"Black Cherry Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burke James Lee)

CHAPTER 9

I filled a clean dish towel with ice cubes and cracked them into a fine, wet paste with a rolling pin on the edge of the sink, then lay down on the living room couch and held the towel to my head. What a sharp ex-cop I proved myself this morning, I thought. I had managed to roust, terrify, and infuriate an innocent telephone man, then invite a contract killer into my house, right after the cops had left, turn my back on him unarmed, when I had access to a.45, a double-barreled twelve-gauge, and a.38 revolver nailed in a holster under a cabinet shelf, and get sapped and manacled to a drainpipe. I didn't want to think about the rest of it: the moist touch of his hand sliding across the quivering muscles of my stomach, the total absence of moral light in his eyes, the transfixed, almost opiated shine in his face while he let the knife hover over my heart cavity.

I had seen the work of his kind before, in New Orleans. They created object lessons that no one in the criminal community ever forgot: a grand jury witness garroted with wire, a hooker drenched with gasoline and turned into a cone of flame, a mob member who had cuckolded a friend emasculated and his phallus stuffed in his mouth. The men who did the work made you shudder. I've heard all kinds of explanations for their behavior and their perverse nature. My personal feeling is that they're simply evil. The hooker, the street dips, the check writers, the fences and hot-money passers at the track, that bumbling urban army of brain-fried misfits, are often people with families and other jobs who eventually disappear into the normalcy of American life without ever leaving more than a forgettable scratch on it. Charlie Dodds's kind are a special bunch, however. I don't think there are many of them around, but enough perhaps to remind us that not every human being can be fixed or explained and that the jailer who keeps them in maximum-security lockdown, chained ankle, waist, and wrist when they're moved only a short distance in the prison, knows and appreciates something about them that the rest of us do not.

I had decided not to call the heat about Charlie Dodds's visit. As Clete had said, how much of it would they be willing to believe, particularly after I had rousted the telephone man? Also, I was tired of having to prove myself to cops. Sometimes it's not good to interfere with the fates. Maybe Clete and Dodds had found each other.

The ice melted in the towel. I got up from the couch, my forehead numb and tight from the cold and the swelling, and cleaned up the kitchen. I wiped Dodds's blood off the wall, stove, and linoleum with wet paper towels, cleaned the same areas again with detergent and rubbing alcohol, then put the towels, his survival knife, his cloth cap, and the sawed handcuffs into his canvas handbill bag, wadded it up, and threw the whole mess down the basement stairs.

Then I showered and took a nap in the bedroom. The breeze ruffled the bushes outside the window and blew coolly across the sheets. In my dream I saw Annie sitting on the rail of my father's houseboat in the misty early morning light down in the Atchafalaya marsh. The houseboat was weathered and paint less streaked with moisture, and clouds of vapor billowed out of the islands of willow and cypress trees and hung low on the motionless water. Her hair was gold, her skin tan, her mouth red in the mist, but she wouldn't speak to me. She smiled and looked toward my father, who waited for me in the outboard, and I realized that I was only fifteen and that I had to help him run the crab line, dripping with catfish heads, that we had strung across the bay the night before. As the sun burned the mist off the water and back into the trees, we filled the bait well with bluepoint crabs, then began picking up the conical fish nets that we had weighted with bricks, marked with sealed, plastic Clo-rox containers, and dropped into deep current yesterday morning. We worked through lunch, shaking huge mud cat and gaspagoo, what Texans called buffalo fish and Negroes goo-fish, into the bottom of the boat, our backs hot and striped with sweat under the white sun. My father's hair was curly and wild, like black wire, his hands big as skillets, his teeth strong and white, his laugh genuine and full of fun, his shoulders and arms so powerful and corded with muscle that he could fight three men at one time in the middle of a dance floor and take blows from every direction without going down. On the pipeline and in the oil field they called him Big Al Ro-bicheaux with the kind of respect and affection that working people have for a man who possesses their best qualities. I leaned over the gunnel, grabbed a floating Clorox container, and got the lip of the net almost to the surface. But it was as heavy as concrete, the wooden hoops fouled, the netting torn, and no matter how I strained I couldn't lift the first hoop clear of the water.

My father cut the engine, climbed to the bow so he wouldn't capsize the boat, and jerked the net up with his massive arms, until he could see the outline of the trapped gar just below the yellow surface.

"Fils p'tain" he said. He hadn't shaved in three days, and his hair and beard were dripping with sweat.

The gar must have been five feet long. Its fins and tail and armor like scales and long, teeth-filled snout were mired in the netting, and there was no way to get it back out through the series of hoops. My father pulled up the bricks that we used to anchor the net, cut them loose, and dropped them into the bottom of the boat; then we towed the net slowly behind us back to the willow island where the houseboat was moored in the shade.

We shook the gar out of the ruined net on the bank and watched it flop and gasp for air and coat its gills with sand. Its teeth could cut a bass in half like a razor slicing through it. My father got behind it, hit it once on the head with a brick, then drove his skinning knife through a soft place between the head and the armored shell, pushing down with both hands until the knife point went through the throat into the sand and blood roared from the gar's mouth and gills. But the gar continued to flop, to twist against the knife and flip sand into the air, until my father crushed its head and its eyes became as suddenly lifeless and cold as black glass. Then he brought the knife straight back along the dorsal fin, and the black-green armor cracked away from the rows of pink meat as cleanly as pecan shell breaking.

It wasn't a good day. The gar wasn't a commercial fish, and we couldn't afford the loss of a net, but my father always put the best light on a situation.

"We cain't sell him, no," he said, "but he gonna be some good garfish balls. You mess with Aldous and Dave, you gonna get fry, you gonna get eat, you better believe, podna."

We cleaned and filleted fish in pans of bloody water until evening, when the mosquitoes started to boil out of the shadows and purple rain clouds gathered on the horizon and lightning flashed far out on the Gulf. We packed the fish in the ice bin, so tomorrow we could take them downriver to sell in Morgan City. I went to sleep in my bunk bed with the wind blowing cool through the window from across the bay, then I woke to a smell that shouldn't have been there. It was thick and gray, as fetid as excrement and sweet at the same time. But we had thrown all the fish guts and heads and piles of stripped mud-cat skins into the current and had washed the deck and all the pans clean. I kept the pillow over my head and tried to push myself deeper into sleep, but I could feel the stench against my face like a rat's breath.

In the first blue light of dawn I went out on the deck, and Annie was leaning against the rail in the mist, dressed like a Cajun fisher girl in sun-faded jeans, tennis shoes without socks, a khaki shirt with the arms cut-off. The smell was everywhere. She pointed toward my father, who waited for me on the sandbar, a shovel over his shoulder.

Don't be afraid, she said. Go with Al.

I don't want to this time.

You mustn't worry about those things. We both love you.

You're about to go away from me, aren't you?

Her face was kind, and her eyes moved over my face as though she were an older sister looking at her younger brother.

I followed my father into the marsh, our tennis shoes splashing through the sloughs, the wet willow branches swinging back into our faces. The early sun was big and hot on the edge of the flooded woods, and the cypress trees looked black against the red light. The water was dead and covered with green algae; cottonmouth moccasins were coiled on the low branches of the trees. The smell became stronger, so that I had to hold my hand to my face and breathe through my mouth. We came up out of a slough onto a hard-packed sandbar, and lying stretched on the sand, huge divots cut out of its back by a boat propeller, was the rotting carcass of the biggest bull alligator I had ever seen. His tail drag and the sharp imprints of his feet trailed off the sandbar back through the trees. I could see the open water where he had probably been hit by a commercial boat of some kind, or the screw on a seismograph drill barge, and had beached himself and begun his crawl to this spot, where he had died on high ground and turkey buzzards and snakes had begun feeding on his wounds.

"Mats, that stink," my father said, and waved at the air in front of his face.

"You start dig a hole." He handed me the shovel, then he grinned as he sometimes did when he was about to play a joke on me.

"Where you gonna dig a hole, you?"

I didn't understand him. I started to scrape in the dry sand with the shovel's tip.

"Que t'as pres faire cher? Tu veux travailler comme un neg?" he said, and laughed. ("What are you doing, dear one? You want to work like a Negro?") I pressed down again into the hard sand, felt it grate and slide over the blade. He took the shovel out of my hand, walked to a dip in the sandbar where the water from two sloughs had washed a small channel, and dug deeply and easily into the wet sand and flung it out into the sunlight, his face grinning at me.

"You do it where it soft," he said.

"Ain't you learned nothing from your old man?"

I woke to a clatter of birds in the trees outside the window, my head thick with afternoon sleep. I rinsed my face in the bathroom sink and looked at the tight purple lump that ran down through my hairline. The dream made no sense to me, other than the facts that I missed my father and Annie, that I feared death, and that I conducted a foolish quarrel with the irrevocable nature of time.

Al, what are you trying to tell me? I thought, as the water streamed off my face in the mirror's silent reflection.

Shortly before three o'clock I walked down to the school and waited for Alafair by the side of the playground. A few minutes later the doors of the building were flung open, and she came running across the small softball diamond with a group of other children, her Donald Duck lunch box clanging against her thigh. Her elastic-wasted jeans were grimed at the knees, and there were dirt and sweat rings around her neck.

"What did you guys do today at recess? Mud wrestling?" I said.

"Miss Regan let us play dodge ball It's fun. I got hit in the seat. You ever play it, Dave?"

"Sure."

"What happened to your head?"

"I hit it when I was working on the truck. Not too smart, huh?"

Her eyes looked at me curiously, then she put her hand in mine and swung her weight on my arm.

"I forgot," she said.

"Miss Regan said to give you this note. She said she'd call you anyway."

"About what?"

"About the man."

"What man?"

"The one at the school yard."

I unfolded the piece of paper she had taken from her lunch box. It read: Mr. Robicheaux, I want to have a serious talk with you. Call me at my home this 'afternoon Tess Regan. Under her name she had written her phone number.

"Who's this man you're talking about, Alafair?" I said.

A bunch of children ran past us on the sidewalk. The sunlight through the maple trees made patterns on their bodies.

"The other kids said he was in a car on the corner. I didn't see him. They said he was looking through, what you call those things, Dave? You got some in the truck."

"Field glasses?"

"They called them something else."

"Binoculars?"

"Yeah." She grinned up at me when she recognized the word.

"Who was he looking at, Alafair?"

"I don't know."

"Why does Miss Regan want to talk to me about it?"

"I don't know."

"What time was this guy out there?"

"At recess."

"What time is recess?"

"First- through third-graders go at ten-thirty."

"Is that when he was out there?"

"I don't know, Dave. Why you look so worried?"

I took a breath, released her hand, and brushed my palm on the top of her head.

"Sometimes strange men, men who are not good people, try to bother little children around schools or at playgrounds. There're not many people like this, but you have to be careful about them. Don't talk with them, don't let them give you anything, don't let them buy you anything. And no matter what they say, never go anywhere with them, never get in a car with them. Do you understand that, little guy?"

"Sure, Dave."

"That kind of man will tell you that he's a friend of your father's. That your father sent him to pick you up, maybe. But if he was a friend, you'd recognize him, right?"

"They hurt children?"

"Some of them do. Some of them are very bad people."

I saw doubt and fear working into her face like a shadow. Her throat swallowed. I picked up her hand in mine again.

"Don't be scared, little guy," I said.

"It's the same thing I've told you before. We just have to be cautious sometimes. Miss Regan tells all the children that, doesn't she? It's no big deal."

But it wasn't working. Her eyes were locked on images in her memory that I could not touch or eradicate.

"Look, when I tell you not to stick your hand in the window fan, that doesn't mean you should be afraid of the fan, does it?" I said.

"No."

"If I tell you not to put your finger in Tripod's mouth, that doesn't mean you should be afraid of Tripod, does it?"

"No." Her eyes crinkled slightly at the corners.

"If Clarise won't let Tex eat at the breakfast table, that doesn't mean she's afraid of horses, does it?"

She grinned up at me, her face squinting in the sunlight. I swung her on my arm under the maple trees, but there was a feeling in my chest like a chunk of angle iron.

At the house she poured a glass of milk and cut a piece of pie at the kitchen table for her afternoon snack, then washed out her lunch box and thermos and began straightening her room. I took the telephone into the bathroom so she could not hear me talking to Tess Regan.

"What's the deal with this guy at the school ground?" I said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You sent a note home. Then Alafair told me about the guy with binoculars."

"I was referring to your tone. Are you always this cross with people over the telephone?"

"It's been an unusual day. Look, Miss Regan Tess what's the deal?"

"At recess we use some of the eighth-graders as monitors for the lower grades. Jason, one of the monitors, said a man was parked in his car under the trees across the street. He said the man walked over to the fence and asked where Alafair Robicheaux was. He said he was a friend of her father's, and he had a message for her. We teach all the children not to talk to people off the street, to direct all visitors to the principal's office. Jason told him he should see Sister Louise inside the building. Then the man pointed to where the little ones were playing dodge ball and said, "Oh, there she is." Jason said, "Yeah, but you have to see Sister Louise." The man said he didn't have time but he'd be back later. When he got back in the car, the children said, he looked at the school ground through a pair of binoculars."

"What time was he there?"

"It must have been about eleven o'clock."

Then it wasn't Charlie Dodds, I thought. He was already inside my house by then.

"What kind of car?"

"The kids said it was yellow."

"What did the guy look like? Did he have an accent?"

"Jason just said he was tall. I didn't ask about an accent."

"That's all right. Was there anything unusual about him? A scar on his lip?"

"Children usually don't remember those kinds of details about adults. In their world adults are simply 'big people' whom they either trust or dislike."

"I'd like to talk to Jason."

"Then you'll need to make an appointment with Sister Louise, and maybe she'll ask the parents to bring Jason in. But I doubt it. Not unless you want to tell us what this is about and also call the police. Because that's what we're going to do."

"That's good. But you need to listen to me now and not be afraid of what I'm going to tell you. This guy is not a child molester. He wants to get at me through Alafair. He may work for the mob out of Vegas or Reno. I had one like that in my house this morning. That's why it's been an unusual day. Or he may be somebody connected with an oil company, a guy named Mapes or somebody who works for him. Either way, the local cops don't have much experience with this kind of guy."

"The mob?" she said.

"That's right."

"You mean like in The Godfather? The honest-to-God Mafia?"

"The real article."

"And you didn't tell me this before?"

"It wouldn't have changed anything. Except maybe to alarm you."

"I think I'm very angry right now."

"Look, I don't want to be the guy to mess up your day. You asked for the truth, I gave it to you. There's no big revelation in what I told you, either. There's some Reno transplants right up there at Flat-head Lake. The mob's anyplace there's money to be made in gambling or dope or any kind of vice."

She didn't answer.

"Listen," I said, "if that guy comes back, you try to get his license number, then you call the heat, then you call me. Okay?"

"What do you plan to do?" she said. Her voice was dry, the way heat is when it lifts off a metal surface.

"I'm going to seriously impair his interest in children on school yards."

"I'll give your words some thought. In the meantime you might reflect a bit on the need for a little more candor in your relationships with other people. Maybe they don't like to feel that they're not to be trusted with this great body of private information that you have."

The line went dead in my hand.

I couldn't blame her. How would any ordinary person deal with the knowledge that an emissary of the mob could stroll into a world as innocent and predictable as a children's playground? But was the man indeed one of Dio's people, a partner of or a backup for Charlie Dodds? Why would Dodds need a backup? It was a simple hit, probably a five-thou whack that a guy like Dodds considered a cakewalk. Unless Dio's outraged pride was so great that he wanted a child's death as well as my own.

It didn't compute, though. If Dodds had been paid to hurt Alafair also, he would have waited until after three o'clock, when we were both home, or he would have come on the weekend.

So that left Harry Mapes. He had been driving a black Jeepster when I had seen him just south of the Blackfeet Reservation, but maybe the man in the yellow car with the binoculars worked with Mapes or had been hired by him. Why would he want to turn the screws on me now? Did he think I was close to finding something or turning it around on him? If he did, he had a lot more confidence in me than I did in myself.

I called Sister Louise, the principal, at the school and caught her just before she left the office. She had already talked with Tess Regan, and she was no more happy with me than Tess Regan had been. She sounded like some of the nuns I had known as a child, the ones who wore black habits that were probably like portable stoves and who whacked your knuckles with tri corner rulers and who could hit you on the run with their fifteen-decade rosaries. She told me that she had just made a police report, that I should do the same, and that a patrol car would be parked by the school tomorrow morning.

"I'd still like to talk with the little boy, what's his name, Jason," I said.

"He's told me everything he knows. He's a shy boy. He's not one to study detail in adults."

"Does he remember if the man had an accent?"

"He's fourteen years old. He's not a linguist."

"Sister, it's good that you'll have a patrol car out there tomorrow. But our man won't be back while the cops are around."

"That's the point, isn't it?"

"But he may well be when they're gone. That's when we can nail him."

"There's no 'we' involved in this, Mr. Robicheaux."

"I see."

"I'm glad you do. Good-bye."

For the second time in ten minutes someone had hung up on me.

I took Alafair to the park to play, then we went back home and fixed supper. Clete had told me I could call him at the Eastgate Lounge at six o'clock. I wasn't sure that I should. Whatever he had done with Charlie Dodds, it wasn't good. But at that point my legal problems as well as the threat to Alafair's and my safety were so involved and seemingly without solution that I wondered why I should be troubled over some marginal involvement with the fate of a depraved and psychotic character like Dodds, whom nobody cared about except perhaps Sally Dio because he had probably paid him half the hit money up front. It was five-thirty, and we were five minutes into our meal when I heard a car park in front and somebody walk up on the porch.

Even before I could make out his silhouette against the screen door, I saw Dixie Lee's battered pink Cadillac convertible parked with two wheels on the edge of my grass. The top was up, but I could see that the backseat was loaded with suitcases, boxes of clothing and cowboy boots, hangered western suits racked on a wire.

His sudden change of fortune, his plans for himself, his rehearsed entreaty, were altogether too obvious and predictable. I didn't open the door. I was even a bit ashamed at my lack of sympathy. But it had been a bad day, and I really didn't need Dixie Lee in it. He was eloquent in his desperation, though. He had marshaled all the raw energies of a drunk who knew that he was operating on the last fuel in his tank.

"Things are coming apart up there at the lake," he said.

"You were right, Sal's a shit. No, that ain't right. He's a crazy person. He wants your ass cooked in a pot. I couldn't abide it. I had to get out."

"Watch your language. My daughter's here."

"I'm sorry. But you don't know what Sal's like when lights start going off in his head. He's got this twisted-up look on his face. Nobody can say anything around him unless you want your head snapped off. One of the broads is eating her dessert at the dinner table, and Sal keeps smoking his cigarette and looking at her like she crawled up out of a drain hole. Her eyes are blinking and she's trying to smile and be pretty and cute and get off the hook, then he says, "You eat too much," and puts out his cigarette in her food.

"He hates you, Dave. You really got to him. You bend up the wheels inside a guy like Sally Dee, and smoke starts to come out of the box. I don't want to be around it. That's where it stands. You tell me to get out of your life, I can relate to it. But I picked myself into some thin cotton, son, and I got nowhere to turn. I'll be straight with you on something else, too. I'm in to Sal for fifteen thou. That's how much flake I put up my nose on the tab. So I got that old Caddy out there, thirty-seven dollars in my pocket, and a quarter tank of gas. I'm'trying to keep it all in E major, but I blew out my amps on this one."

"Save the rock 'n' roll corn pone for somebody else," I said.

"I had Charlie Dodds in my house this morning."

"Dodds? I thought he went back to Vegas last night. What was he doing here?"

"You don't know?"

"You mean he's a mechanic? I didn't know. I swear in front of God I didn't. I thought he was one of Sal's mules. Is that how you got that purple knot on your head?"

"Something like that."

"Man, I'm sorry. I didn't have any idea. The guy didn't say three words when he was around me. I thought he was retarded. All those mules got that meltdown look in their eyes. They swallow balloons full of skag, fly in and out of canyons, land on dirt roads at night. We're talking about the dumbest white people you ever met."

"I think he might have a backup man still after me. Is there some other new guy hanging around Sal's place?"

"No."

"You're sure?"

"Yeah."

"Anyway, I can't help you, Dixie."

He looked at me blankly through the screen. He swallowed, glanced up the street as though something of significance were waiting for him there, then started to speak again.

"I've got too many problems of my own. That's about it, partner," I said.

"No way, huh?"

"I'm afraid not."

He blew his breath up into his face.

"I can't blame you," he said.

"I just ain't got many selections right now."

"Start over."

"Yeah, why not? It ain't my first time washing dishes or living in a hallelujah mission. Hey, I want you to remember one thing, though, Dave. I ain't all bad. I never set out to harm anybody. It just worked out that way."

"Whatever you do, good luck with it, Dixie," I said, and closed the inside door on him and went back to the kitchen table, where Alafair had already started in on her dessert.

I looked at my watch it was a quarter to six now and tried to finish supper. The food seemed tasteless, and I couldn't concentrate on something Alafair was telling me about the neighbor's cat chasing grasshoppers in the flower bed.

"What's wrong?" she said.

"Nothing. It's just a little headache. It'll pass."

"That man made you mad or something?"

"No, he's just one of those guys who'll always have his elevator stuck between floors."

"What?"

"Nothing, little guy. Don't worry about it."

I chewed my food and looked silently out the window at the shadows and the cool gold light on the backyard. I heard Alafair wash her dishes in the sink, then walk toward the front of the house. A moment later she was back in the kitchen.

"That man's still out there. Just sitting in his car. What's he doing, Dave?" she said.

"Probably figuring out ways to sell the Rocky Mountains to Arab strip miners."

"What?"

"Just ignore him."

But I couldn't. Or at least I couldn't ignore the twelfth-step AA principle that requires us to help those who are afflicted in the same way we are. Or maybe I knew that I had asked for all my own troubles, and it wasn't right any longer to blame it on Dixie Lee. I set my knife and fork down on my plate and walked outside to his car. He was deep in thought, a cigarette burned almost down to his fingers, which rested on top of the steering wheel. His face jerked around with surprise when he heard me behind him.

"Lord God, you liked to give me a heart attack," he said.

"You can't drink while you stay with us," I said.

"If you do or if you come home with it on your breath, you're eighty-sixed. No discussion, no second chance. I don't want any profanity in front of my daughter, and you go outside if you want to smoke. You share the' cooking and the cleaning, you go to bed when we do. The AA group down the street has a job service. If they find you some work, you take it, whatever it is, and you pay one third of the groceries and the rent. That's the deal, Dixie. If there are any rules here you can't live with, now's the time to tell me."

"Son, you say 'Frog' and I'll say 'How high?' "

He began unloading the backseat of his car. His face wore the expression of a man who might have been plucked unexpectedly from the roof of a burning building. As he piled his boxes and suitcases and clothes on the sidewalk, he talked without stop about the 1950s, Tommy Sands, Ruth Brown, the Big Bopper, the mob, cons in Huntsville, the actress wife who paid goons to beat him up behind Co amp;k's Hoe Down in Houston. I looked at my watch. It was five minutes to six.

He was still talking while I looked up the number of the Eastgate Lounge.

"-called him 'the hippy-dippy from Mississippi, yes indeed, Mister Jimmy Reed,' " he said.

"When that cat went into 'Big Boss Man,' you knew he'd been on Parchman Farm, son. You don't fake them kind of feelings. You don't grow it in New York City, either. You don't put no mojo in your sounds unless you picked cotton four cents a pound and ate a mess of them good ole butter beans. My daddy said he give up on me, that somebody snuck me into the crib, that I must have been a nigra turned inside out."

Alafair sat delighted and amazed as she listened to Dixie Lee's marathon storytelling. I dialed the Eastgate Lounge, then listened to the hum and clatter of noise in the background while a woman called Clete to the phone. I heard him scrape the receiver off a hard surface and place it to his ear.

"Streak?"

"Yep."

"Did I surprise you? Did you think maybe your old partner had headed for Taco Greaso Land again?"

"I wasn't sure."

"I don't rattle, mon. At least not over the shit bags."

"Maybe you should be careful what you tell me."

"Do I sound like I'm sweating it? When are you going to stop pretending you still got your cherry?"

"You're starting to get to me, Clete."

"What else is new? All I did was save your life today."

"Is there something you want to say?"

"Yeah. Get your butt over here. You know where the East-gate is?"

"Yeah, but I'm bringing Alafair with me. I'll meet you in the park across the river from the shopping center. You walk across an old railway trestle that's been made into a footbridge."

"And you'll be eating ice cream cones at a picnic table. Man, how do I get in on the good life?" he said, and hung up.

I told Dixie Lee there was a cold roast, bread, and mayonnaise in the icebox, and he could fix himself sandwiches if he hadn't eaten yet. Then Alafair and I drove across town to the ice cream place on the north bank of the Clark Fork, bought cones, and walked across the river on the footbridge to the park on the opposite side. In the past, there had been a bad fire up the sides of Hellgate Canyon, and the pines that grew down from the crest had been scorched black and then the ash and the burnt needles had been washed away by rain and the spring snowmelt so that the steep gray-pink cliffs of the canyon were exposed high above the river. The wind was up, and the leaves of the cottonwoods along the river's edge clicked and flickered in the soft light; because the spring runoff had ended and the water was dropping each day, more and more white, moss-scaled stones were exposed in the riverbed and the main channel was turning from copper-colored to a dark green. The white water had formed into long, narrow trout riffles that fanned out behind big rocks into deep pools.

The park was full of blue spruce and Russian olive trees, and kids from the university, which was only a block away, sailed Fris-bees overhead and played rag football. We sat on the mowed grass, high up on the riverbank, so we could look out over the tops of the willows and watch two men who were fishing with worms and spinning rods, throwing lead weights far out into the channel. I saw Clete walk across the bridge with a paper sack hefted in one arm. I got'Alafair started on one of the swing sets and then sat back down on the bank. His knees cracked, his stomach hung over his Budweiser shorts, and he grunted hard in his chest when he sat down beside me.

"You look undressed," I said.

"Oh." He touched his chest and smiled.

"I don't work for Sal anymore. I don't have to walk around with a piece all the time. Feels good, mon."

He twisted the cap off a bottle of Great Falls.

"Dixie Lee says he didn't know Dodds was a hit man."

"He probably didn't. Where'd you see Dixie Lee?"

"He's living at my house."

"I'll be damned. He cut the umbilical cord? I didn't think he had the guts. Sal doesn't handle rejection well."

"Dodds may have had a partner, a backup guy. Does Dio have another guy in town?"

"If he does, I don't know about it. I know a lot of them, too. At least the ones Sal hangs with. They're New York transplants who think the essence of big time is playing bridge by the pool with a lot of gash lying around. Hey, dig this. Sal had a bunch of them staying at his motel, and the motel manager is this little Jewish guy who used to run a book for the mob out of a pizza joint in Fort Lauder-dale. Of course, the Jew can't do enough for the dagos because they scare the shit out of him. But he's got this kid who's a wiseass college student at Berkeley, and the kid works for his old man as the poolside waiter during the summer. So four of the dagos are playing cards at one of the umbrella tables. And these are big, mean-looking cocksuckers, shades, wet black hair all over their stomachs, big floppers tucked in their bikinis, and they're giving the kid a terrible time sending food back to the kitchen, complaining the drinks taste like there's bathroom antiseptic in them, running the kid back and forth for cigarettes and candied cherries and sun cream for the gash and anything else they think of.

"Then one guy spills ice and vodka all over the table and tells the kid to mop it up and bring him another deck of cards. The kid says, "Hey, I've been studying Italian at school this year. What does Eatta my shitta mean?"

"The old man hears it and slaps his kid's face in front of everybody. Then he starts swallowing and sweating and apologizing to the dagos while they stare at him from behind those black shades. Finally one of them stands up, hooks his finger in the old man's mouth, and throws him down in an iron chair. He says, "He don't have manners 'cause you didn't teach him none. So you shut up your face and don't be talking to impress nobody. You clean this up, you bring everybody what they want, you sit over there and you don't go nowhere till we say."

"They made him sit out there in the sun like an organ-grinder's monkey for four hours. Till the kid finally begged them to let the old man go back inside.

"It's good to say Ciao, ciao, bambino to the grease balls The next time the United States drops an A-bomb on anyone, I think it should be Palermo."

"Where's Dodds?"

"You really want to know?"

"I want to know if he's going to be back after me."

"First you tell me why you didn't drop the dime on me." There was a half grin on his face as he raised the beer bottle to his mouth.

"No games, Clete."

"Because a guy out on bond for murder doesn't like to introduce cops to his blood-spattered kitchen. Because maybe he knows they might just take the easy route and haul his butt down to the bag. Sounds like your faith might be waning, Streak."

"Is that guy going to be back?"

"That's one you don't have to worry about."

"Where is he?" I asked.

"Get serious. You don't need to know any more, Streak. Except the fact that our man didn't like heights."

"What?"

"Did you ever meet a psychopath yet that wasn't scared of something? It's what makes them cruel. Charlie didn't like high places. At least not the one I showed him."

I looked out silently at the river. A Frisbee sailed by overhead.

"Too grim for you?" Clete said.

"Did he kill Darlene?"

"No, I'm convinced that's one he didn't do."

"Dio, then?"

"He didn't know. Put it in the bank, too."

I stood up and began brushing the grass off my pants.

"You're going to turn to stone on me, huh?" he said.

"It's a school night. Alafair has to get home."

"Why is it you always make me feel like anthrax, Streak?"

"You're right about one thing today. I didn't call the heat because I didn't want to be part of another criminal investigation. Particularly when I was left with the problem of explaining how somebody's blood got smeared all over my walls and stove and floor. Right now I'm going to believe that Charlie Dodds is on a flight to new opportunities in Mexico City. Beyond that, I wouldn't count on anything, Clete."

"I'm going to get the guy that did her. You want to sit around and bite your nails, that's cool with me."

I walked off toward a group of children with whom Alafair was playing tag. Then Clete called after me, in a voice that made people turn and stare, "I love you anyway, motherfucker."

I needed some help. I had accomplished virtually nothing on my own; I had been locked up for punching out Sally Dio, had persuaded nobody of my theories, and instead had managed to convince a couple of local cops that I was a gun-wielding paranoid. That night I called Dan Nygurski at his home in Great Falls. A baby-sitter answered and said that he was at a movie with his wife, that she would take down my name and number. He returned my call just after ten, when I was drifting off to sleep with a damp towel folded across the lump on my forehead. I took the phone into the kitchen and closed the hallway door so as not to wake Alafair or Dixie Lee, who was sleeping on the living room couch.

I told him about Charlie Dodds in my house. About the slapjack across the head, the handcuffs, the Instamatic camera, the survival knife that he had started to shove into my heart. Then I told him about Clete, the working over that Dodds had taken, the rolled rug, and the trip in the jeep probably up a log road in either the Bitterroot Valley or the Blackfoot Canyon.

"You realize what you're telling me?" Nygurski said.

"I don't give a damn about Dodds. That's not why I called."

"You didn't tell the cops any of this?"

"I'm telling you. Do with it what you want. I'll bet nobody ever finds Dodds, though. Clete's done this kind of thing before and gotten away with it."

"You should have called the cops."

"Bullshit. I'd be trying to arrange bond right now."

"I'll have to report this to them."

"Go ahead. I think their interest level on a scale of one to ten will be minus eight. Look, Nygurski, there's somebody else after me or my daughter. He was hanging around her school this morning. Maybe it's Mapes, maybe it's another one of Dio's people. I need some help."

"I think it takes a hell of a lot of nerve to ask a federal agent for help after you run around two states with a baseball bat."

"We both want the same thing Sally Dee doing some serious time."

"No, you've got it wrong. I want to do my job. You want to write your own rules on a day-to-day basis."

"Then you give me a solution. You pledge the safety of my daughter, you assure me that I won't be headed for Angola Farm in about three weeks, and I won't be a problem to you."

"What kind of help do you want?"

"Can you find out if Dio might have another hit man in town?"

"If he does, we don't know about it. Maybe he put out the contract and let Dodds hire a backup guy. I tell you, though, if this new guy is working with Dodds, he's not going to try for any 'before and after' stuff, not after Dodds blew it. He'll go for a clean hit, one that you'll never see coming. I don't want to be graphic, but you know how they usually do it one behind the head, one in the ear, and three under the chin."

"Run Mapes for me."

"What do you expect to find?"

"I don't know. My lawyer says he was in trouble only once, for beating up a kid with a golf club when he was seventeen. But I've seen this guy in action, and I can't believe he hasn't bumped into the furniture more than once."

"Where's he from?"

"He beat up the kid in Marshall, Texas."

"I'll see what I can do."

"There's one other thing. Dixie Lee moved out of Dio's place. He says he's through with him. You might talk to him."

"About what?"

"That's your province. How about grand jury testimony? It took guts to walk out on Dio, particularly when he owes him fifteen thou."

"When did you decide to start sharing Pugh's secrets?"

"He's probably going to need federal protection sometime. He might be a drunk, but his head sops up information and people's conversations like a blotter."

"Where is he?"

"He's staying with me."

"What did you do for kicks as a kid? Swallow thumbtacks?"

"The guy's up against the wall," I said.

"No, I take that crack back. You're a slick operator, Robicheaux. Pugh becomes a federal witness, Pugh lives at your house, your house and the people in it go under our umbrella. Right?"

"Not really."

"I hope not. Because we choose the accommodations."

"Clever people don't end up in the mess I'm in, Nygurski."

"I think maybe there's solid truth in that statement. I'll get back to you. In the meantime you watch your butt."

"When can I hear from you about Mapes?"

"I'm going the extra mile for you. Ease up on the batter, okay? Have a little trust. If you ever get out of this, get your badge back. I think everybody would rather have you inside the tent pissing out the flap rather than the other way around. I'm sure of it."

Dixie Lee was up early the next morning and had breakfast with me and Alafair at the kitchen table. He was one of those drunks whose eyes clear and whose skin becomes pink and unlined with only a twenty-four-hour respite from alcohol. This morning his face was shaved and bright, and he wore a pair of pleated, white summer shorts and a white sport shirt with green parrots on it. I walked Alafair to school, then made him go to an AA meeting with me down the street and put his name in with the job-placement service. His mood was not as cheerful on the way back home as it had been earlier.

"Them people make me nervous, son," he said.

"I feel like a turd floating around in somebody's soup bowl."

"It's the one place where maybe people can understand guys like us, Dixie."

"Yeah, well, I've been to them meets before, and it didn't take. I think that's just the way it is with some guys. Jesus pointed his finger at the people he wanted. I ain't seen nobody point his finger at me. Hey, you remember those jokes we used to tell in the fifties? Like, what'd the bathtub say to the toilet?"

"I get the same amount of ass you do, but I don't have to take all that shit."

"Come on, partner, what's really bothering you?"

"I don't relate to that fourth- and fifth-step stuff. Where you got to go over all you done wrong and confess everything to somebody. I really don't dig that at all. I got enough damn guilt without poking at it with a stick."

"Take it a step at a time. You don't have to do that now. Besides, haven't you owned up to a lot of things already? You told me some pretty honest stuff when you were in the hospital in Lafayette."

"I got all kinds of things that make me ashamed. Hell, I knew Sal was no good when I met him in the pen. He was a geek. But he had bread, a lot of dope, and he liked me. So I didn't have to sweat the wolves and the swinging dicks and the guys who'd blow out your candle if they ever thought you snitched for the boss man. So I pretended not to see what went on in our cell. I wrote it off. A lot of guys turn homosexual inside the joint. I didn't go for it myself, but I didn't knock the guys who did. So Sal had a punk. Big deal, I thought. The fucking system does it to guys. That's what I said to myself. So I'd take a walk when this Mexican kid would come to our cell. It wasn't my business, right? Except something very weird started happening."

We sat down on the front steps of my porch. Birds flew in and out of the shade. There was no wind, and the maple trees looked green and bright and stiff against the sky.

"You see, in that kind of relationship, in the pen, I mean, the punk is disposable," Dixie Lee said.

"A pair of pork chops. All right, it's sickening stuff, but that's the way it is. But this kid was a real lover for Sal. He'd bring lipstick and women's underwear to the cell, and he'd wash and comb Sal's hair and then they'd hang a blanket down off the top bunk and really go at it. Except the kid turned out to be a lot more than Sal's punk. Sal really fell for him. The kid always had' cigarettes candy bars, ludes, magazines, an easy job in the infirmary, safe-conduct pass with the bad asses Then the kid started acting like a celebrity, walking around with a little pout on his face, making cow eyes at some very dangerous guys in the v shower. A couple of guys told Sal he'd better straighten out his punk, but it wasn't too long before everybody knew that this kid could jerk Sal around any way he wanted to.

"The problem was some black guys wanted to take over Sal's drug action. But he had too many mean guys working for him, and they knew he was connected on the outside, too, so they always walked around him. Then the kid started making him look like a douche bag, and they decided it was time for them to get into some serious pharmaceutical sales. Sal had been bringing in about four or five hundred bucks a week, which is a lot of money in the joint, and in three weeks' time the blacks cut that in half. His mules came around the cell like scared mice and asked him what he was going to do about it, since the blacks were telling them they were out of the business for good, and Sal tried to blow it off and tell them everything was cool and that he was bringing in a load of Afghan skunk that would cook brains all over the joint.

"But everybody was laughing at him behind his back. The kid treated Sal like he was the punk instead of the other way around, and in the meantime he was hanging with a couple of other yard bitches who were anybody's punch, and the three of them would go swishing around the place while the kid talked in a loud voice about Sal like he was some Dagwood Bumstead the kid put up with.

"But somebody called up Sal's old man in Galveston, and the shit hit the fan. The old man came up to Huntsville, and I don't know what he said to Sal in the visiting room, but whatever it was it put the fear of God in him. His face was white when he came back to our cell. He sat up all night smoking cigarettes on the side of his bunk, and in the morning he puked his breakfast out on the work detail. I asked him what was wrong, and he said, "I got to do something." I said, "What?" He said, "Something I don't want to do."

"So I said, "Don't do it." Then he said, "I'm a made guy. When you're a made guy, you do what they tell you."

"See, that's that dago stuff. They got some kind of ritual with knives and blood and magical bullshit, and they get to be made guys, which means they can smoke cigars at front tables in Vegas and pretend they're not a bunch of ignorant fish peddlers anymore.

"Two days later, right before lockup, Sal went to the kid's cell, where the kid was reading a comic book on his bunk with another fairy. He told the other kid to take off, then he took a piece of pipe out of his pants and beat that Mexican boy almost to death. He broke his nose, busted out his teeth, cauliflowered his ears, hurt that boy so bad his mother wouldn't know him.

"When he come back to the cell he had his shirt wadded up in his hand to hide the blood. After lights-out he tore it up in strips and flushed it down the toilet. In the morning he was all smiles, like he'd just made his first jump in the airborne or something. That kid was in the hospital three weeks. They shaved his head bald and put a hundred stitches in it. He looked like a lumpy white basketball with barbed wire wrapped all over it.

"Then Sal put out the word the kid was anybody's bar of soap. You know what that means in the joint for a kid like that? They're some cruel, sick sonsofbitches in there, son. That kid had an awful time of it. I don't like remembering it."

"Why are you telling me this, Dixie?"

"Because most of them people at the meet are just drunks. Liquor's only part of my problem. I lived off a guy like Sal. The reason I done it was because it was easy. You can't beat lobster and steak every day, plus the sweet young things were always ready to kick off their panties. If I didn't cut it with the oil business, life was still a pure pleasure around Sal's swimming pool. It didn't have nothing to do with liquor or dope. It has to do with a lack of character."

"It's part of the illness. You'll learn that if you keep going to meetings," I said.

He pulled a long-bladed weed from the edge of the step and bounced it up and down between his feet.

"You'll see," I said.

"You want me to talk to the DEA, don't you?"

"Why do you think that?"

"I heard you on the phone last night."

"You want to?"

"No." He bounced the weed on the toe of his loafer, then picked up a small red bug with the weed's tip and watched it climb toward his hand.

"You wouldn't use me, would you, Dave?" he said.

"No, I wouldn't do that."

"Because I'd be sorely hurt. I mean it, son. I don't need it. I surely don't."

I stood up and brushed off the seat of my pants.

"I don't know how you do it," I said.

"What's that?" He squinted up at me in the sunlight. His hair was gold and wavy and shiny with oil.

"No matter what I talk to you about, somehow I always lose."

"It's your imagination. They don't come much more simple than me."

I remember one of the last times I saw my mother. It was 1945, just before the war ended, and she came to our house on the bayou with the gambler she had run away with. I was out front on the dirt road, trying to catch my dog, who was chasing chickens in the ditch, when he stopped his coupe, one with a rumble seat and a hand-cranked front window with gas-ration stamps on it, thirty yards down from the house. She walked fast up the lane into the shade of our oaks and around to the side yard, where my father was nailing together a chicken coop. She worked in a drive-in and beer garden in Morgan City. Her pink waitress uniform had white trim on the collar and sleeves, and because her body was thick and muscular it looked too small on her when she walked. Her back was turned to me while she talked to my father, but his face was dark as he listened and his eyes went up the road to where the coupe was parked.

The gambler had his car door open to let in the breeze. He was thin and wore sideburns and brown zoot pants with suspenders and a striped shirt and a green necktie with purple dots on it. A brown fedora sat in the back window.

He asked me in French if the dog was mine. When I didn't answer, he said, "You don't talk French, boy?"

"Yes, sir."

"That your dog?"

"Yes, sir."

"You know how to make him stop running them chicken? Break a stick on him. You ain't got to do it but once."

I walked away in the dust toward the house and the trees, and I didn't look at my dog. I heard my father say to my mother, "In five minutes I'm coming there. That little gun won't do him no good, neither."

She took me by the hand and walked me quickly to the front steps and sat me in her lap. She brushed my face and hair with her hands and kissed me and patted my thighs. There were drops of perspiration behind her neck, and I could smell her perfume, like four-o'clocks, and the powder on her breasts.

"You been good at school, huh?" she said.

"You been going to mass, too, you? You been making confess and go to communion? Aldous been taking you? You got to do good in school. The brothers gonna teach you lots of t'ings."

"Why you stay with him?"

She pressed my face against her breasts. I could feel the hard shape of her stomach and her thighs.

"He shot somebody. In a card game," I said.

"He ain't bad. He's good to me. We brung you a present. You gonna see."

She picked me up and carried me to the road. I could see my father watching from the side yard, the hammer in his hand. She set me down by the open door of the coupe. The air was humid and hot in the sun, and the cattails in the ditch were coated with dust.

"Come see," she said.

"Show it him, Mack. Behind the seat."

His face had no expression. He reached behind the seat, his eyes looking out at the yellow road, and pulled out a paper bag. It was folded across the top and tied with string.

"Here," she said, and unwrapped it for me. Her dress was tight across her thighs and there were dimples in her knees. The man got out of the car and walked out on the road and lit a cigarette. He didn't look in my father's direction, but they could see each other well.

"You like a top, huh?" my mother said.

"See, it got a crank. You push it up and down and it spin around and whistle."

There was perspiration in her black hair. She put the top in my hands. The metal felt hot against my palms.

"Is he coming out?" the man said.

"No. He promised."

"The last time was for free. You told him that?"

"He don't want no more trouble, Mack. He ain't gonna bother us."

"I give a damn, me."

"Don't be talking that way. We gotta go. Don't be looking over there. You hear me, Mack?"

"They gonna keep him in jail next time."

"We going right now. Get in the car. I gotta be at work. Dave don't need be standing out in the hot road. Ain't that right, Davy? Mack, you promised."

He flipped his cigarette away in the ditch and got behind the steering wheel. He wore two-tone brown and white shoes, and he wiped the dust off the shine with a rag from under the seat. I saw my father toss his hammer up on the workbench, then pick up the chicken coop and look at the angles of its side.

My mother leaned over me and pressed me against her body. Her voice was low, as though the two of us were under a glass bell.

"I ain't bad, Davy," she said.

"If somebody tell you that, it ain't true. I'll come see you again. We'll go somewheres together, just us two. Eat fried chicken, maybe. You gonna see, you."

But a long time would pass before I would see her again. The Victory gardens, the picket-fenced donation centers of worn tires and bundled coat hangers, the small tasseled silk flags with blue and gold service stars that hung in house windows to signify the number of family members who were in uniform or killed in action, would all disappear within the year, an era would end, and the oil companies would arrive from Texas. I would hear that my mother worked in the back of a laundry with colored women in Baton Rouge, that Mack died of tuberculosis, that she married a man who operated carnival rides. Then when I was sixteen years old and I went for the first time to the Boundary Club on the Breaux Bridge highway, a rough, ramshackle roadhouse where they fought with knives and bottles in the shale parking lot, I saw her drawing draft beer behind the bar. Her body was thicker now, her hair blacker than it should have been, and she wore a black skirt that showed a thick scar above one knee. She brought a beer tray to a table full of oil-field workers, then sat down with them. They all knew her and lit her cigarettes, and when she danced with one of them she pressed her stomach against his loins. I stood by the jukebox and waved at her, and she smiled back at me over the man's shoulder, but there was no recognition in her face…

I waited out in the car for my friends to come out of the club. I saw a drunk man pushed out the side door onto the shale. I saw some teenagers throw a Coke bottle at a car full of Negroes. I saw a man in a yellow cowboy shirt and tight blue jeans without a belt slap a woman against the side of a car. He hit her hard and made her cry and shoved her in the backseat and made her stay there by herself while he went back inside. It was hot and still in the parking lot, except for the sounds of the woman. The willow trees were motionless on the banks of the Vermilion River, and the moonlight looked like oil on the water's surface. Dust drifted through the car window, and I could smell the stench of dead garfish out on the mud bank and hear the woman weeping quietly in the dark.

The opinion of certain people has always been important to me. Most of those people have been nuns, priests, Catholic brothers, and teachers. When I was a child the good ones among them told me I was all right. Some in that group were inept and unhappy with themselves and were cruel and enjoyed inculcating guilt in children. But the good ones told me that I was all right. As an adult, I still believe that we become the reflection we see in the eyes of others, so it's important that someone tell us we're all right. That may seem childish, but only to those who have paid no dues and hence have no. question mark about who they are, because their own experience or lack of it has never required them to define themselves. You can meet some of these at university cocktail par ties; or sometimes they are journalists who fear and envy power and celebrity but who love to live in its ambience. There is always a sneer buried inside their laughter. They have never heard a shot fired in anger, done time, walked through a mortared ville, seen a nineteen-year-old door gunner go ape shit in a free-fire zone. They sleep without dreaming. They yawn at the disquietude of those whom they can't understand. No one will ever need to tell them that they are all right.

I think for some the soul has the same protean shape as fire, or a collection of burning sticks that melts and hisses through the snow until only an ill-defined and soot-streaked hollow remains to indicate the nature of flame and its passage through ice.

Then somebody tells you that you are all right.

I had to go back on the other side of the Divide. It was a good time to take Alafair out of Missoula, too. I walked down to the school and found Tess Regan in her office. A vase of mock orange sat on her desk, and her cork board was a litter of thumbtacked crayon drawings. Through a sunny window I could see the children on the playground, a solitary basketball hoop, and the brick wall of the church next door. She wore a cotton knit yellow dress, a gold neck chain, and gold earrings that were almost hidden by her auburn hair. Her nails were cut short and painted with clear polish, and her fingers were spread on her desk blotter while she listened to me talk. I liked her and respected her feelings, and I didn't want her to be angry with me any longer or to be uncomfortable because of our conversation yesterday.

"People hang up on me all the time. I expect it," I said.

"A Treasury agent once told me I had the telephone charm of Quasimodo."

"That purple lump on your head, that happened at your house yesterday?"

"I was careless. It'll be gone soon."

"You want to take Alafair out of school today and tomorrow?"

"That's right. She'll be back Thursday."

"Where are you going, if you don't mind my asking?"

"I have to take care of some business across the mountains."

"I'm very concerned about all this. You give me bad feelings. These men you talk about are evil, aren't they? But you seem almost cavalier."

"You're wrong about that, kiddo."

"I wish you wouldn't call me that."

"All right."

"Alafair is a wonderful little girl. I worry about her. I worry about your attitudes."

"She thinks the world of you, too. I don't want to be unpleasant or to upset you in any way, but I want you to understand something. Somebody sent me a used hypodermic needle and a letter and a photograph. I won't tell you what was in the photograph, but the person who wrote the letter said the needle had been used in a snuff film. His threat was not aimed at me. It was directed at Alafair. I believe he was serious, too.

"Now, in the movies potential murder or assault victims are given twenty-four-hour protection by the cops. But it doesn't happen that way. You're on your own. If you don't believe me, ask anybody who has been hunted down by a guy who they had locked up and who made bail by the next morning. They tell a great story. A lot of them tend to become NRA members."

Her green eyes were steady and intelligent. She was a good soldier and obviously was trying to look beyond the abrasive quality of my words; but I had gone over a line, almost like an emotional bully, and she wasn't up to handling it.

"I'll get Alafair for you," she said.

"Miss Regan… Tess, I'm at a real bad place in my life. I apologize for the way that I talk, but I'm really up against it. Don't make me walk out of here feeling like a shit."

But it was no use. She brushed past me, her hips creasing inside her knit dress, her eyes welling with tears.

Later that day Alafair and I drove into the clouds on the Divide. It rained hard and the trees looked thick and black in the wet light, and water sluiced off the road into the canyons far below. It was too late to get anything done at the Teton County courthouse, so we stayed the night at a motel in Choteau, the county seat.

The next day I found the connection between Sally Dee and the oil business. I found it all over the East Front, in Teton, Pondera, and Glacier counties. And I found out the service that Dixie Lee had been performing for him.