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"Dave, we just have to keep her," she said.
Again I didn't answer her. I sat out on the gallery through the evening and watched the light turn purple on the bayou and listened to the cicadas and the rain dripping in the trees. At one time in my life, rain had always been the color of wet neon or Jim Beam whiskey. Now it just looked like rain. It smelled of sugarcane, of the cypress trees along the bayou, of the gold and scarlet four-o'clocks that opened in the cooling shadows. But as I watched the fireflies lighting in the pecan orchard, I could not deny that a thin tremolo was starting to vibrate inside me, the kind that used to leave me in after-hours bars with the rain streaking down the neon-lit window. I kept watching the dirt road, but it was empty. Around nine o'clock I saw some kids in a pirogue out on the bayou, gigging frogs. The headlamps of the children danced through the reeds and cattails, and I could hear their paddles chunking loudly in the water. An hour later I latched the screen, turned out the lights, and got in bed next to Annie. The little girl slept on the other side of her. In the moon's glow through the window I saw Annie smile without opening her eyes, then she laid her arm across my chest.
He came early the next morning, when the sun was still misty and soft in the trees, even before the pools of rain had dried on the road, so that his government car splashed mud on a family of Negroes walking with cane poles toward my fishing dock. I walked into the kitchen where Annie and Alafair were just finishing their breakfast.
"Why don't you take her down to the pond to feed the ducks?" I said.
"I thought we'd go into town and buy her some clothes."
"We can do that later. Here's some old bread. Go out the back door and walk through the trees."
"What is it, Dave?"
"Nothing. Just some minor bullshit. I'll tell you about it later. Come on, off you go."
"I'd like to know when you first thought you could start talking to me like this."
"Annie, I'm serious," I said.
Her eyes flicked past me to the sound of the car driving across the pecan leaves in front. She picked up the cellophane bag of stale bread, took Alafair by the hand, and went out the back screen door through the trees toward the pond at the end of our property. She looked back once, and I could see the alarm in her face.
The man got out of his gray U.S. government motor-pool car, with his seersucker coat over his shoulder. He was middle-aged, thick across the waist, and wore a bow tie. His black hair was combed across his partially bald head.
I met him on the gallery. He said his name was Monroe, from the Immigration and Naturalization Service in New Orleans. While he talked, his eyes went past me into the gloom of the house.
"I'd ask you in, but I'm on my way down to the dock," I said.
"That's all right. I just need to ask you one or two things," he said. "Why didn't you all wait for the Coast Guard after you called in on the emergency channel?"
"What for?"
"Most people would want to hang around. For curiosity, if nothing else. How often do you see a plane go down?"
"My wife gave them the position. They could see the oil and gas on the water. They didn't need us."
"Huh," he said, and took a cigarette out of his shirt pocket. He rolled it back and forth between his fingers without lighting it and looked away at the pecan trees. The tobacco grains crackled dryly inside the paper. "I got a problem, though. A diver found a suitcase in there with a bunch of child's clothes in it. A little girl's, in fact. But there wasn't a kid in that plane. What's that suggest to you?"
"I'm late for work, Mr. Monroe. Would you like to walk down to the dock with me?"
"You don't like federal people too much, do you?"
"I haven't known that many. Some of them are good guys, some of them aren't. I guess you tapped into my file."
He shrugged.
"Why do you think illegals would carry a child's clothing with them when they had no child? I'm talking about people that left the banana farm one step ahead of the National Guard shredding them into dog food. Or at least that's what they tell the press."
"I don't know."
"Your wife told the Coast Guard you were going to dive that wreck. Are you going to tell me you only saw three people down there?"
I looked back at him.
"What do you mean, three?" I said.
"The pilot was a priest named Melancon, from Lafayette. We've been watching him for a while. We think the two women were from El Salvador. At least that's where the priest had been flying them out from before."
