"This guy Legion's not that smart. He hasn't figured out where it's coming from yet," he said.

Clete had put in a change of address for Legion at the post office, forwarding his mail to General Delivery, Bangor, Maine; called the utility companies and ordered the cutoff of his water, electricity, telephone, and gas service; hired neighborhood black kids to throw firecrackers on his roof, shoot out his windows with BB guns, and shove a burning sack of dog shit under his bedroom floor.

Then, in a finale that would have made even No Duh Dolowitz, the Mob's merry prankster, doff his hat, he got an exterminator to go to Legion's house, while Legion was at work, and tent the whole building and fumigate it with termicide, so that the building stank of noxious chemicals for days.

Clete casually sipped on a beer while he drove and told me these things, his face handsome with windburn and his aviator's sunglasses, his tropical shirt puffing, steering with two fingers at the bottom of the wheel, like an over-the-hill low rider cruising out of the 1950s.

"Have you lost your mind?" I said.

"You stoke 'em and smoke 'em, noble mon. I give this character about two weeks before he runs into a wrecking ball. Hey, I'm taking Barbara Shanahan to dinner tonight. You and Bootsie want to come along? Zerelda Calucci told me Perry LaSalle's schlong looks like a fifteen-inch nozzle on a firehose. She's exaggerating, right?"

I couldn't even begin to track his train of thought. We were on University Avenue in Lafayette now, passing the old oak-shaded brick buildings and colonnaded walkways where I once attended college.

"Drop me in front of the meeting," I said.

"I'm going in with you."

"With a beer can?"

He pulled to the curb and tossed the can in an arc over his head, depositing it dead center in a trash barrel.

CHAPTER 16

A love affair with Louisiana is in some ways like falling in love with the biblical whore of Babylon. We try to smile at its carnival-like politics, its sweaty, whiskey-soaked demagogues, the ignorance bred by its poverty and the insularity of its Cajun and Afro-Caribbean culture. But our self-deprecating manner is a poor disguise for the realities that hover on the edges of one's vision like ditty smudges on a family portrait.

The state roadsides and parking lots of discount stores are strewn, if not actually layered, with mind-numbing amounts of litter, thrown there by the poor and the uneducated and the revelers for whom a self-congratulatory hedonism is a way of life. With regularity, land developers who are accountable to no one bulldoze out stands of virgin cypress and two-hundred-year-old live oaks, often at night, so the irrevocable nature of their work cannot be seen until daylight, when it is too late to stop it. The petrochemical industry poisons waterways with impunity and even trucks in waste frdm out of state and dumps it in open sludge pits, usually in rural black communities.

Rather than fight monied interests, most of the state's politicians give their constituency casinos and Powerball lotteries and drive-by daiquiri windows, along with low income taxes for the wealthy and an eight and one quarter percent sales tax on food for the poor.

Why meditate upon a depressing subject?

Because on occasion an attempt at redress can come from an unexpected source.

On Monday afternoon Marvin Oates was pulling his suitcase on wheels down a rural road that traversed cattle acreage and pecan orchards, across a bridge that spanned a coulee lined with hardwoods and palmettos, past neat cottages with screened porches and shade trees. Up ahead was the Boom Boom Room, the dilapidated Iberia Parish bar owned by Jimmy Dean Styles. A red convertible, the top down, roared past him, the stereo blaring. A bag of fast-food trash and beer cans sailed out of the backseat and exploded against the trunk of a pecan tree, showering litter in a yard.

Marvin Oates labored down the road, the roller skate affixed to the bottom of his suitcase grating against the road surface with the unrelieved intensity of marbles rolling down a corrugated tin roof. When he reached the Boom Boom Room, three of Jimmy Styles's rappers and two tattooed, peroxided white women in shorts were drinking long-necked beer and passing a joint by the side of the convertible.

A line of sweat leaked from Marvin's hat down his cheek. He loosened his tie, craned his neck, blew out his breath, as though releasing the heat trapped inside his sports coat.

"Excuse me, but back yonder one of y'all threw a bag of trash out your car," he said.

"Say what?" said a tall man with orange and purple hair and rings through his eyebrows.

"There's some old colored folks living in that house where you flung your garbage. How'd you like it if you was them and you had to pick up lunch trash with mouth germs all over it?" Marvin said.

"Where you from, cracker?" the tall man with orange and purple hair said.

"Where folks ain't so ashamed of what they are they got to pay a couple of fat whores to take their dick out of their pants for them," Marvin said.

"Hey, Jimmy Sty, come out here! You got to check this out!" another black man called out. Then he turned back to Marvin. "Run all that by us again, man."

"Ain't my purpose to get nobody mad. I'm going back on my route now. Lessen one of y'all is interested in a magazine subscription or a discount Bible offer," Marvin said.

"You believe this motherfucker?" the man with orange and purple hair said, then balanced his beer bottle on the oyster shells.

"You ask me a question, I give you a straight answer. The Bible is my road map, sir. You don't like what you hear, that's your dadburn problem," Marvin said, and blotted his forehead on his coat sleeve. "It's flat burning up, ain't it?"

The group around the convertible was now joined by others from inside the bar, including Jimmy Dean Styles. They stared at Marvin in dismay.

"Somebody put you up to this? Or you just a dumb white motherfucker want to commit suicide?" said a man with a nylon stocking crimped down on his head.

Marvin looked innocuously at a cloud, his eyebrows raised. "Most of y'all got born 'cause your mama dint have money for an abortion. That's why you call other people 'motherfucker' all the time. It's 'cause y'all know everybody in town got in your mother's drawers. So anytime you insult other folks with a bad name like that, it's on your own self. I ain't trying to hurt your feelings. It's just a psychological fact."

The tall man with rings in his eyebrows picked up his beer bottle from the oyster shells, tossed Marvin Oates's hat into the crowd, and smashed the bottle across Marvin's head. The crowd roared.

Marvin fell across his suitcase and took a kick in the ribs and another between his buttocks. He pushed himself up on the convertible's bumper, his coat powdered with white dust, his eyes closing, then opening, as though a piece of sharp metal was buried deep in his bowels.

He felt the back of his head and swallowed, then walked unsteadily on the shells and found his hat and knocked it clean of dust on his leg.

"You still ain't got the right to throw trash in old folks' yard," he said.

The crowd surged forward, but Jimmy Dean Styles stepped between Marvin and his adversaries and leaned over and retrieved the tow strap of Marvin's suitcase from the dust and placed it in his hand.

"Don't come around here no more," he said.

Marvin stared into Styles's eyes, as though looking for an answer to an ancient question about the nature of evil.

"Who are you?" Marvin asked.

"The man who know a nigger when he see one. You better hoof it, bro," Styles replied.

Helen and I were on our way back from an inter-agency law enforcement meeting in Jeanerette when we passed the situation in progress in front of the Boom Boom Room. We pulled to the side of the road and told Marvin to get in the backseat of the cruiser, behind the steel-mesh screen.