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enact their irrevocable maniac nightmares.
    The glades unfolded as Verlaine drove, a demarcation point more of sound and smell than vision, for here the undergrowth began to drift from the verges into the road, the hot-top worn and beaten, here and there broken up and allowing small stripes of vegetation to creep through. The air seemed closer, harder to breathe, and the shroud of trees provided a cover that daylight found hard to penetrate. The heat held the rain up, evaporated a good deal of it before it reached the ground, and the mist hung like a pall over everything. The sound of the engine was swallowed, and Verlaine – feeling for perhaps the first time the full weight of his present situation, its possibilities, its potential repercussions – sat uneasily in the driving seat. He slowed the car some and eased through the beginning of this shifting, ever-changing country like someone invading a private and personal territory. He was thankfully unfamiliar with this land, the rise and sweep of verdant plantations, the gaps between the solid ground where the earth would swallow you effortlessly in mud and filth and depthless suffocation. Walk out here with uncertain feet, and those feet would walk you quietly to your death. No-one was ever heard out here; however loud they screamed, that sound was snatched away and evaporated by the heat, the solidity, the thick atmosphere. People died out here like it was one moving, living cemetery, and there was no retrieval for burial or cremation. Once this land had you, well, it had you for keeps.
    Verlaine’s mouth was bitter and dry. He thought of wharfside bars, of cool lemonade, of sweet Louisiana oranges from the French market along North Peters and Decatur.
    He drove for close to an hour, and as he felt the beaten dirt road dip beneath the wheels of the car he also felt the intuitive awareness that something was close. He slowed the car, rolled it leftwards and stopped it beneath a deep overhang of head-height branches. But for close inspection – cover afforded by the mist, the trees themselves – the car was almost invisible. Verlaine thought for a moment about what he was doing, whether he would walk out there and never find his way back. As he exited the vehicle his heart hung in his chest like a fist of tense muscle, beating only because his brain dictated it. His pulse was shallow, his head tight and giddy, his hands shaking. He felt nauseous, a little overwhelmed. He felt watched.
    From the dash he had taken his gun; he headed on foot the way he’d been driving, sticking to the boundary of the road, careful not to miss the verge and wander into the glades.
    Verlaine heard the sound of voices before he saw the house. Imagery again, strange and anachronistic, as he turned through dense branches, through the grasping fingers of thorned and flowered trees. He stopped at the edge of a fence that ran as far as he could see in both directions. He stood there immobile, right within the heart of Feraud family territory, and his heart thudded noisily.
    Approaching a turning in the road he found an unlocked gate and, passing through it, he started up the driveway towards the vast frontage of the wooden house. Painted yellow some eternity before, the woodwork had not so much surrendered its color to the heat as absorbed the quality of the environment into itself. It was shadowed and oppressive in some way, the gaudiness of its age-old decoration at variance with its soul. Here was the seat of jurisdiction for this territory; here was the Feraud family with all its many tentacles; here was Daddy Always, the head of this dynasty.
    By the time he was twenty yards from the house he could see men standing along the veranda, could hear their voices more clearly, French dialects similar to those found in the wharfside bars, in the Creole gambling haunts, around the cockfight arenas in the harbor houses by Toulouse and Bienville. These men carried carbines, and handguns in belt