That evening I sat by myself for a long time in the backyard. The sky was purple, full of birds, the sun a molten red inside a bank of rain clouds. I felt Bootsie's hands on my shoulders.

"Perry LaSalle called. He says the assault charge probably won't hold up. Something about Clete seeing a knife," she said.

"Clete's testimony is a little bit of an ethical problem," I said.

"Why?"

"He wasn't there. He went in later and threw a switchblade under a table."

I felt her hands leave my shoulders.

"Dave, this seems to go from bad to worse," she said.

"Clete's a loyal friend. The sheriff isn't."

"He's an elected official. What's he supposed to do? Let you kick the shit out of anyone you don't like?" she said.

I got up from the picnic table and walked down the driveway to my truck. I heard her on the grass behind me, but I started the engine and backed onto the road, then shifted into first gear and drove away, her face slipping past the window like a pale balloon, her words lost in the wind.

The 7 p.m. Wednesday night AA meeting was held in the living room of a small gray house owned by the Episcopalian church, arbored by live oaks, across from the massive stone outline of old Iberia High. The neighborhood, with its firehouse, its ubiquitous trees, its streets glistening from a sun shower, its lawns and small porches on which a boy on a bicycle sailed the afternoon newspaper, the flashing signals dinging at an empty rail crossing, was an excursion into the America that perhaps all of us are nostalgic for, a country secure between its oceans and content with its working-class ambitions, somehow in my mind forever identified with an era when a minor league baseball game or an evening radio show was considered a special pleasure.

It was a Big Book meeting, one in which the participants read from the book that is the centerpiece of the fellowship known as Alcoholics Anonymous. But my purpose in being there was to do what AA members call a Fifth Step, or, more specifically, to admit the exact nature of my wrongs.

Most of the people there were from middle-class backgrounds and did not use profanity at meetings or discuss their sexual lives. By and large, they were the same people you would see at a PTA gathering. When it was my turn to speak, I realized that the world in which I lived and worked and looked upon as fairly normal was not one you shared with people whose worst legal sins might reach the level of a traffic ticket.

I told them all of it. How I had stolen and eaten my wife's diet pills for the amphetamine in them, then had kicked it up into high gear with white speed I had taken from an evidence locker. How I had bludgeoned Jimmy Dean Styles's face with my fists, breaking his nose and lips, knocking his bridge down his throat, grabbing his head and smashing it repeatedly on the bar, my hands slick with his blood and the sweat out of his hair, while an insatiable white worm ate a hole in the soft tissue of my brain and I ground my teeth together with a need that no amount of sex or violence or dope would relieve me of, that nothing other than whiskey and whiskey and whiskey would ever satisfy.

The room was silent when I finished. A well-dressed woman got up from her chair and went into the bathroom, and we could hear the water running in the lavatory while she kept clearing her throat behind the door.

The discussion leader that evening was a genial, silver-haired, retired train conductor from Mississippi.

"Well, you got it off your chest, Dave. At least you're not aiming to kill anybody now," he said, starting to smile. Then he looked at my face and dropped his eyes.

After the meeting adjourned, I sat by myself in the living room, the light failing in the trees. When I left, the parking area was deserted, the streets empty. I drove to a pool hall in St. Martinville and drank coffee at the bar and watched some old men playing bouree, the shadows from the blades of a ceiling fan breaking on their faces and hands with the rhythmic certainty of a clock that no one watched.

CHAPTER 18

During the night a 911 caller reported an assault with a deadly weapon in a black slum area off the Loreauville Road. A New Orleans man with orange and purple hair by the name of Antoine Patout had been asleep with his girlfriend in his aunt's house when an intruder climbed through a window, drew back the sheet from Patout's rump, and sliced him a half-inch deep across both buttocks.

While Patout screamed and his girlfriend wadded the sheet and tried to close his wound, the intruder calmly climbed back out the window into the darkness, at the same time folding his knife and slipping it into his back pocket. No one heard an automobile. The girlfriend told the first officer on the scene that she did not see the assailant's face, nor could she determine his race, but she thought he was one of the neighbors with whom Patout had quarreled over the rap music he played full-blast almost every night until 1 a.m.

Helen Soileau came into my office early Thursday morning.

"You know the name of the guy with the tie-dye hair, follows Jimmy Dean Styles around?" she asked.

"No."

"You don't know the name of the guy you hit across the face with a.45?"

"No, I didn't check it out."

"Isn't he the same guy who smashed a beer bottle on Marvin Oates's head?"

"Could be, Helen. I'm on the desk."

"Then get off it. While you're at it, pull the telephone pole out of your ass," she replied.

Just before noon I walked down to the sheriffs office. He was reading a fishing magazine and eating a ham-and-egg sandwich.

"Sorry to interrupt," I said.

He closed the magazine and brushed the crumbs off his mouth with the back of his wrist. "What is it?" he said.

"I'm sorry about my conduct. It's not going to happen again."

"I'm glad to hear you take that position. But you're on the desk."

"We've got two open homicides. What's the harm if I help Helen?"

"You tell me. You've gone into St. Martin Parish twice now and thrown one black person in the bayou and stomped another one into jelly. We're lucky we don't have black people burning down the town. You leave me at a loss for words."

I could see the genuine bewilderment in his face, as though the simple fact that I worked under his supervision made him doubt his own sanity.

"I guess I dropped in at a bad time," I said.

"No, it's just you, Dave. What you've never understood is that you resent authority just like the people we lock up. That's your problem, podna, not all this bullshit you keep dragging into my office," he said.

"That doesn't leave a lot unsaid, does it?" I said.

"No, I don't guess it does," he replied. He picked up his magazine again, his cheeks blotched with color.

I signed out of the office and wrote the word "dentist" in the destination box. Then I drove my truck across the railway tracks to the shotgun cottage of Marvin Oates.

The yard was covered with trash-shrimp husks, spoiled food, used Q-Tips, disposable female items-that seemed to have been methodically sprinkled from the gallery out to the street. I knocked on the door, but no one answered. The air was hot and close and smelled like brass and distant rain. I walked around back and saw Marvin in a sweaty T-shirt, scuffed boots, and a beat-up cowboy hat, hacking dead banana trees out of the ground with a machete. A bolt of lightning popped across the bayou in City Park. He looked in the direction of the lightning bolt, as though it contained meaning directed specifically at him. He had not heard me walk up behind him, and he remained motionless, the machete dripping from his hand, listening, watching the stormclouds that creaked with thunder, the wind blowing leaves out of the trees.