“I’ve sat in with them.”

“When that truck threw dust all over you, what were you thinking about?”

“Nothing.”

“Not a thing?”

“Except some folks don’t have no business driving on dirt roads, throwing dust and rocks all over people.”

“How about a hundred and fifty a week and rent and utilities?”

J.D. shifted the guitar on his lap and smiled. “That’s pert’ near the exact figure I had in mind.”

“On the subject of jail?”

“Yes sir?”

“I was on the hard road when I was eighteen. I was in several other cans, too. I wasn’t a criminal, but I could have turned out to be one.”

J.D. waited, unsure of what he was being told. “Yes sir, I’m listening.”

“That’s all. You have a voice and an accent that are reminiscent of Jimmie Rodgers. That’s quite unusual,” Albert replied. “I hope you like it here.”

CLETE PURCEL WAS the bane of his enemies and feared in New Orleans by pimps, drug dealers, cops on a pad, jackrollers, scam artists who victimized old people, and sexual predators of all stripes. Paradoxically, his closest friends included whiskey priests, strippers, stand-up cons, hookers on the spike, badass biker girls, button men, Shylocks, and mind-blown street people who claimed they had seen UFOs emerging from the waters of Lake Pontchartrain.

His reputation for chaos and mayhem was legendary. In the men’s room of the New Orleans bus depot, he forced a contract killer to swallow a full dispenser of liquid soap. In the casino at the bottom of Canal, he blew a degenerate into a urinal with a firehose, then escaped the building by creating a bomb scare on the casino floor. He dropped a Teamster steward off a hotel balcony into a dry swimming pool. He filled a gangster’s hundred-thousand-dollar convertible with concrete. He hijacked an earth-grader from a construction site and drove it through the front of a palatial mansion owned by a member of the Giacano crime family. No, that is not an adequate description. He drove an earthmover through the entirety of the house, punching through the walls, grinding the furniture and tile and hardwood floors into rubble under the steel tracks. Not satisfied, he burst through the back of the house and destroyed the garages and parked cars and all the grounds, uprooting the hedges and trees, pushing the statuary and flagstone terrace into the swimming pool, finally exiting the property by exploding a brick wall onto the avenue.

I could go on, but what’s the point? For Clete, life was a carnival, a theme park full of harlequins and unicorns, a reverse detox unit for people who took themselves seriously or thought too much about death. In an ambience of palm trees and pink sunrises on live-oak trees, of rainwater ticking onto the philodendron inside a lichen-stained courtyard, inside the smell of beignets and coffee and night-blooming flowers two blocks from the Café du Monde, he had lived the ethos of the libertine and the happy hedonist, pumping iron to control his weight, eating amounts of cholesterol-loaded food that would clog a sewer main, convincing himself that a vodka Collins had little more influence on his hypertension than lemonade.

During all of it, he had never showed his pain and had never complained. The Big Sleazy was God’s gift to those who could not find peace in either the world or rejection of it. How could one refuse life inside a Petrarchan sonnet, particularly when it was offered to you without reservation or conditions by a divine hand?

But the chink in Clete’s armor remained right below his heart, and the same knife went through it every time.

It’s fair to say most of his girlfriends were nude dancers, grifters, drunks, or relatives of mobsters. Most of them wore tattoos, and some had tracks on their arms or thighs. But the similarity in Clete’s lovers didn’t lie in their occupations or addictions. Almost all of them were incurable neurotics who went through romantic relationships like boxes of Kleenex. The more outrageous their behavior, the more Clete believed he had found kindred spirits.

Ironically, it wasn’t the hookers and strippers and addicts who did him the most damage. It was usually a woman with a degree of normalcy and education in her background who wrapped him in knots. I suspect a psychologist would say Clete didn’t believe he was worthy of being loved. As a consequence, he would allow himself to be used and wounded by people whose own lack of self-knowledge didn’t allow them to see the depth of injury they inflicted upon him. Regardless, it was the quasi-normal ones who hung him out to dry.

TWO DAYS AFTER our interview of Jamie Sue Wellstone, Clete began acting strange. “I’d better cancel out on our fishing trip today,” he said on our front porch after knocking at seven A.M.

“What’s the problem?” I said.

“Just some doodah I need to take care of in town,” he replied. He looked up at the sunlight breaking on the mountain, his cheeks bright with aftershave. His hair was freshly combed and clipped, his shoes buffed. He wore a pair of pressed slacks and a crisp new sport shirt.

“How about some coffee?” I said.

“I’d better run. Check with you later.”

“What are you up to, Clete?”

“Why do I always feel like you’re trying to staple my umbilical cord to the corner of your desk?”

“When will you be back?” I asked.

“Does anyone at your meetings ever say you have a control problem?”

By three that afternoon, he had not returned. I tried his cell but got no answer. I drove three miles down the highway to the little service town of Lolo and saw his convertible parked outside the town’s only saloon. He was at the far end of the bar, hunched over his drink, perhaps twenty feet away from a table full of bikers who were half in the bag. The bikers were talking loudly, obviously getting Clete’s attention, although they were unaware of it.

I sat down next to him and ordered a glass of ice and carbonated water. “What are you drinking?” I said.

“A gin gimlet,” he replied. “It’s summertime, so I’m having a gin gimlet.”

“You look like you’re shitfaced.”

“I had the top down. It’s windburn. Dave, will you get off my back?”

“It’s the Wellstone woman, isn’t it?” I said.

“She called me on my cell. She wanted to retain me.”

“For what?”

“To find an old boyfriend. It’s not an unusual situation.” My eyes were boring into the side of his face. He took a sip from his drink and balled up a napkin. He looked over his shoulder at the bikers. “Can you guys hold down the noise?” he said.

The bikers turned and stared at us. They were stone-faced and head-shaved, unsure which of us had spoken, their eyes taking our inventory.

“We’re just having a drink here. How you guys doin’?” I said.

They went back to their conversation, the tenor of their voices unchanged.

“Has this got something to do with the man who was watching her in the saloon?” I said.

“Jamie Sue used to-”

“Jamie Sue?”

“That’s what I said. Jamie Sue used to sing with a guy who went to prison. He tried to stop a pimp beating up a hooker outside a nightclub. He ended up putting a shiv in the guy,” Clete said. “She thinks he’s out now and maybe hanging around. She’s afraid her husband’s security people might bust him up.”

“You believe that crap?”

“Come on, Dave.”

“You stop jerking me around. You tell me what happened today.”

“I met her for an early lunch at this joint on Flathead Lake. We had a couple of drinks and took a boat ride. The water was blue as far as you could see, you know, like you’re out on the Pacific Ocean rather than a lake. Man, she looked fine, too, sitting on the bow of the boat with her gold hair blowing in the wind.”

“Yeah, Jane Powell on a yacht. Get to it, Clete.”

“We went back to the joint at the marina and had a couple more drinks. Then she put some money in the juke and asked me to dance. She felt so little inside my arms. Then I felt this wetness on my shirt. She was crying. She denied it, but she was crying.”