"You're a very cool lady," I said.

She took a slow, easy hit on the reefer and let the smoke curl out of her mouth into her nose.

"I guess I just don't scare you too much," I said.

She flexed herself on the bed and drew one knee up before her. Her toenails were painted red.

"You gonna do what you gonna do, ain't you?" she said.

"Possession can be serious stuff in Louisiana."

"Honey, if you was interested in 'resting me, you wouldn't be tapping on no do'."

"You're pretty hip, too."

"Why don't you tell me what you want, sweetheart? Somebody tole you the black berry got the sweet juice?"

"Was Hipolyte Broussard your pimp?"

"That's a bad word. Like it mean I doing something I ain't suppose to."

I turned a straight-backed chair around backward and straddled it.

"Let's understand something," I said. "I don't care what y'all do here. I'm after a white man named Jimmie Lee Boggs. I'll do just about anything to find him. I feel that way about him because he shot me. Are we communicating here?"

She smiled lazily in the smoke.

"So you the one?" she said.

"That's right. And let's get rid of this distraction, too." I took the roach out of her fingers and mashed it out in the ashtray. "Did you know Boggs?"

"I seen him."

"Where?"

"He come see Hipolyte."

"Why?"

"Where you been, honey? You ever see black folks who ain't got to give part their money to white folks? You ain't dumb. You just pretend, you. I think you just here to see me." She smiled again and stretched both her arms over her head.

"Did Boggs come see Gros Mama Goula?"

"That white trash mess with Gros Mama, snakes be crawling out his grave."

I heard the screen open on the spring; then the inside door raked back on the buckled linoleum floor, and the black woman in the purple dress with the scrolled blue tattoos on the tops of her breasts stood in the doorway, one hand on her hip, a flowered kerchief curled in her fingers.

"You taking up too much of people's time," she said. "You got jelly roll oh your mind, or you think bothering my womens gonna clean that man outta your head?"

"What?" I said.

She told the woman on the bed to dress and get up to the juke and help wait tables. She picked up the ashtray with the roach in it and threw it outside into the darkness.

"Wait a minute, what did you say?" I said.

She ignored me.

"And tell that drunk nigger giving Al trouble when I be back up there his skinny ass better be gone," she said to the other woman, who buttoned her jeans, pulled on her blouse, and went out the door.

Gros Mama Goula's face was big and hard-boned, like a man's, her eyes deep-set and dark, so that they had a cavernous quality under the broad forehead and thick brows. I had heard stories about her from other Negroes, the juju woman who could blow the fire out of a burn; stop bleeding by pressing her palm against a wound; charm worms out of a child's stomach; cause a witch to invade the marriage bed, straddle the husband, and fornicate with him until his eyes crossed and he would remain forever discontent with his wife.

"What did you say?" I repeated.

"Po-licemens after jelly roll just like everybody else. You want it, you come ax me first, don't be bothering my womens. That ain't what on your mind, though. You got Jimmie Lee Boggs crawling round in your head. Jelly roll ain't gonna get him out you. He lying there, waiting."

"Is this supposed to impress me?"

She opened a cabinet over the stove, took out a jelly glass and a pint bottle of rum, poured herself three fingers, sat down at a small breakfast table, and lit a cigarette. She drank down the rum, inhaled from the cigarette, blew smoke out over her hand, and studied her knuckles as though I were not there.

"What you want?" she said.

"For openers take a break on the traiteur routine."

"What you mean?"

"You talked with Dorothea. You knew I was looking for Boggs. You'd seen my picture in the newspaper, or you figured out I was one of the men he shot."

"Think what you want. I ain't got the problem."

"What I think is you're operating a place of prostitution."

She smoked and flicked her ashes and waited for me to go on.

"I don't bother you?" I said.

"You want to carry me up to the jail, that's your bidness. They's people pay my bond make sure I stay open."

"Was Jimmie Lee Boggs cutting into Hipolyte's and your action?"

"Darlin', they ain't nobody cutting into my action."

"I don't believe you, Gros Mama. There's not a hot-pillow house in South Louisiana that doesn't have to piece off its action to New Orleans."

She poured rum into her glass again, then as an afterthought looked at me and pointed her finger at the bottle.

"No thanks," I said.

She screwed the top slowly onto the bottle.

"Lookie here," she said. "You don't care 'bout them dagos in New Orleans, 'bout what some niggers be doing down here on Saturday night. You want that man 'cause he hurt you, 'cause he walking round in your sleep at night. You wake up tired in the morning, cain't open and close your hands on the side the bed. You dragging a big chain all day long. Food don't taste no good, women's just something for other mens. You can tell the whole round world I lying, but me and you knows better."

I stared at her woodenly. She continued to smoke idly.

"I ain't seen him since they 'rested him for killing that man with the ball bat," she said. "He in New Orleans, though."

"How do you know?"

"He gonna die over there. In a black room, with lightning jumping all over it. Don't mess with it, darlin'. Come down see Gros Mama when you wake up with that bad feeling. She make you right," she said, and squared her shoulders so that the tattoos on her breasts stretched like a spiderweb.

The next morning Alafair and I raked and burned leaves under the pecan trees in my front yard. It was a perfect blue-gold autumn day, and the smoke from the fire hung in the spangled sunlight and drifted out across the bayou into the cypress trees. A little over two years earlier my wife, Annie, and I had been seining for shrimp just the other side of Marsh Island when we saw a twin-engine plane trailing a column of thick black smoke across the sky. It pancaked into a trough, dipped one wing into a wave, and cartwheeled like a child's stick toy across the water. While Annie called the Coast Guard on the emergency channel, I went over the side with an air tank and weight belt and swam down into the greenish-yellow light to the plane, which had come to rest upside down in a trench. Through the window, among the drowned bodies undulating in their seats, I saw Alafair kicking her legs and fighting to keep her head afloat inside a wobbling envelope of trapped air. Her small mouth looked like a guppy's above the waterline.

Later, Annie and I would find the bruise marks on her legs where her mother had held her up in the air pocket while she herself lost her life.

I gave Alafair my mother's name, and after Annie's death I legally adopted her. But even now I still knew little of the Central American world which she had fled, except that memories of it had given her nightmares for a long time and she thought of manual labor almost as play. She loved to work in the yard with me. She held the rake handle midway down and scoured the ground bare with the tines, her elastic-waisted jeans grimed at the knees, her face hot and bright with her work. She wore her yellow T-shirt with a smiling purple whale and the words "Baby Orca" embossed on it, but it was too small for her now and her arms looked fat and round in the sleeves.

It was too good a day to dwell on Jimmie Lee Boggs and Gros Mama Goula and a lot a mojo claptrap, so Alafair and I took the jugboat and headed out Southwest Pass onto the salt. It was called a jugboat because it had been used by a marine seismograph company to lay out and recover the long rubber-coated cables and instruments, or "jugs," that recorded the vibrations off the substrata after an explosion was detonated in the drill hole. It was narrow and long, built for speed, with a low draft, a big Chrysler engine, two screws, and the windowed pilot's cab flush on the stern. I had outfitted it with gear boxes, ice bins, a small galley, a bait well, winches for my trawling nets, iron rod-and-reel sockets for trolling. In the middle of the deck I bolted down a telephone-company spool table, with a collapsible Cinzano umbrella set in the center hole.