a dollar bill for an insulator. No more sense than God give a turnip.'
'Was he in any racial beefs?'
'When you got nigger and white boys in the same cage, there ain't any of them wouldn't cut each other's throats.'
'Do you know if he was in the AB?'
'The what?'
'The Aryan Brotherhood.'
'We ain't got that in here.'
'That's funny. It's the fashion everywhere else.' I tried to smile.
But he was not given to humor about his job.
'Let me sit down. My hip's hurting,' he said. He raised his cane in the air and shouted, 'Walnut!' A mulatto convict, his denims streaked with mud and sweat, dropped his shovel, picked up a folding chair, ran it up the incline, and popped it open for the captain.
'Tell Mr. Robicheaux what you're in for,' the captain said.
'Suh?'
'You heard me.'
The convict's eyes focused on a tree farther down the levee.
'Murder, two counts,' he said, quietly.
'Whose murder?' the captain asked.
'My kids. They say I shot bof' my kids. That's what they say.'
'Get on back to work.'
'Yes, suh.'
The captain waited until the convict was back down the mud-flat, then said, pointing with the steel tip of his cane, 'See that big one yonder, the one flinging them bags up on the levee, he raped an eighty-five-year-old woman, then snapped her neck. You tell these white boys they're gonna have to cell with niggers like them two out yonder or they'll lose their good-time, what do you think's gonna happen?'
'I'm not following you.'
He drew in on his pipe, his eyes hazy with a private knowledge. It was overcast, and his lips looked sick and purple against his liver-spotted skin.
'We had two white boys shanked in the Block this year,' he said. 'One a trusty, one a big stripe. We think the same nigger got both of them, but we can't prove it. If you was a white person living up there, what would you do?'
'So maybe there's something like the AB in Angola?'
'Call it what you want. They got their ways. The goddamn Supreme Court's caused all this.' He paused, then continued. 'They carve swastikas, crosses, lightning bolts on each other, pour ink in the sores. The black boys don't tend to mess with them, then. Wait a minute, I'll show you something. Shorty! Get it up here!'
'Yow boss!' A coal-black convict, with a neck like a fire hydrant, his face running with sweat, heaved a sandbag against the levee and lumbered up the incline toward us.
'What'd Boss Gilbeau put you in isolation for?' the captain asked.
'Fightin', boss.'
'Who was you fighting with, Shorty?'
'One of them boys back in Ash.' He grinned, his eyes avoiding both of us.
'Was he white or colored, Shorty?'
'He was white, boss.'
'Show Mr. Robicheaux how you burned yourself when you got out of isolation.'
'Suh?'
'Pull up your shirt, boy, and don't act ignorant.'
The convict named Shorty unbuttoned his sweat-spotted denim shirt and pulled the tail up over his back. There were four gray, thin, crusted lesions across his spine, like his skin had been branded by heated wires or coat hangers.
'How'd you burn yourself, Shorty?' the captain said.
'Backed into the radiator, boss.'
'What was the radiator doing on in April?'
'I don't know, suh. I wished it ain't been on. It sure did hurt. Yes, suh.'
'Get on back down there. Tell them others to clean it up for lunch.'
'Yes, suh.'
The captain knocked his pipe out on his boot heel and stuck it back in his holster belt. He gazed out on the wide yellow-brown sweep of the river and the heavy green line of trees on the far side. He didn't speak.
'That's the way it is here, huh?' I said.
'Besides dope, Raintree's problem is his prick. He's got rut for brains. It don't matter if it's male or female, if it's warm and moving he'll try to top it. The other thing you might look for is fortune-tellers. He had astrology maps all over his cell walls. He give a queer in Magnolia a carton of cigarettes a week to read his palm. By the way, it ain't the AB you ought to have on your mind. Them with the swastikas I was telling you about, they get mail from some church out in Idaho calestian Identity. Hayden Lake, Idaho.'
He raised himself up on his cane to indicate that our interview was over. I could almost hear his bones crack.
'I thank you for your time, captain,' I said.
Then as an afterthought he said, 'If you bust that boy, tell him he just as lief hang himself as come back here for killing a policeman.'
His pupils were like black cinders in his washed-out blue eyes.
I arrived back at my office just in time to shuffle some papers around on my desk and sign out at five o'clock. I was tired from the round-trip drive up to Angola; my shoulder still hurt where Eddy Raintree had caught me with the crowbar, and I wanted to go home, eat supper, take a run along the dirt road by the bayou, and maybe go to a movie in Lafayette with Alafair and Bootsie.
But parked next to my pickup truck was a waxed fireengine-red Cadillac, with the immaculate white canvas top folded back loosely on the body. A man in ice-cream slacks lay almost supine across the leather seats, one purple suede boot propped up on the window jamb, a sequined sunburst guitar hung across his stomach.
'Allons i Lafayette, pour voir les Itites franCaises, ' he sang, then sat up, pulled off his sunglasses with his mutilated hand, and grinned at me. 'What's happening, lieutenant?'
'Hello, Lyle.'
'Take a ride with me.'
'How many of these do you own?'
'They actually belong to the church.'
'I bet.'
'Take a ride with me.'
'I'm on my way home.'
'You can blow a few minutes. It's important.'
'Do you have anything against talking to me during office hours?'
'Somebody broke into Drew's house last night.'
'I didn't hear anything about it. Did she report it to the city police?'
'No.'
'Why not?'
'Maybe I'll explain that. Take a ride with me.' He lifted his guitar over into the back seat. I opened the door and sat back in the deep flesh-colored leather seat next to him. We clanked across the drawbridge over Bayou Teche and drove out of town on East Main. He picked up a paper cup from the floor and drank out of it. A familiar odor struck my nostrils in the warm air.
'Did you give yourself a dispensation today?' I said.
'I preach against drunkenness, not drinking. There's a big difference.'
'Where are we going, Lyle?'
