In a year's time Malcolm smoked, hyped, snorted, bonged, dropped, or huffed the whole street dealer's menu-bazooka, Afghan skunk, rock, crank, brown scag, and angel dust. His mother brought him back to New Iberia for a Christmas visit. Malcolm borrowed a car and went to a convenience store for some eggnog. Then he changed his mind and decided he didn't need any eggnog. Instead, he sodomized and executed the eighteen-year-old college girl who ran the night register. He maintained at his trial that he was loaded on speed and angel dust and had no memory of even entering the convenience store. I was a witness at his electrocution, and I'm convinced to this day that even while they strapped and buckled his arms and legs to the oak chair, fitted the leather gag across his mouth, and dropped the black cloth over his face, even up to the moment the electrician closed the circuits and arched a bolt of lightning through his body that cooked his brains and exploded his insides, Malcolm did not believe these people, whom he had never seen before or harmed in any way, would actually take his life for a crime which he believed himself incapable of committing.

That evening I sat at the kitchen table with a nautical chart of the Louisiana coast spread out before me.

Through the open bedroom door I heard Bootsie turn on the shower water. Recently she had made a regular habit of taking long showers in the afternoon, washing the cigarette smoke from a lounge out of her hair, holding her face in the spray until her skin was ruddy and the appearance of clarity came back into her eyes. I had not spoken to her yet about the DWI she had almost received the previous day.

I flattened and smoothed the nautical chart with my hand and penciled X's at the locations where I had sighted the German U-boat when I was in college and on my boat with Batist. Then I made a third X where Hippo Bimstine's friend, the charter-boat skipper, had pinged it with his sonar. The three X's were all within two miles of each other, on a rough southwest-northeastwardly drift line that could coincide with the influences of both the tide and the currents of the Mississippi's alluvial fan. If there was a trench along that line, tilting downward with the bevel of the continental shelf, then the movements of the sub had a certain degree of predictability.

But I couldn't concentrate on the chart. I stared out the back window at the tractor shed by the edge of the coulee. The door yawned open, and the late sun's red light shone like streaks of fire through the cracks in the far wall. I called Clete at his apartment in New Orleans and told him about the break-in of last night, the linen-covered butcher block, the offering of bourbon, the crystal goblet half-filled with burgundy and rimmed with lipstick and moonlight.

'So?' he said when I had finished.

'It's not your ordinary B and E, Clete.'

'It's Buchalter or his trained buttwipes, Streak.'

'Why the blue rose on a china plate?'

'To mess up your head.'

'You don't think it has anything to do with the vigilante?'

'Everybody in New Orleans knows the vigilante's MO now. Why should Buchalter be any different?'

'Why a woman's lipstick on the glass?'

'He's probably got a broad working with him. Sometimes they dig leather and swastikas.'

I blew out my breath and looked wanly through the screen at the fireflies lighting in the purple haze above the coulee.

'You got framed once on a murder beef, Dave. But you turned it around on them, with nobody to help you,' Clete said. 'I've got a feeling something else is bothering you besides some guy with rut for brains opening bottles in your tractor shed.'

I could still hear the shower water running in the bathroom.

'Dave?'

'Yes.'

'You want me to come over there?'

'No, that's all right. Thanks for your time, Clete. I'll call you in a couple of days.'

'Before you go, there's something I wanted to mention. It sounds a little zonk, though.'

'Zonk?'

'Yeah, deeply strange. Brother Oswald told me he was in the merch when World War II broke out.' He paused a moment. 'Maybe it's just coincidence.'

'Come on, Clete, get the peanut brittle out of your mouth.'

'He says he was a seventeen-year-old seaman on an oil tanker sailing out of New Orleans in nineteen forty-two. Guess what? A pigboat nailed them just south of Grand Isle.'

A solitary drop of perspiration slid down the side of my rib cage. Through the back screen I could see black storm clouds, like thick curds of smoke, twisting from the earth's rim against the molten red ball of setting sun.

'He says while the tanker was burning, the sub came to the surface and rammed and machine-gunned the lifeboats. He was floating around in the waves for a couple of days before a shrimper fished him out… It's kind of weird, isn't it, I mean the guy showing up about the same time as Buchalter?'

'Yeah, it is.'

'Probably doesn't mean anything, though, does it? I mean… What do you think?'

'Like somebody told me yesterday, I'm firing in the hole on this one, Clete.'

After I hung up I walked into the bedroom. Through the shower door I could see Bootsie rinsing herself under the flow of water. She held her hair behind her neck with both hands and turned in a slow circle, her buttocks brushing against the steamed glass, while the water streamed down her breasts and sides. I wanted to close the curtains and latch the bedroom door, rub her dry with a towel, walk her to our bed, put heir nipples in my mouth, kiss her lean, supple stomach, then feel my own quivering energies enter and lose themselves in hers, as though my desperate love could overcome the asp that she had taken to her breast.

Then I heard her open the medicine cabinet and unsnap the cap on a plastic vial. Her face jumped when she saw me in the mirror.

'Oh, Dave, you almost gave me a coronary,' she said. Her hand closed on the vial. I took it from her and read the typed words on the label.

'Where'd you get these, Boots?'

'Dr. Bienville,' she said.

'Dr. Bienville is a script doctor and should be in prison.'

'It's just a sedative. Don't make a big thing out of it.'

'They're downers. If you drink with them, they can kill you.' I shook the pills into the toilet bowl, then cracked the vial in the palm of my hand and dropped it in the wastebasket. Her eyes were blinking rapidly as she watched me push down the handle on the toilet. She started to speak, but I didn't let her.

'I'm not going to lose you, Boots,' I said, wrapped her terry-cloth robe around her, and walked her to our bed.

We sat down on the side of the mattress together, and I blotted her hair with a towel, then laid her back on the pillow. Her face looked pale and fatigued in the gloom. I remained in a sitting position and picked up one of her hands in mine.

'The sheriff told me about your almost getting a DWI,' I said. 'If a person commits himself to an alcoholic life, he or she is going to drive drunk. Then eventually that person gets a DWI or maybe he kills somebody. It's that simple.'

Her eyes started to water; she looked sideways at the window and the curtains that were lifting in the breeze.

'The sheriff's a good guy,' I said. 'He knows we're having problems. He wants to help. Everybody does, Boots. That's why I want you to go to a meeting with me in the morning.'

Her eyes tried to avoid mine. Then she said, 'It's gone that far?'

'An AA meeting isn't the worst fate in the world.'

'Do you think I'm an alcoholic?'

'Booze is starting to hurt you. That fact's not going to go away.'

She turned her head sideways on the pillow and rested the back of her wrist on her temple.

'Why did this come into our lives?' she said.

'Because I let Hippo Bimstine take me over the hurdles.'