"Do you remember what that fellow was charged with?"

"He wasn't charged with nothing. It never got to that."

"I wonder why he was still in a holding cell eleven hours after he was arrested."

"They busted him out of the tank."

"Not according to the newspaper."

"That's why a lot of people use newspaper to wipe their ass with."

"He went into a white woman's home with a butcher knife, did he?"

"Find the nigger and ax him."

"That's what puzzles me. Nobody seems to know what happened to this fellow, and nobody seems to care. Does that make sense to you?"

He puffed on his cigarette. It was wet and splayed when he took it out of his mouth. I waited for him to speak but he didn't.

"Did y'all just close the books on a jailbreak, Mr. Hebert?" I asked.

"I don't remember what they done."

"Was DeWitt Prejean a rapist?"

"He didn't know how to keep his prick in his pants, if that's what you mean."

"You think her husband broke him out?"

"He might have."

I looked into his face and waited.

"That is, if he could," he said. "He was a cripple-man. He got shot up in the war."

"Could I talk to him?"

He tipped his cigarette into an ashtray and looked out toward the bright glare of sunlight on the edge of his yard. Across the street black people were going in and out of the Popeye's restaurant.

"Talk to him all you want. He's in the cemetery, out by the tracks east of town," he said.

"What about the woman?"

"She moved away. Up North somewhere. What's your interest in nigger trouble that's thirty-five years old?"

"I think I saw him killed. Where's the man who was on duty the night of the jailbreak?"

"Got drunk, got hisself run over by a train. Wait a minute, what did you say? You saw what?"

"Sometimes rivers give up their dead, Mr. Hebert. In this instance it took quite a while. Y'all took his boot strings and his belt, didn't you?"

"You do that with every prisoner."

"You do it when they're booked and going into the tank. This guy was never booked. He was left in a holding cell for two armed men to find him. You didn't even leave him a way to take his own life."

He stared at me, his face like a lopsided white cake.

"I think one of the men who killed Prejean tried to kill me," I said. "But he murdered a young woman instead. A film actress. Maybe you read about it."

He stood up and dropped his cigarette over the gallery railing into a dead scrub. He smelled like Vick's VapoRub, nicotine, and an old man's stale sweat. His breath rasped as though his lungs were filled with tiny pinholes.

"You get the fuck off my gallery," he said, and walked heavily on a cane into the darkness of his house, and let the screen slam behind him.

I STOPPED AT POPEYE'S ON PlNHOOK ROAD IN LAFAYETTE AND ate an order of fried chicken and dirty rice, then I drove down Pinhook through the long corridor of oak trees, which had been planted by slaves, down toward the Vermilion River bridge and old highway 90, which led through the little sugar town of Broussard to New Iberia.

Just before the river I passed a Victorian home set back in a grove of pecan trees. Between the road and the wide, columned porch a group of workmen were trenching a water or sewer line of some kind. The freshly piled black dirt ran in an even line past a decorative nineteenth-century flatbed wagon that was hung with baskets of blooming impatiens. The bodies and work clothes of the men looked gray and indistinct in the leafy shade, then a hard gust of wind blew off the river through the trees, the dappled light shifted back and forth across the ground like a bright yellow net, and when I looked back at the workmen I saw them dropping their tools, straightening their backs, fitting on their military caps that were embroidered with gold acorns, picking up their stacked muskets, and forming into ranks for muster.

The general sat in the spring seat of the wagon, his artificial leg propped stiffly on the iron rim of a wheel, a cigar in his mouth, the brim of his campaign hat set at a rakish angle over one eye.

He screwed his body around in the wagon seat and raised his hat high over his head in salute to me.

Gravel exploded like a fusillade of lead shot under my right fender. I cut the wheel back off the shoulder onto the pavement, then looked back at the wide sweep of leafy lawn under the pecan trees. A group of workmen were lowering a long strip of flexible plastic pipe into the ground like a white worm.

Back in New Iberia I parked behind the sheriff's depart-ment and started inside the building. Two deputies were on their way out.

"Hey, Dave, you're supposed to be in sick bay," one of them said.

"I'm out."

"Right. You look good."

"Is the skipper in?"

"Yeah. Sure. Hey, you look great. I mean it."

He gave me the thumbs-up sign.

His words were obviously well intended, but I remembered how I was treated after I stepped on a bouncing Betty in Vietnam-with a deference and kindness that not only separated me from those who had a lock on life but constantly reminded me that the cone of flame that had illuminated my bones had also given me a permanent nocturnal membership in a club to which I did not want to belong.

The dispatcher stopped me on my way to the sheriff's office. He weighed over three hundred pounds and had a round red face and a heart condition. His left-hand shirt pocket was bursting with cellophane-wrapped cigars. He had just finished writing out a message on a pink memo slip. He folded it and handed it to me.

"Here's another one," he said. He had lowered his voice, and his eyes were hazy with meaning.

"Another what?"

"Call from this same party that keeps bugging me."

"Which party?"

His eyebrows went up in half-moons.

"The Spanish broad. Or Mexican. Or whatever she is."

I opened the memo and looked at it. It read, Dave, why don't you return my calls? I'm still waiting at the same place. Have I done wrong in some way? It was signed "Amber."

"Amber?" I said.

"You got eight or nine of them in your mailbox," he said. "Her last name sounded Spanish."

"Who is she?"

"How should I know? You're the guy she's calling."

"All right, thanks, Wally," I said.

I took all my mail out of my box, then shuffled through the pink memo slips one at a time.

The ones from "Amber" were truly an enigma. A few examples:

I've done what you asked. Please call.

Dave, leave a message on my answering machine.

It's me again. Am I supposed to drop dead?

You 're starting to piss me off. If you don't want me to bother you again, say so. I'm getting tired of this shit.

I'm sorry, Dave. I was hurt when I said those things. But don't close doors on me.

I walked back to the dispatcher's cage.

"There's no telephone number on any of these," I said.

"She didn't leave one."

"Did you ask her for one?"

"No, I got the impression y'all were buddies or something. Hey, don't look at me like that. What is she, a snitch or something?"

"I don't have any idea."

"She sounds like she's ready to bump uglies, though."

"Why don't you give some thought to your language, Wally?"

"Sorry."

"If she calls again, get her telephone number. If she doesn't want to give it to you, tell her to stop calling here."

"Whatever you say."

I wadded up the memo slips, dropped them into a tobacco-streaked brass cuspidor, and walked into the sheriff's office.

A manila folder was open on his desk. He was reading from it, with both his elbows propped on the desk blotter and his fingertips resting lightly on his temples. His mouth looked small and downturned at the corners. On his wall was a framed and autographed picture of President Bush.