'We're gonna have some coffee. Down at his shop,' Tommy said.

'Breakfast among the worms. How could a girl ask for more?' she said.

'His wife ain't up yet,' Tommy said. Then with his back to the woman, he moved his lips silently so I could read the words Give me some fucking help, man.

I took a quiet breath and put my hands in my back pockets.

'I apologize for not inviting y'all in,' I said. 'But Batist has some doughnuts and some ham-and-egg sandwiches that I can heat up.'

'Boy, that sounds good. I could go for that,' Tommy said. He hit me hard on the arm with the flat of his hand.

The three of us walked down the slope to the dock. I couldn't begin to explain Tommy Blue Eyes' mercurial behavior. He walked on the balls of his feet, talking incessantly, his shoulders rolling, his eyes flicking from the bayou to the outboards leaving the dock to a flight of black geese dissecting the early sun.

He and the woman named Charlotte sat at a spool table under the canvas awning while I went inside and brought out coffee and doughnuts on a tray.

'Call Hippo for me,' Tommy said.

'What for?'

'Maybe I don't want to be enemies anymore. Maybe we ought to work together.'

'Call him yourself,' I said.

'I get three words out and he hangs up.'

'Write him a letter.'

'What I look like, St. Valentine or something?' He glanced at his wristwatch, then shook it close to his ear. 'You got the time?'

'It's ten to six,' I said.

'Look, why should Hippo and me be always cutting a piece out of each other? We're both in the casino business. Hippo's a good businessman, he'd be a good partner, he doesn't steal from people. I want you to tell him I said that.'

'I think you got some damn nerve, Tommy.'

He took his coffee cup away from his mouth and pointed four stiffened fingers into his chest. 'You come out to my house, you give me a lecture on conscience and responsibility, you hit me in the face with a gun, now I get another lecture?'

'Is there anything else you want to tell me? I have some work to do.'

He pushed a knuckle against his teeth, then clamped his hand across my forearm when I attempted to rise. He took it away and made a placating gesture.

'It's not easy for me to talk to Hippo,' he said. I saw his blue eyes fill with a pained, pinched light. 'He just doesn't listen, he sees it one way, it's always been like that, he'd just walk off when I tried to say I was sorry about his little brother. I tried a whole bunch of times.'

'When?'

'When we were growing up.'

'It's between you and him, Tommy. But why don't you say it to him once more, as honestly as you can, then let it go?'

'He's not. He sees me on the street, he looks at me like I was butt crust.'

'So long, Tommy. About the other day, I didn't want to hit you. I'm sorry it happened.' I nodded to the woman as I got up to go.

He wiped part of a doughnut off his mouth with his wrist.

'We're gonna rent a boat and some gear, do some fishing,' he said. 'If you're around later, we'll buy you lunch.'

'I'm tied up. Thanks, anyway,' I said, and walked up the dock toward my house just as Alafair was coming down the slope, with Tripod on his chain, to get me for breakfast.

At noontime Batist and I were outside in the cool lee of the bait shop, serving our customers barbecue chickens from our split-barrel pit, when I saw Tommy and the woman named Charlotte coming up the bayou in one of our boat rentals. The engine was out of the water, and I Tommy was paddling against the current, his face heated and knotted with frustration as the boat veered from side to side. It had rained hard at midmorning, then had stopped abruptly. The woman's hair and sundress were soaked. She looked disgusted.

A few minutes later they came into the bait shop.

Without asking permission the woman went around behind the counter and unrolled a huge wad of paper towels to dry her hair.

'I owe you some money. I ran the motor over a log or something,' Tommy said.

'It's in the overhead,' I said.

He hit on the surface of his watch with his fingers.

'What time is it?' he said.

I pointed at the big electric clock on the wall.

'Twelve-fifteen. Boy, we were out there a long time,' he said. 'A snake ate my fish, too. It came right up to the boat and sucked it off my stringer. Are they supposed to do that?'

'Take an ice chest next time.'

'That's a good idea.' He opened two long-necked beers from the cooler and gave one to the woman, who sat in a chair by a table, rubbing the towels back over her long hair. 'I guess we better hit the road. I didn't know it was already afternoon.'

They went out the screen door, then I saw Tommy stop in the shade, tap one fist on top of another, turn in a circle, then stop again. He looked back through the screen at me and raised his fists momentarily in a boxer's position, as though he wanted to spar. He reminded me of a mental patient spinning about in a bare room.

I walked outside. It was breezy and cool in the shade, and the sun was bright, like yellow needles, on the water.

'What's on your mind, podna?' I said.

He craned a crick out of his neck and pumped his shoulders. The cords in his neck flexed like snakes. Then he shook my hand without speaking. His palm felt like the hide on a roughened baseball.

'You got to understand something, Dave. You mind if I call you Dave?'

'You always have, Tommy.'

'I go by the rules. I don't break rules, not the big ones, anyway. The greaseballs got theirs, cops got 'em, guys like me, micks who've made good from the Channel I'm talking about, we got ours, too. So when somebody breaks the rules, I got no comment. But I don't want to get hurt by it, either. You understand what I'm saying here?'

'No.'

'I never hurt anybody who didn't try to do a Roto-Rooter on me first.'

'A hit's going down that you don't like?'

'I said that? Must be a ventriloquist around here.'

'What's the game, Tommy?'

'No game. I got to do certain things to survive. You hold that against me? But that doesn't mean I wasn't on the square about Hippo. He was once my friend. I ain't trying to job you on that one.'

I watched him walk up the dock toward his car, his head turned sideways into the breeze, the red scab on his nose like an angry flag, his blue eyes hard as a carrion bird's, as though hidden adversaries waited for him on the wind.

I decided that it would take a cryptographer to understand the nuances of Tommy Lonighan.

I walked around the side of the house to the backyard and turned on the soak hose in my vegetable garden. The bamboo and periwinkles along the coulee ruffled in the breeze. Beyond my duck pond, the sugarcane in my neighbor's field flickered with a cool purple and gold light.

Bootsie had gone shopping in New Iberia, and Alafair was fixing sandwiches at the drain board when I walked into the kitchen. From the front of the house I heard the flat, tinny tones of a 1920s jazz orchestra, then the unmistakable bell-like sound of Bunk Johnson's coronet rising out of the mire of C-melody saxophones.

'What's going on, Alf?' I said.

She turned from the counter and looked at me quizzically. I could see the outlines of her training bra under her yellow T-shirt.

'Who put one of my old seventy-eights on the machine?' I said.

'I thought you did,' she said.

The record ended, then the mechanical arm swung back automatically and started again. I walked quickly into the living room. The front door was open, and the curtains were swelling with wind. I opened the screen door and went out on the gallery. The yard and drive were empty and blown with dead leaves. Out on the dirt road black kids on bicycles, with fishing gear propped across their handlebars, were pedaling past the dock. I went back inside, lifted the arm off the record, and turned off the machine. The paper jacket for the record lay on the couch. The record itself was free from any finger smudges; it had been placed on the spindle with professional care.