"Unexpected visit from the wife, Dock?" I asked.

"I don't know why she's got her head up her hole. She's filing for divorce, anyway."

He poked at the fire with a blackened rake. The wind shifted and suddenly the smell hit me. In the center of burning tree limbs and a bed of white ash was the long, charred shape of an alligator.

"It got stuck in my culvert and drowned. A gator don't know how to back up," he said.

"Why don't you bury it?"

"Animals would dig it up. What d' you want here?"

"You've been out in front of me all the time, Dock. I respect that," I said.

"What?"

"About the body on the LaRose plantation and any number of other things. It's hard to float one by you, partner."

His face was smeared by charcoal, warm with the heat of the fire. He watched me as he would a historical enemy crossing field and moat into his enclave.

"I spent some time in the courthouse this afternoon. You've got state contracts to build hospitals," I said.

"So?"

"The contracts are already let. You're going to be a rich man. Eventually Buford's going to take a fall. Why go down with him?"

"Good try, no cigar."

"Tell me, Dock, you think he'll have Crown popped if I set up Crown's surrender?"

"Who gives a shit?"

"A grand jury."

He brushed at his nose with one knuckle, huffed air out a nostril, flicked his eyes off my face to the women in the pool, then looked at nothing, all with the same degree of thought or its absence.

"You're dumb," he said.

"I see."

"You're worried about a worthless geezer and nigger-trouble that's thirty years old. LaRose'll put a two-by-four up your ass."

"How?"

"He wants company."

"Sorry, Dock, I don't follow your drift."

His thick palm squeezed dryly on the hoe handle.

"Why don't people want to step on graves? Because they care about the stiffs that's down there? If he gets his hand on your ankle, he'll pull you in the box with him," he said.

My lips, the skin around my mouth, moved wordlessly in the wind.

Bootsie and I did the dishes together after supper. It had stopped raining, and the sky outside was a translucent blue and ribbed with purple and red clouds.

"You're going to set it up?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"I want to cut the umbilical cord."

"What's the sheriff say?"

"Do it.'"

"What's the problem, then?"

"I don't trust Buford LaRose."

"Oh, Dave," she said, her breath exhaling, her eyes closing then opening. She put her hands on my arms and lay her forehead awkwardly on my shoulder, her body not quite touching mine, like someone who fears her embrace will violate propriety.

In the morning I called Sabelle Crown and told her of Buford's offer. Two hours later the phone on my desk rang.

"I can be out in two or three years?" the voice said.

"Aaron?"

"Is that the deal?" he asked.

"I'm not involved. Use an attorney."

"It's lawyers sold my ass down the river."

"Don't call here again. Understand? I've got nothing more to do with your life."

"You goddamn better hope you don't," he said, and hung up.

The rest of the workweek passed, and I heard nothing more about Aaron Crown. Friday had been a beautiful December day, and the evening was just as fair. The wind was off the Gulf, and you could smell salt and distant rain and night-blooming flowers and ozone in the trees, and you had to remind yourself it was winter and not spring. Bootsie and I decided to go Christmas shopping in Lafayette, and I asked Batist to close the bait shop and stay up at the house with Alafair until we returned.

It wasn't even necessary. She was playing at the neighbor's house next door. When we drove away, Batist was standing in our front yard, his overalls straps notched into his T-shirt, the smooth, saddle-gold texture of his palm raised to say good-bye.

The man in the floppy hat and black rubber big-button raincoat came at sunset, from a great distance, where at first he was just a speck on the horizon, walking across my neighbor's burned sugarcane acreage, ash powdering around his boots, the treeline etched with fire behind him. He could have been a fieldhand looking for a calf stuck in the coulee, a tenant fanner shortcutting home from his rental acreage, or perhaps a hobo who had swung down from a S.P. freight, except for the purpose in his gait, the set of his jaw, the switch in his gloved hand that he whipped against his leg. When clouds covered the sun and lightning struck in the field, the man in the raincoat never broke stride. My neighbor's cows swirled like water out of his path.

Batist had been watching television in the living room. He went back into the kitchen to refill his coffee cup, burned his lips with the first sip, then poured it into the saucer and blew on it while he looked out the kitchen window at the ash lifting in the fields, the rain slanting like glass across the sun's last spark in the west.

The window was open and he heard horses running on the sod and cattle lowing in the coulee, and only when he squinted his eyes did he see the hatted and coated shape of the man who whipped the switch methodically against his leg.

Batist rubbed his eyes, went back into the living room for his glasses, returned to the window and saw a milky cloud of rain and dust rising out of the field and no hatted man in a black coat but a solitary Angus heifer standing in our yard.

Batist stepped out into the yard, into the sulfurous smell blowing out of the fields, then walked to the duck pond and down the fence line until he saw the fence post that had been wedged sideways in the hole and the three strands of barbed wire that had been stomped out of the staples into the ground.

"Somebody out here?" he called.

The wind was like a watery insect in his ears.

He latched the screen door behind him, walked to the front of the house and stepped out on the gallery, looked into the yard and the leaves spinning in vortexes between the tree trunks, the shadows of overhead limbs thrashing on the ground. Down by the bayou, one of our rental boats clanked against its chain, thumping against the pilings on the dock.

He thought about his dogleg twenty gauge down in the bait shop. The bait shop looked small and distant and empty in the rain, and he wished he had turned on the string of electric lights over the dock, then felt foolish and embarrassed at his own thoughts.

He stood in the center of the living room, the wind seeming to breathe through the front and back screens, filling the house with a cool dampness that he couldn't distinguish from the sheen of sweat on his skin.

He pulled aside a curtain and looked across the driveway at the neighbor's house. The gallery was lighted and a green wreath and pinecones wrapped with scarlet ribbon hung on the front door; a Christmas tree, a blue spruce shimmering with tinsel, stood in a window. A sprinkler fanned back and forth in the rain, fountaining off the tree trunks in the yard.

He picked up the phone and started to dial a number, then realized he wasn't even certain about whom he was dialing. He set the receiver back in the cradle, ashamed of the feeling in his chest, the way his hands felt stiff and useless at his sides.

He wiped his face on his sleeve, smelled a sour odor rising from his armpit, then stood hesitantly at the front door again. In his mind's eye he saw himself walking down to the bait shop and returning up the slope with a shotgun like a man who finally concedes that his fears have always been larger than his courage. He unlatched the screen and pushed it open with the flat of his hand and breathed the coolness of the mist blowing under the gallery eaves, then stepped back inside and blew out his breath.