"It's nice to meet you, Dave. The wedding is Saturday at St. Peter's," he said. "Please come if you feel like it."

"Thank you," I said. And I cleared my throat so they wouldn't see me swallow.

Bootsie blew more gusts of air up into her face and her eyes became brighter, as though a generator were gaining momentum inside her.

"I could have told you I was pregnant. That would have blown your mind, wouldn't it?" she said.

"What?" I felt my mouth hang open, because in New Iberia at that time it was unthinkable to talk like that in a public place.

"But that would have seriously screwed you up," she said. "You would have ended up a family guy with kiddies and you couldn't go off to war, then come home and stand around on a cane like an F. Scott Fitzgerald character. The pose is perfect, Dave. You look so absolutely sad and wounded. We wouldn't rob you of it for anything."

"I think you're being pretty rotten," I said.

"Hold on, now," her fiancé said.

"No, rotten is when you put it in without a rubber because you're really promising that person you're going to marry her, then you leave her like she's yesterday's backseat hand job."

The band had stopped playing, and her words carried out to the edge of the dance floor. People stared at us with their smiles suddenly frozen on their faces. Bootsie's eyes were watery and shining, and there were beads of perspiration on her upper lip. In the silence I could feel the skin of my face tighten and flex against the bone.

When I woke in the morning a note folded inside an envelope was stuck in my screen door. It read:

I'm sick and trembling with a hangover this morning, and I guess I deserve it. I'm sorry for what I was to you last night. I shouldn't apologize to you, but I do anyway. But tell me this, Dave, please please please tell me this, why did you push me away, why did you destroy it for both of us, why did you ruin everything we'd shared together that summer, tell me in the name of suffering God why you did it, Dave.

Love,

Bootsie

P.S. On second thought it's probably better that you don't answer this note. I'm going to be married to John, and the past is the past, right? If I say that enough it'll finally be true. I hope you have a good life. I really mean that even though I think you were a bastard.

But as she'd said, the past was the past, and after we had dinner, we washed the dishes, put them away, and went upstairs to her bedroom. It was misting outside, and the sky was a soft gray, the sun a low red ball on the western horizon. The long strips of pink cloud above the trees reminded me of flamingo wings.

I took off my shirt, then sat on the side of the bed to remove my shoes. She sat next to me in only her bra and a half-slip and put her hand on my back.

"Your skin's hot," she said.

"It happens when I'm with a certain lady," I said, and tried to smile.

"No, your muscles are tight as iron. What is it, Dave?"

"I just have a couple of things on my mind right now."

"There's a big buy going down, isn't there?"

"Why do you think that?"

"I always know. I hear people talking on the phone, a lot of money gets transferred around. Dave, are you still a cop?"

"No questions tonight, Boots."

"They'll catch on to you eventually. What you don't understand is that the narcs who get inside the organization are like them. You're not. It's a matter of time before they'll see that."

"Let's not talk about it anymore."

"All right, if that's what you want. But at some point you'll have to confide in me. If not now, later. You know that, Dave."

I touched her lips with my fingers.

"It's going to rain," I said. "Remember when we used to go to my father's boathouse in the rain?"

She laid her cheek against my bare shoulder and rested her hand lightly on my arm. I finished undressing, and she pulled her slip up over her thighs and sat on top of me. I felt myself go deep inside her, felt her heat and wetness spread across my loins. Her face became round and pale in concentration. She made love with the confidence and knowledge of an older woman, and when she came she pressed my palm hard against her breast as though she were forcing me to share the whirrings of her heart.

It was dark outside, and the rain was slanting against the French windows. An oak tree raked wetly against the side of the house. She lay inside my arm, with her hand on my stomach, and I could smell the rose-scented shampoo in her hair and taste the thin film of perspiration on her forehead.

Then, as though determined to pass on all my anxieties and fears to someone else, as though I had to hurt her again as I had many years before, I asked her the question that had bothered me since I'd first gone to her house on Camp Street.

"Why don't you get out from under them?"

"I told you why."

"You said you didn't know your husband was in the mob when you married him. I never knew one of them who wasn't obvious, Boots."

"I wasn't very careful, I guess."

"Bootsie, you had to know."

"He was good-looking and well-mannered. He said he had a degree from Tulane. He smiled all the time. He was fun to be around, Dave."

"All those game-room machines you distribute are made by a Mafia front in Chicago. You're into it big-time, old pal."

Her hand left my stomach, and she sat up on the side of the bed and looked out at the wet treetops. Then she walked barefoot in her bra and half-slip to a cabinet above a small desk, her hips creasing softly. I could see the dark outline of her sex through her slip.

"I'm going to have a glass of cream sherry," she said. "You don't mind, do you? It helps me to sleep sometimes. I always have trouble sleeping when it thunders. It's a silly way to be."

She kept her face turned toward the French windows, but I could see the wet shine on her cheeks.

CHAPTER 8

It was black and raining hard when I guided the jugboat from the dock down the canal toward open water. The boat was built to float high up in the water, but the tide was out, the canal was shallow, and yellow mud and tangles of dead hyacinths boiled up under the propeller. The long expanses of saw grass on each side of us were bent in the rain.

Ray Fontenot and Lionel Comeaux both wore yellow raincoats with hoods and sat hunched forward in their chairs by my small butane stove, which held a pot of coffee. The weather had turned cold, and their faces were morose and irritable. When we hit open water I pushed the throttle forward and felt the engine surge and the bow lift into the waves. The coastline became gray and indistinct and then dropped behind us altogether. In the distance I could see a gas flare burning on an offshore oil well.

"Turn off your running lights," Lionel said.

"There's a fogbank up there."

"I don't care. Turn off your lights."

"Look, if you're worried about the Coast Guard, it monitors the traffic by radar. You don't become invisible by turning off your lights."

He got up from his chair, walked to my instrument board, and clicked off the two toggle switches that controlled the red and green running lights on the stern and bow. I pulled the throttle back to idle and cut the ignition. Suddenly it was quiet except for the rain against the roof and the glass. The jugboat pinched in one trough and then slid over the top of a black wave into another; the coffeepot crashed on the floor.

"These are the rules, partner. There's one skipper on a boat," I said. "You're looking at him. If that doesn't sit right with you, we'll turn it around here."

"We've made this run a dozen times. You don't advertise," Lionel said.

"What's the matter with you?" I said. "The best way to attract attention is to do something stupid like run without lights."