I blame myself for what happened next.

Buford and me were hoeing weeds in the string beans at the end of the field, when this old Mexican hooked one wheel of the pump truck off the edge of the irrigation ditch and dropped the whole thing down on the axle. I left Buford alone and got the jack and some boards out of the cab, and the old man and me snugged them under the frame and started jacking the wheel up till we could rock it forward and get all four wheels on dirt again. Then I looked through the square of light under the truck and saw Buford across the field, playing under a shade tree with the little black girl just as Jude came down the road in his station wagon.

I felt foolish, maybe cowardly, too, for a reason I couldn't explain, lying on my belly, half under the truck, while Jude got out of his station wagon and walked toward his son with a look that made Buford's face go white.

He pulled Buford by his hand up on the black family's gallery, went right through their door with no more thought than he would in kicking open a gate on a hog lot, and a minute later came back outside with one of the little girl's dresses wadded up in his hand.

First, he whipped Buford's bare legs with a switch, then pulled the dress down over his head and made him stand on a grapefruit crate out in the middle of the field, with all the Mexicans bent down in the rows, pretending they didn't see it.

I knew I was next.

He drove out to where the pump truck was still hanging on the jack, and stared out the car window at me like I was some dumb animal he knew would never measure up.

"You didn't mind your priorities. What you see yonder is the cost of it," he said.

"Then you should have took it out on me."

"Don't be a hypocrite on top of it. If you had any guts, you'd have spoken up before I whipped him."

I could feel my eyes watering, the words quivering in my mouth. "I think you're a sonofabitch, Jude."

"He's a LaRose. That's something you won't ever understand, Jerry Joe. You come from white trash, so it's not your fault. But you've got a chance to change your life here. Don't waste it."

He dropped the transmission in first gear, his face as empty of feeling as a skillet, and left me standing in the weeds, the dust from his tires pluming in a big cinnamon cloud behind his car.

I'd like to tell you I drug up that night, but I didn't. Jude's words burned in my cheeks just like a slap, like only he knew, of all the people in the world, who I really was.

It's funny how you can become the reflection you see in the eyes of a man you admire and hate at the same time. The family went back to Louisiana in the fall, and I stayed on and slant drilled, brought wets across the river, killed wild horses for a dog food company, and fell in love every Saturday night down in Chihuahua. Those boys from Huntsville pen and the pea farm at Sugarland didn't have anything on me.

When he died of lung cancer ten years later, I thought I'd go to the funeral and finally make my peace with him. I made it as far as the door, where two guys told me Mr. LaRose had left instructions the service was to be attended only by family members.

Ole Jude really knew how to do it.

It was dark now and rain was falling on the bayou and the tin roof of the bait shop. Jerry Joe drank out of a thick white coffee cup across the table from me. A bare electric light bulb hung over our heads, and his face was shadowed by his fedora.

"What's the point?" I said.

"You're a parish cop in a small town, Dave. When's the last time you turned the key on a rich guy?"

"A DWI about twenty years ago."

"So am I getting through here?"

"It doesn't change anything."

"I saw Buford pitch in a college game once. A kid slung the bat at him on a scratch single. The kid's next time up, Buford hit him in the back with a forkball. He acted sorry as hell about it while the kid was writhing around in the dirt, but after the game I heard him tell his catcher, 'Looks like we made a Christian today.'"

"Buford's not my idea of a dangerous man."

"It's a way of mind. They don't do things to people, they let them happen. Their hands always stay clean."

"If you're letting the LaRoses use you, that's your problem, Jerry Joe."

"Damn, you make me mad," he said. He clicked his spoon on the handle of his cup and looked out at the rain falling through the glare of the flood lamps. His leather jacket was creased and pale with wear, and I wondered how many years ago he had bought it to emulate the man who had helped incinerate the Florence of northern Europe.

"Take care of what you got, Dave. Maybe deep-six the job, I'll get you on with the union. It's easy. You get a pocketful of ballpoint pens and a clipboard and you can play it till you drop," he said.

"You want to come up and eat with us?"

"That's sounds nice…" His face looked melancholy under his fedora. "Another time, though. I've got a gal waiting for me over in Lafayette. I was never good at staying married, know what I mean?… Dave, the black hooker who saw the screenwriter popped, you still want to find her, she works for Dock Green… Hey, tomorrow I'm sending you a jukebox. It's loaded, podna-Lloyd Price, Jimmy Clanton, Warren Storm, Dale and Grace Broussard, Iry LeJeune… Don't argue."

And he went out the screen door into the rain. The string of electric bulbs overhead made a pool of yellow light around his double shadow, like that of a man divided against himself at the bottom of a well.

Dock Green was an agitated, driven, occasionally vicious, ex-heavy-equipment operator, who claimed to have been kidnapped from a construction site near Hue by the Viet Cong and buried alive on the banks of the Perfume River. His face was hard-edged, as though it had been layered from putty that had dried unevenly. It twitched constantly, and his eyes had the lidless intensity of a bird's, focusing frenetically upon you, or the person behind you, or the inanimate object next to you, all with the same degree of wariness.

He owned a construction company, a restaurant, and half of a floating casino, but Dock's early money had come from prostitution. Whether out of an avaricious fear that his legitimate businesses would dry up, or the satisfaction he took in controlling the lives of others, he had never let go of the girls and pimps who worked the New Orleans convention trade and kicked back 40 percent to him.

He had married into the Giacano family but soon became an embarrassment to them. Without warning, in a restaurant or in an elevator, Dock's voice would bind in his throat, then squeeze into a higher register, like a man on the edge of an uncontrollable rage. During these moments, his words would be both incoherent and obscene, hurled in the faces of anyone who tried to console or comfort him.

He had a camp and acreage off of old Highway 190 between Opelousas and Baton Rouge, right by the levee and the wooded mudflats that fronted the Atchafalaya River. His metallic gray frame house, with tin roof and screened gallery, was surrounded by palm and banana trees, and palmettos grew in the yard and out in his pasture, where his horses had snubbed the winter grass down to the dirt. Clete and I drove down the service road in Clete's convertible and stopped at the cattleguard. The gate was chain-locked to the post.

A man in khakis and a long-sleeve white shirt with roses printed on it was flinging corn cobs out of a bucket into a chicken yard. He stopped and stared at us. Clete blew the horn.

"What are you doing?" I said.

"He's crazy. Give him something to work with."

"How about waiting here, Clete?"

"The guy's got syphilis of the brain. I wouldn't go in his house unless I put Kleenex boxes over my shoes first."