"What you mean is she didn't hang around black musicians."

"Read it any way you want. I get the sense you're using this Calucci woman for your own ends."

"You come out to my house without calling, then you insult me. You're too much, Dave."

"A friend of mine thinks you and Barbara Shanahan were an item at one time."

"I suspect you're talking about that trained rhino who follows you around, what's his name, Purcel? He's an interesting guy. Tell him to keep his mouth off me and Barbara Shanahan."

Through the trees I could see the sun glimmering on the bay like points of fire.

"When I walked down to the pond and saw you on the bench here, I was put in mind of Captain Dreyfus. It's a foolish comparison, I guess," I said.

He reeled in his lure until it was snug against the tip of his rod, then idly flicked drops of water off it onto the pond's surface.

"I like you, Dave. I really do. Just cut me a little slack, will you?" he said.

"By the way, I ran down a guy named Legion, one of your old overseers. He raped Ladice Hulin. Can you figure out how a guy like that became head of security at the casino? Something else, too. Zerelda Calucci comes from a Mafia family. Is that how you know her, through your grandfather's old connections?" I said.

Perry's lips parted and the blood drained out of his cheeks. He clenched his fishing rod in his hand and walked up the embankment toward his house, the azaleas and four-o'clocks in his yard rippling with color in the shade.

Then he flung the fishing rod against a porch column and walked back down the slope and faced me, his hands balled into fists.

"Get this straight. Barbara might hate my guts, but I respect her. Number two, I'm not my grandfather, you self-righteous son of a bitch. But that doesn't mean he was a bad man. Now get off my property," he said.

CHAPTER 9

The next Saturday was a festive day for New Iberia, featuring a citywide cleaning of the streets by volunteers, a free crawfish boil in City Park, and a sixteen-mile foot race that began with a grand assemblage of the runners under the trees by the recreation center. At 8 a.m. they took off, jogging down an asphalt road that meandered through the live oaks and out onto the street, their bodies hard and sinewy inside a golden tunnel of mist and sunlight that seemed to have been created especially for the young at heart.

They thundered past an art class that was sketching on the tables under the picnic shelters. Among the runners was every kind of person, the narcissistic and passionately athletic, the lonely and inept who loved any community ritual, and those who humbly ignored their limitations and were content simply to finish the race, even if last.

There was another group, too, whose psychology was less easily defined, whose normal pursuits separated them from their fellowmen but who sought membership in the crowd, perhaps to convince both others and themselves that they were made of the same stuff as the rest of us. On a gold-green morning, under oaks hung with Spanish moss, who would begrudge them their participation in a fine event that ultimately celebrated what was best in ourselves?

Jimmy Dean Styles wore a black spandex gym suit that looked like a shiny plastic graft on his skin. Three of his rappers ran at his side, their hair dyed orange or blue and purple, their eyebrows and noses pierced with jeweled rings. Behind them I saw the door-to-door magazine-and-encyclopedia-and-Bible salesman, Marvin Oates, a soggy sweatband crimped around his hair, his olive skin stretched as tightly as a lampshade on his ribs and vertebrae, his scarlet running shorts wrapped wetly on his loins, emphasizing the crack in his buttocks.

After the runners had streamed by the old brick fire-house onto a neighborhood side street, one member of the art class began to draw furiously on her sketch pad, her face bent almost to the paper, a grinding sound emanating from her throat.

"What's wrong, Rosebud?" the art teacher asked.

But the young black woman, whose name was Rosebud Hulin, didn't reply. Her charcoal pencil filled the page, then she dropped the pencil to the ground and began to hit the table with her fists, trembling all over.

After the race I drove home and showered, then returned to City Park with Alafair and Bootsie for the crawfish boil. The art teacher, who was a nun and a volunteer at the city library, found me at the picnic pavilion by the National Guard Armory, not far from the spot where years ago the man named Legion had opened a knife on a twelve-year-old boy.

"Would you take a walk with me?" she asked, motioning toward a stand of trees by the armory.

She was an attractive, self-contained woman in her sixties and not one to burden others with her concerns or to look for complexities that in the final analysis she believed human beings held no sway over. A large piece of art paper was rolled up in her hands. She smiled awkwardly. "What is it, Sister?" I said when we were alone.

"You know Rosebud Hulin?" she asked.

"Tee Bobby's twin sister?" I replied.

"She's an autistic savant. She can reproduce in exact detail a photograph or painting she's seen only once, maybe one she saw years ago. But she's never been able to create images out of her imagination. It's as though light goes from her eye through her arm onto the page."

"I'm not following you."

"This morning she drew this figure," the art teacher said, unrolling the charcoal drawing for me to see.

I stared down at a reclining female nude, the wrists crossed above the head, a crown of thorns fastened on the brow. The woman's mouth was open in a silent scream, like the figure in the famous painting by Munch. The eyes were oversize, elongated, wrapped around the head, filled with despair.

Two skeletal trees stood in the foreground, with branches that looked like sharpened pikes.

"The eyes are a little like a Modigliani, but Rosebud didn't re-create this from any painting or picture I ever saw," the art teacher said.

"Why are you bringing me this, Sister?"

She gazed at the smoke from cook fires drifting into the trees.

"I'm not sure. Or maybe I'm not sure I want to say. I had to take Rosebud into the rest room and wash her face. That gentle girl tried to hit me."

"Did she tell you why she drew the picture?"

"She always says the pictures she draws are put in her head by God. I think maybe this one came from somewhere else," the art teacher said. "Can I keep this?" I asked.

On Monday I called Ladice Hulin's house on Poinciana Island and asked to speak to Tee Bobby.

"He's at work," she said.

"Where?" I asked.

"The Carousel Club in St. Martinville."

"That's Jimmy Dean Styles's place. Styles told me he wasn't going to let Tee Bobby play there again."

"You ax where he work. I tole you. I said anyt'ing about music?"

I drove up the bayou to St. Martinville and parked in the lot behind the Carousel Club. The garbage piled against the back wall hummed with flies and reeked of dead shrimp. Tee Bobby was using a wide-bladed shovel to scoop up the rotted matter and slugs that oozed from a mound of split vinyl bags.

He was sweating profusely, his eyes like BBs when he looked at me.

"You're doing scut work for Jimmy Sty?" I said.

"Ain't no clubs want to hire me. Jimmy give me a job."

He slung a shovel-load of garbage into the back of a pickup truck His eyes were filled with a peculiar light, the irises jittering.

"You looked like you cooked your head, podna," I said.

"Cain't you leave me be, man?"

"I want to show you something."

I started to unroll his sister's drawing, but he speared his shovel into a swollen bag of garbage and went through the side door of the club. I used a pay phone at the grocery down the street and called the St. Martin Parish Sheriffs Department to let them know I was on their turf, then went inside the club. The chairs were stacked on the tables and a fat black woman was mopping the floor. Tee Bobby sat at the bar, his face in his hands, the streamers from an air-conditioning unit blowing above his head.