"The line's down. I don't know what's wrong. I have to use a separate line," he replied.

"I can pay cash," she said.

"That's all right, ma'am. I'll be right back," he said, and walked away.

She looked straight ahead, examining a row of antique firearms on the wall. Then she smelled an odor behind her, like sweat and unrinsed soap detergent ironed into someone's clothes. No, that wasn't it. It was far worse, raw and dead smelling, like a rat buried inside a wall.

She turned and stared into Legion Guidry's face, only inches from her own. He took a puff off his cigarette and averted his face and blew his smoke at an upward angle.

"Is there something I can help you with?" she said.

"I seen you. Both you and him," he said. He nodded toward the parking lot, where Clete sat in his car, reading a magazine.

"You saw me? What are you talking about?" she said.

"What you t'ink? T'rew your window. You must be hard up, you. To let some shithog like that one out yonder put his dick in you."

She tried to step back from his words, from the smell that seemed auraed on his body. She felt the edge of the glass counter knock into her back.

He laughed under his breath and spit a grain of tobacco off his tongue and started to walk away. Her hand went into her purse.

"Wait," she said.

He dropped his cigarette to the wood floor and twisted his shoe on it, then turned.

"What you want, bitch?" he said.

Her hand closed around her car and house and office keys. They were mounted on a ring, and the ring was mounted on a stainless-steel handle. She pulled the keys out of her purse and swung them, like a sock filled with scrap iron, across his face.

"You ever look through my window again, you pathetic fuck, I'll blow your goddamn liver out," she said.

A narrow welt, needle-pointed with blood, appeared just below his eye. He touched it with the balls of his fingers, then rubbed them against his thumb. He reached out and clenched her hand in his, squeezing, cupping the bones behind the knuckles into a circle of pain, blowing his breath into her face, touching her hair with it, tracing her eyes and mouth with it, causing her to push her free hand against his chest like a child.

"I know where that shithog live. Y'all gonna be seeing a lot more of me. You gonna like it, you," he said.

Then he walked toward the rear of the store, past customers who stepped back from him, stunned and open-mouthed. He pushed through the back door, and the interior of the store was filled with a hot light like the sun leaping off a heliograph. Then Legion Guidry was gone.

Clete opened the front door and walked into the air-conditioning, his face puzzled.

"Anything wrong? What's that smell?" he said.

That evening, just at sunset, I ran four miles on the dirt road that wound past my house. The moss was blowing in the trees along the road, and I could smell water sprinklers twirling on my neighbors' lawns and the heavy, fecund odor of the bayou. The sugarcane and cattle acreage and distant clumps of pecan trees behind the houses had already fallen into shadow, but the summer light still filled the sky, as though somehow it had a life of its own and was not affected by the setting of the sun. Then a huge flock of birds rose out of the swamp and freckled the perfection of the sky directly overhead, and for some reason I thought of a painting by Van Gogh, a cornfield suddenly invaded by black crows.

A gas-guzzler passed me, with two figures in the front seat, then stopped at a bend in the road, the muffler rattling against the frame. The driver cut the engine and got out and stood with one arm propped across the top of the door, waiting. He wore a pink shirt unbuttoned on his chest and black trousers, stitched with silver thread, that hung down below his navel. His throat and chest ran with sweat.

I slowed and wiped my face with a bandanna, then tied it around my forehead. "Just taking a drive?" I said.

"I'll go into that treatment program you was talking about," Tee Bobby said.

"What changed your mind?"

"I cain't take it no more."

I leaned down slightly, below the top of the car door. "How you doin', Rosebud?" I asked.

His sister smiled lazily, in a private and self-indulgent way, then her eyes closed and opened vacantly and looked at nothing.

"Your trial is in a couple of weeks," I said to Tee Bobby.

"If I'm in a treatment program, I can get it postponed.

See, a guy got to be able to hep with his own defense." "Talk to Mr. Perry. You can't scam the court." "Ain't no scam. I'm sick. Perry LaSalle ain't worried about me. He worried about his family, his pink ass, his Confederate flags and portraits he got all over the walls."

"Know what's bothered me from the jump on this deal, Tee Bobby? It's the fact you've got everything else in the world on your mind except the death of that girl. Yourself, your habit, your music, your troubles with Jimmy Sty and Perry LaSalle, a kind of general discontent with the entire universe. But that poor girl's murder never seems to enter your thought processes." "Don't say that," he said,

"Amanda Boudreau. That was her name. Amanda Boudreau. It's never going to go away. Amanda Boudreau. You knew her. She was your friend. You saw her die. Don't tell me you didn't, Tee Bobby. Say her name and look me in the eye and tell me you're not responsible in any way for her death. Say her name, Tee Bobby. Amanda Boudreau."

Rosebud twisted against her seat strap and began to keen and slap the seat and the dashboard, her face round with fear, the corners of her mouth flecked with slobber. "See what you done? I hate you, you white motherfucker. I hate Perry LaSalle and I hate every drop of white blood I got in my veins. I hate y’all in ways y’all cain't even think about," Tee Bobby said, and smashed his fists into the window glass of the back door, again and again, the glass flying into the interior, his knuckles flaying against the broken edges.

I stared at him stupidly, only now realizing some of the complexities that drove Tee Bobby's soul.

"Perry should plead you out, but he's not. He's feeding you to the lions, isn't he? Perry's connected in some way to Amanda's death," I said.

But Tee Bobby had gotten behind the wheel of his car again and started the engine, the backs of his hands slick with blood. He floored his car down the road while his sister screamed insanely out the window.

CHAPTER 25

The next morning was Friday. I awoke early, rested, my mind free of dreams and nocturnal worries, the trees outside filled with birdsong. Wednesday night I had broken into the home of Legion Guidry and had probably experienced the most bizarre behavior I had ever witnessed in a human being, namely, the revelation of what I believed to be an enormous evil presence living inside a man who looked little different than the rest of us. But nonetheless, because I had been able to tell him I would pursue no personal vendetta against him, I felt freed of Legion Guidry and the violation he had committed against my person.

The white worm was gone. I didn't feel the need to drink and use.

Bootsie's body was warm with sleep under the sheet, the breeze from the window fan ruffling her hair on the pillow. I kissed the back of her neck and began making breakfast, then noticed an unopened envelope from Reed College under the toaster, the same envelope I had seen two days earlier on the couch. It was addressed to Alafair, and the fact that she had not opened it told me what the contents were. Ever since she and I had gone on a backpacking trip up the Columbia River Gorge, she had longed to return to the Oregon coast and to major in English and creative writing at Reed. She had applied for a scholarship, then had realized that even with a grant we would still have to pay several thousand more in fees than we would if she chose to commute to the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.