I guess I looked like a drowned cat. I hadn't eaten in two days, and my boots were laced around my neck and the knees were tore out of my britches. He had on a blue raincoat and a straw hat, with water sluicing off the brim, and his beard was silky and black and pointed like a Chinaman's.

"Jude LaRose's place. It's somewhere around here, ain't it?" I said.

"You on it now, man."

"Where's he live at?"

"Why you want to know that?"

"I'm a friend of his. He told me to come out."

He leaned down to the window of the cab and said to the Mexicans inside, "Dice que es amigo del Señor LaRose." They laughed. The ones in back had the tarp pushed up over their heads so they could see me, and two of them were eating refried beans and tortillas they had folded into big squares between their fingers. But they were a different sort, not the kind to laugh at other people.

"You know where his house is at?" I said.

He'd already lost interest. He hit on the roof with his fist, and they drove off in the rain, with the drill pipe flopping off the back of the bed and the Mexicans in back looking out at me from under the tarp.

I found Jude LaRose's town that evening. It was nothing more than a dirt crossroads set in a cup of hills that had gone purple and red in the sunset. It had a shutdown auction barn and slaughterhouse, a dried-out hog feeder lot next to a railroad bed with no track and a wood water tank that had rotted down on itself, and a shingle-front two-story saloon and cafe, where a little black girl was laying out steaks on a mesquite fire in back. The sidewalk was almost higher than the pickups and horses in front of it, iron-stained with the rusted cusps of tethering rings and pooled with the blood of a cougar someone had shot that day and had hung with wire around the neck from the stanchion of an electric Carta Blanca sign that was the same blue as the glow above the hills.

The inside of the saloon had a stamped tin ceiling, card and domino tables in back, a long bar with old-time towel rings and a wall mirror and brass rail and spittoons, and antlers nailed all over the support posts. A dozen cowboys and oil field roughnecks were playing five-card stud and sipping shots with Pearl and Grand Prize on the side.

The menu was on a chalkboard over the bar. The bartender wore a red chin beard, and his eyes were hollowed deep in his face and his arms were as thick as hams. A fat black woman set a platter of barbecue sandwiches in the service window and rang a bell. The bread was gold and brown with butter and grill marks and soft in the center from the barbecue sauce that had soaked through. The bartender put four bottles of Pearl on the tray and carried it to the card table.

"How much is just the lima bean soup without the sandwich?" I asked. I had to keep my hands flat on the bar when I said it, too, because there was a wood bowl full of crackers and pickles right at the end of my fingers.

"Twenty cents," he said.

"How much for just a cup?"

"Where you from, boy?"

" Louisiana."

"Go around back and I'll tell the nigger to fix you something."

"I ain't ask for a handout."

He pulled up his apron, took a lighter out of his blue jeans, and lit a cigarette. He smoked it and spit a piece of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. He picked up the bowl of crackers and pickles and set it on the counter behind him with the bottles of whiskey and rum and tequila.

"You cain't hang around here," he said.

It had started to rain again, and I could see the water dripping off the Carta Blanca sign on the face of the dead cougar. Its eyes were seamed shut, like it had gone to sleep. A man opened the front door and the rain blew across the floor.

"How far is it to the LaRose house?" I said.

"What you want out there?"

"Mr. LaRose told me to come out."

The cigarette smoke trailed out of the side of his mouth. A shadow had come into his face, like a man who's caught between fear and suspicion and anger at himself and an even greater fear you'll see all these things going on inside him.

He walked down the duckboards and used the phone on the counter. When he put the receiver back down his eyes wouldn't stay fixed on mine.

"Mr. LaRose says for you to order up. He'll be along when it quits raining," he said. He set the bowl of pickles and crackers back in front of me, then pried off the top of a Barge's root beer on a wall opener and set it next to the bowl.

"How about a steak and eggs and those stewed tomatoes?" I said.

"Anything else?"

"How about some fried potatoes?"

"What else?"

"How come a Mexican would carry a M-1 carbine on a pipe truck?" I asked.

He leaned on the bar. I could smell soap and sweat in his clothes. "Where you seen it?" he asked.

"Coming north of the river."

"You ever heard of no God or law west of the Pecos?"

"No."

"It means you see wets, you forget it."

"I don't understand."

"It's a subject you'd best carry on the end of a shit fork," he said.

An hour later the sky was empty and dry and pale behind the hills and you could see the sage for miles when Jude LaRose pulled up next to the sidewalk in a wood-paneled Ford station wagon, leaned over and popped open the passenger door and looked at me from under the brim of his Stetson with those blue eyes you didn't eyer forget. He was a handsome man in every respect-tall, with a flat stomach, his gray hair cropped GI, his skin sun-browned the shade of a cured tobacco leaf-but I never saw beautiful eyes like that on a man before or since. They were the dark blue you see in patches of water down in the Keys, when the day's hot and bright before a storm and a cloud of perfect blue darkness floats across the reef, and you almost think you can dip your hand into the color and rub it on your skin, like you would ink, but for some reason, down below that perfect piece of color, down in those coral canyons, you know a school of hammerheads are shredding the bonito into pink thread.

I sat down next to him, with my duffle between my legs, and closed the door. The seats were made from rolled yellow leather, and the light from the mahogany dashboard shone on the leather and reflected up in Jude's face.

"They want you?" he asked.

"Sir?"

"You know what I mean."

"There're ain't any warrant."

"What was it?"

"A man whipped me with his belt behind Provost's saloon. Another man held me while he done it."

"What else?"

"I caught him later that night. When he was by himself. It worked out different this time."

He unsnapped the button on his shirt pocket and took a Camel out and fitted it in his mouth without ever letting go of my eyes.

"You're not lying about the warrant, are you?" he said.

"I wouldn't lie about something like that."

"What would you lie about?"

"Sir?"

When we drove away I saw the little black girl who had been laying steaks on the mesquite fire run out from the side of the building and wave at the station wagon.

That night I slept on a bare mattress on the floor of a stucco cottage full of garden tools behind the main house. I dreamed I was on a flat-wheeler freight, high up on a trestle above a canyon, and the trestle's supports were folding under the train's weight and the wheels were squealing on the rail as they gushed sparks and fought to gain traction.

The main house was three-story purple brick, with white balconies and widow's walks and poplar trees planted as windbreaks around the yard. There was a bunkhouse with a tar paper roof for the fieldhands, rows of feeder lots and corrugated water tanks and windmills for the livestock, a red barn full of baled hay you could stuff a blimp in, a green pasture with hot fences for Jude's thoroughbreds, a scrap yard that was a museum of steam tractors and Model T flatbed trucks, a hundred irrigated acres set aside for vegetables and melons and cantaloupes, and through a long, sloping valley that fanned into a bluff above the river, deer and Spanish bulls mixed in together, belly-deep in grass.