"Maybe you should ask those guys barbecuing out back. They might know him."

"You were in the corps?"

"Yeah."

"You're only in the crotch once."

"You were in the corps?"

"No, I was in the army. That's not my point. You're only in the AB once, too."

He lit another cigarette and bit a hangnail on his thumb.

"I don't know what you're saying, buddy, but this is the wrong fucking place to get in somebody's face," he said.

A barmaid came in the side door, put her handbag in a cabinet, and carried a sack of trash out the back.

"You're saying you don't understand me, my words confuse you?" I asked.

"What's with you, man? Somebody shoved a bumblebee up your ass?"

"What's your name, podna?"

"Harvey."

"You're treating me like I'm stupid, Harvey. You're starting to piss me off."

"I don't need this shit, man." He looked out the back door at the men in jeans, cutoff denim jackets, and motorcycle boots, who were drinking canned beer in the barbecue smoke under the tree.

"It's just you and me, Harvey. Those guys don't have anything to do with it," I said.

The barmaid came back inside. She looked like she had dressed for work in a dime store. Her blond hair was shaved on one side, punked orange on the tips; she wore black fingernail polish, a pink top, black vinyl shorts, owl glasses with red frames, earrings made from chrorned.38 hulls.

"Give this guy a free 7 Up if he wants one. I'm going to the head," Harvey said to her.

I waited a moment, then followed him into the men's room and shot the bolt on the door. He was in the single stall, urinating loudly into the toilet bowl.

"Zipper it up and come out here, Harvey," I said.

He opened the stall door and stared at me, his mouth hanging open. I stuck my badge up close to his face.

"The man's real name is Eddy Raintree," I said. "Now don't you bullshit me. Where is he?"

"You can bust me, you can kick my ass, it don't matter, I don't know the sonofabitch," he said. "Guys get their mail here. They go behind the bar and pick it up. I don't know who they are, I don't ask. Check out those cats behind the building, man. There's one guy drove a pool cue through another guy's lung out there."

"Where's my man live, Harvey?"

He shook his head back and forth, his mouth a tight line.

I rested one hand on his shoulder and looked steadily into his face.

"What are you going to do when you walk out of here?" I said.

"What do you mean going-"

"You think you're going to make some mileage with my butt?"

"Look, man-" He started to shake his head again.

"Maybe ease on over to the phone booth. and make a call? Or take a round of beers to the outdoor geek show and mention that the heat is drinking 7 Up inside?"

"I'm neutral. I got no stake in this."

"That's right. So it's time for you to go. To tell the lady behind the bar you're taking off early tonight. We're understood on this, aren't we?"

"You're the man. I do what you say."

"But if I find out you talked to somebody you shouldn't, I'll be back. It's called aiding and abetting and obstruction of justice. What that means is I'll take you back with me to the Iberia Parish all. The guy who runs it is a three hundred-pound black homosexual with a sense of humor about which cells he puts you guys in."

He rubbed his mouth. His hand made a dry sound against his whiskers.

"Look, I didn't see you, I didn't talk to you," he said. "Okay? I'm going home sick. What you said about the AB, it's true, it's lifetime. If one guy doesn't take you out, another does. I'm a four-buck-an-hour beer bartender. I've got ulcers and a slipped disc. All I want is some peace."

"You've got it, partner. We'll see you around. Stay away from phones tonight, watch a lot of television, write some letters to the home folks."

"How about treating me with a little dignity, man? I'm doing what you want. I ain't a criminal, I ain't your problem. I'm just a little guy running around in a frying pan."

"You've probably got a point, Harvey."

I unbolted the door and watched him walk to the bar, say something to the barmaid, then leave by the side door and drive up the dirt road in a pointless pickup truck. The dust from the parking lot drifted back through the rusted screens in the late-afternoon sunlight. Once he was out of sight, it would not take Harvey long to decide that his loyalties to the bikers and Eddy Raintree were far more important to his welfare than his temporary fear of me and the Iberia Parish jail.

I returned to the bar and asked the barmaid for a pencil and a piece of paper. She tore a page from a notepad by the telephone and handed it to me. I scribbled two or three sentences on the back and folded it once, then twice.

"Would you give this to Elton for me?" I said.

"Elton Rupert?"

"Yeah."

"Sure." She took the note from my hand and dropped it in the letter box behind the bar. "You probably just missed him. He usually comes in about four o'clock."

"Yeah, that's what Harvey was saying. Too bad I missed him."

"Too bad?" She laughed. "You got stopped-up nostrils or something? Trying to open up your sinuses?"

"What?"

"The guy's got gapo that would make the dead get up and run down the road."

"He has what?"

"Gorilla armpit odor. You sure you know Elton? He stays in that shack by the levee and doesn't bathe unless he gets rained on. I don't know where he gets off knocking the niggers all the time."

"I like your earrings."

"I got them just the other day. You really like them?"

"Sure. I've never seen any made out of.38 shells."

"My boyfriend made them. He's a gun nut but he's real good at making jewelry and stuff. He's thinking of opening up a mail-order business."

"Elton doesn't have a phone, does he?"

"He doesn't have any plumbing. I don't know why he'd have a phone."

I looked at my watch.

"Maybe I have time to stop by his place just a minute. It's not far, is it?" I said.

"Straight down the road to the levee. You can't miss it. Just follow your nose. Hah!"

"By the way, how's Elton's eye?"

"It looks like worms ate it. Are you doing some kind of missionary work or something?"

The violet air was thick with insects as I drove down the yellow road toward the levee and the marsh. The road crossed the Southern Pacific tracks, then followed alongside a green levee that was covered with buttercups. On the other side of the levee were a canal, a chain of willow islands and sandbars, and a bay full of dead cypress. Three hundred yards from the track crossing was a fishing shack, a small box of a place with a collapsed gallery, an outhouse, an overflowing garbage barrel in back. Both a pirogue and a boat with an outboard engine were tied to wood stobs driven into the mudflat. A chopped-down Harley was parked on the far side of the gallery, its chrome glinting with the sun's last red light. The sky was black with birds.

I parked the truck down the levee, took my World War II Japanese field glasses from my locked toolbox, which the kids from the Iberville project hadn't gotten into, and waited. It was going to be a hot night. The air was perfectly still, heated from the long afternoon, stale with the smell of dead water beetles and alligator gars that fishermen had thrown up on the bank. I studied the shack through the field glasses. The garbage barrel boiled with flies, an. orange cat was eating a fishhead in a bowl on the shack step, a man walked past a window.

Then he was gone before I could focus on his face.

Finally it was dark, and the man inside the shack lit an oil lamp, opened a tin can at a table, and ate from it with a fork, hunched over with his back toward me. Then he urinated off the back steps with a bottle of beer in one hand, and I saw his big granite head in the light from the door, and the muscles that swelled in his shoulders like lumps of garden hose.