His lips looked gray and cracked, the texture of snakeskin that has dried in the sun, and the whites of his eyes were laced with pink blood vessels. The light through the blinds seemed to reflect like a liquid yellow presence in his incredulous glare. I heard his drinking glass crash to the floor and the call button clicking rapidly in his fist as I walked toward the door.

That evening I had to go far down the bayou in a boat to tow back a rental whose engine one of our customers had plowed across a sandbar. It was dark before I finally locked up the bait shop and walked to the house. Boptsie was asleep, but as soon as I entered the bedroom I knew how she had spent the last three hours. Her breathing had filled the room with a thick, sweet odor like flowers soaked overnight in cream sherry.

I sat on the edge of the bed in my skivvies and looked at the smooth white curve of her hip in the moonlight. I rubbed my hand along her rump and thigh; her skin felt heated, flushed, as though she were experiencing an erotic dream, but it was also insensitive to my touch.

I put my fingers in the thick curls of her hair, kissed her back, and felt like a fifty-five-year-old adolescent impotently contending with his own throbbing erection.

I had been saved from my alcoholism by A A. Why did it have to befall her?

But I already knew the answer. The best way to become a drunk is to live with one.

What are we going to do, Boots? I thought. Bring the dirty boogie full tilt into our lives, then do a pit stop five years down the road and see if the trade-off was worth it?

But somebody else was already working on an answer for me. At 2:00 a.m. I heard the door on my father's old tractor shed, which was always padlocked, knocking against the jamb in the wind, then I heard music, a song that was a generation out-of-date, that seemed to float across wine-dark seas crowded with ships in a time when the lights almost went out all over the world.

I slipped on my khakis and loafers, took my.45 from under the bed, and walked with a flashlight along the edge of the coulee to the shed. I bounced the beam ahead of me on the willows and the weathered gray sides of the shed, the open door that drifted back and forth on two rusty hinges, the hasp and padlock that had been splintered loose from the wood.

Then I clearly heard the words to 'Harbor Lights.'

I clicked off the safety on the.45, flipped back the door with my foot, and shined the light inside the shed.

In front of my father's old tractor was a butcher block where we used to dress game. Someone had covered it with white linen that was almost iridescent in the moonlight burning through the spaces in the slats. On the tablecloth was a cassette player, a clean china plate with a blue, long-stemmed rose laid across it, a freshly uncorked bottle of Jack Daniel's, a glass tumbler filled with four inches of bourbon, and a sweat-beaded uncapped bottle of Dixie beer on the side. A crystal goblet of burgundy that was half empty stood in a shaft of moonlight on the far side of the butcher block. On the rim of the glass was the perfect lipsticked impression of a woman's mouth.

Before he had been elected to office, the sheriff had owned a dry-cleaning business and had been president of the local Rotary Club, or perhaps it was the Lions, I don't recall which, but it was one of those businessmen's groups which manage to do a fair amount of civic good in spite of their unprofessed and real objective.

He was watering his window plants with a hand-painted flowered teapot while I told him of my 2:00 a.m. visitor. He had a round, cleft chin, soft cheeks veined with tiny blue and red lines, and a stomach that pouched over his gunbelt, but his posture was always so erect, his shirt tucked in so tightly, that he gave you the impression of a man who was both younger and in better physical condition than he actually was.

But even though the Rotary or Lions Club still held strong claim on the sheriff's soul, he often surprised me with a hard-edged viewpoint that I suspected had its origins in his experience at the Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War, which he refused, under any circumstances, to discuss with anyone.

'Well, you didn't drink any of it. That's what seems most important, if you ask me.'

'Some people might call that a pretty cavalier attitude,' I said.

'It's your call. Write it up, Dave. Bring our fingerprint man in on it. I don't know what else to say.'

He sat down in his swivel chair behind his desk. He pushed at his stomach with his stiffened fingers. Then he had another running start at it.

'Dave, what's it going to sound like when you tell people that somebody, maybe a woman, did a B and E on you so she could cover your butcher block with a tablecloth and set it with burgundy, cold beer, and expensive whiskey?'

'It's Buchalter, Sheriff. Or somebody working with him.'

'What was the motive for his house call last night?'

'He doesn't need one. He's a psychopath.'

'That's no help.' He began picking a series of bent paper clips out of a glass container and throwing them at the waste can. 'Before you came to the department, we had a particularly nasty homicide case.' Ping. 'Maybe you remember it. A lowlife degenerate named Jerry Dipple raped and then hanged a four-year-old child.' Ping. 'We thought we had him dead bang. His prints were all over the murder scene, there was a torn theater ticket in his shirt pocket from the show where he'd abducted the child, the rope he used was in the bottom of his closet.' Ping. 'Guess what? The lamebrain handling the investigation went into Dipple's house and seized the evidence without a warrant. Then when he realized he'd screwed up, he put the evidence back and let his partner find it later.' Ping.

'Guess what again? I learned about it and didn't say a thing. But Dipple's lawyer was a smart greasebag from Lafayette, you know him, the same guy who was fronting points for a PCB-incinerator outfit last year, and he found out what the lamebrain and his partner had done.' Ping. 'Our case was down the drain and we were about to turn loose a child killer who had done it before and would do it again. Bad day for the good guys, Dave.

'Except six months earlier we had raided a trick pad on the St. Martin line. One of the girls had some photographs of our lawyer-friend from Lafayette, I'm talking about real Tijuana specials, you know what I mean? So I invited our friend in and let him have a look. If he wanted to investigate our practices, we'd let some people in the state bar association have a peek at his.' Ping, ping, ping.

'Dipple fried. I thought it might bother me. But the night he rode the bolt I took my grandchildren to the movies and then went home and slept like a stone.'

'I don't know if I get your point.'

'I'll be honest with you, I don't know what we're dealing with here. Whatever it is, it's not part of the normal ebb and flow.' He stopped, ran his fingers through his hair, and kneaded the back of his neck. 'Look, I think Buchalter is trying to hit you where you're weakest.'

'Where's that?'

'Booze.'

'A guy like that can't make me drink, Sheriff.'

'I'm not talking about you.' He rubbed one hand on top of the other, then folded them on the desk blotter and looked me in the face. 'This guy's trying to mess up your family and I think he's doing a good job of it.'

'That's not a very cool thing to say, Sheriff.'

'Bootsie almost had a DWI yesterday afternoon.'

I felt something sink in my chest.

'Fortunately the right deputy stopped her and let the other lady drive,' the sheriff said.

The room seemed filled with white sound. I took my sunglasses out of their leather case, then slipped them back in again. I opened my mouth behind my fist to clear my ears and looked out the window. Then I said, 'What other lady?'