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that’s new.”
    She let out her breath and took a drink from her glass.
    “I know you were a good cop and all that bullshit,” she said, “but there’s a lot of stuff you guys never see. You can’t. You don’t live in it, Streak. You’re a visitor.”
    “I’ve got to run, kiddo,” I said. “We live just south of New Iberia. If you ever want to work in the boat-and-bait business, give me a call.”
    “Dave…”
    “Yeah?”
    “Come see me again, okay?”
    I walked out into the dusky, neon-lit street. The music from the Dixieland and rockabilly bars was thunderous. I looked back at Robin, but her barstool was empty.
     
    That night I rolled along the I-10 causeway over the Atchafalaya flood basin. The willows and the half-submerged dead trunks of the cypress trees were gray and silver in the moonlight. There was no breeze, and the water was still and black and dented with the moon’s reflection. A half-dozen oil derricks stood out blackly against the moon, then a wind blew up from the Gulf, ruffling the willows along the far shore, and wrinkled the water’s surface like skin all the way out to the causeway.
    I turned off at Breaux Bridge and followed the old backroad through St. Martinville toward New Iberia. An electric floodlight shone on the white face of the eighteenth-century Catholic church where Evangeline and her lover were buried under a spreading oak. The trees that arched over the road were thick with Spanish moss, and the wind smelled of plowed earth and the young sugarcane out in the fields. But I could not get Bubba Rocque’s name out of my mind.
    He was among the few white kids in New Iberia who were tough and desperate enough to set pins at the bowling alley, in the years before air conditioning when the pits were 120 degrees and filled with exploding pins, crashing metal racks, cursing Negroes, and careening bowling balls that could snap a pinsetter’s shinbone in half. He was the kid who wore no coat in winter, had scabs in his hair, and cracked his knuckles until they were the size of quarters. He was dirty and he smelled bad and he’d spit down a girl’s collar for a nickel. He was also the subject of legends: he got laid by his aunt when he was ten; he hunted the neighborhood cats with a Benjamin pump; he tried to rape a Negro woman who worked in the high school lunch room; his father whipped him with a dog chain; he set fire to his clapboard house, which was located between the scrap yard and the SP tracks.
    But what I remember most about him were his wide-set gray-blue eyes. They never seemed to blink, as though the lids had been surgically removed. I fought him to a draw in district Golden Gloves. You could break your hands on his face and he’d keep coming at you, the pupils of those unrelenting eyes like burnt cinders.
    I needed to disengage. I wasn’t a copy anymore, and my obligations were elsewhere. If Bubba Rocque’s people were involved with the plane crash, a bad moon was on the rise and I didn’t want anything more to do with it. Let the feds and the lowlifes jerk each other around. I was out of it.
    When I got home the house was dark under the pecan trees, except for the glow of the television set in the front room. I opened the screen door and saw Annie asleep on a pallet in front of the television, the wood-bladed fan overhead blowing the curls on the back of her neck. Two empty ice cream bowls streaked with strawberry juice were beside her. Then in the corner I saw Alafair, wearing my blue-denim shirt like pajamas, her frightened face fixed on the television screen. A documentary about World War II showed a column of GIs marching along a dirt road outside of a bombed-out Italian town. They wore their pots at an angle, cigarettes dangled from their grinning mouths, a BAR man had a puppy buttoned up in his field jacket. But to Alafair these were not the liberators of Western Europe. Her thin body trembled under my hands when I picked her up.
    ” Vienen los soldados