For a time his mother and mine worked together in a laundry, and Jerry Joe would come home from school with me and play until my mother and his came down the dirt road in my father's lopsided pickup. We owned a hand-crank phonograph, and Jerry Joe would root in a dusty pile of 78's and pull out the old scratched recordings of the Hackberry Ramblers and Iry LeJeune and listen to them over and over again, dancing with himself, smiling elfishly, his shoulders and arms cocked like a miniature prizefighter's.

One day after New Year's my father came back unexpectedly from offshore, where he worked as a derrick man, up on the monkey board, high above the drilling platform and the long roll of the Gulf. He'd been fired after arguing with the driller, and as he always did when he lost his job, he'd spent his drag-up check on presents for us and whiskey at Provost's Bar, as though new opportunity and prosperity were just around the corner.

But Jerry Joe had never seen my father before and wasn't ready for him. My father stood silhouetted in the doorway, huge, grinning, irreverent, a man who fought in bars for fun, the black hair on his chest bursting out of the two flannel shirts he wore.

"You dance pretty good. But you too skinny, you. We gone have to fatten you up. Y'all come see what I brung," he said.

At the kitchen table, he began unloading a canvas drawstring bag that was filled with smoked ducks, pickled okra and green tomatoes, a fruit cake, strawberry preserves, a jar of cracklings, and bottle after long-necked bottle of Jax beer.

"Your mama work at that laundry, too?… Then that's why you ain't eating right. You tell your mama like I tell his, the man own that place so tight he squeak when he walk," my father said. "Don't be looking at me like that, Davie. That man don't hire white people lessen he can treat them just like he do his colored."

Jerry Joe went back in the living room and sat in a stuffed chair by himself for a long time. The pecan trees by the house clattered with ice in the failing light. Then he came back in the kitchen and told us he was sick. My father put a jar of preserves and two smoked ducks in a paper bag for him and stuck it under his arm and we drove him home in the dark.

That night I couldn't find the hand crank to the phonograph, but I thought Jerry Joe had simply misplaced it. The next day I had an early lesson about the nature of buried anger and hurt pride in a child who had no one in whom he could confide. When the school bus stopped on the rock road where Jerry Joe lived, I saw a torn paper bag by the ditch, the dog-chewed remains of the smoked ducks, the strawberry preserves congealed on the edges of the shattered Mason jar.

He never asked to come to our house again, and whenever I saw him he always conveyed the feeling I had stolen something valuable from him rather than he from us.

Clete parked his dinged, chartreuse Cadillac convertible by the boat ramp and walked down the dock with Jerry Joe toward the bait shop. Jerry Joe was ebullient, enthused by the morning and the personal control he brought to it. His taut body looked made of whipcord, his hair thick and blond and wavy, combed in faint ducktails in back. He wore oxblood tasseled loafers, beige slacks, a loose-fitting navy blue sports shirt with silver thread in it. I said he walked down the dock. That's not true. Jerry Joe rolled, a Panama hat spinning on his finger, his thighs flexing against his slacks, change and keys ringing in his pockets, the muscles in his shoulders as pronounced as oiled rope.

"Comment la vie, Dave? You still sell those ham-and-egg sandwiches?" he said, and went through the screen door without waiting for an answer.

"Why'd you do this, Clete?" I said.

"There're worst guys in the life," he replied.

"Which ones?"

Jerry Joe bought a can of beer and a paper plate of sliced white boudin at the counter and sat at a table in back.

"You're sure full of sunshine, Dave," he said.

"I'm off the clock. If this is about Mingo, you should take it to the office," I said.

He studied me. At the corner of his right eye was a coiled white scar. He speared a piece of boudin with a toothpick and put it in his mouth.

"I'm bad for business here, I'm some kind of offensive presence?" he asked.

"We're way down different roads, Jerry Joe."

"Pull my jacket. Five busts, two convictions, both for operating illegal gambling equipment. This in a state that allows cock fighting… You got a jukebox here?"

"No."

"I heard about the drowned black girl. Mingo's dirty on this?"

"That's the name on the warrant."

"He says his car got boosted."

"We've got two witnesses who can put him together with the car and the girl."

"They gotta stand up, though. Right?" he asked.

"Nobody had better give them reason not to."

He pushed his plate away with the heel of his hand, leaned forward on his elbows, rolling the toothpick across his teeth. Under the bronze hair of his right forearm was a tattoo of a red parachute and the words 101st Airborne.

"I hire guys like Mingo to avoid trouble, not to have it. But to give up one of my own people, even though maybe he's a piece of shit, I got to have… what's the term for it… compelling reasons, yeah, that's it," he said.

"How does aiding and abetting sound, or conspiracy after the fact?"

He scratched his face and glanced around the bait shop. His eyes crinkled at the corners. "You like my tattoo? Same outfit as Jimi Hendrix," he said.

I pushed a napkin and a pencil stub toward him. "Write down an address, Jerry Joe. NOPD will pick him up. You won't be connected with it."

"Why don't you get a jukebox? I'll have one of my vendors come by and put one in. You don't need no red quarters. You keep a hundred percent," he said. "Hey, Dave, it's all gonna work out. It's a new day. I guarantee it. Don't get tied up with this Aaron Crown stuff."

"What?"

But he drank his beer, winked at me as he fitted on his Panama hat, then walked out to the Cadillac to wait for Clete.

Monday morning, when I went into work, I walked past Karyn LaRose's blue Mazda convertible in the parking lot. She sat behind the wheel, in dark glasses with a white scarf tied around her hair. When I glanced in her direction, she picked up a magazine from the seat and began reading it, a pout on her mouth.

"There's a guy talks like a college professor waiting to see you, Dave," Wally, the dispatcher, said. His great weight caused a perpetual flush in his neck and cheeks, as though he had just labored up a flight of stairs, and whenever he laughed, usually at his own jokes, his breath wheezed deep in his chest.

I looked through the doorway of the waiting room, then pointed my finger at the back of a white-haired man.

"That gentleman there?" I asked Wally.

"Let's see, we got two winos out there, a bondsman, a woman says UFOs is sending electrical signals through her hair curlers, the black guy cleans the Johns, and the professor. Let me know which one you t'ink, Dave." His face beamed at his own humor.

Clay Mason, wearing a brown narrow-cut western coat with gold and green brocade on it, a snap-button turquoise shirt, striped vaquero pants, and yellow cowboy boots on his tiny feet, sat in a folding chair with a high-domed pearl Stetson on his crossed knee.

I was prepared to dislike him, to dismiss him as the Pied Piper of hallucinogens, an irresponsible anachronism who refused to die with the 1960s. But I was to learn that psychedelic harlequins don't survive by just being psychedelic harlequins.

"Could I help you, sir?" I asked.

"Yes, thank you. I just need a few minutes," he said, turning to look up at me, his thought processes broken. He started to rise, then faltered. I placed my hand under his elbow and was struck by his fragility, the lightness of his bones.