"That's for other people to decide."

"I figured you might say that. Pride can be a sonofabitch sometimes, can't it?"

He pulled up the blinds. The hot, white radiance off the cement outside and the violent green of the trees and shrubs grass made my eyes water. As I walked out of the office, I heard him pull the cassette from the VCR and drop it carelessly into a metal file drawer, then slam the drawer shut.

CHAPTER 16

I took a vacation day from work the next day. Alafair and I packed a lunch, iced down some soft drinks, paddled a pirogue deep into the green light of the marsh, and fished with red worms and spinners for bluegill and goggle-eye.

The morning air was moist and cool among the flooded trees, and in the shadows and mist rising off the water you could hear big-mouth bass flopping on the edge of the lily pads, hear a heron lift and flap his wings as he flew down a canal through a long corridor of trees and disappeared like a black cipher in a cone of sunlight at the end.

But as I pulled the paddle through dark water, heard it knock against a wet cypress knee, watched the earnestness in Alafair's face as she cast her baited spinner next to the water lilies and slowly retrieved it through a nest of bream, I knew that something else was taking hold of me, too. Age had finally taught me that there was a time to go with the season, to let go of the world's seriousness, to leave the terrible obligation of defining both yourself and the world to others.

Yesterday at the dock I had told Batist that Lyle Sonnier had invited him to the crab boil in Baton Rouge.

"What for he ax a black man?" he said.

"Because he likes you, because he'd like us all to come over."

He cocked one eye at me. "sure he want me there, Dave?"

"Yeah, or I wouldn't ask you, Batist."

He looked at me and reflected a moment.

"All right, that sounds nice. I'd like to go wit' y'all," he said. Then, when I turned to go back up to the house, he added, "Dave, why you want to go? I had the feeling for a while you might want to put all them Sonniers in a tote sack with some bricks and Vrow it in the bayou."

I smiled at his joke and didn't reply.

Did I indeed still feel guilt for letting Lyle go down a VC tunnel when we could have blown it and passed it by? Or did I feel obligated to Drew because of our young impetuosity in the back seat of my convertible on a summer night years ago? Was I so self-destructively flawed that I had taken on Weldon's problems only because I saw myself mirrored in him?

No, that wasn't it.

A therapist once told me that we're born alone and we die alone.

It's not true.

We all have an extended family, people whom we recognize as our own as soon as we see them. The people closest to me have always been marked by a peculiar difference in their makeup. They're the walking wounded, the ones to whom a psychological injury was done that they will never be able to define, the ones with the messianic glaze in their eyes, or the oblique glance, as though an M-1 tank is about to burst through their mental fortifications. They drive their convertibles into automatic carwashes with the tops down, cause psychiatrists and priests to sigh helplessly, leave IRS auditors speechless, turn town meetings into free-fire zones, and even frighten themselves when they wake up in the middle of the night and think they've left the light on, and then realize that perhaps their heads simply glow in the dark.

But they save us from ourselves. Whenever I hear and see a politician or a military leader, a bank of American flags at his back, trying to convince us of the rightness of a policy or a deed that will cause harm to others; when I am almost convinced myself that setting humanitarian concern in abeyance can be justified in the interest of a greater good, I pause and ask myself what my brain-smoked friends would have to say. Then I realize that the rhetoric would have no effect on them, because for those who were most deeply injured as children, words of moral purpose too often masked acts of cruelty.

So that's when you let go of reason and slip deep into the wobbling, refracted green light of a marsh, with a child as your guide, and let the season have its way with your heart.

Alafair decided to go to a movie with the neighbor's children that evening and spend the night at their house. So Bootsie fixed her an early supper, and just as the heat began to go out of the day, Bootsie, Batist, and I got in her car and, in the lengthening shadows, took the back road along the Teche, through St. Martinville, to the interstate and Baton Rouge.

We went over the wide sweep of the Mississippi at Port Allen, looked out over the crimson-yellow wash of sunlight on the capitol building and the parks and green trees in the center of Baton Rouge, and passed the old brick warehouses on the river that had been refurbished into restaurants and shops and named Catfish Town by the Chamber of Commerce (one block away from a black neighborhood of paintless cypress shacks, with sagging galleries and dirt yards, where emancipated slaves had lived during Reconstruction).

Then we turned out onto Highland, toward the LSU campus, and began to see more and more posters advertising Bobby Earl's barbecue and political rally.

I slowed the car at a congested intersection where directional signs had been nailed to telephone posts pointing to the site of the rally at a public park two blocks away. Many of the cars around us had yellow ribbons tied on their radio aerials and Bobby Earl stickers plastered on their bumpers.

I felt Bootsie's eyes on my face.

"What?" I said.

"Don't be bothered by them," she said. "It's just Louisiana. Think about the Longs."

"It's not the same thing, -Boots. The Longs weren't racists. They didn't sponsor legislation that would make it a twenty-five-dollar fine to beat up flag burners."

"Well, I'm just not going to let a person like that affect me.

"Yeah, I guess that's why you told Alafair that Bobby Earl was a shit."

My window was down. So was the window of the pickup truck next to me. The man in the passenger seat, whose chewing tobacco in his jaw looked as stiff as a biscuit, glanced directly into my face.

"You got a problem, partner?" I asked.

He rolled up his window and looked directly ahead.

"Dave…" Bootsie said.

"All right, I'm sorry. Sometimes I'm just not sure that democracy is the right idea."

"Talk about narrow attitudes," she said.

"Hey, Dave, that man Bobby Earl ain't been all bad," Batist said from the back seat.

"What?" I said.

"Mais black folk wasn't votin' for a long time. Now they is. I bet you ain't Vought about that, no."

Bootsie smiled and punched me in one of my love handles, then reached across the seat and brushed a strand of hair out of my eyes. How do you argue with that kind of company?

Lyle had tried to do it right. He had strung bunting in the trees, laid out a wonderful hors d'oeuvre and salad table, hired a professional bartender, piped music out onto the patio, and hung baskets of petunias from the ironwork on the upstairs veranda. The lawn had just been mowed, and the air was heavy with the smell of freshly cut grass and the wood smoke curling around the iron caldron on the brick barbecue pit.

He wore a pair of cream-colored pleated slacks, shined brown loafers, and a Hawaiian shirt outside his belt; his hair was wet and combed back on his collar, his cheeks still glowing from a fresh shave. His smile was electric when he greeted us in the side yard and shook hands and walked us to the patio, where Weldon, his wife Barna, Drew, and several people whom I didn't know stood around the drink table. The deference, the unrelenting smile, the nervous light in Lyle's eyes made me feel almost as though he were trying to rearrange all the elements in his life in front of a camera so he could freeze-frame the moment and correct the inadequacies of a past, a childhood, that would never be acceptable to him or finally to anyone who had had a similar one imposed upon him.