Candor? What was candor.

After the lecture hall had emptied, Tony still sat in his desk, his eyes fastened on the professor, who was putting his notes and books in a briefcase. The professor glanced up and smoothed his beard. “Something you want to ask me?” he said.

“What did you mean by that, Dr. Edwards?”

“By what?”

“This being the place to pull a thorn out. Were you saying something about me? Just tell the truth.”

“Supposedly that’s why I get paid.”

“Sir?”

“I get paid to tell the truth.” The professor gave it up. “I was saying that the idea of class superiority has one basic function-it allows people to justify their exploitation of their fellow human beings. The exploitation happens on many levels, Tony, the most common of which is financial or sexual. It’s taught in fraternities, it’s taught in churches. People screw down and marry up.”

Tony got up from his seat and approached the lectern, his stomach churning, a sound like an electrical short buzzing in his head. “Are you accusing me of sexually using a girl from a poor family?”

“Excuse me?”

“I didn’t have anything to do with her death,” he said. “We had something special. It just didn’t last. It just went to hell, all at once. I don’t even know why.”

“I’m afraid I don’t-”

“You were talking about Yvonne. You were doing it in front of the whole class.”

The professor stared at him. “You have a few minutes, Tony? Why don’t you and I go for a cup of coffee?”

Tony looked at the confusion in the professor’s face and realized the terrible mistake he had made. “I’m sorry, I misunderstood. I’m not feeling too good, Dr. Edwards. I didn’t mean to bother you.”

“You’re a fine boy. One day you’ll discover who you are and none of this will matter.” The professor seemed to smile with a level of compassion Tony did not think him capable of. But was it compassion, or perhaps something else? “Come talk to me when you have a chance. We’ll have a drink in my backyard. I can make a grand martini.”

But Tony was already walking rapidly up the aisle toward the exit, his footsteps echoing in the empty room, his face red with shame.

THE FRATERNITY HOUSE had been created out of a large white three-story Victorian home, one whose gables and cornices were visible through the crepe myrtle and azaleas and live oaks like the hard edges of a medieval fortress. The pledges mowed the lawn, raked the leaves, and trimmed the hedges, and kids whose families couldn’t afford the fraternity’s costs worked off their room and board by cooking and serving meals and cleaning the house.

Tony shared a room on the third floor with Slim Bruxal, one with a small balcony that provided a magnificent view of the trees and rooftops in the neighborhood. The room was the most desirable in the house, and when Slim requested it, none of his fraternity brothers objected, although others had more seniority than Slim and wanted it.

Tony’s insides were like water when he returned to the house from his poli-sci class. He tried to tell Slim about what had happened, how he had made a fool out of himself, how Dr. Edwards had looked at him as though he were an object of pity.

While Tony sat on the side of his unmade bed and went through every detail of his public embarrassment in class, Slim stood bare-chested at a full-length mirror, combing his hair, examining his facial skin for imperfections, checking to see if the barber had etched his sideburns sufficiently. “I got news for you. Dr. Edwards is an alcoholic fudge-packer. He pushes that pinko douche rinse whenever he gets the chance. Be proud you stood up to him.”

“I’m scared, Slim.”

“Of what?”

“My lawyer and I meet with the D.A. tomorrow.”

“Tell him to stuff it, just like I did. The Feds are using Monarch Little and the Iberia D.A. to get at my old man. They don’t got jack on either one of us. Winos get run over all the time. You’re an innocent man. Keep remembering that. They’re targeting you because of who your father is.”

“They’ll send him to prison.”

“No, they won’t. My old man eats guys like that D.A. for lunch. Back in Miami, these local schmucks wouldn’t have been allowed to clean his toilet.”

“I feel real bad. I keep seeing that guy on the road. I keep thinking about Yvonne. Why did she go nuts like that?”

“How do I know? She had mental problems. Yvonne doesn’t have anything to do with this. You keep the two issues separate. I don’t want to see you like this.”

“I can’t help it. I’m coming apart.”

Slim studied Tony in the mirror and slipped his comb in his back pocket. He sat down next to him and put his arm over Tony’s shoulders. Tony could smell the clean odor of Slim’s skin, the tinge of testosterone from his armpit. Slim squeezed him fraternally to get him out of his funk. “In no time you’ll be the house’s top cocksman again. Trust me, nobody cares about a winehead who walked in front of a car.”

“That’s not what happened, Slim.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“I can’t hurt my folks like this.”

Slim’s eyes were filled with the kind of thoughts he never shared. He massaged the back of Tony’s neck a long time, then glanced through the partially opened door and saw two junior classmen studying at a table in the room across the hall. He got up from the bed and quietly shut the door.

An hour later Tony drove his silver Lexus to St. John’s Cathedral, a nineteenth-century brick church with twin bell towers a few blocks from Lafayette ’s old downtown area. If asked, he probably would not have been able to tell anyone what he was doing there. Before her accident, his mother had dutifully attended the local Episcopalian church, served graciously on all its social committees, and had believed in absolutely none of it. Ironically, Tony became convinced of the spiritual world’s authenticity by his father. Bellerophon Lujan feared no man, but he would quit plowing or avoid proximity to any livestock at the first creak of electricity in the clouds. He was terrified of the prospect of hell and the consequences of his own libidinous nature, and believed it was the devil’s hand that constantly subverted his attempts to achieve social respectability, which in Bellerophon’s mind was the same as morality. For Bello, God was an abstraction, but the devil was real and reminded Bello of his presence each morning when Bello awoke throbbing and hard, chained to unrequited dreams that followed him into the day.

Tony walked across the church lawn to the St. John Oak and sat down on a stone bench. The oak was supposedly over four hundred years old. The limbs were so thick and so heavy, they not only touched the ground but had formed huge elbows that allowed the limbs to continue growing into the sunlight. The breeze was cool under the tree and smelled of flowers in the garden planted by the rectory. A young priest was watering the flowers with a hose, amusing himself by placing his thumb over the end of the hose and firing a jet into a nest of mud daubers. He caught Tony looking at him and grinned self-consciously.

Tony did not know how long he sat on the stone bench. He could have stayed there forever. The limbs of the live oak were hung with Spanish moss and encrusted with lichen, the stone under him cool to his touch. How did he get mixed up in so much trouble? Why did Yvonne have to go and kill herself? In his mind he created a fantasy in which he walked through the front door of the church and out the back, free of all the misery that had come into his life since he had started hanging out with Slim Bruxal.

But in truth he couldn’t put it on Slim. He had sought out Slim; it wasn’t the other way around. There were rumors about Slim’s expulsion for cheating at LSU and a fight with a Texas Aggie in the restroom at Tiger Stadium, one that left the Aggie ruptured and bleeding inside from a broken rib. But Slim had another side to him. He listened to Tony and always sensed what Tony needed to hear. Slim took no guff from anyone. He understood what it was like to have a father he admired, even loved, but who was looked down upon by others. In fact, sometimes Tony looked at Slim soaping himself in the shower and experienced feelings he didn’t like to dwell upon.