That night at the track, while heat lightning danced in the western sky, we strolled among the flower gardens by the paddock, watched the hot-walkers cool out the thoroughbreds that had already run, smelled the wonderful odors of freshly raked and dampened sod and horse sweat and manure and oats in the stables, and looked with genuine wonder and admiration at the rippling sheen of the roans and black three-year-olds walking onto the track under a halo of electric arc lights.

We cashed the daily double, a perfecta, two win, and three place tickets. The palm trees were purple against the flickering sky; the lake in the centerground caught the stars and the moon, and when the surface shuddered in a gust of wind off the Gulf, the water was streaked with quicksilver; I could smell oak trees and moss and night-blooming flowers. Gamblers and lovers pay big dues and enjoy limited consolations. But sometimes they are enough.

NINE

The sky was pink over the lake at dawn the next day, and I put on my running shoes and tennis shorts and ran five miles along the lakefront with the wind cool in my face and the sun warm on my bare back. I could feel the sweat glaze and dry on my skin in the wind, and the muscles in my chest and legs seemed to have a resiliency and tension and life in them that I hadn't felt in weeks. Seagulls drifted on the air currents above the water's edge, their wings gilded in the sunlight, then they would dip quickly down toward the sand and peck small shellfish from the receding foam. I waved at families in their cars on the way to church, drank orange juice at a child's street stand under a palm tree, and pounded down the asphalt with a fresh energy, my chest and head charged with blood, my heart strong, the summer morning part of an eternal song.

I could have run five more miles when I got back to the houseboat, but my phone was ringing. I sat on the edge of a chair and wiped my sweating face with a towel while I answered it.

"Why don't you trust your own family a little bit?" my brother Jimmie asked.

"What are you talking about?"

"I understand you bopped into an interesting scene the other night. Very stylish. There's nothing like crashing a Garden District party with a.45 on your hip."

"It had been a dull night."

"Why didn't you call me? I could have bonded you out in fifteen minutes. I might even have had a little influence on that concealed-weapons charge."

"This is one you can't oil."

"The point is, I don't like my brother being taken apart by some pencil-pushers."

"You'll be the first to know the next time I'm in the bag."

"Can you get somebody over there that speaks Spanish in the next half hour?"

"What for?"

"I told Didi Gee I'd get him in the Knights of Columbus. He likes me. Who else would eat lunch with a character like that except at gunpoint?"

"What are you doing, Jimmie?"

"It's already done. Presents come in strange packages. Don't question the fates."

"Anything Didi Gee does has ooze and slime all over it."

"He never said he was perfect. Stay cool, bro," he said, and hung up.

I called a Cuban horse trainer I knew at the Fairgrounds and asked him to come to the houseboat. He arrived there ten minutes before a Cadillac limousine with tinted windows pulled up on the dead-end street by the sand dune and palm trees where my boat was moored, and two of Didi Gee's hoods, dressed in slacks, loafers, and shades, with flowered shirts hanging over their belts, got out and opened the back door with the electric motions of chauffeurs who might have been delivering a presidential envoy. Instead, an obviously terrified man sat in the gloom of the backseat with a third hoodlum next to him. He stepped out into the sunlight, swallowing, his face white, his pomade-slicked, kinky red hair and grease-pencil mustache like a parody of a 1930s leading man's. He held one palm around the fingers of his other hand.

"This guy asked us for a ride. Begged us to bring him here," the driver said. "We can't shut him up, though. All he wants to do is talk."

"But give him something for his breath. It smells like sewer gas. The guy must eat dog turds for breakfast," the other hood said.

"Hey, serious, he's got an interesting story," the driver said. "If somehow he don't remember it, tie a shirt on your TV antenna. I got to pick up a loaf of bread at the corner store a little later. We can help him fill in the empty spaces. We're just out for the morning air, anyway."

I couldn't see either one of them well behind their shades, and Didi Gee's hired help tended to run of a kind-slender young Sicilians and Neapolitans who would blow out your light as easily as they would flip away a cigarette-but I thought I'd seen the driver in a lineup two years ago after we'd prized parts of a bookie out of his own kitchen garbage compactor.

They drove off in their Cadillac, the white sun bouncing off the black-tinted glass in the rear.

"Andres, I wouldn't hang around with that bunch if I were you," I said.

But you still can't accept gratuities when they're given to you on other people's terms, particularly when they come from somebody like Didi Gee. Besides, the fingers of the Nicaraguan's left hand were wrapped in tape, and I had an idea where they had been earlier. He sat at my kitchen table, rigid, his brown eyes riveted fearfully on me as though the lids were stitched to his forehead. I put a tape recorder, a Polaroid camera, and a pint of white rum on the table.

"I don't have a tank full of piranha here, and I'll take you to the hospital if you want to go," I said to him through my Cuban friend, whose name was Jaime.

He did not need a hospital; the injuries were not serious; but he would very much appreciate a glass of Bacardi, no ice, please.

I opened the morning newspaper, pulled my chair around next to him, held up the front section between us so the headline and date were visible, and told Jaime to take our picture with the Polaroid. The Nicaraguan's breath was awful, as though there were something dead in his lungs. He drank the rum and wiped his lips, and the wispy gray scars around his mouth shone like pieces of waxed string.

"I want you to understand something," I said. "You're going to be a cooperative person, but not because of Didi Gee's hoods and the business with your fingers. Those guys will not get to you again, at least not because of me. If you want, you can file assault and kidnapping charges against them. I'll drive you to either the police station or the FBI."

He watched me carefully as Jaime translated. The thought of reporting Didi Gee's people to the authorities was evidently so absurd to him that his eyes didn't even register the proposal.

"But our photograph here is another matter," I said.

"I'll make copies, many of them, and circulate them around town for those who might be interested. Maybe you have the trust of your friends, and this will be of little consequence to you. Maybe you are in command of your situation and this is childishness to you."

His face clouded, and his eyes flicked meanly at me for a moment, the way an egg-sucking dog might if you pushed it inside a cage with a stick.

"Qué quiere?" his voice rasped.

It was a strange tale. It was self-serving, circumventive, filled in all probability with lies; but as with all brutal and cruel people, his most innocent admissions and most defensive explanations were often more damning and loathsome in their connotations than the crimes others might accuse him of.

He had been a sergeant in Somoza's national guard for seven years, a door gunner on a helicopter, and he had flown in many battles against the communists in the jungles and the hills. It was a war of many civilian problems, because the communists hid among the villagers and posed as workers in the rice fields and coffee plantations, and when the government helicopters flew too low they often took hostile fire from the ground, where the peasants denied there were any Sandinistas or weapons. What was one to do? Surely Americans who had been in Vietnam could understand. Those who fought wars could not always be selective.