"I don't own it. I'm mortgaged up to my eyeballs. It all went into the college. That ain't a shuck, either, Loot."

"What do you pay that black woman with?"

He laughed.

"I don't pay her anything. She works three hours a day for room and board. She just got out of St. Gabriel. She did five years for murdering her pimp."

"What you do is your business, Lyle, but I think you have a dangerous and psychotic man staying at your home."

"That black gal, Clemmie, might cut my throat, but a good fart would blow ole Vic off the planet like a dandelion. Come on, let's eat. You're too serious about everything, Dave. That's always been your problem. Treat the world seriously and in turn it'll treat you like a clown. You ought to learn that, Loot."

"How about saving it for a wider audience, Lyle?"

"It's just one guy's opinion," he said, and shrugged his shoulders. Then he waved at the man who called himself Vic Benson and who was now flinging a pile of dried banana fronds into a trash fire by a brick wall at the back of the property. His body was silhouetted like a figure cut from tin against the puffs of sparks and plumes of black smoke.

He walked toward us, out of the shade, his eyes redrimmed, unblinking, welded on mine, his puckered face as unreal as rubber twisted around a fist.

I didn't look directly at him while the black woman served us plates of black-eyed peas, dirty rice, and barbecued pork chops. But I could smell him, an odor like turpentine, tobacco smoke, wind-dried sweat.

Because part of his lips had been pared away, you could see everything in his mouth when he chewed his food. He reached across the table for a second pork chop, and a patch of black hair on his arm brushed the rim of my iced-tea glass.

"The way I eat, it bothers you?"

"No, not at all," I said.

"I seen them a lot worse than me. In an armed service hospital," he said. "They had to eat their food out of toothpaste tubes."

He drank from his glass. The iced tea gurgled across his teeth. His splayed fingers looked like gnarled and baked tubers.

"Someone used a piano wire on Weldon Sonnier and tried to remodel him into a stump," I said. "Do you know anything about that, Vic?"

"About what?"

"You heard me."

"Piano wire? That's a good one. The last time I seen you, you ax me if I was looking in somebody's windows. Maybe you got a bump on the brain or something."

The black maid had put on a Walkman headset and was dusting the patio furniture by slapping it with a dish towel, one hand propped on her hip, while she jiggled to music that no one else could hear. Vic pushed a piece of meat back into his mouth with his thumb and studied her undulating curves.

"I talked with the gentleman who runs the Sally in Lafayette," I said "He said you were watching Lyle on TV one time and you mentioned how you'd like to pour lye down his throat."

Lyle's fork paused over his food a moment, then he continued eating with is eyes askance.

"What a drunk man says don't have no more meaning than horse piss on a rock," Vic said.

"He says you flipped a hot cigarette into a child's face."

"Men I say I don't have no recollection of him being there to say what I done and what I ain't done in my life."

"People sure seem to know when you've been around, though, Vic," I said.

"How about we ease it down a notch, Dave?" Lyle said.

"It don't bother me none," Vic said. "One guy like me gives a job to a hunnerd like him. He knows it, too."

"You're wrong about that, partner," I said. "You become a job for me when I have to cut a warrant on you. But right now I can't prove that you tried to take your son's head off with a piece of piano wire. That means you have another season to run. If I were you, I'd take advantage of my good fortune and change my ways. Change ta vie, t'connais que je veux dire?"

"I'm tired of this. Where'd you put that tobacco at?" he said, and pushed his plate away with the heel of his hand.

"I think I set it up on the brick wall. Stay where you're at. I'll get it," Lyle said, rose from his chair, and walked across the lawn.

Vic Benson stared straight into my face. His thin nose was hooked, like a hawk's beak.

"It looks like you drove up here for nothing, don't it?" he said.

I looked back into his face. His puttylike skin was incapable of wearing an expression, and his surgically devastated mouth was cut back into a keyhole over his teeth; but his eyes, which seemed to water as though they were smarting from smoke, contained a malevolent, jittering light that made me want to look away.

"I've got a feeling about you, partner," I said. "I think you not only want revenge against your children. I think you want to do something spectacular. A real light show."

"Go shit in your plate."

"You might even be thinking about torching Lyle's house, particularly if you could get Weldon and Drew inside with Lyle at the same time. I suspect fire stays on your mind quite a bit."

His red eyes shifted to the maid, her large breasts, her dress that tightened across her rump as she reached upwards to dust cobwebs off a bug lamp. He took a lucifer match out of his shirt pocket and rolled it across his teeth with his tongue.

"Fire don't know no one place. Fire don't know no one man," he said.

"Are you threatening me, Vic?"

"I don't waste my time on twerps," he said.

The moon was down that night, but the pecan trees in the yard seemed to shake with a sudden white-green light when the wind blew out of the south and dry lightning trembled in the marsh. I couldn't sleep. I thought of fire, the vortex of flame that had swirled about Vic Benson (or Verise Sonnier) in a Port Arthur chemical plant, the sheets of hot metal that had buried him alive and branded his soul, the hateful energies that he must have carried with him like a burning chain draped around his neck. He was one of those for whom society had no solution. His life was ashes; he was morally insane and knew it; and his thoughts alone could make a normal person weep. The sight of pity in our eyes made him grind his back teeth. Years ago his kind were lobotomized.

He had nothing to lose. He was a living nightmare to hospital employees; prisons didn't want him; psychiatrists considered him pathological and hence untreatable; and even if he was convicted of a capital crime, judges knew that he could turn his own execution into an electronic carnival of world-class proportions.

Would he take an interest in my home and family? I had no answer. But I was convinced that, like Joey Gouza or Bobby Earl, he was one of those who had gone across a line at some point in his life and had declared war on the rest of us. Whether we elected to recognize that fact or not, Vic would be at work with a penny book of matches or a strand of wire that he would pop musically between his fists. The time of his appearance in our lives would be of his choosing.

I fixed a cup of coffee and walked down the slope of my yard to the dock. The stars looked white and hot in the sky; on the wind I could smell the sour reek of mud and rotted humus in the marsh, and the wet, gray odor of something dead. A white tree of lightning splintered across the southern sky. Sweat ran down my sides. It was going to be a scorching day.

I unlocked the door of the bait shop and went inside and pulled the chain on the electric bulb that hung over the counter. Then I saw the diagonal slash across the back screen window that gave onto the bayou.

But it was too late. He rose up from behind the bait tanks and gently pressed the barrel of a pistol behind my ear.

"No, no, don't turn around, my friend. That'd get both of us in trouble," he said.

The light threw both of our shadows on the floor. I could see his extended arm, the pistol rounded by his fist, and an object, a sack perhaps, that seemed to dangle from his other hand.