Out on the bayou I heard the peculiar cry of a bull 'gator calling to its mate. I was sweating now, even in the cool wind drawn by the attic fan through the window, and in the mire of thoughts that can occur in such a heart-rushing and self-defeating moment, I tried to justify both my lustful dependency and my willingness to force her to be my accomplice.

I stopped and raised myself off her, my body trembling with its own denial, and worked my underwear back over my thighs. She turned her head on the pillow and looked at me as a patient might from a hospital bed.

"It's been a long day," she said quietly.

"Not for me. I think I'd like to go out and blow the shit out of some tin cans and bottles right now."

I stood up from the bed and put on my shirt and pants.

"Where are you going?" she said.

"I don't know."

"Come back to bed, Dave."

"I'll lock the front door on the way out. I'll try not to wake you when I come back."

I slipped on my loafers and went outside to my truck. The few black clouds in the sky were rimmed with moonlight, and shadows fell through the oaks on the dirt road that led back into New Iberia. The bayou was high from the rain, and I could see the solitary V-shaped ripple of a nutria swimming from the cattails to the opposite shore. I banged and splashed through the muddy pools in the road, and gripped the steering wheel so tightly that my fists were ridged with bone. When I went across the drawbridge, the spare tire in the bed of the pickup bounced three feet in the air.

Main Street in New Iberia was quiet and empty when I parked in front of the poolroom. The oaks along the street stirred in the breeze, and out on the bayou the green and red running lights of a tug moved silently through the opened drawbridge. I could see the bridge tender in his little lighted office. Down the block a man in shirt sleeves, smoking a pipe, was walking his dog past the old brick Episcopalian church that had been used as a hospital by federal soldiers during the War Between the States.

The inside of the poolroom was like a partial return into the New Iberia of my youth, when people spoke French more often than English, when there were slot and race-horse machines in every bar, and the cribs on Railroad Avenue stayed open twenty-four hours a day and the rest of the world was as foreign to us as the Texans who arrived after World War II with their oil rigs and pipeline companies. A mahogany bar with a brass rail and spittoons ran the length of the room; there were four green-felt pool tables in back that the owner sometimes covered with oilcloth and served free gumbo on, and old men played bourée and dominoes under the wood-bladed fans that hung from the ceiling. The American and National League scores were written on a big chalkboard against one wall, and the television above the bar always seemed to have a baseball game on it. The room smelled of draft beer and gumbo and talcum, of whiskey and boiled crawfish and Virginia Extra tobacco, of pickled pig's feet and wine and Red Man.

The owner was named Tee Neg. He was an old-time pipe-liner and oil-field roughneck who looked like a mulatto and who had had three fingers pinched off by a drilling chain. I watched him draw a beer in a frosted schooner, rake the foam off with a ladle, and serve it with a jigger of neat whiskey to a man in denim clothes and a straw hat who stood at the bar and smoked a cigar.

"I hope you're here to play pool, Dave," Tee Neg said.

"Give me a bowl of gumbo."

"The kitchen's closed. You know that."

"Give me some boudin."

"They didn't bring me none today. You want a Dr. Pepper?"

"I don't want anything."

"Suit yourself."

"Give me a cup of coffee."

"You look tired, you. Go home and sleep."

"Just bring me a cup of coffee, Tee Neg. Bring me a cigar, too."

"You don't smoke, Dave. What you mad at, you?"

"Nothing. I didn't eat tonight. I thought your kitchen was open. You got today's paper?"

"Sure."

"I'm just going to read the paper."

"Anyt'ing you want."

He reached under the bar and handed me a folded copy of the Daily Iberian. There were beer rings on the front page.

"Give those old gentlemen in back a round on me," I said.

"You don't have to do that."

"I want to."

"You don't have to do that, Dave." He looked me steadily in the face.

"So I'm flush tonight."

"Okay, podna. But they buy you one, you go behind the bar and get it yourself. You don't use Tee Neg, no."

I shook open the paper and tried to read the sports page, but my eyes wouldn't focus on the words. My skin itched, my face burned, my loins felt as though they were filled with concrete. I folded the paper, dropped it on the bar, and walked back outside into the late-spring night.

I drove down to the bay at Cypremort Point and sat on a jetty that extended out into the salt water and watched the tide go out. When the sun came up in the morning the sky was empty and looked as white as bone. Seagulls flew low over the wet, gray sand flats and pecked at the exposed shellfish, and I could smell the odor of dead fish on the wind. My clothes felt stiff and gritty with salt as I walked back to my truck. All the way back to town my visit to the poolroom remained as real and as unrelenting in its detail as a daylong hangover.

Later, Batist and I opened up the bait shop and dock, then I went up to the house and slept until early afternoon. When I woke, it was bright and warm, and the mockingbirds and blue jays were loud in the trees. Annie had left me two waxpaper-wrapped ham and onion sandwiches and a note on the kitchen table.

Didn't want to wake you but when I get back from town can you help me find a horny middle-aged guy with a white streak in his head who knows how to put a Kansas girl on rock 'n' roll?

Love,

A.

PS. Let's picnic in the park this evening and take Alafair to the baseball game. I'm sorry about last night. You'll always be my special guy, Dave.

It was a generous and kind note. I should have been content with it. But it disturbed me as much as it reassured me, because I wondered if Annie, like most people who live with alcoholics, was not partly motivated by fear that my unpredictable mood might lead all of us back into the nightmarish world that AA had saved me from.

Regardless, I knew that the problems that had been caused us by the plane crash at Southwest Pass would not go away. And having grown up in a rural Cajun world that was virtually devoid of books, I had learned most of my lessons for dealing with problems from hunting and fishing and competitive sports. No book could have taught me what I had learned from my father in the marsh, and as a boxer in high school I had discovered that it was as important to swallow your blood and hide your injury as it was to hurt your opponent.

But maybe the most important lesson I had learned about addressing complexity was from an elderly Negro janitor who had once pitched for the Kansas City Monarchs in the old Negro leagues. He used to watch our games in the afternoon, and one day when I'd been shotgunned off the mound and was walking off the field toward the shower, he walked along beside me and said, "Sliders and screwballs is cute, and spitters shows 'em you can be nasty. But if you want to make that batter's pecker shrivel up, you throw a forkball at his head."

Maybe it was time to float one by the batter's head, I thought.

Bubba Rocque had bought a ruined antebellum home on the Vermilion River outside of Lafayette and had spent a quarter-million dollars rebuilding it. It was a massive plantation house, white and gleaming in the sun, the three-story Doric columns so thick that two men could not place their arms around them and touch hands. The front gallery was made of Italian marble; the second-story veranda ran completely around the building and was railed with ironwork from Seville and hung with boxes of petunias and geraniums. The brick carriage house had been expanded to a three-car garage; the stone wells were decorated with ornamental brass pulleys and buckets and planted with trumpet and passion vine; the desiccated wood outbuildings had been replaced with a clay tennis court.