"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.

7

THE NEXT MORNING when I awoke, back in New Iberia, I heard blue jays and mockingbirds in my pecan trees. I put on my gym shorts and tennis shoes and jogged all the way to the drawbridge in the early blue light, drank coffee with the bridge tender, then hit it hard all the way home. I showered and dressed, ate a breakfast of strawberries and Grape-Nuts on the picnic table in the backyard, and watched the breeze ruffle the delicate leaves of the mimosa tree. It had been over thirty hours since I had had a drink. I was still weak, my nerve endings still felt as though they had been touched with lighted matches, but I could feel the tiger starting to let go.

I drove to Lafayette and talked with two priests who had worked with the pilot of the plane that had gone down at Southwest Pass. What they told me was predictable: Father Melancon, the drowned priest, had been a special piece of work. He had been an organiser of migrant farm workers in Texas and Florida, had been busted up with ax handles by company goons outside Florida City, and had served three months' county time in Brownsville for slashing the tires of a sheriff's van that was loaded with arrested strikers. Then he got serious and broke into a General Electric plant and vandalised the nose cone of a nuclear missile. Next stop, the federal pen in Danbury for three years.

I was always fascinated by the government's attempt to control political protest by the clergy in the country. Usually the prosecutor's office would try to portray them as naive idealists, bumblers who had strayed from their pulpits and convents, and when that didn't work, they were sent up the road with the perverts, geeks, and meltdown cases, which are about the only types that do hard time anymore. However, once they were in the slam, they had a way of spreading their message throughout the convict population.

But the priest in Lafayette didn't recognise the names of Johnny Dartez and Victor Romero. They simply said that Father Melancon had been a trusting man with unusual friends, and that sometimes his unusual friends went with him when he ferried refugees out of villages in El Salvador and Guatemala.

"Romero is a little, dark guy with black curls hanging in his face. He wears a beret," I said.

One of the priests tapped his finger on his cheek.

"You remember him?" I said.

"He didn't wear a beard, but the rest of it was like you say. He was here a month ago with Father Melancon. He said he was from New Orleans but he had relatives in Guatemala."

"Do you know where he is now?"

"No, I'm sorry."

"If he comes round again, call Minos Dautrieve at the Drug Enforcement Administration or call me at this number." I wrote Minos's name and my home number on a piece of paper and gave it to him.

"Is this man in trouble?" the priest said.

"I'm not sure what he is, Father. He used to be a drug courier and street dealer. Now he may be an informer for Immigration and Naturalisation. I'm not sure if he's moving up or down in his moral status."

I drove back to New Iberia through Breaux Bridge so I could stop for lunch at Mulate's. I had deep-fried soft-shell crabs with a shrimp salad and a small bowl of étouffée with French bread and iced tea. Mulate's was a family place now, with only the long mahogany bar and the polished dance floor to remind me of the nightclub and gambling spot it had been when I was in college. The last twenty-five years had changed southern Louisiana a great deal, much of it for the better. The laws of segregation were gone; kids didn't go nigger-knocking on Saturday nights; the Ku Klux Klan didn't burn crosses all over Plaquemines Parish; the demagogues like Judge Leader Perez had slipped into history. But something else was gone, too: the soft pagan ambience that existed right in the middle of a French Catholic culture. Oh, there was still plenty of sleaze around-and narcotics, where there had been none before-but the horse race and slot machines, with their winking lights and rows of cherries and plums and gold bells, had been taken out of the restaurants and replaced with video games; the poolrooms and working-class bars with open bourée games were fewer; the mulatto juke joints, where Negroes and dark-skinned Cajuns had lost their racial identity at the door, were now frequented by white tourists who brought cassette recorders to tape zydeco music. The old hot-pillow joints-Margaret's in Opelousas, the Column Hotel in Lafayette, the cribs on Railroad Avenue in New Iberia-were shut down.