"You've eaten salt and fried food every day of your life and your systolic is ten points above a cadaver's. What's your secret, Streak?" she said.

"Picture of Dorian Gray syndrome."

"Let me take your blood pressure," she said.

"I'd better get on the road."

"No, I want to see if my monitor's accurate," she said.

She wrapped my arm and pumped the rubber ball in her hand. She looked at the numbers on the monitor and punched the air release, her expression neutral.

"Your systolic is 165 over 90," she said. I turned the page on the newspaper and tried to shine her on.

"That's almost forty points above your normal," she said.

"Maybe I'm off my feed this morning."

She put the monitor back in its box and began fixing cereal for herself at the drainboard. When she spoke again, her back was still turned to me.

"All my diet pills are gone. So is the aspirin. So are all the megavitamins I bought in Lafayette. What the hell are you doing, Dave?" she said.

I went to the office and tried to concentrate on a back-load of paperwork in my intake basket, A dozen messages were on my voice mail, a dozen more in my mailbox. A homeless man, who daily walked the length of the city with all his belongings rolled inside a yellow tent that he carried draped over his neck and shoulders like a gigantic cross, wandered in off the street and demanded to see me.

His eyes were filled with madness, his skin grimed almost black, his yellow hair glued together with his own body grease, his odor so offensive that people left the room with handkerchiefs over their mouths.

He said he had known me in Vietnam, that he'd been a medic who had loaded me with blood-expander and shot me up with morphine and pulled me onboard a slick and held me in his arms while the air frame rang with AK-47 rounds from the canopy sweeping by below us.

I looked into his seamed, wretched face and saw no one there I recognized.

"What was your outfit, Doc?" I asked.

"Who gives a shit?" he replied.

"I've got twenty bucks here. Sorry it's not more."

He balled his hand on the bill I gave him. His nails were as thick as tortoiseshell, gray through the tops with the amounts of dirt impacted under them.

"I had a rosary wrapped around my steel pot. I gave it to you. Don't let them get behind you, motherfucker," he said.

After he was gone we opened the windows and Wally the dispatcher had the janitor wipe down the chair the deranged man had sat in.

"You knew that guy?" Wally said.

"Maybe."

"You want me to have him picked up, take him to a shelter?"

"The war's over," I said, and went back to my office.

At ten o'clock my skin was coming off. I drank water at the cooler, chewed two packs of gum, went to Baron's Health Club and pounded the heavy bag, then returned to the office, sweating inside my clothes, burning with irritability.

I checked but a cruiser and drove out to the home of Amanda Boudreau's parents. I found Mr. Boudreau at the back of his property, under shade trees by the coulee, uncrating and assembling an irrigation pump. It was a large, expensive machine, the most sophisticated one on the market. But he had no well or water lines to attach it to, no network of ditches to carry the water it would draw from the aquifer.

He wore a white, short-sleeved shirt and new strap overalls, dark blue and still stiff from the box. His face was flushed, his knuckles skinned where his hand had slipped on a wrench.

"I ain't gonna get caught by drought again," he said. "Last year almost all my cane dried up. Ain't gonna allow it to happen again. No, sir."

"I think the drought is pretty well busted," I said, looking at a bank of black clouds in the south.

"I'm gonna be ready, me. That's the way my father always talked. I’m gonna be ready, me,'" he said. I squatted down next to him.

"I know you and Mrs. Boudreau don't think well of me, but I lost both my mother and my wife, Annie, to violent people. I wanted to find those people and kill them. There's nothing wrong in feeling that way. But I don't want to see a good man like yourself take matters into his own hands. You're not going to do that, are you, sir?"

He clapped his broad hand on a mosquito that had landed on the back of his neck and looked at the bloody smear on his palm.

"Lou'sana's been drying up. Gonna dig me a well. Gonna have ditches and lines all through those fields. It can get dry as a brick in a stove, but I'm gonna have all the water I want," he said. He went back to his work, twisting a wrench on a nut, his meaty, skinned hand shining with sweat.

I stopped at a phone booth and called Clete's apartment.

"You still have flashbacks?" I asked.

"About 'Nam? Not much. Sometimes I dream about it. But not much."

"A guy came off the street today. He said he was the medic who took care of me when I was hit."

"Was he?"

"He was deranged. His hair was blond. The kid who got me to battalion aid was Italian, from Staten Island."

"So shit-can it."

"The homeless man had a New York accent. What's a New York street person doing around here?" I said.

"Where are you, big mon?"

I drove to Jimmy Dean Styles's New Iberia bar and was told by his bartender that Jimmy Dean was at his other club, the one he owned jointly with a bondsman in St. Martinville. I was there in twenty minutes. Styles was at the bar, reading a newspaper while he dipped cracklings into a bowl of red sauce and ate them, wiping his fingers on a moist towel, his eyes never leaving the page he was reading.

"You follow the market?" I asked.

"High-yield municipals, Lou'sana Chuck. Pay twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Like a girl got her groove with the right people, it always working, know what I'm sayin'? I can help you with something?" Styles replied.

"I don't know if you can or not, but hold that thought. Where's your rest room?" I said.

He nodded his head toward the rear of the building and dipped a crackling into his bowl and inserted it in his mouth, an amused light in his eyes.

His entourage of rappers and whores were at tables by the dance floor. They paid no attention to me as I passed. Inside the rest room I washed my face with cold water and looked in the mirror. I could hear a sound in my ears, like wind whistling inside a tin can, feel a pressure band along the side of my head, as though I were wearing a tight hat. A jukebox began playing by the dance floor, and I would have sworn the voice on the recording was Guitar Slim's. I washed my face again. When I closed my eyes against the coldness of the water, I saw faces from my platoon, kids who had been out too long, their legs pocked with jungle ulcers, the smell of trench foot rising from their socks, scared shitless of night-trail toe-poppers and booby-trapped 105's, nobody in touch with who they used to be. A San Bernardino hot-rodder with a juju bag tied under his throat and a scalp lock to his rifle. A black kid from West Memphis, Arkansas, zoned on uppers and too many firefights, a green sweat towel draped over his head like a monk's cowl, the barrel of his blooker painted with tiger stripes. I could hear them marching, blade-faced, their uniforms stiff with salt, feeding off one another's anger, their boots thudding across a wooden bridge.

I spit in the lavatory and dried my face on my shirt rather than touch the cloth towel on the roller, then went out the door, the breeze from a fan suddenly cool on my skin, my heart racing.

Jimmy Dean Styles closed his newspaper and lifted a demitasse of coffee to his lips.

"Marse Charlie not wit' you today?" he said.

"You were at Rosebud Hulin's art class. That area is now off-limits for you. If she needs a ride, I'll provide one," I said.