"It means part of him is still intact. I'm not sure if the same is true of me. I think I felt all the st.i.tches pop today. "

She steered into the traffic. The yellow haze, the heat off the concrete, the hot leather against my back, the acrid gasoline fumes around me, filled my head with a sensation that was like breathing over a tar-roofer's pot on a summer day.

"I don't know much about alcohol and drinking problems, Dave. Do you want to stop for a beer? I don't mind. Isn't it better to taper off sometimes?"

She had made it very easy, and at that moment I think I would have cut my fingers off one at a time with tin snips for a frosted quart of Jax beer.

"I'd just appreciate it right now if you'd drive me to my houseboat. Did you have to put up a thousand for the bondsman?" I said.

"Yes."

"I'll make it good tomorrow. I'm suspended from the credit union, but I'm going to take a loan out on the boat."

"I'm not thinking about that. Last night you tried to make amends, and I sent you away."

"You had someone coming for dinner."

"He was just a friend from the music school. He would have understood."

"Let me explain something. My getting thrown in jail doesn't have anything to do with you. I had four years of sobriety, and I blew it in."

"You can stop again."

I didn't answer. We were on Elysian Fields Avenue, headed out toward the lake. My seersucker suit was rumpled and stained with tobacco juice from the jail, and the skin of my face felt grimy and unshaven under my hand.

"Pull in by that eating place, will you?" I said.

She parked next to a cafe that had an open-air counter and tables under shade trees where people ate poor-boy sandwiches and bleeding slices of watermelon. I ordered two Dr. Peppers in paper cups packed with crushed ice and asked the waiter to add a handful of candied cherries and cut limes. I sat in the car and drank out of the cup with both hands, and the slide of ice and bruised cherries and syrupy soda ached wonderfully all the way down my throat and into my stomach.

"When I was a kid in New Iberia, we had a drink called Dr. Nut. It tasted just like this," I said. "My father always bought my brother and me a Dr. Nut when we went to town. That was a big treat back then."

"How do you think of the past, Dave?" she asked. Her curly hair blew in the wind through the window while she drove.

"What do you mean?"

"What feelings do you have when you remember your father?"

"I think of him with fondness."

"That's right, you do, even though your family was poor and sometimes your father wasn't there when you needed him. You didn't take any anger toward him into your adult life. You forgave him and you remember what was best about him. Why not do the same for yourself?"

"It's not that simple with some people's metabolisms."

"Today is Sat.u.r.day, and it's Sat.u.r.day all day long, and I don't care about what happened yesterday, at least not about the bad things. I like being with you and remembering good things and knowing it's going to get better all the time. Don't they teach something like that at AA?"

"That's pretty close."

"Will you take me to the horse races tonight?"

I touched the damp, curly hair on the nape of her neck and brushed the smoothness of her cheek with my fingers. She smiled at me with her eyes and patted me on the thigh, and I felt a weakness drain through my body like water and then settle and swell in my loins.

When we got to Lake Pontchartrain it was like walking out from under a layer of steam into a slap of cool, salt-smelling air. Pelicans dove for fish out of the blue sky, plummeting downward with their wings c.o.c.ked behind their heads as though they had been dropped from a bomb rack, exploding in the smoky green water and rising suddenly with silvery fish flipping helplessly in their beaks. Far out on the horizon the water was capping in the sunlight, and a long, gleaming white yacht with red sails was dipping into the troughs and sending geysers of foam bursting into the air.

I showered and shaved in my tin stall and felt the smell of the jail, its physical touch that was like an obscene hand, go out of my body. I washed carefully around the st.i.tches in my scalp, then I pulled off the old dressing on my shoulder and arm, where the chips of gla.s.s had been embedded, and let the water run warmly on the crusted skin. Annie was cooking ba.s.s fillets and spinach with hard-boiled eggs on my small stove, and for the first time that day I felt hunger. I dried off, sat on the side of the bed with the towel wrapped around my waist, and opened the plastic first-aid box in which I kept the bandages and ointment to dress my shoulder and arm. I could have done it myself. Pride and a larger measure of self-respect actually required it. I looked at the closed curtain and heard Annie turn down the pots on the stove.

"Annie, I need you to help me," I said.

She slid back the curtain on the door.

"I have a little trouble getting these bandages into place," I said.

She sat beside me, wiped ointment on my cuts with a piece of cotton, snipped adhesive tape into strips with the scissors, and taped down two big, folded squares of gauze on top of the ointment. Then she rubbed her hands over my skin, down my shoulders and back, across my chest, her eyes looking over my body without embarra.s.sment, as though she were discovering me for the first time. I leaned her back on the bed and kissed her mouth, her neck, unb.u.t.toned her flower-print blouse and placed my head against the red birthmark on her breast. I felt her body stretch out against mine, felt the confidence, the surrender that a woman gives in that moment when she no longer hides her hunger and instead blesses you with a caress that is always unexpected and heart-rushing and humbling in its generosity.

This time I wanted to give her more than she gave me, but I wasn't able. In seconds I was lost inside her, her hands tight against my back, her legs in mine in almost a maternal way, and when I tried to tense and stop because it was too soon, she held my face close to hers, kissed my cheek, ran her fingers through the back of my hair, saying, "It's all right, Dave. Go ahead. It's all right." Then I felt all the anger, the fear, and the heat of the last two days rise inside me like a dark bubble from a well, pause in its own gathered energy and momentum, and burst away into light, into the joy of her thighs, the squeeze of her arms, the blue tenderness of her eyes.

That night at the track, while heat lightning danced in the western sky, we strolled among the flower gardens by the paddock, watched the hot-walkers cool out the thoroughbreds that had already run, smelled the wonderful odors of freshly raked and dampened sod and horse sweat and manure and oats in the stables, and looked with genuine wonder and admiration at the rippling sheen of the roans and black three-year-olds walking onto the track under a halo of electric arc lights.

We cashed the daily double, a perfecta, two win, and three place tickets. The palm trees were purple against the flickering sky; the lake in the centerground caught the stars and the moon, and when the surface shuddered in a gust of wind off the Gulf, the water was streaked with quicksilver; I could smell oak trees and moss and night-blooming flowers. Gamblers and lovers pay big dues and enjoy limited consolations. But sometimes they are enough.

NINE.

The sky was pink over the lake at dawn the next day, and I put on my running shoes and tennis shorts and ran five miles along the lakefront with the wind cool in my face and the sun warm on my bare back. I could feel the sweat glaze and dry on my skin in the wind, and the muscles in my chest and legs seemed to have a resiliency and tension and life in them that I hadn't felt in weeks. Seagulls drifted on the air currents above the water's edge, their wings gilded in the sunlight, then they would dip quickly down toward the sand and peck small sh.e.l.lfish from the receding foam. I waved at families in their cars on the way to church, drank orange juice at a child's street stand under a palm tree, and pounded down the asphalt with a fresh energy, my chest and head charged with blood, my heart strong, the summer morning part of an eternal song.

I could have run five more miles when I got back to the houseboat, but my phone was ringing. I sat on the edge of a chair and wiped my sweating face with a towel while I answered it.

"Why don't you trust your own family a little bit?" my brother Jimmie asked.

"What are you talking about?"

"I understand you bopped into an interesting scene the other night. Very stylish. There's nothing like crashing a Garden District party with a .45 on your hip."

"It had been a dull night."

"Why didn't you call me? I could have bonded you out in fifteen minutes. I might even have had a little influence on that concealed-weapons charge."

"This is one you can't oil."

"The point is, I don't like my brother being taken apart by some pencil-pushers."

"You'll be the first to know the next time I'm in the bag."

"Can you get somebody over there that speaks Spanish in the next half hour?"

"What for?"

"I told Didi Gee I'd get him in the Knights of Columbus. He likes me. Who else would eat lunch with a character like that except at gunpoint?"

"What are you doing, Jimmie?"

"It's already done. Presents come in strange packages. Don't question the fates."

"Anything Didi Gee does has ooze and slime all over it."

"He never said he was perfect. Stay cool, bro," he said, and hung up.

I called a Cuban horse trainer I knew at the Fairgrounds and asked him to come to the houseboat. He arrived there ten minutes before a Cadillac limousine with tinted windows pulled up on the dead-end street by the sand dune and palm trees where my boat was moored, and two of Didi Gee's hoods, dressed in slacks, loafers, and shades, with flowered shirts hanging over their belts, got out and opened the back door with the electric motions of chauffeurs who might have been delivering a presidential envoy. Instead, an obviously terrified man sat in the gloom of the backseat with a third hoodlum next to him. He stepped out into the sunlight, swallowing, his face white, his pomade-slicked, kinky red hair and grease-pencil mustache like a parody of a 1930s leading man's. He held one palm around the fingers of his other hand.

"This guy asked us for a ride. Begged us to bring him here," the driver said. "We can't shut him up, though. All he wants to do is talk."

"But give him something for his breath. It smells like sewer gas. The guy must eat dog t.u.r.ds for breakfast," the other hood said.

"Hey, serious, he's got an interesting story," the driver said. "If somehow he don't remember it, tie a shirt on your TV antenna. I got to pick up a loaf of bread at the corner store a little later. We can help him fill in the empty s.p.a.ces. We're just out for the morning air, anyway."

I couldn't see either one of them well behind their shades, and Didi Gee's hired help tended to run of a kind-slender young Sicilians and Neapolitans who would blow out your light as easily as they would flip away a cigarette-but I thought I'd seen the driver in a lineup two years ago after we'd prized parts of a bookie out of his own kitchen garbage compactor.

They drove off in their Cadillac, the white sun bouncing off the black-tinted gla.s.s in the rear.

"Andres, I wouldn't hang around with that bunch if I were you," I said.

But you still can't accept gratuities when they're given to you on other people's terms, particularly when they come from somebody like Didi Gee. Besides, the fingers of the Nicaraguan's left hand were wrapped in tape, and I had an idea where they had been earlier. He sat at my kitchen table, rigid, his brown eyes riveted fearfully on me as though the lids were st.i.tched to his forehead. I put a tape recorder, a Polaroid camera, and a pint of white rum on the table.

"I don't have a tank full of piranha here, and I'll take you to the hospital if you want to go," I said to him through my Cuban friend, whose name was Jaime.

He did not need a hospital; the injuries were not serious; but he would very much appreciate a gla.s.s of Bacardi, no ice, please.

I opened the morning newspaper, pulled my chair around next to him, held up the front section between us so the headline and date were visible, and told Jaime to take our picture with the Polaroid. The Nicaraguan's breath was awful, as though there were something dead in his lungs. He drank the rum and wiped his lips, and the wispy gray scars around his mouth shone like pieces of waxed string.

"I want you to understand something," I said. "You're going to be a cooperative person, but not because of Didi Gee's hoods and the business with your fingers. Those guys will not get to you again, at least not because of me. If you want, you can file a.s.sault and kidnapping charges against them. I'll drive you to either the police station or the FBI."

He watched me carefully as Jaime translated. The thought of reporting Didi Gee's people to the authorities was evidently so absurd to him that his eyes didn't even register the proposal.

"But our photograph here is another matter," I said.

"I'll make copies, many of them, and circulate them around town for those who might be interested. Maybe you have the trust of your friends, and this will be of little consequence to you. Maybe you are in command of your situation and this is childishness to you."

His face clouded, and his eyes flicked meanly at me for a moment, the way an egg-sucking dog might if you pushed it inside a cage with a stick.

"Que quiere?" his voice rasped.

It was a strange tale. It was self-serving, circ.u.mventive, filled in all probability with lies; but as with all brutal and cruel people, his most innocent admissions and most defensive explanations were often more d.a.m.ning and loathsome in their connotations than the crimes others might accuse him of.

He had been a sergeant in Somoza's national guard for seven years, a door gunner on a helicopter, and he had flown in many battles against the communists in the jungles and the hills. It was a war of many civilian problems, because the communists hid among the villagers and posed as workers in the rice fields and coffee plantations, and when the government helicopters flew too low they often took hostile fire from the ground, where the peasants denied there were any Sandinistas or weapons. What was one to do? Surely Americans who had been in Vietnam could understand. Those who fought wars could not always be selective.

The soldiers went forth in uniform, as men, in plain sight, while the communists threaded their way among the poor and fought with the methods of cowards and h.o.m.os.e.xuals. If I did not believe him, witness his eye, and he pulled down the skin on one side of his face and showed me the dead, puttylike muscle under the retina. Their gun-ship had come in low over a secured area, and down below he could see Indians stacking green hay in the field, then a rocket exploded through the armored floor of the helicopter, blew one man out the door, and left a steel needle quivering in Andres's eyeball. The American journalist who visited the army hospital in Managua did not seem interested in his story, nor did he take pictures of Andres as the journalists did of the communist dead and wounded. That was because the American press's greatest fear was to be called rightist by their own membership. Like the Maryknoll missionaries, they kept their own political vision intact by compromising the world in which others had to live.

If I was offended by his statement, I must remember that he did not choose exile in this country any more than he chose the ruination of his vocal cords and lungs.

"I heard his regular punch gave him some special gargle water," I said.

"What?" Jaime said.

"He and some other guys gang-raped a girl before they executed her. Her sister poured muriatic acid in our friend's drink."

"This is true?" Jaime asked. He was a small and delicate man with a sensitive face. He always wore a New York Yankees baseball cap and rolled his own cigarettes from illegal Cuban tobacco. His toylike face looked from me to the Nicaraguan.

"Our man from Managua is a big bulls.h.i.tter, Jaime."

The Nicaraguan must have understood me.

The story about the execution and the acid was a lie, he said, a fabrication of Philip Murphy and the maricon Starkweather. They took pleasure in the denigration of others because they were not real soldiers. Murphy was a morphine addict who made love to his own body with his syringes. He pretended courage but was flaccid like a woman and could not bear pain. Did I really want to know how he, Andres, had his throat and lungs burnt out, how this terrible odor came to live in his chest like a dead serpent?

"I was blind in one eye, but I could not stop in the fight for my country," Jaime translated for him. "Just as they posed as priests and labor organizers, I went among them as a radical who hated the Somoza family. But a diseased puta, a worthless army s.l.u.t, betrayed me because she thought I had given her the foulness in her organs. The Sandinistas c.o.c.ked a pistol at my head and made me drink kerosene, then they lighted matches to my mouth. I suffered greatly at their hands, but my country has suffered more."

"Where are Philip Murphy and the Israeli?" I asked.

"Who knows? Murphy lives in airports and pharmacies and finds people when he needs them. Jews stay with their own kind. Maybe Erik is with the rich Jew who owns the warehouse. They're a close and suspicious people."

"What Jew? What warehouse?"

"The warehouse where the weapons to free Nicaragua are kept. But I don't know where it is, and I don't know this Jew. I'm only a soldier."

His face was empty. His eyes had the muddy, stupid glaze of someone who believed that the honest expression of his ignorance was an acceptable explanation to those who had the power to make judgments.

"I'll give you an easier question, then," I said. "What did you all do to Sam Fitzpatrick before he died?"

Jaime translated, and the Nicaraguan's face became as flat as a shingle.

"Did you wire up his genitals?" I asked.

He looked out at the lake, his mouth pinched tight. He touched the rum gla.s.s with his fingers, then withdrew them.

"Murphy gave the orders, but I suspect you and Bobby Joe carried them out with spirit. Your experience stood you well."

"I think this one has a big evil inside him," Jaime said. "I believe you should give him back to the people who brought him here."