"We might turn out to be your best friends, Swede," I said.

"Yeah, shit goes great with frozen yogurt, too," he said, and walked away from us, his bare triangular back arched forward like that of a man in search of an adversary.

"You going to let him slide like that?" Helen said.

"Sometimes the meltdowns have their point of view."

"Just coincidence he stops up a toilet in a theater on the day he needs an alibi?"

"Let's go to the airport."

BUT IF SWEDE TOOK a plane to San Antonio or rented one, we could find no record of it.

That night the air was thick and close and smelled of chrysanthemums and gas, then the sky filled with lightning and swirls of black rain that turned to hail and clattered and bounced like mothballs on the tin roof of the bait shop.

Two days later I drove to St. Mary Parish with Cool Breeze Broussard to watch the exhumation of his wife's body from a graveyard that was being eaten daily by the Atchafalaya River.

AT ONE TIME THE graveyard had sat on dry ground, fringed by persimmon and gum trees, but almost twenty years ago the Atchafalaya had broken a levee and channeled an oxbow through the woods, flooding the grave sites, then had left behind a swampy knob of sediment strung with river trash. One side of the graveyard dipped toward the river, and each year the water cut more deeply under the bank, so that the top layer hung like the edge of a mushroom over the current.

Most of the framed and spiked name tags that served as markers had been knocked down or stepped on and broken by hunters. The dime-store vases and the jelly glasses used for flower jars lay embedded in sediment. The graduation and wedding and birth pictures wrapped in plastic had been washed off the graves on which they had been originally placed and were now spotted with mud, curled and yellowed by the sun so that the faces on them were not only anonymous but stared incongruously out of situations that seemed to have never existed.

The forensic pathologist and a St. Mary Parish deputy and the two black men hired as diggers and the backhoe operator waited.

"You know which one it is?" I asked Cool Breeze.

"That one yonder, wit' the pipe cross. I welded it myself. The shaft goes down t'ree feet," he said.

The serrated teeth on the bucket of the backhoe bit into the soft earth and lifted a huge divot of loam and roots and emerald-colored grass from the top of the grave. Cool Breeze's shoulder brushed against mine, and I could feel the rigidity and muted power in his body, like the tremolo that rises from the boiler room of a ship.

"We can wait on the levee until they're finished," I said.

"I got to look," he said.

"Beg your pardon?"

"Cain't have nobody saying later that ain't her."

"Breeze, she's been in the ground a long time."

"Don't matter. I'll know. What you t'ink I am anyway? Other men can look at my wife, but I'm scared to do it myself?"

"I think you're a brave man," I said.

He turned his head and looked at the side of my face.

The backhoe was bright yellow against the islands of willow trees between the graveyard and the main portion of the river. The loam in the grave turned to mud as the bucket on the backhoe dipped closer to the coffin. The day was blue-gold and warm and flowers still bloomed on the levee, but the air smelled of humus, of tree roots torn out of wet soil, of leaves that have gone acidic and brown in dead water. At five feet the two black diggers climbed into the hole with spades and began sculpting the coffin's shape, pouring water from a two-gallon can on the edges, wiping the surface and corners slick with rags.

They worked a canvas tarp and wood planks under it, then ran ropes tied to chains under the tarp, and we all lifted. The coffin came free more easily than I had expected, rocking almost weightlessly in the bottom of the canvas loop, a missing panel in one side blossoming with muddy fabric.

"Open it up," Cool Breeze said.

The pathologist looked at me. He wore red suspenders and a straw hat and had a stomach like a small pillow pushed under his belt. I nodded, and one of the diggers prized the lid loose with a blade screwdriver.

I had seen exhumations before. The view of mortality they present to the living is not easily dismissed. Sometimes the coffin fills with hair, the nails, particularly on the bare feet, grow into claws, the face puckers into a gray apple, the burial clothes contain odors that cause people to retch.

That is not what happened to Ida Broussard.

Her white dress had turned brown, like cheesecloth dipped in tea, but her skin had the smooth texture and color of an eggplant and her hair was shiny and black on her shoulders and there was no distortion in her expression.

Cool Breeze's hand reached out and touched her cheek. Then he walked away from us, without speaking, and stood on the edge of the graveyard and looked out at the river so we could not see his face.

"How do you explain it?" I said to the pathologist.

"An oil company buried some storage tanks around here in the 1930s. Maybe some chemical seepage got in the coffin," he replied.

He looked back into my eyes. Then he spoke again. "Sometimes I think they wait to tell us something. There's no need for you to pass on my observation."

TWENTY-ONE

FRIDAY EVENING BOOTSIE AND I dropped Alafair at the show in Lafayette, then ate dinner at a restaurant on the Vermilion River. But as soon as Alafair was not with us, Bootsie became introspective, almost formal when she spoke, her eyes lingering on objects without seeing them.

"What is it?" I said outside the restaurant.

"I'm just tired," she replied.

"Maybe we should have stayed home."

"Maybe we should have."

After Alafair went to bed, we were alone in the kitchen. The moon was up and the trees outside were full of shadows when the wind blew.

"Whatever it is, just say it, Boots."

"She was at the dock today. She said she couldn't find you at your office. She didn't bother to come up to the house. Of course, she's probably just shy."

"She?"

"You know who. She finds any excuse she can to come out here. She said she wanted to thank you for the shooting lessons you arranged for her. You didn't want to give them to her yourself?"

"Those guys almost killed her. They might pull it off the next time."

"Maybe it's her own fault."

"That's a rough thing to say, Boots."

"She hides behind adversity and uses it to manipulate other people."

"I'll ask her not to come here again."

"Not on my account, please."

"I give up," I said, and went out into the yard.

The cane in my neighbor's field was green and dented with channels like rivers when the wind blew, and beyond his tree line I could see lightning fork without sound out of the sky. Through the kitchen window I heard Bootsie clattering dishes into the dishwasher. She slammed the washer door shut, the cups and silverware rattling in the rack. I heard the washer start to hum, then her shadow went past the window and disappeared from view and the overhead light went off and the kitchen and the yard were dark.

WE WANTED HARPO SCRUGGS. But we had nothing to charge him with. He knew it, too. He called the dock on Sunday afternoon.

"I want to meet, talk this thing out, bring it to an end," he said.

"It's not a seller's market, Scruggs."

"What you got is your dick in your hand. I can clean the barn for you. There's an old nigra runs a barbecue joint next to a motel on State Road 70 north of Morgan City. Nine o'clock," he said, and hung up.

I went outside the bait shop and hosed down a rental boat a fisherman had just returned, then went back inside without chaining it up and called Helen Soileau at her home.