"You from the U.K.?" I said.

"Just the accent. I travel on a French passport," he said, smiling. He removed a pair of dark glasses from his shirt pocket and put them on.

"Y'all need any medical attention here?"

"No, not today, I don't think," the man said.

"Sure? Because I can run y'all down to Iberia General. It's no trouble."

"That's very kind of you, but we'll pass," the man said.

"What's he talking about?" the woman said.

"Being helpful, that sort of thing, welcoming us to the neighborhood," the man said.

"Hospital?" She scratched her back by rubbing it against her chair. "Did anybody ever tell you you look like Johnny Wadd?"

"Not really."

"He died of AIDS. He was very underrated as an artist. Because he did porno, if that's what you want to call it." Then her face went out of focus, as though her own words had presented a question inside herself.

"Dave, can I see you?" Cisco said softly behind me.

I left Billy Holtzner's daughter and the man with the ponytail without saying goodbye. But they never noticed, their heads bent toward each other as they laughed over a private joke.

Cisco walked with me through the shade trees to my truck. He had slipped on a golf shirt with his gym shorts, and he kept pulling the cloth away from the dampness of his skin.

"I don't have choices about what people around me do sometimes," he said.

"Choose not to have them here, Cisco."

"I work in a bowl of piranhas. You think Billy Holtzner is off the wall? He twists noses. I can introduce you to people who blow heads."

"I didn't have probable cause on your friends. But they shouldn't take too much for granted."

"How many cops on a pad have you covered for? How many times have you seen a guy popped and a throw-down put on his body?"

"See you, Cisco."

"What am I supposed to feel, Dave? Like I just got visited by St. Francis of Assisi? In your ear."

I walked to my truck and didn't look back at him. I heard the woman braying loudly in the back yard.

WHEN I WENT DOWN to the bait shop to open up Monday morning, Cool Breeze Broussard was waiting for me at a spool table, the Cinzano umbrella ruffling over his head. The early sun was dark red through the trunks of the cypresses.

"It gonna be another hot one," he said.

"What's the haps, Breeze?"

"I got to talk… No, out here. I like to talk in the open space… How much of what I tell you other people got to learn about?"

"That depends."

He made a pained face and looked at the redness of the sun through the trees.

"I went to New Orleans Saturday. A guy up Magazine, Jimmy Fig, Tommy Figorelli's brother, the guy the Giacanos sawed up and hung in pieces from a ceiling fan? I figured Jimmy didn't have no love for the Giacanos 'cause of his brother, and, besides, me and Jimmy was in the Block together at Angola, see. So I t'ought he was the right man to sell me a cold piece," Cool Breeze said.

"You're buying unregistered guns?" I said.

"You want to hear me or not?… So he go, 'Willie, in your line of work, you don't need no cold piece.'

"I go, 'This ain't for work. I got in bad wit' some local guys, maybe you heard. But I ain't got no money right now, so I need you to front me the piece.'

"He say, 'You feeling some heat from somewhere, Breeze?' And he say it wit' this smart-ass grin on his face.

"I say, 'Yeah, wit' the same dudes who freeze-wrapped your brother's parts in his own butcher shop. I hear they drank eggnog while he was spinning round over their heads.'

"He say, 'Well, my brother had some sexual problems that got him into trouble. But it ain't Italians you got to worry about. The word is some peckerwoods got a contract to do a black blabbermouth in New Iberia. I just didn't know who it was.'

"I say, 'Blabbermouth, huh?'

"He go, 'You was ripping off the Giacanos and selling their own VCRs back to them? Then you snitch them off and come to New Orleans figuring somebody's gonna front you a piece? Breeze, nothing racial meant, but you people ought to stick to pimping and dealing rock'."

"Who are these peckerwoods?" I asked.

"When I tole you the story about me and Ida, about how she wrapped that chain round her t'roat and drowned herself, I left somet'ing out."

"Oh?"

"A year after Ida died, I was working at the Terrebonne cannery, putting up sweet potatoes. Harpo Delahoussey run the security there for Mr. Terrebonne. We come to the end of the season and the cannery shut down, just like it do every winter, and everybody got laid off. So we went on down to the unemployment office and filed for unemployment insurance. Shouldn't have been no problem.

"Except three weeks go by and the state sends us a notice we ain't qualified for no checks 'cause we cannery workers, and 'cause the cannery ain't open, we ain't available to work.

"I went on down to see Mr. Terrebonne, but I never got past Harpo Delahoussey. He's sitting there at a big desk wit' his foot in the wastebasket, sticking a po'boy sandwich in his mout'. He go, 'It's been explained to you, Willie. Now, you don't want wait round here till next season, you go on down to New Orleans, get you a job, try to stay out of trouble for a while. But don't you come round here bothering Mr. Terrebonne. He been good to y'all.'

"'Bout a week later they was a big fire at the cannery. You could smell sweet potatoes burning all the way down to Morgan City. Harpo Delahoussey jumped out a second-story window wit' his clothes on fire. He'da died if he hadn't landed in a mud puddle."

"You set it?"

"Harpo Delahoussey had a nephew wit' his name. He use to be a city po-liceman in Franklin. Everybody called him Li'l Harpo."

"You think this is one of the peckerwoods?"

"Why else I'm telling you all this? Look, I ain't running no more."

"I think you're living inside your head too much, Breeze. The Giacanos use mechanics out of Miami or Houston."

"Jimmy Fig tole me I was a dumb nigger ought to be pimping and selling crack. What you saying ain't no different. I feel bad I come here."

He got up and walked down the dock toward his truck. He passed two white fishermen who were just arriving, their rods and tackle boxes gripped solidly in their hands. They walked around him, then glanced over their shoulders at his back.

"That boy looks like his old lady just cut him off," one of them said to me, grinning.

"We're not open yet," I said, and went inside the bait shop and latched the screen behind me.

EIGHT

YOU READ THE JACKET ON a man like Swede Boxleiter and dismiss him as one of those genetically defective creatures for whom psychologists don't have explanations and let it go at that.

Then he does or says something that doesn't fit the pattern, and you go home from work with boards in your head.

Early Monday morning I called Cisco Flynn's home number and got his answering service. An hour later he returned my call.

"Why do you want Swede's address? Leave him alone," he said.

"He's blackmailing you, isn't he?"

"I remember now. You fought Golden Gloves. Too many shots to the head, Dave."

"Maybe Helen Soileau and I should drop by the set again and talk to him there."

BOXLEITER LIVED IN A triplex built of green cinder blocks outside St. Martinville. When I turned into his drive he was throwing a golf ball against the cement steps on the side of the building, ricocheting it off two surfaces before he retrieved it out of the air again, his hand as fast as a snake's head, click-click, click-click, click-click. He wore blue Everlast boxing trunks and a gauzy see-through black shirt and white high-top gym shoes and leather gloves without fingers and a white bill cap that covered his shaved and stitched head like an inverted cook pan. He glanced at me over his shoulder, then began throwing the ball again.