I nailed him in New Orleans, busted him in a Negro hot-pillow joint off Magazine, took a.32 automatic and a straight razor off him and dropped them in a toilet bowl while a half dozen of his friends watched, threatened, and finally did nothing. Later I escorted him back to Iberia Parish for trial. For some reason he has asked me to be here in the Red Hat House. I think he is a borderline psychotic or retarded, or perhaps he has simply melted down his head with cocaine. But I'm convinced that in these last few moments he believes I can wave a wand over his circle of torment, pop the straps and buckles loose from his body, and lead him back outside into the wind, the ruffling sugarcane, the smell of distant rain.

When the voltage hits him his body leaps against the straps, stiffens, trembles violently with a life of its own, like that of a man having a seizure. A curl of smoke rises from under the facecloth. They hit him again, and we can hear the leather straining against the oak arms and legs of the chair. The smell is like the electric scorch of a streetcar, like the smell of hair burning in a barbershop trash barrel. A newsman next to me puts his handkerchief in his mouth and begins gagging.

Later I'm in a bar one mile down the road from Angola Penitentiary. The bar is in a remote and thickly wooded area, and the few people who drink in there either work at the penitentiary or in a piney-woods sawmill nearby. It's a joyless place where personal and economic failure and institutional cruelty are not made embarrassing by comparisons with the outside world. The light in the bar is hard and yellow, the wood floor scorched with cigarette and cigar burns.

Dry lightning leaps outside the window and turns the oak trees white. I order a schooner of Jax and a shot of Jim Beam. I lower the jigger into the schooner, release it, and watch it slide down the side of the glass to the bottom. The sour mash rises in a cloud and turns the beer from gold to amber, and I cup the schooner with my fingers and drink it empty with one long swallow.

"You were up at the Red Hat tonight?" the bartender asks. He's a barrel-chested man, with gray hair curling over his shirt lapels. A blue chain is tattooed around his thick neck.

"Yes."

"What's a guy think in those last few seconds?"

"He begs."

"I wouldn't do that. Would you?"

I don't answer.

"Would you?" he says again.

I tell him to hit me again. He refills my schooner and pours another shot of Beam on the side.

I empty the jigger into the beer and raise the schooner to my mouth. In the bar mirror the cloud of whiskey floating in beer is the color of blood that has dried in the sun, that has been burned with an electric arc. I can feel the glass begin to boil in my hands. Lightning explodes in the shell parking lot outside, illuminating the battered cars and pickup trucks and racist bumper stickers. The air is filled with a wet sulfurous smell; my ears ring with a sound that is like a scream muffled under a black cloth.

It was two in the morning when I awoke from the dream and sat listlessly on the side of the bed. What did the dream mean? Was it simply a replay of the electrocution that I had in fact witnessed when I was a newly promoted detective with the New Orleans Police Department? Old timers at AA would probably say it had to do with fear, which they believe is the cause of all the problems of alcoholics. Fear of mortality, fear that we'll drink again, fear of the self's dark potential. And for an alcoholic, fear is the acronym for Fuck Everything And Run. Clete had had his hand on it. I had loved bars and bust-head whiskey with the adoration and simple trust of a man kneeling before a votive shrine. That kind of emotional faith and addiction dies no less easily than one's religion.

The phone rang at one the next afternoon. It was Kim Dollinger.

"I want to talk to you," she said.

"Go ahead."

"No, come down to your buddy's place. I'll buy you a drink."

"What is it you want to tell me?"

"What's the matter, your social calendar all full?"

"No, I just-"

"Then come on over, hotshot."

"I'm not up to nicknames today. My name is Dave. To tell you the truth, Kim, you sound like you got started a little early today."

"Then buy me a cup of coffee. You have that paternal quality. Are you coming or not?"

Ten minutes later I was at Clete's Club. Clete and his black helper were filling the beer coolers, and she was at the far end of the bar. She wore black stockings, a denim skirt, and a sleeveless orange sweater, and she had had her hair cut so that it was short and thick on her pale neck.

"I want to tell you something before you leave," Clete said to me as I passed him.

"What is it?"

"Later, noble mon."

I sat on the stool next to Kim. She had a gin gimlet wrapped in a napkin in front of her.

"You want one?" she asked.

"No, thanks."

"You don't go to a whorehouse to play the jukebox, do you?"

"I joined the Dr Pepper crowd a few years ago."

"Too much. You want to be in the candy business, but you don't touch the juice?"

"How about holding it down?"

"You sure you're not just a big put-on?"

"What do you mean?"

"I think somebody shook up your puzzle box, that's what I mean."

"How about I buy you some gumbo?"

"I think you're weird. Do people in the bayou country grow up weird and think they can make big money in the city dealing with somebody like Ray Fontenot? Are you that dumb?"

"What is it you want to tell me, Kim?"

"I don't know what I want to tell you." She looked away into space. The green and purple neon tubing on the bar mirror glowed on her face. "You don't listen to people. Back there where you come from, don't you have something better going than this stuff in New Orleans? You want to risk it for a score with a bunch of dipshits who wouldn't take a leak on you if you were burning?"

"Why all this concern for me?"

"Because you didn't try to put moves on me. Because there're things about you that are nice. Also, because I think you're a fish."

"I look like a fish?"

"I know you're a fish, hon."

She finished her gimlet and signaled the black barman for another. He took her glass away and filled a fresh one from the blender. The color in her green eyes deepened when she sipped from the glass.

"Is there something I should know, Kim?" I asked.

"You're a big boy. Make up your own mind. Look at the flamingos."

"What?"

"Painted on the edge of the mirror. The pink flamingos. When I was a little girl we lived in Miami. My father was the guy who took care of the flamingos at the Hialeah racetrack. Before the seventh race he'd chase them with a broom in the center ground and make them fly high above the stands. That was his job. He thought it was a real important job."

She drank again from her glass and closed and opened her eyes slowly. Her mouth was bright red.

"I see," I said.

"One morning he took me to work with him and told me to sit on this wood bench by the finish line while he picked up paper from the track with a stick that had a nail in it. But I wandered out in the center ground and started feeding the flamingos. There was a bucket of ground-up shrimp by the lake, and I was throwing handfuls of it at these big, beautiful pink birds. I didn't see or hear him come up behind me. My hair was long then, and he twisted it in his hand and jerked it against my scalp like you'd snap a rope. He pulled me back to the bench and told me if I cried any more I'd get it again when I got home.

"Then this horse trainer walked up and shook his finger at my father and said, 'Don't you hurt that little girl, Bill. She didn't mean no harm.' He picked me up in his arms like my father wasn't there and carried me to his car. 'She don't belong out here. I'm going to take her to the zoo. You go on about your work,' he said. 'I'll bring her back to your trailer later. Don't be giving me any trouble about it, either, Bill.'