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"See, your face jumped. Just like it was you instead of me about to take the bullet. But I can tell by the weight where the round is," he said.

She pushed herself up on her hands so her back was against the headboard. She thought she was going to lose control of her bladder. She looked at her baby in the crib and at the glow of a television set inside the cabin of a neighbor who worked nights and at her plastic welfare charge card on the table and next to it the thirteen dollars she had to make last until the end of the week and at the cheap clothes that hung on hangers in her closet. She breathed the funk that rose from her armpits and a soapy odor that either came from her bedclothes or her pajama top, and her breasts seemed to hang like an old woman's jugs from her skeleton. Her stomach had stretch marks on it and felt flaccid and like a water-filled balloon at the same time, and she realized she owned absolutely nothing of value in this world, not even in her own person, nor could she call upon one friend or resource, to bargain for her and her baby's life, that if she was lucky the world would simply take what it needed from her and leave a piece of something behind.

"I ain't gonna fight you no more, Rain Man. I'm just a nigger."

She pulled the sheet off her and sat on the side of the bed, her feet not quite touching the floor, her eyes downcast.

"You shouldn't use racial words like that. It's what whites have taught you people to do. To feel bad about yourself," he said, and sat beside her. He moved his arm around her waist but did not look at her. Instead, his lips moved silently, as though he were talking to other people in the room.

"You coming apart, Rain Man?" she said.

"You couldn't guess at what's in my head, girl."

She unfastened his belt and unbuttoned the top of his trousers and pulled his zipper partway down. She placed one hand inside his underwear and looked into his eyes. They were black, then suddenly apprehensive in the flashes of light through the window, as though he were watching his own behavior from outside himself and was not sure which person he was.

Her hand moved mechanically, as though it were disconnected from her. She watched the side of his face.

She took her hand away and let it rest by his thigh.

"It ain't me you want," she said.

"Yes, it is."

"The one you want is the one you cain't have."

He got up from the bed and stood in front of her, his legs slightly spread, his unbuttoned trousers exposing the top of his Jockey underwear. His stomach was as flat as a swimmer's, smooth as tallow in the flashes of lightning through the window.

"Take off your clothes," he said.

"Won't do no good, Rain Man. Can kill me and my baby, both. But it ain't gonna get you no satisfaction."

He made a sound that she could not interpret, like someone who knew his anger must always be called upon in increments and never allowed to have complete expression.

He tucked in his shirt and worked the zipper up on his trousers and fastened the button at the top and began buckling his belt. But his fingers started shaking and he could not line up the hole in the leather with the metal tongue in the buckle.

She reached out to help him. That's when his fist exploded on the side of her face.

She found Bootsie and me that Sunday evening at Jefferson Island while we were eating supper in the restaurant by the lake, the sun glowing through the oak trees and Spanish moss. I watched her come up the winding walkway through the flower gardens and groups of tourists, her diapered baby mounted on her arm, her blue-jeans shorts rolled up high on her thighs, her face bruised like an overripe eggplant.

She marched into the restaurant and stopped in front of our table.

"Somebody shit in that white boy's brain. It ain't me done it, either. You better get him out of our lives, Sad Man. I mean now. 'Cause he come back around, I got me a gun now and I'm gonna blow his fucking head off," she said.

I walked outside with her into the gardens and we sat down on a scrolled-iron bench. Through the restaurant windows I could see Bootsie by herself at our table, staring out at the lake, her coffee cold and her dessert uneaten.

"Did you file a report at the department?" I asked.

"They was real hepful. Man kept looking down my top to make sure Johnny Remeta wasn't hiding there."

"I doubt Remeta will bother you again."

"Where Fat Man at?"

"Why?" I asked.

"'Cause he ain't like you. 'Cause he don't fool hisself. 'Cause people mess wit' him only once."

"Remeta might try to kill my daughter, Little Face. I'm sorry about what happened to you. But I'm tired of your anger," I said.

I left her on the bench with her baby. When I went back inside the restaurant, Bootsie was gone.

The sheriff was at the bait shop before dawn Monday morning, but he did not come inside the building right away. He propped his hands on the dock railing and stared across the bayou at the cypress trees inside the fog. In his cowboy boots and pinstripe suit and Stetson hat, he looked like a cattleman who had just watched his whole herd run off by dry lightning. He took off his hat and walked through the cone of light over the screen door and entered the shop.

"You gave Jim Gable a concussion Friday night. Now you take a vacation day and don't even have the courtesy to call me?" he said.

"Johnny Remeta is stalking my daughter and leaving notes at my house. I don't care what happens with Gable," I replied.

"Everything's personal with you, Dave. You use the department the way a prizefighter uses a rosin box. You're an employee of the parish. Which means I'm your supervisor, not a guy who follows you around with a dustpan and whisk broom. I don't like coming out here to explain that."

"Did Gable press charges?"

"No."

"Then it's a private matter."

"As of this moment you're on suspension."

"That's the breaks."

"That casual, huh?"

"How'd you like Remeta creeping your place?"

"Do what you're thinking and I've got your cell already waiting for you."

"I didn't call you because I can't prove what Gable was doing behind my wife's person in that pavilion. It would only bring her embarrassment."

"Behind her person? What the hell does that mean?"

"End of conversation."

"You're right. It does no good to talk to you. I wish I hadn't come here," he said. He tapped his Stetson against his leg and walked out into the mist, his mouth a tight seam.

I worked with Batist at the dock all day, then drove to the Winn-Dixie in town, filled the back of the pickup with soda pop and loaded the ice chest with lunch meat for the bait shop cooler. Right down the street was the ancient motel where Clete was living. I had not seen him since Saturday afternoon, when I had left him bleary-eyed and alcne with a scrap of paper in his hand that could have been torn from the Doomsday Book.

I pulled into the motel entrance and drove under the canopy of oaks to the stucco cottage he rented at the end of the row. Leaves were drifting out of the oak branches overhead and he was dusting the exterior of his Cadillac with a rag, flicking the leaves off the finish as though no others would drop out of the tree, the hair on his bare shoulders glowing like a blond ape's in a column of sunlight.

"What's the haps, Streak?" he said without looking up from his work.

"You doing all right?" I said.

"I used the medical dictionary at the City Library. From what it says, that stuff's like going to hell without dying."

"There're treatments."

"The victims look like they're wrapped in sheets of plastic?"

"How's Passion?"

"She doesn't talk about it. At least not to me." His voice was without tone or inflection. "It's true, you tore up Jim Gable at the Shrimp Festival?"

"I guess I have to lose it about every six months to remind myself I'm still a drunk."

"Save the dish rinse. You didn't lose it. He took it from you."

"What?"

"Gable never does anything without a reason. You're trying to bring him down. Now nobody will believe anything you say about him."