"When those men took away your wife twenty years ago, you couldn't do anything about it. Same kind of guys are still out there, Breeze. They function only because we allow them to."

"I promised Mout' to go crabbing with him in the morning. I best be getting my sleep," he said.

But when I got into my truck and looked back at him, he was still in the swing, staring at his hands, his massive shoulders slumped like a bag of crushed rock.

IT WAS HOT AND dry Friday night, with a threat of rain that never came. Out over the Gulf, the clouds would vein and pulse with lightning, then the thunder would ripple across the wetlands with a sound like damp cardboard tearing. In the middle of the night I put my hands inside Bootsie's nightgown and felt her body's heat against my palms, like the warmth in a lampshade. Her eyes opened and looked into mine, then she touched my hardness with her fingertips, her hand gradually rounding itself, her mouth on my cheek, then on my lips. She rolled on her back, her hand never leaving me, and waited for me to enter her.

She came before I did, both of her hands pushing hard into the small of my back, her knees gathered around my thighs, then she came a second time, with me, her stomach rolling under me, her voice muted and moist in my ear.

She went into the bathroom and I heard the water running. She walked toward me out of the light, touching her face with a towel, then lay on top of the sheet and put her head on my chest. The ends of her hair were wet and the spinning blades of the window fan made shadows on her skin.

"What's worrying you?" she asked.

"Nothing."

She kicked me in the calf.

"Clete Purcel. I think he's going to be hurt," I said.

"Advice about love and money. Give it to anyone except friends."

"You're right. You were about Megan, too. I'd thought better of her."

She ran her fingernails through my hair and rested one ankle across mine.

SUNDAY MORNING I WOKE at dawn and went down to the bait shop to help Batist open up. I was never sure of his age, but he had been a teenager during World War II when he had worked for Mr. Antoine, one of Louisiana's last surviving Confederate veterans, at Mr. Antoine's blacksmith shop in a big red barn out on West Main. Mr. Antoine had willed Batist a plot of land and a small cypress home on the bayou, and over the years Batist had truck farmed there, augmented his income by trapping and fishing with my father, buried two wives, and raised five children, all of whom graduated from high school. He was illiterate and sometimes contentious, and had never traveled farther from home than New Orleans in one direction and Lake Charles in the other, but I never knew a more loyal or decent person.

We started the fire in the barbecue pit, which was fashioned from a split oil drum with handles and hinges welded on it, laid out our chickens and sausage links on the grill for our midday customers, and closed down the lid to let the meat smoke for at least three hours.

Batist wore a pair of bell-bottomed dungarees and a white T-shirt with the sleeves razored off. His upper arms bunched like cantaloupes when he moved a spool table to hose down the dock under it.

"I forgot to tell you. That fella Cool Breeze was by here last night," he said.

"What did he want?"

"I ain't ax him."

I expected him to say more but he didn't. He didn't like people of color who had jail records, primarily because he believed they were used by whites as an excuse to treat all black people unfairly.

"Does he want me to call him?" I asked.

"I know that story about his wife, Dave. Maybe it wasn't all his fault, but he sat by while them white men ruined that po' girl. I feel sorry for him, me, but when a man got a grief like that against hisself, there ain't nothing you can do for him."

I looked up Mout's name in the telephone book and dialed the number. While the phone rang Batist lit a cigar and opened the screen on the window and flicked the match into the water.

"No one home," I said after I hung up.

"I ain't gonna say no more."

He drew in on his cigar, his face turned into the breeze that blew through the screen.

BOOTSIE AND ALAFAIR AND I went to Mass, then I dropped them off at home and drove to Cisco Flynn's house on the Loreauville road. He answered the door in a terry-cloth bathrobe that he wore over a pair of scarlet gym shorts.

"Too early?" I said.

"No, I was about to do a workout. Come in," he said, opening the door wide. "Look, if you're here to apologize about that stuff on the set-"

"I'm not."

"Oh."

"The sheriff wants to know why the city of New Iberia is hosting a mainline con like your friend Boxleiter."

We were in the living room now, by the collection of photographs that had made Megan famous.

"You were never in a state home, Dave. How would you like to be seven years old and forced to get up out of bed in the middle of the night and suck somebody's cock? Think you could handle that?"

"I think your friend is a depraved and violent man."

"He's violent? Y'all put him in the hospital over a drop of sweat."

Through the French doors I could see two dark-skinned people sitting at a glass table under a tree in the back yard. The man was big, slightly overweight, with a space between his front teeth and a ponytail that hung between his shoulder blades. The woman wore shorts and a tank top and had brownish-red hair that reminded me of tumbleweed. They were pouring orange juice into glasses from a clear pitcher. A yellow candle stub was melted to the table.

"Something bothered me the last time I was here. These photos that were in Life magazine? Y'all caught the kill from inside the drainpipe, just as the bullet hit the black guy in the neck?"

"That's right."

"What were you doing in the pipe? How'd you know the guy was coming out at that particular place?"

"We made an arrangement to meet him, that's all."

"How'd the cops know he was going to be there?"

"I told you. He raped a high school girl. They had an all-points out on him."

"Somehow that doesn't hang together for me," I said.

"You think we set it up? We were inside the pipe. Bullets were ricocheting and sparking all around us. What's the use? I've got some guests. Is there anything else?"

"Guests?"

"Billy Holtzner's daughter and her boyfriend."

I looked out the French doors again. I saw a glassy reflection between the fingers of the man's right hand.

"Introduce me."

"It's Sunday. They're just getting up."

"Yeah, I can see."

"Hey, wait a minute."

But I opened the French doors and stepped outside. The man with the ponytail, who looked Malaysian or Indonesian, cupped the candle stub melted to the table, popping the waxy base loose, and held it behind his thigh. Holtzner's daughter had eyes that didn't fit her fried hair. They were a soapy blue, mindless, as devoid of reason as a drowsy cat's when small creatures run across its vision.

A flat, partially zippered leather case rested on a metal chair between her and her boyfriend.

"How y'all doing?" I asked.

Their smiles were self-indulgent rather than warm, their faces suffused by a chemical pleasure that was working in their skin like flame inside tallow. The woman lowered her wrist into her lap and the sunlight fell like a spray of yellow coins on the small red swelling inside her forearm.

"The officer from the set," the man said.

"It is," the woman said, leaning sideways in her chair to see behind me. "Is that blond lady here? The one with the blackjack. I mean that guy's head. Yuck."

"We're not in trouble, are we?" the man said. He smiled. The gap in his front teeth was large enough to insert a kitchen match in.