Clete wiped the oil off the blue-black surfaces of his.38, then flipped the cylinder from the frame and began inserting cartridges one by one into the chambers, his blond eyelashes lowered so I could not read his eyes.

“I can hear your wheels turning, Clete. Forget about it,” I said.

“I’m glad I’ve finally heard the voice of God. You can actually go into people’s heads now and explain their own thoughts to them.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass. I’m trying to-”

He cut me off before I could continue. “We used to do business one way with these assholes-under a black flag. Why do you think Whitey Bruxal is here? It’s because he gets a free pass. In the old days, at least he would have been under the control of the Giacanos. Now he can kick the shit out of cerebral palsy victims and be on the Society page.”

“You don’t think NOPD can find you in a fishing camp? Use your brain,” I said.

He spun the cylinder on the.38, the butt end of the loaded cartridges glinting in the light. His green eyes were bright and happy, free of alcoholic influence or fatigue, and I realized when he didn’t reply that I hadn’t listened carefully to what he had said and I had once again misread the complexities of an antithetically mixed man.

“You were already planning to take out Whitey Bruxal, weren’t you?” I said.

“Not exactly. But if these guys make a move on us, we hunt them down and pitch the rule book. What’s to lose? We’re dinosaurs anyway. The only guys who haven’t figured that out are us. Pop me a beer, will you?”

He laid a clear line of oil along the side of the Beretta, then wiped all of its surfaces clean with a rag. He pulled back the slide on an empty magazine and ran the bore brush up and down the inside of the barrel, smiling at me while he did it. In the muted glow of the lamplight he looked like a young man again, one who still believed the world was a magical place full of adventure and goodness and intriguing encounters up every street. In moments like these I sometimes wondered if Clete had ever intended to age and grow old and change from the irresponsible man of his youth, if indeed he had not always courted death as a means of tearing off the hands on his own clock.

“Why you looking at me like that?” he asked.

“No reason.”

“You worry about all the wrong things, Streak. In this case, about me and Trish. All that stuff you told me about the Lujan murders and Crustacean Man and the Darbonne girl? There’s something missing. This character in the D.A.’s office, what’s his name?”

“Lonnie Marceaux.”

“This Marceaux guy is the one to worry about. It’s these white-collar cocksuckers who’d crank up the gas ovens if they had the chance. You’re really going bail for Yvonne Darbonne’s old man?”

“I put him in jail. He’s an innocent man. What should I do?” I replied.

“How many guys have you known inside who were actually innocent?”

“Some,” I said.

“But almost all of them were guilty of other crimes, usually worse ones. Right or wrong, noble mon?”

I poured my Dr Pepper into the sink and dropped the empty can into the trash basket. “See you later,” I said, trying to suppress the anger in my voice.

“Put it in neutral a minute and check those satellite pictures on the tube,” he said, nodding at the television screen. “The state of Florida must feel like a bowling pin. You were on the water when Audrey hit back in ’fifty-eight?”

“It was ’fifty-seven.”

“Think we’ll ever have one that bad again?”

“Don’t change the subject, Clete. Take Trish and go somewhere a long way from New Iberia. You keep hurting yourself in ways your worst enemies couldn’t think up.”

He reached under the bed and removed a pint of brandy. He unscrewed the cap and lifted the bottle at me. “Here’s to chaos and mayhem and blowing the bad guys out of their socks,” he said. He drank the brandy down like soda water, one eye cocked at me over the upended bottle.

I WENT TO AN A.A. meeting in the Episcopalian cottage across the street from old New Iberia High School. When I came out, the sky had turned yellow and purple and was full of dust blowing out of the cane fields. The oak trees in front of the school throbbed with birds, and when the wind changed, the air smelled like a lake that has gone dry. It was an evening when the colors of the sky and the earth and the trees seemed out of accordance with one another. The end of summer in South Louisiana is usually like sliding over the crest of a torpid season of heat and humidity into autumnal days that ring with the sounds of marching bands and smell of burning leaves and the damp, fecund odor of the bayous. But this year was different.

The skies were red at morning, and at night churning with clouds that looked like curds of smoke from giant oil fires. Afternoon showers turned into violent storms, with trees of lightning bursting across the entirety of the sky. I have never given credence to apocalyptical theology or prophecies, but this year I felt a sense of foreboding that I couldn’t shake. It wasn’t based on an intuitive knowledge about the future, either. I had seen the show before.

It is hard for someone who has not experienced a hurricane to understand the terror of being inside one. Perhaps the fear has its roots in the unconscious. Psychiatrists say the most terrifying moment in our lives occurs when we are delivered out of the birth canal from the safety of the womb-unable to breathe, shuddering against the light, knowing we will die unless we receive the slap of life. Supposedly that moment is sealed forever in a corner of the mind we wish never to reenter. Then one day the world of predictability, the earth itself, caves under our feet.

That moment came for me on a seismograph drill barge anchored by deep-water steel pilings in a bay west of Morgan City in the summer of 1957. On board were 160 pounds of canned dynamite and boxes of canned primers and spools of cap wire that were tipped with a vial of nitroglycerin gel that could be detonated with either an electrical spark or a hard knock against a steel surface.

No one anticipated the ferocity of Hurricane Audrey or the tidal wave it would push ahead of it. Our company chose to ride it out. That experience was one that will remain with me the rest of my life.

The tide dropped at sunset, and for miles there was hardly a ripple of wind on the water. The sky was lidded with clouds that were the color of scorched pewter, but the horizon was still blue, glowing with an iridescence that seemed trapped behind the earth’s rim. We went to bed on the quarterboat with a sense of peace about the storm, convinced it was passing far to the west, perhaps over in Texas, and that our fears had been unfounded.

At dawn, the miles of flooded cypress and gum trees surrounding us were thick with birds of every description, as though none of them could find a proper tree upon which to rest. At 9 a.m. my half brother Jimmie and I were building explosive charges for the driller, screwing six cans of dynamite end to end, then screwing on a primer that would attach to a second string of six cans, doing this three times until we had a charge of eighteen cans that we would slide down the drill pipe with the cap wire whipping off the spool behind it.

Without any transition, the sky erupted with lightning, the barometer dropped so fast our ears popped, a line of whitecaps shot from the mouth of the bay into the swamp, like skin wrinkling, and the miles of flooded trees surrounding us bent simultaneously toward the water.

I turned away from the drill and the wind struck my face as hard as a fist. The tarp that was used to shade the drill deck, one that was made of heavy canvas and inset with metal rods and brass eyelets, ripped loose from the pilothouse and disappeared in the wind like a discarded Kleenex. What happened next was an event of such magnitude and intensity that neither Jimmie nor I nor anyone else on board would ever quite understand it or the natural causes that created it. Some thought it was a waterspout. Some believed a secondary system, one with its own eye, had passed over us. But whatever it was, it carried its own set of rules and they had nothing to do with the laws of physics, at least not as I understand them.