"Right. The bream might mind?"

"Yes. And you won't need the waders."

"Why not?"

"If you try to wade in one of these bayous, you'll sink out of sight in the muck. I'll get you some tennis shoes."

We spin down the bayou in my ancient Arkansas Traveler, a fourteen-foot, olive-drab aluminum skiff with square ends and a midship well. My twenty-year-old Evinrude kicks off first yank.

A bass club is having a rodeo. Identical boats, of new grassgreen fiberglass, nose along the bank. Fishermen wearing identical red caps sit on high swivel seats in the bow.

"You sure you want to fish for bream?" I ask Van Dorn.

"I figured you might know places those guys don't know. I've been with them. They're mostly Baton Rouge lawyers."

Down the Bogue Falaya past country clubs, marinas, villages, bocages, beaux condeaux. I turn into the bushes, through a scarcely noticeable gap in the swamp cyrilla, and we're in Pontchatolawa, a narrow meander of a bayou, unspoiled because there's too much swamp for developers and it's too narrow for yachts and water-skiers. It is not even known to the bass rodeo.

I cut the motor. Pontchatolawa hasn't changed since the Choctaws named it. The silence is sudden. There is only the ring of a kingfisher. The sun is just clearing the cypresses and striking shafts into the tea-colored water. Mullet jump. Cicadas tune up. There is a dusting of gold on the water. The cypresses are so big their knees march halfway across the bayou. Their tender green is just beginning to go russet.

"My Lord," says Van Dorn, almost whispering. "We're back in the Mesozoic. Look at the fucking ferns."

Van Dorn is busy with his tackle. I watch him. There is as usual in him the sense both of his delight and of his taking pleasure in rehearsing it.

There is a huge swirl of water under his nose. He gives a visible unrehearsed start.

"Good God, what was that, an alligator?"

"Probably not, though they're here. Probably a gar."

"Gators won't bother you, will they?"

"No, gators won't bother you."

I try to place his speech. Despite its Southernness, the occasional drawled vowel, it is curiously unplaced. He sounds like Marlon Brando talking Southern.

We are drifting. I keep a paddle in the water.

"Can we try for bream?" Van asks.

"All right, though it's late. The best time is when they nest in April and July. But some of them will be hanging around. You see those cypress knees over there."

"Sho now."

"You see the two big ones?"

"Yeah."

"Just beyond is a bed. It's been there for years. They use the same bed. My father showed me that one fifty years ago."

"Well, I be."

"You see that birch and cyrilla hanging out over it from the swamp?"

"Those two limbs? Yeah."

"What you got to do is come in sideways with your line so you won't get hung up."

"Sho. But wouldn't it be a good idea to cut those limbs off? That's pretty tight."

"Then all the sunfish would leave. You don't mess with light and shade."

"No kidding."

Van Dorn has opened his triple-tiered tackle box. He takes out a little collapsed graphite rod and reel, presses a button, and out it springs, six or seven feet. He shows me the jeweled reel, which is spring-loaded to suck back line.

"Very nice."

"You can keep this in your glove compartment. Once I was driving through Idaho, saw a nice little stream, pulled over. Six rainbows."

"What type of line you got there?"

"It's a tapered TP5S."

His equipment probably cost him five hundred dollars.

"You not fishing, Tom?"

"No. I'll hold the boat off for you."

"You don't want to fish!"

"No." What I want to do is watch him.

He takes off his helmet and selects a fly. "I thought I'd try a dry yellowtail."

"Would you like something better?"

"What's better?"

"Something that's here and alive. Green grasshoppers, wasps. Catalpa worms are the best."

"Fine, but-"

"Wait a minute. I remember something."

We drift silently past the bed and under a catalpa tree. The perfect heart-shaped leaves are like small elephant ears. A few black pods from last year hang down like beef jerky. This year's pods look like oversized string beans. I stand up, cut a leaf carefully at the stem. "Hold out your hands." I roll the leaf into a funnel, shake down the worms, small white ones that immediately ball up like roly-polies. "Sunfish are fond of these."

"Well, I be. What now?"

"Take off that fly and put on a bream hook."

"This little bitty job?"

"Right. Even big sunfish have tiny mouths."

"How about just nigger-fishing with worms?"

"Earthworms are all right, but these are better." It is hard to tell whether he is trying to say "nigger-fishing" in a natural Southern way or in a complicated liberal way, as if he were Richard Pryor's best friend.

"Okay, you're set," I tell him. "You see the beds close to the bank, a dozen or so?" Bream beds are pale shallow craters in the muck made by the fish fanning the eggs.

"I see."

Van Dorn is surprisingly good. He slings his hundred-dollar line under the cyrilla on second try. Even more surprising, he catches a fish. I thought they'd be gone. A big male pound-and-a-half sunfish feels like a marlin on a fly line.

"Well, I be goddamned," says Van Dorn, landing him, his pleasure now as simple as a boy's. We gaze at the fish, fat, round as a plate, sinewy, fine-scaled, and silvered, the amazing color spot at his throat catching the sun like a topaz set in amethyst. The colors will fade in minutes, but for now the fish looks both perfectly alive yet metallic, handwrought in Byzantium and bejeweled beyond price, all the more amazing to have come perfect from the muck.

But the beds are mostly empty. Van Dorn catches a couple more bream and a half dozen bass. "For y'all," he says. Y'all? Hudeen will be pleased. Into the ice well go the fish, out comes the beer.

It is getting on to noon and hot in the sun. We drink beer and watch the gnats swarm. The cicadas are fuguing away. I watch him.

"That was sump'n, cud'n," says Van Dorn.

Cud'n?

"You want to know something, Tom?"

"What?"

"I'll make you a little confession. I think at long last I'm back where I belong. Among my own people. And a way of life."

"I see."

"Do you understand? What do you think?"

"Yes." What I'm thinking is that Louisiana fishermen would not dream of speaking of such things, of my own people, of a way of life. If there is such a thing as a Southern way of life, part of it has to do with not speaking of it.

"Tom, I'm what you call a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. I do all right, but I'm not really first-rate. I've been a pretty good physiologist, computer hacker, soccer bum, bridge bum, realtor, you name it. I went to Harvard and M.I.T. and did all right-I was a real hacker at M.I.T. and not bad at Harvard, but they were not for me, too many nerds at one, too many wimps at the other. So I cut out and headed for the territory like Huck. I chucked it all-except the kids."

"Don't you run the computer division at Mitsy?"

"Yeah, but it's routine, checking out systems and trying to keep the local yokels from messing up-we don't need another T.M.I. No, if I'd been first-rate I'd have gone from hacking to A.I."

"A.I.?"

"Artificial intelligence, Tom. That's where it's at. As you well know-don't think I don't know your work on localizing cortical function."

"I've gotten away from that."

"Tom, you've no idea what's around the corner. It's a scientific revolution to end all revolutions. But I'm out of it now- quite content to be back where I started from."

"Where are you from originally, Van?"

"Not a hundred miles from here. Port Gibson. Did you know the general was born there?"

"What general?"

"Earl Van Dorn."

"You related?"

"How can there be two Van Dorns from Port Gibson without being kinfolks?"

"I see."

I watch Van Dorn as he lounges at his ease, head cocked, eyes squinted up at the cypresses. He's not as handsome as his picture in Dixie. His handsomeness is spoiled by the heaviness of his face and jaw, his pocked skin, the coldness of his blue eyes in the shadow of his sun helmet, humorless even when he is smiling. But he does remind me of an Afrika Corps officer, the heavy handsome face, helmeted, the steel-blue eyes, even the skin so heavily pocked on the cheeks that it looks like a saber scar.

"Do you enjoy bridge?" I ask, watching him.

"Let me put it this way, Tom. It was fun, I was good at it, and I made a living. Now I don't have to. Do you play?"

"No. A little in college. All I remember is the Blackwood convention. When you bid four no-trump you're asking for aces."

He laughs. "Still do-with modifications."

"Tell me something, Van," I say, watching him over my beer can. "What is mud?"

"Mud?" He takes a long swig, holds the can against his forehead. "You mean as in drilling mud?"

"No, a bridge term."

"Oh." He laughs. "You mean mud as in M.U.D. You do know something. That means the middle of three cards in an unbid suit. It's an opening lead and tells your partner something."

"I see. How about Schenken?"

"Schenken? Oh, I get it. Ellen must be talking bridge. That's an Italian bidding system."

"K.S.?"

"Same thing."

"Roth-Steiner?"

"Same, though it sounds German. Ellen goes for the Italian systems-and she's good. Say, what-"

"How about Azalea?"

Van Dorn frowns. "Azalea?"