He paid his bill in the silence of the cafe, put two half-dollars by his plate, and walked outside, into the darkness, into the flicker of heat lightning and the tink of raindrops on the tin roof of the cafe. He heard Tee Bobby come out the door behind him.

"You're him, ain't you?" Tee Bobby said.

"Depends on who you t'ink I am," Legion said.

"The overseer. From Poinciana Island. The one called Legion. The one who-"

"Who what, boy?"

"The overseer who slept wit' my grandmother. I'm Tee Bobby. Ladice Hulin is my gran'mama."

"You look like her. But you ain't as pretty."

"What you done inside the cafe, it's 'cause of what happened at the plantation, ain't it? It's 'cause maybe you're my-"

"Your what, boy?"

"My mama was half-white. Everybody on the plantation know that."

Legion laughed to himself and shook a cigarette out of his pack and fed it into the corner of his mouth.

"Your daddy didn't know how to use a rubber. That's how you got here, boy. That's how come other people try to wipe their shit on your face," he said.

Tee Bobby brushed a raindrop out of his eye and continued to stare at Legion, his sequined purple shirt puffing with air in the wind.

"I said you slept with my grandmother. That ain't true. You raped her. You pushed old man Julian around and you raped my gran'mama," he said.

"The white man gonna screw down whenever he got the chance. Nigger woman always gonna get what she can out of it. Which one gonna lie about it later?"

"My gran'mama don't never lie. You better not call her a nigger, either," Tee Bobby said.

Legion struck the flint on his lighter and cupped the flame in the wind, inhaling on his cigarette.

"I'm leaving now. Them shrimpers gonna be coming out of there. You better get your ass home, you," he said.

Legion got behind the wheel of Joe Zeroski's automobile and started the engine, his cigarette hanging from his mouth. But before he could back out and turn around, Tee Bobby picked up a piece of broken cement the size of a Softball and smashed the driver's-side window with it.

Legion braked the car and got out, a huge hole in the window, his forehead bleeding, his cigarette still in his mouth.

"You got sand," he said.

"Fuck you," Tee Bobby said.

"Ax yourself where you got it. The parents who didn't want you? Be proud of the blood you got, boy," Legion replied.

He got back in Joe Zeroski's automobile, tossed his cigarette through the hole in the window, and drove away.

Late that night Baby Huey Lagneaux stole Joe Zeroski's automobile out of Legion's yard and was driving it back to New Iberia when he was stopped for speeding. Baby Huey sat in jail for suspicion of car theft until Monday morning. Before he went back on the street, I had a deputy bring him by my office.

"You were taking the car back to Joe?" I asked.

"Yes, suh."

"I don't get it. His men used a stun gun on you."

"Mr. Joe t'rew down his.38 and got on his knees to save my life. He don't even know me."

The chair he sat in groaned with the strain, his skin so black it had a purple sheen to it. He gazed out the window at the freight train clicking by on the rail crossing.

"See you around, Huey," I said.

"I can go?"

"Why'd you ever become a pimp?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "I ain't one now. Can I go?"

"You bet," I said. I leaned back in my chair, my fingers laced behind my head, and wondered at the complexities and contradictions that must have existed in the earth's original clay when God first scooped it up in His palm.

Twenty minutes later my desk phone rang.

"This kid Marvin Grits or whatever was handing out Bible pamphlets at the motor court this morning. But that ain't why he's here. He's got the hots for Zerelda. I want him picked up. Besides, he's drunk," the voice said.

"Joe?"

"You thought it was the pope?"

"Marvin Oates is drunk?"

"He looks like he got hit by a train. He smells like puke. Maybe he just come from First Baptist," Joe said.

"I'll see what I can do. Baby Huey Lagneaux just left my office. He told me about your run-in with Legion Guidry."

"Don't know what you're talking about."

"I always said you were a stand-up guy."

"Go soak your head," he said, and hung up.

I told Wally, our dispatcher, to have Marvin Oates picked up at the motor court.

Later, I walked downtown to eat lunch. When I came back to the department, Wally stopped me in the corridor. He was holding three pink message slips that he was about to put in my mailbox.

"This woman keeps calling and axing for you. How about getting her off my neck?" he said.

He put the message slips in my hand. The telephone number was in St. Mary Parish, the caller's name one I didn't immediately recognize.

"Who is she?" I asked.

"Hillary Clinton, in coonass disguise. How do I know, Dave? By the way, Marvin Oates wasn't at the motor court when the cruiser got there," he answered.

The woman's name was Marie Guilbeau. I returned her call from my office phone. When she picked up, I suddenly remembered the face of the cleaning woman who had claimed a man in a rubber mask, wearing leather gloves, had invaded her house and molested her. "The priest tole me I got to tell you somet'ing," she said.

"What's that, Ms. Guilbeau?" I asked.

There was no response.

"I'm a little busy right now, but if you like, I can drive out to your house again," I said.

"I clean at the motel out on the fo'-lane," she said. "They was a nice-looking fellow staying there. I kind of flirted wit' him. Maybe I give him the wrong idea," she said.

"Was he a white or black man?" I asked.

"He was white. I t'ink he t'ought I was a prostitute from the truck stop. I tole him to get away from me. I was ashamed to tell you about that when you come out to my house."

"You think the man in the rubber mask was the guy from the motel?"

"I don't know, suh. I don't want to talk about this no more," she replied. The line went dead.

What do you say to sexual assault victims?

Answer: You're going to catch the guys who hurt them and bury them in a maximum-security prison from which they will never be paroled, and with good luck they'll cell with predators who are twice their size and ten times more vicious.

Except it's usually a lie on every level. More often than not the victims get torn apart on the stand by defense attorneys and ultimately exit the process disbelieved, discredited, and accused of being either delusional or opportunistic.

I once heard an elderly recidivist say, "Jailing ain't the same no more. Folks just ain't rearing criminals like they used to." Any old-time lawman, if he's honest, will probably tell you he's sickened by the class of contemporary criminals he's forced to deal with. As bad as the criminals of the Great Depression were, many of them possessed the virtues Americans admire. Most of them came from midwestern farm families and were not sexual predators or serial killers. Usually their crimes were against banks and the government, and at least in their own minds they were not out to harm individuals. Even their most vehement antagonists, usually Texas Rangers and FBI agents, granted that they were brave and died game and asked for no quarter and pleaded no excuse for their misdeeds.

Clyde Barrow was beaten unmercifully with the black Betty in Eastham State Prison and made to run two miles to work in the cotton fields and two miles back to the lockup every workday of his sentence. He swore that one day he would not only get even for the brutality he suffered and witnessed there, but he would return to Eastham a free man and break out every inmate he could. Sure enough, after he was paroled, he and Bonnie Parker shot their way into the prison, then shot their way back out with five convicts in tow, whom they packed into a stolen car and successfully escaped with.