probably the nicest thing anyone has ever said about them, Sister."

"Are they after the men who did this to you?"

"I'm afraid they get paid for catching other cops."

"I don't understand." Her face was round and pretty inside her nun's wimple.

"It's nothing. Sister, I don't think I can eat lunch. I'm sorry."

"Don't worry about it. Your stomach will be better by tonight."

"You know what I'd really like, that I'd give anything to have?"

"What?"

The words wouldn't come. My eyes swept around the brightly lit room and went outside the window to the green tops of the oak trees moving in the breeze.

"Could you get me a big glass of Coca-Cola? With a lot of ice in it, maybe with cherry juice and slices of lime in it?"

"Of course."

"Thanks very much, Sister."

"Do you want anything else?"

"No. Just the Coca-Cola. I'm sure that's all I need."

That afternoon Captain Guidry sat on the foot of my bed, snuffed down in his nose, and wiped his glasses on my bedsheet.

"One time after every newspaper in the country condemned George Wallace as a racist, he told a reporter, 'Well, that's one man's opinion,'" Captain Guidry said. "I was never his admirer, but I always liked that statement."

"How bad is it going to be?"

"They stiffed you. Indefinite suspension without pay."

"That's what they give cops who get caught dealing dope."

"For what it's worth, I argued against it. They dumped on you, Dave, but you've got to see their side of it, too. In a week's time your name has gotten into a lot of paperwork. We're also talking about two people shot to death in one of the richest neighborhoods in New Orleans, and a Treasury agent killed in your automobile that falls three stories into the middle of a city street. That's a tough act to follow.",

"Do you believe my report?"

"You've always been a good cop. There's none better."

"Do you believe me?"

"How the hell do I know what happened out there? To tell you the truth, I'm not sure you do, either, Dave. The paramedics said you were half crazy when they brought you in here. I saw what was left of your car. I don't know how you survived it. The doctor said you had enough dope and booze in your blood to embalm the Russian army."

"You want me to resign?"

"Don't let them call the plays for you. You let parasites like Baxter see that you're wounded and they'll try to file a manslaughter charge against you."

"That special agent, Fitzpatrick's supervisor, knows who this guy Abshire is. I saw it in his eyes."

"You shake a federal tree, and all you get in your face is birdshit. Secondly, you're suspended. You're out of it. That's absolute."

"What am I supposed to do, Captain?"

"It's your turn in the barrel. I just hope it passes quick. Tell them all to go fuck themselves and take up needlepoint if you have to."

I watched the sunset through the window that evening. The sky was crimson above the trees and the rooftops, then it turned lavender and finally a deep purple as the sun burned itself out in a crack of brilliant fire on the horizon. I sat alone in the dark awhile, then used the remote television control to switch on the twenty-four-hour cable news. I watched pictures of Salvadoran guerrillas threading their way through a jungle trail at the base of a dead volcano. Their faces were very young, with wispy beards like Orientals, and their bodies were hung with bandoliers and cloth belts of shotgun shells. Each of them had laced his straw hat with long blades of pampas grass.

A moment later the screen showed an unrelated scene of government troops in GI issue moving through a forest of banana trees and enormous clumps of green elephant ears. A Cobra gunship streaked across the glassy sky, hovered at an angle over a deep, rocky ravine, then unloaded a succession of rockets that blew water, powdered coral, and bits of trees and scrub brush out of the bottom of the ravine. The footage closed with a shot of the government troops retreating out of the banana trees with their wounded on stretchers. The heat in those trees must have been terrible, because the wounded were covered with sweat and the medics were washing their faces with water from canteens. It all looked very familiar.

Having been raised in Louisiana, I had always thought that politics was the province of moral invalids. But as a gambler I had certain instincts about which side I would wager my money on in certain military situations. On one side of the equation were people who had been conscripted into the army and were either forced or paid to fight, and who sometimes sold their weapons to the enemy if given the chance. On the other side was a group that lived off the jungle, scavenged guns and ammunition wherever they could buy or steal them, had absolutely nothing of economic value to lose, and who, because they had no illusions about their fate if they were captured, would go down to the last man in a firefight. I doubted there was a bookie in New Orleans who would take a bet on that one.

But my war was over, and maybe my career as well. I turned off the set and looked out the window at the reflection of the lights against the sky. The room was quiet, the sheets were cool and clean, and my stomach didn't feel sick anymore; but the tuning fork was still vibrating inside me. I brushed my teeth, I showered, I rinsed my mouth with Listerine again; then I got back in bed and pulled my knees up in front of me and started to shake all over.

Fifteen minutes later I checked myself out of the hospital and took a cab to my houseboat. It was a dark, hot night and the heat had built up all day in the cabin. My collection of historical jazz records-irreplaceable seventy-eights of Blind Lemon, Bunk Johnson, Kid Ory, Bix Beiderbecke-lay scattered and broken and tattooed with footprints on the floor. I opened the windows wide, turned on my floor fan, picked up the few records that were still hard and stiff in their jackets, cleaned them with a soft cloth, and set them in the wail rack. Then I swept the rest into a paper bag and lay down to sleep on the couch with my clothes on.

Small waves chucked against the hull, and the boat rocked rhythmically under me. But it was no good; I couldn't sleep. I was sweating and trembling and when I took my shirt off I shivered as though I'd been struck with a blast of arctic air. Each time I closed my eyes I felt the earth's surface drop away under me, felt myself spinning end over end inside my automobile toward the distant bottom of a rock-strewn canyon, saw words form like a bubble on the dead lips of Sam Fitzpatrick sitting next to me.

Later, Annie Ballard tapped softly on the cabin door. I unlocked it and went back to the couch in the dark. A sailing yacht out on the lake had a floodlamp lighted on its deck, and it made gold lights in Annie's hair. I saw her feel for the switch on the wall.

"Don't turn it on," I said.

"Why not?"

"People just out of the hospital don't look good."

"I don't care."

"I do."

"You knew I was coming up there. Didn't you want to leave me a message?"

"I thought I did. Maybe I didn't. There were cops in there all day."

She walked closer to the couch. She wore a pair of white jeans with a blue denim shirt tucked inside.

"What's wrong?" she said.

"I guess it's malaria. I picked it up in the Philippines."

"I'm going to turn on the light."

"No."

"You don't have to hide anything, Dave."

"I'm suspended without pay. I don't feel well right now. To tell you the truth, I feel like killing somebody."

"I don't understand."

"When they suspend you indefinitely without pay, it means you're probably not coming back. It's the kind of stuff they drop on cops that are about to be indicted."

She sat down on the edge of the couch and put her hand on my bare shoulder. Her face was a dark silhouette against the glass behind her. She touched my forehead with her fingers.

"I can't believe they would do that to you."

"It's my past history. You don't know about it. I was a full-blown drunk for years. They figure I'm back into it."

"They can't hold the past against you."

"Why the hell not? It makes it easier. Most cops couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag. They think categorically about virtually every situation. That's why we don't put a lot of people away. Look, four pieces of human slime that wouldn't even make good bars of soap are out there right now drinking a beer, celebrating burning a kid into charcoal, while some of our own people are wondering if they should hang a DUI on me, or a DUI and a manslaughter charge."

"You're not talking like yourself."

"Annie, in the real world we fry paupers in the electric chair and send priests to prison for splashing chicken blood on draft files. It's the nature of ritual. We deal with the problem symbolically, but somebody has to take the fall. In this case, a guy that looked like he escaped from a Popsicle wrapper launched a one-man crusade against an entire government policy in Central America. If you were an administrative pencil-pusher, don't you think it would be easier to deal with a drunk-driving fatality than a story about a lot of right-wing crazies who are killing peasant villagers in Nicaragua?"

"Why do you think you're the only person who sees the truth?"

"I didn't say that."

"But it's the way you feel, Dave. That's too big a burden for a person." Her face was soft and composed and she looked out the window across the water for a moment, then stood up and began undressing in the dark.

"Annie, I'm not a charity case. I'm just not doing too good today."

"If you want me to go away, tell me. But look me directly in the face and tell me honestly, with no weirdness or bullshit this time."

"I like you a great deal."

She sat back down on the couch and leaned her face close to mine.

"Loving somebody is being there when nobody else is. When it's not even a choice. You should understand that, Dave," she said. She bent and kissed me lightly on the mouth.

She was beautiful to look at, and her skin was smooth and warm and I could smell the sun and a perfume like the scent of four-o'clocks in her hair. She kissed me again and blew her breath on the side of my face and slipped her arms around my neck and pressed her breasts tight against me. I sat up on the side of the couch and took off my trousers; then she pressed me back into the cushions, raised herself up on her knees, and with her hand guided me inside her. Her eyes closed, she moaned and her mouth opened wide, and she leaned down over me on her arms with her breasts close to my face. She had ignored all my anger-no, my self-pity-and I felt humbled and dizzy and physically weak when I looked up into the electric blueness of her eyes.

There was a strawberry birthmark on her right breast, and it seemed to grow darker and fill with blood as her breathing became more rapid. I felt her warmth drawing me into her, felt her wet palms slip under me, felt her thighs flex and tighten around me, then her hands held my face and my heart twisted in my chest and I felt an aching hardness crest inside of me and burst apart like a heavy stone ripping loose in a rushing streambed.

"Oh, you fine man," she said, and brushed the drops of sweat out of my eyes with her fingers, her body still shaking.

She fell asleep next to me, and I covered her with a sheet from the bedroom. The moon was out now, and the light through the glass made her curly blond hair look like it was touched with silver. Just the edge of her strawberry birthmark showed above the sheet.

I knew I was very fortunate to have a girl like this. But the great nemesis of the gambler is that he's never satisfied with just winning the daily double; he'll reinvest his winnings in every race remaining that afternoon, and if he's still ahead when the window closes on the last race, he'll be at the dog track that night and stay with it until he loses everything.

I didn't have a parimutuel window handy, so I left Annie asleep and started walking down the lakefront toward Pontchartrain Beach Amusement Park. The wind had picked up and the waves were cresting against the hard-packed sand of the beach and the palm fronds were rattling dryly against the darkening sky. By the time I reached the amusement park the air was cool and filled with flying grains of sand and smelled of the gale blowing out of the south. Most of the rides were closed, with tarpaulins stretched over them to protect them from the coming rain, and the red neon signs over the empty funhouse looked like electrified blood in the sky.

But I found what I had been looking for all day.

"A double Jack Daniel's with a Pearl draft on the side," I told the bartender.

"You look like you already lost a fight to a chainsaw, buddy," he said.

"You ought to see the chainsaw," I said.

But it was a dark, cheerless place, not given to either humor or protocol, and the bartender poured silently into my shot glass.