The honed blade sliced through the telephone cord and sunk into the counter's hardwood edge. He leaned over and swung again, the blade whanging off the shelves, dissecting cartons of worms and dirt, exploding a jar of pickled sausage.

Batist's coffee pot was scorched black and boiling on the butane fire. The handle felt like a heated wire across my bare palm. I threw the coffee, the top, and the grinds in the man's face, saw the shock in his eyes, his mouth drop open, the pain rise out of his throat like a broken bubble.

Then I grabbed the tattooed wrist that held the machete and pressed the bottom of the pot down on his forearm.

He flung the machete from his hand as though the injury had come from it rather than the coffee pot. I thought I was home free. I wasn't.

He hit me harder than I'd ever been struck by a fist in my life, the kind of blow that fills your nose with needles, drives the eye deep into the socket.

I got to my feet and tried to follow him out on the dock. One side of my face was already numb and throbbing, as though someone had held dry ice against it. The man in the white straw hat had leaped off the dock onto the concrete ramp and mounted the bow of his boat with one knee and was pushing it out into the current, his body haloed with humidity and electric light.

Batist came out of the tin shed in the willows where we stored our outboard motors, looked up at me, then at the fleeing man.

"Batist, no!" I said.

Batist and I both stood motionless while the man jerked the engine into a roar with one flick of the forearm, then furrowed a long yellow trough around the bend into the darkness.

I used the phone at the house to call the department again, then walked back down to the dock. The moon was veiled over the swamp; lightning forked out of a black sky in the south.

"How come you ain't want me to stop him, Dave?" Batist said.

"He's deranged. I think it's PCP," I said. But he didn't understand. "It's called angel dust. People get high on it and bust up brick walls with their bare hands."

"He knowed who you was, Dave. He didn't have no interest in coming in till he seen you… This started wit' that old man from the penitentiary."

"What are you talking about?"

"That guard, the one you call Cap'n, the one probably been killing niggers up at that prison farm for fifty years. I tole you not to have his kind in our shop. You let his grief get on your front porch, it don't stop there, no. It's gonna come in your house. But you don't never listen."

He pulled his folded cap out of his back pocket, popped it open, and fitted it on his head. He walked down the dock to his truck without saying good night. The tin roof on the bait shop creaked and pinged against the joists in the wind gusting out of the south.

Monday morning the sky was blue, the breeze warm off the Gulf when I drove to the University of Southwestern Louisiana campus in Lafayette to talk with Buford LaRose. Classes had just let out for the noon hour, and the pale green quadrangle and colonnaded brick walkways were filled with students on their way to lunch. But Buford LaRose was not in his office in the English department, nor in the glassed-in campus restaurant that was built above a cypress lake behind old Burke Hall.

I called his office at the Oil Center, where he kept a part-time therapy practice, and was told by the receptionist I could find him at Red Lerille's Health and Racquet Club off Johnson Street.

"Are you sure? We were supposed to go to lunch," I said.

"Dr. LaRose always goes to the gym on Mondays," she answered.

Red's was a city-block-long complex of heated swimming pools, racquet ball and clay tennis courts, boxing and basketball gyms, indoor and outdoor running tracks, and cavernous air-conditioned rooms filled with hundreds of dumbbells and weight benches and exercise machines.

I looked for Buford a half hour before I glanced through the narrow glass window in the door of the men's steam room and saw him reading a soggy newspaper, naked, on the yellow tile stoop.

I borrowed a lock from the pro shop, undressed, and walked into the steam room and sat beside him.

His face jerked when he looked up from his paper. Then he smiled, almost fondly.

"You have a funny way of keeping appointments," I said.

"You didn't get my message?"

"No."

"I waited for you. I didn't think you were coming," he said.

"That's peculiar. I was on time."

"Not by my watch," he said, and smiled again.

"I wanted to tell you again I was sorry for my remarks at your party."

"You went to a lot of trouble to do something that's unnecessary."

The thermostat kicked on and filled the air with fresh clouds of steam. I could feel the heat in the tiles climb through my thighs and back. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes with my hand.

"Your jaw's bruised," he said.

"We had a visitor at the bait shop this weekend. NOPD thinks he's a Mexican carnival worker who got loose from a detox center."

He nodded, gazed without interest at the tile wall in front of us, pushed down on the stoop with the heels of his hands and worked the muscles in his back, his brown, hard body leaking sweat at every pore. I watched the side of his face, the handsome profile, the intelligent eyes that seemed never to cloud with passion.

"You have Ph.D. degrees in both English and psychology, Buford?" I said.

"I received double credits in some areas, so it's not such a big deal."

"It's impressive."

"Why are you here, Dave?"

"I have a feeling I may have stuck my arm in the garbage grinder. You know how it is, you stick one finger in, then you're up to your elbow in the pipe."

"We're back to our same subject, I see," he said.

Other men walked back and forth in the steam, swinging their arms, breathing deeply.

"How do you know Aaron Crown's daughter?" I asked.

"Who says I do?"

"She does."

"She grew up in New Iberia. If she says she knows me, fine… Dave, you have no idea what you're tampering with, how you may be used to undo everything you believe in."

"Why don't you explain it to me?"

"This is hardly the place, sir."

We showered, then went into an enclosed, empty area off to one side of the main locker room to dress. He dried himself with a towel, put on a pair of black nylon bikini underwear and flipflops, and began combing his hair in the mirror. The muscles in his back and sides looked like tea-colored water rippling over stone.

"I've got some serious trouble, Dave. These New York film people want to make a case for Aaron Crown's innocence. They can blow my candidacy right into the toilet," he said.

"You think they have a vested interest?"

"Yeah, making money… Wake up, buddy. The whole goddamn country is bashing liberals. These guys ride the tide. A white man unjustly convicted of killing a black civil rights leader? A story like that is made in heaven."

I put on my shirt and tucked it in my slacks, then sat on the bench and slipped on my loafers.

"Nothing to say?" Buford asked.

"Your explanations are too simple. The name Mingo Bloomberg keeps surfacing in the middle of my mind."

"This New Orleans mobster?"

"That's the one."

"I've got a fund-raiser in Shreveport at six. Come on the plane with me," he said.

"What for?"

"Take leave from your department. Work for me."

"Not interested."

"Dave, I'm running for governor while I teach school. I have no machine and little money. The other side does. Now these sonsofbitches from New York come down here and try to cripple the one chance we've had for decent government in decades. What in God's name is wrong with you, man?"