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"Not yet. I'll probably go in later."
She was quiet a moment.
"Have you talked to the sheriff?" she asked.
"There's not really much to talk about. The guy could make a beef but he won't. They don't like to get messed up in legal action against cops."
She uncrossed her legs and brushed idly at her knee with her fingertips.
"Dave, is something else going on, something you're not telling me about?"
"The guy put his hand on my shoulder and I wanted to tear him apart. Maybe I would have done it if this guy named Manelli hadn't stepped in front of me."
I saw her breasts rise and fall under her shirt. Far down the bayou Batist was towing a second boat behind his outboard and the waves were slapping the floating hyacinths against the banks. She got up from her chair and stood behind me. She worked her fingers into my shoulders. I could feel her thigh touch my back.
"New Iberia is never going to be the same place we grew up in. That's just the way things are," she said.
"It doesn't mean I have to like it."
"The Balboni family was here a long time. We survived, didn't we? They'll make their movie and go away."
"There're too many people willing to sell it down the drain."
"Sell what?"
"Whatever makes a dollar for them. Redfish and sac-a-lait to restaurants, alligators to the Japanese. They let oil companies pollute the oyster beds and cut canals through the marsh so salt water can eat up thousands of square miles of wetlands. They take it on their knees from anybody who's got a checkbook."
"Let it go, Dave."
"I think a three-day open season on people would solve a lot of our problems."
"Tell the sheriff what happened. Don't let it just hang there."
"He's worried about some guys at the Chamber of Commerce, Bootsie. He's a good guy most of the time, but these are the people he's spent most of his life around."
"I think you should talk to him."
"All right, I'm going to take a shower, then I'll call him."
"You're not going to the office?"
"I'm not sure. Maybe later."
Batist cut the engine on his boat and floated on the swell into the dock and bumped against the strips of rubber tire we had nailed to the pilings. His shirt was piled on the board seat beside him, and his black shoulders and chest were beaded with sweat. His head looked like a cannon-ball. He grinned with an unlit cigar in the corner of his mouth.
I was glad for the distraction.
"I was up at the fo'-corners," he said. "A man there said you mopped up the restaurant flo' with one of them dagos."
Thanks, Batist, I thought.
I SHOWERED IN WATER THAT WAS SO COLD IT LEFT ME breathless, changed clothes, and drove to the bottling works down by the Vermilion River in Lafayette. The two-story building was an old one, made of yellow brick, and surrounded by huge live-oak trees. In back was a parking lot, which was filled with delivery trucks, and a loading dock, where a dozen black men were rattling crates of soda pop out of the building's dark interior and stacking them inside the waiting trucks. Their physical strength was incredible. Some of them would pick up a half-dozen full cases at a time and lift them easily to eye level. Their muscles looked like water-streaked black stone.
I asked one of them where I could find Twinky Hebert Lemoyne.
"Mr. Twinky in yonder, in the office. Better catch him quick, though. He fixin' to go out on the route," he said.
"He goes out on the route?"
