My mother was not at work at the Tabasco bottling plant, where she should have been. Instead, I looked from the hallway through the bedroom door and saw a man's candy-striped shirt, suspenders, and sharkskin zoot slacks and panama hat hung on the bedpost, his socks sticking out of his two-tone shoes on the floor. My mother was naked, on all fours, on top of the bedspread, and the man, whose name was Mack, was about to mount her. A cypress plank creaked under my foot, and Mack twisted his head and looked at me, his pencil mustache like a bird's wings above his lip. Then he entered my mother.

For months I had dreams about a white wolf who lived in a skeletal black tree on an infinite white landscape. At the base of the tree was a nest of pups. In the dream the wolf would drop to the ground, her teats sagging with milk, and eat her young one by one.

I would deliberately miss the school bus in the afternoon and hang around the playground until the last kids took their footballs or kites and walked off through the dusk and dead leaves toward lighted houses and the sound of Jack Armstrong or Terry and the Pirates through a screen door. When my father returned home from trapping on Marsh Island, I never told him what I had seen take place in their bedroom. When they fought at night, I sat on the back steps and watched the sugarcane stubble burning in the fields. The fires looked like thousands of red handkerchiefs twisting in the smoke.

I knew the wolf waited for me in my dreams. Then one afternoon, when I started walking home late from school, I passed an open door in the back of the convent. It was the music room, and it had a piano in it, a record player, and a polished oak floor. But the two young nuns who were supposed to be waxing the floor had set aside their mops and rags, turned on a radio, and were jitterbugging with each other in their bare feet, their veils flying, their wooden rosary beads swirling on their waists.

They didn't see me, and I must have watched them for almost five minutes, fascinated with their flushed faces inside their wimples and the laughter that they tried to hide behind their hands when it got too loud.

I could not explain it to myself, but I knew each night thereafter that if I thought of the dancing nuns before I fell asleep, I would not dream about the white wolf in the tree.

I wondered what kind of dreams Murphy Doucet had. Maybe at one time they were the same as mine. Or maybe it was better not to know.

I had no doubt, though, that he was ready for us when we arrived at the security building at Spanish Lake. He stood with his legs slightly spread, as though at parade rest, in front of the door, his hands propped on his gunbelt, his stomach flat as a plank, his eyes glinting with a cynical light.

I unfolded the search warrant in front of him.

"You want to look it over?" I said.

"What for? I don't give a good fuck what y'all do here," he replied.

"I'd appreciate it if you'd watch your language," I said.

"She can't handle it?" he said.

"Stand over by my truck until we're finished," I said.

"What do you think y'all gonna find?" he said.

"You never know, Murph. You were a cop. People get careless sometimes, mess up in a serious way, maybe even forget they had their picture taken with one of their victims."

Tiny webs of brown lines spread from the corners of his eyes.

"What are you talking about?"

"If I'd been you, I wouldn't have let Cholo take my picture with Baby Feet and Cherry LeBlanc over in Biloxi."

His blue eyes shuttered back and forth; the pupils looked like black pinheads. The point of his tongue licked across his bottom lip.

"I don't want her in my stuff," he said.

"Would you like to prevent me from getting in your 'stuff,' Mr. Doucet?" Rosie said. "Would you like to be charged this morning with interfering with a federal officer in the performance of her duty?"

Without ever removing his eyes from her face, he lifted a Lucky Strike with two fingers from the pack in his shirt pocket and put it in the corner of his mouth. Then he leaned back against my truck, shook open his Zippo lighter, cupped the flame in his hands, sucked in on the smoke, and looked away at the pecan trees bending and straightening in the wind and an apple basket bouncing crazily across a field.

On his work table were a set of Exacto knives, tubes of glue, small bottles of paint, tiny brushes, pieces of used sandpaper, and the delicate balsa-wood wing struts of a model airplane pinned to a blueprint. Outside, Doucet smoked his cigarette and watched us through the door and showed no expression or interest when I dropped his Exacto knives into a Ziploc bag.

His desk drawers contained Playboy magazines, candy wrappers, a carton of Lucky Strikes, a thermos of split pea soup, two ham sandwiches, paper clips, eraser filings, a brochure advertising a Teamster convention in Atlantic City, a package of condoms.

I opened the drawer of his work table. In it were more sheets of sandpaper, an unopened model airplane kit, and the black-handled switchblade knife he had lent me to trim back the insulation on an electrical wire in my truck. I put it in another Ziploc bag.

Doucet yawned.

"Rosie, would you kick over that trash basket behind his desk, please?" I said.

"There's nothing in it," she said, leaning over the corner of the desk.

My back was turned to both her and Doucet when I closed the drawer to the work table and turned around with an aluminum-handled utility knife in my fingers. I dropped it into a third plastic bag.

"Well, I guess this covers it," I said.

Through the door I saw his hand with the cigarette stop in midair and his eyes lock on the utility knife.

He stepped toward us as we came out of the building.

"What do you think you're doing?" he said.

"You have a problem with something that happened here?" I said.

"You planted that," he said, pointing at the bag with the utility knife in it. "You sonofabitch, you planted it, you know you did."

"How could I plant something that belongs to you?" I said. "This is one of the tools you use on your airplane models, isn't it?"

Rosie was looking at me strangely.

"This woman's a witness," he said. "You're salting the shaft. That knife wasn't there."

"I say it was. I say your fingerprints are all over it, too. It's probably going to be hard to prove it's not yours, Murph."

"This pepper-belly bitch is in on it, isn't she?" he said.

I tapped him on the cheek with the flat of my hand. "You say anything else, your day is going to deteriorate in a serious way," I said.

Mistake.

He leaped into my face, his left hand like a claw in my eyes, his right fist flailing at my head, his knees jerking at my groin. I lost my balance, tried to turn away from him and raise my arm in front of my face; his fists rained down on the crown of my skull.

Rosie pulled her.357 from her purse, extended it straight out with both hands, and pointed the barrel into his ear.

"Down on the ground, you understand me?" she shouted. "Do it! Now! Don't look at me! Get your face on the ground! Did you hear me? Don't look at me! Put your hands behind your head!"

He went to his knees, then lay prone with the side of his face in the grass, his lined, deeply tanned neck oozing sweat, his eyes filled with the mindless light that an animal's might have if it were pinned under an automobile tire.

I slipped my handcuffs from the back of my belt and snipped them onto his wrists. I pulled his revolver and can of Mace from his gunbelt, then raised him to his feet. His arm felt like bone in my hand.

"You're under arrest for assaulting an officer of the law, Murph," I said.

He turned toward me. The top button of his shirt was torn and I could see white lumps of scar tissue on his chest like fingers on a broken hand.