"Has he been in trouble with some people?"

"You know Weldon. He always went right down the middle.

"I remember once he got caught stealing food out of the back of the poolroom in St. Martinville. The bartender pulled him out of the kitchen by his ear and twisted it until he squealed in front of everybody in the room. Ten minutes later Weldon came back through the door with tears in his eyes and grabbed a handful of balls off the pool table and smashed every inch of window glass in the place."

"That's a sad story," she said.

"They were sad kids, weren't they?" I sat down at the table in front of my smoking bowl of crawfish jtoucee. The roux was glazed with butter and sprinkled with chopped green onions. The white window curtains with tiny pink flowers on them rose in the breeze that blew through the oak and pecan trees in the side yard. "Well, let's eat and not worry about other people's problems."

She stood close to me and stroked my hair with her fingers, then caressed my cheek and neck. I put my arm across her soft rump and pulled her against me.

"But you do worry about other people's problems, don't you?" she said.

"Under it all Weldon's a decent guy. I think it's a contract hit of some kind. I think he's going to lose, too, unless he stops acting so prideful."

"You mean Weldon's mixed up with the mob or something?"

"After he got out of the navy I heard he flew for Air America. It was a CIA front in Vietnam. I think that stuff involves a lifetime membership." I clicked my spoon on the side of the 6toufee bowl. "Or maybe Bobby Earl has something to do with it. A guy like that doesn't forget somebody dragging him through the tossed salad by his necktie."

"A big smile on our detective's face."

"You have made wonderful footage on the evening news."

She leaned over me, pressed my head against her breasts, and kissed my hair. Then she sat across from me and started peeling a crawfish.

"Are you busy after lunch?" she asked.

"What'd you have in mind?"

"You can't ever tell." She looked up and smiled at me with her eyes.

I am one of the few people I have ever known who has been given two second chances in his life. After investing years in being a drunk and sawing myself apart in pieces, I was given back my sobriety and eventually my self-respect by what people in Alcoholics Anonymous call a Higher Power; then after the murder of my wife Annie, Bootsie Mouton came back into my life unexpectedly, as though all the years had not passed and suddenly it was once again the summer of 1957 when we first met at a dance out on Spanish Lake.

I'll never forget the first time I kissed her. It was at twilight under the Evangeline Oaks on Bayou Teche in St. Martinville, and the sky was lavender and pink and streaked with fire along the horizon, and she looked up into my face like an opening flower, and when my lips touched hers she came against me and I felt the heat in her suntanned body and suddenly realized that I'd never had any idea of what a kiss could be. She opened and closed her mouth, slowly at first, then wider, changing the angle, her chin lifting, her lips dry and smooth, her face confident and serene and loving. When she let her hands slide down on my chest and rested her head against mine, I could hardly swallow, and the fireflies spun webs of red light in the black-green tangle of oak limbs overhead and the sky from horizon to horizon was filled with the roar of cicadas.

I stopped eating and walked around behind her chair, leaned down and kissed her on the mouth.

"My, what kind of thoughts have you been having this morning?" she said.

"You're the best, Boots," I said.

She looked up at me, and her eyes were kind and soft, and I touched her hair and cheek with my fingers.

Then she looked out the window toward the front road.

"Who's that?" she said.

A silver Cadillac with television and CB antennas and windows that were tinted almost black turned off the dirt road by the bayou and parked next to my pickup truck under the pecan trees. The driver cut the engine and stepped out into the yard, dressed in a suit that was silver-charcoal, a blue shirt with French cuffs, a striped red-and-blue necktie, and wraparound black sunglasses. He pulled off his sunglasses gingerly with his right hand, which had only a carved, half-moon area where the two bottom fingers should have been, widened his eyes to let them adjust to the light, and walked over the layer of leaves and pecan husks toward the gallery. His black shoes were shined so brightly they could have been patent leather.

"Is that--2' Bootsie began.

"Yeah, it's Lyle Sonnier. He shouldn't have come out here."

"Maybe he tried at the office and they told him you were home."

"It doesn't matter. He should have arranged to meet me at the office."

"I didn't know you felt that way about him."

"He takes advantage of poor and uneducated people, Boots. He used the Ethiopian famine to raise money for that television sideshow of his. Look at the car he drives."

"Shhhh, he's on the gallery," she whispered.

"I'll talk to him outside. There's no need to invite him in.

Okay, Boots?"

She shrugged and said, "Whatever you say. I think you're being a little too hard."

Lyle grinned through the screen when he saw me walking toward the door. He had the same dark Cajun complexion as the other Sonniers, but Lyle had always been the thin one, narrow at the shoulders and hips, a born track runner or poolroom lizard and ultimately one of the most fearless grunts I knew in Vietnam. Except Vietnam and pajama-clad little men who hid in tunnels and spider holes were twenty-five years back down the road.

"What's happenin', Loot? he said.

"How are you, Lyle?" I said, and shook hands with him out on the gallery. His mutilated hand felt light and thin and unnatural in mine. "I have to feed the rabbits and my daughter's horse before I go back to work. Do you mind walking with me while we talk?"

"Sure. Bootsie isn't home?" He looked toward the screen.

On the right side of his face was a shower of shrapnel scars like a chain of flesh-toned plastic teardrops.

"She'll be out directly. What's up, Lyle?" I walked toward the rabbit hutches under the trees so he would have to follow me.

He didn't speak for a while. Instead he combed his waxed brown hair in the shade and looked out toward my dock and the cypress swamp on the far side of the bayou.

Then he put his comb in his shirt pocket.

"You don't approve of me, do you?" he said.

I opened the chicken-wire door to one of the hutches and began filling the rabbits' bowl with alfalfa pellets.

"Maybe I don't approve of what you do, Lyle," I said.

"I don't apologize for it."

"I didn't ask you to."

"I can heal, son."

I looked at my watch, opened up the next hutch, and didn't answer him.

"I don't brag on it," he said. "It's a gift. I didn't earn it. But the power comes through my shoulder, through my arm, right through this deformity of a hand, right into their bodies. I can feel the power swell up in my arm just like I was holding a bucket of water by the bail, then it's gone, from me into them, and my arm's so light it's like my sleeve is empty. You can believe it or not, son. But it's God's truth. I tell you another thing. You got a sick woman up in that house."

I set down the alfalfa bag, latched the hutch door, and turned to look directly into his face.

"I'm going to ask two things of you, Lyle. Don't call me son' again, and don't pretend you know anything about my family's problems."

He scratched the back of his deformed hand and looked up toward the house. Then he sucked quietly on the back of his teeth and said, "It wasn't meant as an offense. That's not my purpose. No, sir."

"What can I help you with today?"