'It goes deeper than that, though, doesn't it? This man… Buchalter… he's evil in a way I don't know how to describe. It's as if he has the power to steal the air out of a room. If I think about him, I can't breathe. It's like I'm drowning.',

'The only power he has is what we allow our fear to give to him.'

But I was falling prey to that old self-serving notion that well-intended rhetoric can remove a stone bruise from the soul.

I pulled the sheet over her and didn't say anything for what seemed a long time. Then I said, to change the subject, 'Who was the woman with you when you got stopped?'

'Sister Marie.'

'Who?'

'Marie Guilbeaux, the nun from Lafayette.'

'What were you doing with her?'

'She was bringing some potted chrysanthemums out to the house. Then she saw me coming out of the convenience store, and I asked her to go with me to the drive-in for a beer. She's a nice person, Dave. She felt bad about her last visit here. What's wrong?'

'I don't want her around here anymore.'

'I don't understand your attitude.'

'She keeps showing up at peculiar times.'

'I don't think you should blame Sister Marie for my behavior, Dave.'

'We'll address our own problems, Boots. We don't need anybody else aboard. That's not an unreasonable attitude, is it?'

'I guess not. But she is nice.'

'I'll fix supper now. Why don't you take a short nap?'

'All right,' she said, and touched my forearm. 'I'm sorry about all this. I want to go to a meeting with you. First thing tomorrow morning. I won't break my promise, either.'

'You're the best.'

'You too, kiddo.'

Later, I strung an entire spool of baling wire, six inches off the ground, hung with tin cans, through the oak and pecan trees in the front and side yards, around the back of the house, across the trunk of the chinaberry tree and the back wall of the tractor shed, over the coulee, and back to Tripod's hutch, where I notched it tightly around an oak trunk. Then I put the sheriffs AR-15 on the top shelf of the bedroom closet, my.45 under the mattress, and got under the sheet next to Bootsie. Her body was warm with sleep, her mouth parted on the pillow with her breathing. The muscles in her back and shoulders and the curve of her hip were as smooth as water sliding over stone. Deep inside a troubling dream she began to speak incoherently, and I pressed myself against her, pulled the contours of her body into mine, breathed the strawberry smell of her hair, and, like a bent atavistic creature from an earlier time, his loins caught between desire and fear, waited for the tinkling of cans on a wire or the soft, milky glow of a predictable dawn.

After work the next afternoon, just as I pulled into the drive, I saw Zoot Bergeron sitting on top of a piling at the end of my dock, flipping pea gravel at the water. I parked my truck under the trees and walked back down the slope toward him. He jumped from the piling, straightened his back, and flung the rest of the gravel into the canebrake. His skin was dusty and his pullover sweater stained with food. In the lobe of his left ear was a tiny green stone, like a bright insect, on a gold pin.

'What's happening, Zoot?' I said.

'I need a job. I thought maybe you could put me on here. I done this kind of boat work before. Lot of it.'

'How'd you get here?'

'Rode the bus to New Iberia. Then walked.'

'You walked fifteen miles?'

'That man yonder give me a ride the last two miles.' He pointed up the road to a parked, mud-caked van where a man in coveralls was working under the front end with a wrench. 'I'll work hard for you, Mr. Dave. I won't get in no trouble, either.'

'What about school, partner?'

'I ain't going back there. I need to train, get in shape, maybe get on a card. You don't need school for that. Mr. Tommy tole me he quit school when he was sixteen.'

'That's part of the reason he's a moral imbecile, Zoot.'

'A wha-'

'What's your mom say about all this?'

He didn't answer.

'Does she know where you are?' I said.

'What she care? She told me this morning I ain't gonna be no better than my daddy. How can I be like my daddy when I never even seen my daddy? I want to join the Marine Corps but she won't sign for me. She say all they'll use me for is cleaning their toilets. She called up the sergeant at the recruiting center and tole him that. That's what she done.'

'Let me be up-front with you, partner. I've got a mess of grief around here right now. I can't help you out, at least not in the way you want me to.'

'Mr. Dave-'

'Sorry, Zoot.'

The air was cool, and red and gold leaves tumbled out of the sunlight into the water. He looked down the road at the shadows among the oak trees, as though they held an answer to his situation.

'I'll find you a place to stay tonight, then I'll drive you to the bus depot in the morning,' I said.

I saw the flicker of injury in his face.

'There've been some bad people around my house, Zoot. I don't want you getting mixed up in it,' I said. 'Look, maybe you should give your mom another chance. Maybe she's scared. In her mind, you're all she's got. That makes her possessive and probably a little selfish. But it's not because she doesn't respect you.'

'It don't make what she say right. You ain't got to find a place for me. That fellow yonder's from New Orleans. He say when he get his van fixed, I can ride back wit' him.'

'You want me to call your mom for you?'

'I ain't going back home. Mr. Tommy'll he'p me out. Y'all can say what you want about him, he ain't a bad white man. He don't get on my case and run me down, he don't tell me he got a mess of grief and don't got time for his friends.'

'I'm sorry you feel that way.'

'You a cop, Mr. Dave.'

'What's that mean?'

'You talk different, you ain't mean like Mr. Baxter, you're smart and educated, too, but you a cop, just like my mama. When it come down to it, you ain't gonna go against the rule, you're on the side got the power. Don't tell me it ain't so, neither.'

He walked down the road through the tunnel of oak trees. His tennis shoes and the bottoms of his jeans were gray with dust, and one elbow poked through the sleeve of his sweater. He squatted in a clump of four-o'clocks and watched the man in coveralls work on his van. In the waning afternoon light his black skin seemed lit with an almost purple sheen.

I went in the house, and Bootsie, Alafair, and I had supper at the kitchen table. Later, Alafair and I fed Tripod and put him in his hutch so he wouldn't make noise in the dead leaves during the night, then I checked the baling wire and tin cans that I had strung the day before and locked up the house. Just after Bootsie and Alafair went to bed, someone knocked on the front screen door.

It was Zoot. He was yawning when I opened the door, and his hair was mussed with pieces of leaves under the yellow porch light.

'Can you come he'p the man wit' the van?' he said.

'I thought you didn't want any favors, Zoot.'

'I didn't ax for one. The man did. He got the tire rod fixed. His batt'ry dead, though.'

'Oh, I see, that's different. Zoot, you're becoming a pain in the butt.'

'He tole me to ax. You don't want to he'p, I can walk down to the fo' corners.'

I locked the door behind me, and we got in my truck. Zoot rubbed the sleep out of his face. Then he said, 'I ain't meant to be rude, Mr. Dave. I just had a lot of stuff on my mind today. I don't see no answer for it, either.'

'You really want to join the Corps?'

'Sure.'

'Let me talk to your mom about it.'

'You'll do that?'

'Why not, partner?'

We drove down the road toward the parked van. The moon was yellow, veiled with a rain ring, low over the cypress trees in the marsh. A few raindrops began hitting on the bayou's surface. In the headlights I could see the man in coveralls bent down into the van's engine, his back pocket swollen with chrome wrenches. But behind the van's shadow I also saw a parked pickup truck, its lights off.