"Happy motoring," the trusty clerk said.

Out in the visitors' area I saw Annie sitting on a wooden bench with her hands pinched together in her lap. She wore blue tennis shoes, Clorox-faded jeans, and a print shirt covered with purple flowers. The tables in the room were filled with inmates and their families who had come to visit them, and each group tried to isolate themselves in their intimate moment by bending their heads forward, never focusing their eyes beyond their own table, holding one another's forearms tightly in their hands. Annie tried to smile at me, but I saw the nervousness in her face.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"Sure."

"My car's right at the curb. We can go now."

"Sure, let's get out of here."

"Dave, what's wrong?"

"The bastards took my piece. I ought to get a receipt fork."

"Are you crazy?" she whispered.

"Forget it. Let's go."

We went through the glass doors onto the street, and the afternoon heat hit me like somebody opening a furnace door next to my skin. We got into her car and she started the engine, then looked across at me with a cloud in her face. My arm jerked when it touched the burning metal on the window.

"Dave, are you okay? Your face is white," she said.

"I'm running on some weird fluids. Just consider the source and don't take everything I say to heart today. How did you know I was in jail?"

"Your partner, what's his name, Clete, called. He said something strange, but he told me to tell it to you just like he said it-'You still own yourself, Streak. That's a big victory. Disconnect from this dogshit while there's time.' What's he talking about?"

"It means part of him is still intact. I'm not sure if the same is true of me. I think I felt all the stitches pop today. "

She steered into the traffic. The yellow haze, the heat off the concrete, the hot leather against my back, the acrid gasoline fumes around me, filled my head with a sensation that was like breathing over a tar-roofer's pot on a summer day.

"I don't know much about alcohol and drinking problems, Dave. Do you want to stop for a beer? I don't mind. Isn't it better to taper off sometimes?"

She had made it very easy, and at that moment I think I would have cut my fingers off one at a time with tin snips for a frosted quart of Jax beer.

"I'd just appreciate it right now if you'd drive me to my houseboat. Did you have to put up a thousand for the bondsman?" I said.

"Yes."

"I'll make it good tomorrow. I'm suspended from the credit union, but I'm going to take a loan out on the boat."

"I'm not thinking about that. Last night you tried to make amends, and I sent you away."

"You had someone coming for dinner."

"He was just a friend from the music school. He would have understood."

"Let me explain something. My getting thrown in jail doesn't have anything to do with you. I had four years of sobriety, and I blew it in."

"You can stop again."

I didn't answer. We were on Elysian Fields Avenue, headed out toward the lake. My seersucker suit was rumpled and stained with tobacco juice from the jail, and the skin of my face felt grimy and unshaven under my hand.

"Pull in by that eating place, will you?" I said.

She parked next to a café that had an open-air counter and tables under shade trees where people ate poor-boy sandwiches and bleeding slices of watermelon. I ordered two Dr. Peppers in paper cups packed with crushed ice and asked the waiter to add a handful of candied cherries and cut limes. I sat in the car and drank out of the cup with both hands, and the slide of ice and bruised cherries and syrupy soda ached wonderfully all the way down my throat and into my stomach.

"When I was a kid in New Iberia, we had a drink called Dr. Nut. It tasted just like this," I said. "My father always bought my brother and me a Dr. Nut when we went to town. That was a big treat back then."

"How do you think of the past, Dave?" she asked. Her curly hair blew in the wind through the window while she drove.

"What do you mean?"

"What feelings do you have when you remember your father?"

"I think of him with fondness."

"That's right, you do, even though your family was poor and sometimes your father wasn't there when you needed him. You didn't take any anger toward him into your adult life. You forgave him and you remember what was best about him. Why not do the same for yourself?"

"It's not that simple with some people's metabolisms."

"Today is Saturday, and it's Saturday all day long, and I don't care about what happened yesterday, at least not about the bad things. I like being with you and remembering good things and knowing it's going to get better all the time. Don't they teach something like that at AA?"

"That's pretty close."

"Will you take me to the horse races tonight?"

I touched the damp, curly hair on the nape of her neck and brushed the smoothness of her cheek with my fingers. She smiled at me with her eyes and patted me on the thigh, and I felt a weakness drain through my body like water and then settle and swell in my loins.

When we got to Lake Pontchartrain it was like walking out from under a layer of steam into a slap of cool, salt-smelling air. Pelicans dove for fish out of the blue sky, plummeting downward with their wings cocked behind their heads as though they had been dropped from a bomb rack, exploding in the smoky green water and rising suddenly with silvery fish flipping helplessly in their beaks. Far out on the horizon the water was capping in the sunlight, and a long, gleaming white yacht with red sails was dipping into the troughs and sending geysers of foam bursting into the air.

I showered and shaved in my tin stall and felt the smell of the jail, its physical touch that was like an obscene hand, go out of my body. I washed carefully around the stitches in my scalp, then I pulled off the old dressing on my shoulder and arm, where the chips of glass had been embedded, and let the water run warmly on the crusted skin. Annie was cooking bass fillets and spinach with hard-boiled eggs on my small stove, and for the first time that day I felt hunger. I dried off, sat on the side of the bed with the towel wrapped around my waist, and opened the plastic first-aid box in which I kept the bandages and ointment to dress my shoulder and arm. I could have done it myself. Pride and a larger measure of self-respect actually required it. I looked at the closed curtain and heard Annie turn down the pots on the stove.

"Annie, I need you to help me," I said.

She slid back the curtain on the door.

"I have a little trouble getting these bandages into place," I said.

She sat beside me, wiped ointment on my cuts with a piece of cotton, snipped adhesive tape into strips with the scissors, and taped down two big, folded squares of gauze on top of the ointment. Then she rubbed her hands over my skin, down my shoulders and back, across my chest, her eyes looking over my body without embarrassment, as though she were discovering me for the first time. I leaned her back on the bed and kissed her mouth, her neck, unbuttoned her flower-print blouse and placed my head against the red birthmark on her breast. I felt her body stretch out against mine, felt the confidence, the surrender that a woman gives in that moment when she no longer hides her hunger and instead blesses you with a caress that is always unexpected and heart-rushing and humbling in its generosity.

This time I wanted to give her more than she gave me, but I wasn't able. In seconds I was lost inside her, her hands tight against my back, her legs in mine in almost a maternal way, and when I tried to tense and stop because it was too soon, she held my face close to hers, kissed my cheek, ran her fingers through the back of my hair, saying, "It's all right, Dave. Go ahead. It's all right." Then I felt all the anger, the fear, and the heat of the last two days rise inside me like a dark bubble from a well, pause in its own gathered energy and momentum, and burst away into light, into the joy of her thighs, the squeeze of her arms, the blue tenderness of her eyes.