But I didn't see Vic Benson, and while we fixed paper plates of chilled shrimp and popcorn crawfish and tried to be convivial, as though we had not all been brought together by a violent event, my eyes kept wandering to the garage apartment where he lived. Clemmie, the black maid who had done time in St. Gabriel, picked up a washtub filled with live bluepoint crabs and poured them skittering into the caldron on the fire pit.

"My, that surely smells good," Bama said. Her ash-blond hair was brushed out thick on her shoulders, and she wore a yellow sundress, gold earrings, and a tiny gold cross and chain around her neck. I never saw anyone with skin so white. You could see her blue veins as though they had been painted on her with the fine point of a watercolor brush.

"I'm real glad y'all could make it," Weldon said. He had already put out a cigarette in his plate and was drinking a beer out of the bottle, his eyes, like mine, glancing sideways unconsciously at the garage apartment. "I'm glad you brought Batist, too. It looks like he's making friends with Clerninie. I hope she doesn't pull a razor on him."

"Lyle is very good to people of color," Barna said.

"Lyle's known Batist since he was knee-high to a tree frog," Weldon said.

"I was speaking of Lyle's kindness to the woman, Weldon."

"Oh."

She turned toward me. Her face was as small as a child's.

Her mouth made a red button before she spoke. There was a steady, serene blue light in her eyes, and I wondered how many downers she had dropped before her first highball.

"Weldon is overly conscious about who my brother is," she said.

"Dave gets a little upset on the subject of Bobby's politics," Weldon said.

"I don't subscribe to everything my brother stands for, but I don't deny that he's my brother, either," she said.

"I see," I said.

"He has many fine qualities of which the press is not aware or which they seem to have no interest in writing about."

Weldon idly twirled a shrimp on a toothpick between his fingers.

"Actually, today is Bobby's birthday," she continued.

"We have to leave a bit early and drop off his present at the rally."

"Bama-" Weldon began.

"It'll take a few minutes. You can stay in the car," she said to him.

He made a face and looked away into the shadows. A moment later Clemmie passed our table.

"Go up and ask Vic to join us, would you, Clemmie?" Lyle said.

She began clearing paper plates off the glass-topped table as though she hadn't heard him. Her breasts looked like watermelons inside her gray-and-white uniform.

"Clemmie, would you please tell Vic all our guests are here?" Lyle said.

"I got to live on the other side of the wall from that nasty old man. That don't mean I got to talk to him," she said.

Lyle's face reddened with embarrassment.

"Maybe he doesn't want to come down. Leave him alone," Weldon said.

"No, he's going to come down here and eat with us," Lyle said. "He's paid for whatever he did to us, Weldon."

"You don't even know that it's him," Weldon said.

"Do you want me to go up there?" Drew said.

Good ole Drew, I thought. Always letter-high and right down the middle. She stood by the bar, her weight resting on one foot, her thick, round arms covered with tan and freckles.

"No, I'll do it," Lyle said.

"Why do you keep stirring up the past all the time?" Weldon said. "If it's not moving, don't poke it. Why don't you learn that?"

"Have another beer, Weldon," Lyle said.

"Lyle, this is your craziness. Don't act like somebody else is responsible," Weldon said.

Lyle got up from his chair and walked across the lawn toward the garage apartment.

"Lord h'ep me Jesus," he said to no one in particular.

Later, he came back down the stairs. Then, a few minutes later, the man who called himself Vic Benson stepped out the door and walked slowly down the stairs, a shaft of late sunlight breaking across his destroyed face.

He wore a frayed white shirt that was gray with washing and creaseless shiny black trousers that were hitched tightly around his bony hips. People glanced once at his face, then focused intensely on their conversations with the people next to them. He was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette without removing it from the corner of his mouth, and the paper was wet with saliva all the way down to the glowing ash.

His eyes made you think he was being entertained by a private joke. He stopped by the edge of the patio, threw his cigarette into a flower bed, and picked up an empty glass off the bar. Then he knotted up a handful of mint from a silver bowl and bruised it around the inside of the glass.

"What you having, sub?" the black bartender asked.

Vic Benson didn't reply. He simply reached over the bar, picked up a bottle of Jack Daniel's and poured four fingers straight up.

Lyle rose from his chair and stood beside him awkwardly.

"This is Vic," he said to Bama and his brother and sister.

"Glad to meet you," Vic said.

Drew's and Weldon's eyes narrowed, and I saw Drew wet her lips. Weldon stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth, then took it out.

"I'm Weldon Sonnier. Do you know me?" he said.

"I don't know you. But I heard about you," Vic said.

"What'd you hear?" Weldon asked.

"You're a big oil man hereabouts"

"I've got a record for dusters," Weldon said.

"You only got to hit a pay sand one in eight. Ain't that right?"

"You sound like you've been around the oil business, Vic," Weldon said.

"I roughnecked some. But I ain't ever run acrost you, if that's what you're asking. I seen her though." He lifted a shriveled forefinger at Drew.

I saw the side of her face twitch. Then she recovered herself.

"I'm afraid I don't recall meeting you," she said.

"I didn't say you'd met me. I seen you jogging on the street. In New Iberia. You was with some other people. But a man don't forget a handsome woman."

Her eyes looked away. Bama stared down at her hands.

"Lyle says you're our old man, Vic," Weldon said.

"I ain't. But I don't argue with it. People abide the likes of me for different reasons. Mostly because they feel guilty about something. It don't matter to me. What time we eat? There's a TV show I want to watch."

"Yeah, those crabs ought to be good and red now," Lyle said.

"You cook them in slow water, they taste better," Vic said. "There's people don't like to do it 'cause of the sound they make in the pot."

He took a long drink from his whiskey, his eyes roving over us as though he had just made a profound observation.

Batist and Lyle began dipping the crabs out of the boiling water with tongs and dropping them in the empty washtub to cool. Vic filled half of a paper plate with dirty rice, walked to the fire pit ahead of everyone else, picked up two hot crabs from the tub with his bare hand, and began eating by himself on a folding chair under an oak tree.

"Is that the man you saw at your window?" Drew said to Barna.

Barna's pulse was quivering like a severed muscle in her throat.

"I'm not sure what I saw," she said. "It was quite dark. Perhaps it was a man in a mask. To be frank, I've tried to put it out of my mind. I prefer not to talk about it, Drew. I don't know why we should be talking about these things at a dinner party."

Weldon smoked a cigarette and watched Vic Benson with a whimsical look on his face.

"Weldon?" Drew said.

"What?"

"Say something."

"What do you want me to say?"

"Is it him?"

"Of course it's him. I'd recognize that old sonofabitch if you melted him into glue."

Bootsie and I got in the serving line, then tried to isolate ourselves from the Sonniers' conversation. But Barna was having her troubles with it, too. She made a mess of shelling the crab on her plate, spraying her dress and face with juice when she squeezed a claw between the nutcrackers, then rushing from the table as though the deck of the Titanic had just tilted under her.