"That's it. That's what she has. What is it?"

His mouth was parted expectantly, his green eyes bleary with alcohol, while he waited for me to reply.

It continued TO rain through the afternoon into the night. Little Face Dautrieve put her baby to bed in his crib and watched television until midnight in the front room of her cabin in the Loreauville Quarters. Then she undressed and put on a pajama top and lay down on top of her bed under the fan and listened to the rain on the tin roof. The wind was blowing hard against the slat walls and she knew the storm would be a long one. The occasional headlights on the state road looked like spi-derwebs flaring on the windowpane.

From the edges of sleep she heard a raw scraping sound, like a rat clawing inside the walls. When she raised her head from the pillow, she saw the dead bolt on the back door rotating in its socket, then sliding free of the door frame.

The man other people called Johnny Remeta stepped into the room, water sliding off his hat and black raincoat, a metal nail file glinting in his right hand.

"I t'ought you was my auntie. She fixing to be here any minute," Little Face said.

"Long drive from Lake Charles. Because that's where she moved to."

Remeta sat down in a chair next to the bed and leaned forward on his hands, his hatted profile in silhouette against the lightning that leaped above the trees on the bayou.

"Can I take off my things? They're wet," he said.

"We ain't got nothing you want, Rain Man. My baby's got the croup. I melted Vicks in hot water. That's how come the room smell like it do. You stay here, you get sick."

He removed his hat and set it crown-down on the floor, then pulled his raincoat off his shoulders and let it hang wet side out on the back of the chair. His eyes settled on her face and mouth and she saw his throat swallow. She pulled the sheet up to her stomach.

"I ain't in that life no more," she said.

He opened and closed his hands on top of his thighs, his veins cording under the skin.

"You've been with white men?" he asked.

"Down South the color line never got drawn when it come to the bedroom."

Then he said something that was lost in the thunder or the thickness that caused his words to bind in his throat.

"I cain't hear you," she said.

"What difference does one more make?"

"I ain't want your money. I ain't want you, Rain Man. You got to go back where you come from."

"Don't talk to me like that," he said. The rain clattered on the roof and sluiced down over the windows. Little Face could feel her heart beating inside the thinness of her pajama top. The elastic of her nylon panties cut into her skin, but she knew she should not move in order to make herself more comfortable, although she could not explain why she knew this.

Remeta's breath came out in a ragged exhalation before he spoke.

"I've used a trick to scare people so I wouldn't have to hurt them. I'll show you," he said.

He slipped a blue-black snub-nosed revolver from a holster that was attached to his ankle with a Velcro strap. He flipped the cylinder out of the frame and ejected all six rounds into his palm. They were thick and brass-cased and seemed too large for the size of the revolver. He inserted one back into a chamber and spun the cylinder, then flipped the cylinder back into the frame without looking at where the loaded chamber had landed.

"Ever read about Doc Holliday? His edge was everybody knew he didn't care if he lived or died. So I do this sometimes and it makes people dump in their drawers," Remeta said.

He cocked the revolver, pressed the barrel against the side of his head, and pulled the trigger.

"See, your face jumped. Just like it was you instead of me about to take the bullet. But I can tell by the weight where the round is," he said.

She pushed herself up on her hands so her back was against the headboard. She thought she was going to lose control of her bladder. She looked at her baby in the crib and at the glow of a television set inside the cabin of a neighbor who worked nights and at her plastic welfare charge card on the table and next to it the thirteen dollars she had to make last until the end of the week and at the cheap clothes that hung on hangers in her closet. She breathed the funk that rose from her armpits and a soapy odor that either came from her bedclothes or her pajama top, and her breasts seemed to hang like an old woman's jugs from her skeleton. Her stomach had stretch marks on it and felt flaccid and like a water-filled balloon at the same time, and she realized she owned absolutely nothing of value in this world, not even in her own person, nor could she call upon one friend or resource, to bargain for her and her baby's life, that if she was lucky the world would simply take what it needed from her and leave a piece of something behind.

"I ain't gonna fight you no more, Rain Man. I'm just a nigger."

She pulled the sheet off her and sat on the side of the bed, her feet not quite touching the floor, her eyes downcast.

"You shouldn't use racial words like that. It's what whites have taught you people to do. To feel bad about yourself," he said, and sat beside her. He moved his arm around her waist but did not look at her. Instead, his lips moved silently, as though he were talking to other people in the room.

"You coming apart, Rain Man?" she said.

"You couldn't guess at what's in my head, girl."

She unfastened his belt and unbuttoned the top of his trousers and pulled his zipper partway down. She placed one hand inside his underwear and looked into his eyes. They were black, then suddenly apprehensive in the flashes of light through the window, as though he were watching his own behavior from outside himself and was not sure which person he was.

Her hand moved mechanically, as though it were disconnected from her. She watched the side of his face.

She took her hand away and let it rest by his thigh.

"It ain't me you want," she said.

"Yes, it is."

"The one you want is the one you cain't have."

He got up from the bed and stood in front of her, his legs slightly spread, his unbuttoned trousers exposing the top of his Jockey underwear. His stomach was as flat as a swimmer's, smooth as tallow in the flashes of lightning through the window.

"Take off your clothes," he said.

"Won't do no good, Rain Man. Can kill me and my baby, both. But it ain't gonna get you no satisfaction."

He made a sound that she could not interpret, like someone who knew his anger must always be called upon in increments and never allowed to have complete expression.

He tucked in his shirt and worked the zipper up on his trousers and fastened the button at the top and began buckling his belt. But his fingers started shaking and he could not line up the hole in the leather with the metal tongue in the buckle.

She reached out to help him. That's when his fist exploded on the side of her face.

She found Bootsie and me that Sunday evening at Jefferson Island while we were eating supper in the restaurant by the lake, the sun glowing through the oak trees and Spanish moss. I watched her come up the winding walkway through the flower gardens and groups of tourists, her diapered baby mounted on her arm, her blue-jeans shorts rolled up high on her thighs, her face bruised like an overripe eggplant.

She marched into the restaurant and stopped in front of our table.

"Somebody shit in that white boy's brain. It ain't me done it, either. You better get him out of our lives, Sad Man. I mean now. 'Cause he come back around, I got me a gun now and I'm gonna blow his fucking head off," she said.

I walked outside with her into the gardens and we sat down on a scrolled-iron bench. Through the restaurant windows I could see Bootsie by herself at our table, staring out at the lake, her coffee cold and her dessert uneaten.