Bootsie came through the door with a vase of flowers and a box of doughnuts. She had slept all night in a chair under a rough woolen blanket, but her face, even without makeup, was as pink and lovely as the morning.

"What's going on?" she said, looking from me to Clete.

Two days later I left the hospital, limping on a cane, my head spinning with painkillers, one eye swollen almost shut, the side of my face inflated with a large yellow and purple bruise. It was Friday, a workday, but I did not go back to the office. Instead, I sat for a long time in the living room by myself, the blinds drawn, and listened to a strange whirring sound in my head. I found myself at the kitchen sink, first pouring a glass of iced tea and a second later opening the bottle of painkillers the doctor had given me.

One or two to get back to normal can't hurt, I thought.

Right.

I poured the pills down the drain, then ran water on top of them and dropped the bottle in the garbage sack under the counter.

Bootsie and I ate lunch on the redwood table under the mimosa tree in the backyard. It was shady and cool in the yard, and a gust of wind ruffled the periwinkles and bamboo that grew along the coulee, but there was no hint of rain in the air and dust blew in brown clouds out of my neighbor's cane field.

Bootsie was talking about a college baseball game scheduled for that night in Lafayette. I tried to follow what she was saying, but the whirring sound began again in my head.

"Do you?" she said.

"Excuse me?" I said.

"Do you want to go to the game tonight?"

"Tonight? Who did you say was playing?"

She set her fork down on her plate. "You have to get your mind off it. The sheriff will find this guy," she said.

My eyes avoided hers. I felt her gaze sharpen and fix on the side of my face.

"Right?" she said.

"Not necessarily."

"Take the marbles out of your mouth, Streak."

"The sheriff doesn't know what to look for. I didn't tell him everything."

"Oh?"

"It was the man called Legion, the overseer from Poinciana Island. He put his tongue in my mouth. He called me his bitch."

She was quiet a long time.

"That's why you kept the sheriff in the dark?"

"This guy Legion is seventy-four years old. Nobody would believe my story. Legion knew that. He really pushed the hook in deep."

Bootsie got up from her bench and walked around the table and put her fingers in my hair and brushed her nails back and forth on my scalp. Then she kissed the top of my head.

"Why didn't you tell me?" she said.

"It wouldn't change anything."

"Come inside, soldier," she said.

We went into the bedroom. She closed the curtains on the window that looked out on the front yard, then disconnected the telephone cord from the jack in the wall and removed her blouse.

"Unhook me, big guy," she said, turning her back to me while she unbuttoned her blue jeans and let them drop to her ankles.

She put her arms around my neck and kissed me on the mouth.

"You all right?" she said.

"Fine."

"Then how about getting undressed?"

I took off my clothes and lay down gingerly on the bed. Bootsie slipped her fingers down inside the elastic of her panties and pushed them over her thighs and lay beside me, her head propped up on her elbow.

"You told Clete about all this?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Before you told me?"

"Yes."

"You don't trust me? You believed I'd think less of you?"

"It wasn't my proudest moment out there."

"Oh, Dave, you're so crazy," she said, and put her face close to mine and touched my sex with her fingers.

"The doc loaded me up on downers. I don't know if I'm up to it, Boots," I said.

"That's what you think, bubba," she replied.

She raised herself up and stroked my sex, then kissed it and placed it in her mouth.

"Boots, you don't need to-" I began.

A moment later she spread her knees and sat on top of me and held me between her hands. As I looked up at her, the light from the side window woven in her hair, all the goodness and beauty in the world seemed to gather in her face. She placed me inside her, then leaned down and kissed me on the mouth again and brushed a strand of hair out of my eyes.

I ran my hands over her back and pressed her down on top of me and kissed her hair and bit her neck. Then, for just a moment, all the pain and solitary rage, all the ugly images that the man called Legion had tried to leave forever in my memory, seemed to become as dross. The only sound in the room was the rise and fall of Bootsie's breath against my chest and the squeak of the bedsprings under our weight and occasionally a small moist, popping noise when her stomach formed a suction against mine. Then her body began to stiffen, the muscles in her back hardening, her thighs tightening on mine. Her eyes were closed now, her face growing small and soft and tense at the same time. I held her as close as I could, as though we were both balanced on the tip of a precipice, then I felt my sex harden and swell and burn in a way it never had, to a degree that made me cry out involuntarily, more like a woman than a man, and the entirety of my life, my identity itself, seemed to dissolve and break and then burst from my loins in a white glow, and in that moment I was joined with her, the two of us locked inseparably together inside the heat of her thighs, the mystery of her womb, the beating of her heart, the sweat on her skin, the flush of blood in her cheeks, the odor of crushed gardenias that rose from her hair when I buried my face in it.

After I showered and put on a fresh pair of khakis and a Hawaiian shirt, I took my holstered 1911-model.45 automatic from the dresser and placed it on the rail of the gallery, then went into the kitchen and rubbed Bootsie on the back and kissed her neck.

"You're special, kid," I said.

"I know," she replied.

"I'll be gone for a little while. But I'll be back in time to go to the game."

"What are you about to do, Dave?"

"There's not a perp or lowlife or shitbag in Louisiana who would come after a cop with a blackjack unless he diought he was protected."

"You and Clete are going to settle things on your own?"

"I wouldn't say that."

"Why not?"

"Because Clete's out of it," I replied, and went out the front door and backed the truck down the drive. Through the windshield I saw Bootsie come out on the porch. I waved, but she didn't respond.

I crossed the freshwater bay onto Poinciana Island and followed the winding paved road through red-dirt acreage and hummocks and oaks green with lichen to Ladice Hulin's house, where she sat on the gallery, absorbed in a magazine, directly across from the scorched stucco shell of the place in which Julian LaSalle's wife had burned to death like a bird caught inside a cage.

I got out of my truck and limped toward her with my cane. "May I sit down?" I asked.

"Looks like you better. A train hit you?" she said.

I eased myself down on the top step and propped my cane across the inside of my leg and looked at the peacocks picking in the grass across the road. In the distance I could see the sunlight on the bay, like thousands of coppery lights, and a boat with a sky-blue sail turning about in the wind. Neither of us spoke for a long time.

"I want to take Legion down. Maybe blow up his shit," I said.

"You use that kind of language in front of white ladies?" she asked.

"Sometimes. With the ones I respect."

Her eyes roved over my face. "Legion done this to you?" she asked.

I nodded, my gaze fixed across the road. I heard her close her magazine and set it down on the gallery.

"It ain't just the beating that bother you, though, is it?" she said.