"You ever hear of a woman called Mattie?"

He took his cigarette carefully off his lip and tipped the ashes between his knees.

"Did you hear me, podna?" I said.

His eyes regarded me quietly.

"You guys got nothing else to do except this kind of stuff?." he asked.

"Did you know a woman named Mattie?"

"No, I didn't."

He picked at a scab inside his wasted forearm.

"How often do you go to the blood bank?" I asked.

"Once Or twice a week. Depends on how many is in town. They keep records."

"Where do you receive your VA checks?"

"What?"

"Your disability payments."

"I don't get them no more. I ain't gone in to certify in five or six years."

"Why not?"

" 'Cause I don't like them sonsabitches."

"I see," I said, then I spoke to him in French.

"I don't speak it," he said.

"I think you're not telling me the truth, Vic."

He dropped his cigarette to the cement and mashed it out with his foot.

"You interested in my life story, run my prints," he said, and turned up his palms. "We were buttoned down when they put one up our snout. I was the only guy got out. The hatch burned me all the way to the bone when I pushed it open. I don't know no preacher, except at the mission. You saying I look in people's windows, you're a goddamn liar."

His breath was stale, his eyes like heated marbles inside his red, manikinlike face.

"Where are you staying?" I said.

"At the Sally, in Lafayette."

"I don't have anything to hold you on, Vic. But I'm going to ask you to stay out of Iberia Parish. If these same people are bothered by a man who looks like you, I want to know that you were somewhere else. Do we have an agreement on that?"

"I go where I want."

I tapped my fountain pen on the back of my knuckles, then stood up and swung the door wide for him.

"All right, podna. The deputy at the end of the corridor will drive you back to Lafayette," I said. "But I'll leave you with a thought. If you're Verise Sonnier, don't blame your children for your unhappiness. They've had their share of it, too. You might even learn to be a bit proud of them."

"Get out of my way," he said, and walked past me, tucking in his shirt over his skinny hips.

I went home, turned on the window fan in the bedroom, and slept for four hours. On the edge of my sleep I could hear Alafair and Bootsie weeding the flower beds under the windows, walking through the leaves, scraping ashes out of the barbecue pit. When I awoke, Bootsie was in the shower. Her figure was brown and softly muted through the frosted glass, and I could see her washing her arms and breasts with a rag and a bar of pink soap. I took off my underwear and stepped into the stall with her, rubbed the smooth muscles of her back and shoulders, worked my thumbs up and down her spine, kissed the dampness of her hair along her neck.

Then I dried her off like she was a little girl, although it was I who often had the heart of a child while making love.

We lay on top of the sheets, and the fan billowed the curtain and drew its breeze across us. I kissed her thighs and her stomach and put her nipples in my mouth. When I entered her, her body was so hot she felt like she was burning with a high fever.

Later, I took Alafair to Saturday evening Mass at the cathedral, then attended an AA meeting. When it was my turn to talk, I did a partial fifth step before the group, which consists of admitting to ourselves, to another human being, and to God the exact nature of our wrongs.

Why?

Because I had gone to Lyle Sonnier's house in Baton Rouge and compromised my faith in my Higher Power. I had let Him down, and by doing so-seeking out the help of a man whom I had considered a charlatan-I had let Bootsie down, too. Even Lyle had said so.

When he had hit the light switch in his kitchen, the chrome, yellow plastic, white enamel, and flowered wallpaper leaped to life with the brilliance of a flashbulb. He took a bottle of milk and pecan pie from the icebox, set forks, plates, and crystal glasses on the table, then sat across from me, wan-faced, tired, obviously unsure of where he should begin.

"We can talk a long time, Dave, but I guess I ought to tell you straight out I can't give you what you want," he said.

"Then you are a fraud."

"That's a tough word."

"You said you can heal, Lyle. I'm calling you on it." I felt a bubble of saliva break in my throat.

"No, you don't understand. I was a fraud. I was strung out on rainbows and purple acid, black speed, you name it, street dealing, breaking into people's cars, hanging in some of those gay places on South Los Angeles Street in L.A., you get my drift, when I met this boozehead scam artist named the Reverend Jimmy Bob Clock.

"Jimmy Bob and me went on the tent circuit all over the South. He'd whip up a crowd till they were hysterical, then he'd walk down that sawdust aisle in a white suit with the spotlight dancing on it and grab some poor fellow's forehead in his hands and almost squeeze his brains out his ears. When he'd let go, the guy would be trembling all over and seeing visions through the top of the tent.

"Before the show he'd have me go to the rear of the line and ask some of the old folks if they wouldn't like a wheelchair to sit in, and wouldn't they like to be right down on the front row? I'd wheel them down there, and halfway into his sermon he'd jump off the stage, take them by the hands, and make them rise up and walk. Then he'd shout, 'What time you got' And they'd shout back, 'It's time to run the devil around the block with the Reverend Jimmy Bob Clock.' "

"Jimmy Bob was a pistol, son. On camera he'd grab a handful of somebody's loose flesh and shake it like Jell-O and say he'd just cured it of cancer. He'd lift up somebody's legs from a wheelchair and hold them at an angle so one looked shorter than the other, then he'd straighten them out" praying all the time with his eyes squeezed shut, and holler out that a man born lame could now walk without a limp.

"Except they got Jimmy Bob on a check-writing rap in Hattiesburg, and I had to do the next show in Tupelo by myself. The tent was busting with people, and I was going to try to get through the night with the wheelchair scam and maybe curing somebody of deafness or back pain or something else that nobody can see, because if that crowd doesn't get a miracle of some kind they're not shelling out the bucks when the baskets go around. But right in the middle of the sermon this old black woman comes up the aisle on two canes and I know I've got a problem.

"She started pulling on my pants leg and looking up at me with these blue cataracts, opening and closing her mouth like a baby bird in its nest. Then everybody in the tent was looking at her, and there wasn't any way out of it, I had to do something.

"I said, 'What's brought you here, auntie?' And I held the microphone down to her."

"She said, 'My spine's fused. They ain't nothing for the pain. 'Lectric blanket don't do it, chiropractor don't do it, mo'phine don't do it. I wants to die.' "

"She had on these big thick glasses that were glowing from the spots, and tears were running down her face. I said, 'Don't be talking like that, auntie.' "

"And she said, 'You can cure this old woman. God done anointed you. It ain't no different than touching the hem of His garment.' And she dropped her canes and set her hands on the tops of my shoes.

"I thought my conscience had been eaten up with dope a long time ago. But I wanted God to take me off the planet, right there. I wanted to tell everybody in that tent they were looking at a man who had gone as low as spit on the sidewalk. I didn't have any words, I didn't know what to do, I couldn't see anything but those spots burning in my eyes. So I got down on my knees and I put my hands on that old woman's head. Her hair was gray and wet with sweat and I could feel the blood beating in her temples. I prayed to God, right up through the top of the canvas, 'Punish me, Lord, but let this lady have her way.' "