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"Why'd y'all run him off?" I asked.
'"Cause the man don't have the sense God give an earthworm."
"Come on, Billy."
"He used to make whiskey and put fertilizer in the mash. That's where I think he got that stink at. His old woman left him for a one-legged blind man."
"You want to help him, Billy, or see him hung out to dry at Angola?"
His hands draped over his thighs. He studied the backs of them.
"It was 'cause of the girl. His daughter, what's her name, Sabelle, the one runs the bar down at the Underpass."
"I don't follow you."
"The meeting was at a church house. She wasn't but a girl then, waiting outside in the pickup truck. Two men was looking out the window at her. They didn't know Crown was sitting right behind them.
"One goes, 'I hear that's prime.'
"The other one goes, 'It ain't bad. But you best carry a ball of string to find your way back out.'
"That's when Crown put the wood to them. Then he tore into them with his boots. It taken four of us to hold him down."
"You kicked him out of the Klan for defending his daughter?" I said.
Billy Odom pried a pale splinter out of his grease-darkened desk and scratched lines in his skin with it.
"When they're young and cain't keep their panties on, the old man's in it somewhere," he said.
"What?"
"Everybody had suspicioned it. Then a woman from the welfare caught him at it and told the whole goddamn town. That's how come Crown moved down here."
"Aaron and his daughter?" I said.
The man who had seen the accident did not report it for almost three days, not until his wife was overcome with guilt herself and went to a priest and then with her husband to the St. Martin Parish sheriff's office.
Helen Soileau and I stood on the levee by a canal that rimmed Henderson Swamp and watched a diver in a wetsuit pull the steel hook and cable off the back of a wrecker, wade out into the water by a row of bridge pilings, sinking deeper into a balloon of silt, then disappear beneath the surface. The sky was blue overhead, the moss on the dead cypress lifting in the breeze, the sun dancing on the sandbars and the deep green of the willow islands. When a uniformed sheriff's deputy kicked the winch into gear and the cable clanged tight on the car's frame, a gray cloud of mud churned to the surface like a fat man's fist.
Helen walked up on the wood bridge that spanned the canal, rubbed her shoe on one unrailed edge, and walked back down on the levee again. The front tires of the submerged car, which lay upside down, broke through a tangle of dead hyacinths.
The man who had seen the accident sat on the levee with his wife at his side. He wore a greasy cap, with the bill pulled low over his eyes.
"Go through it again," I said.
He had to crane his head upward, into the sunlight, when he spoke.
"It was dark. I was walking back to the camp from that landing yonder. There wasn't no moon. I didn't see everything real good," he replied. His wife looked at the steel cable straining against the automobile's weight, her face vaguely ashamed, the muscles collapsed.
"Yes, you did," I said.
"He fishtailed off the levee when he hit the bridge, and the car went in. The headlights was on, way down at the bottom of the canal."
"Then what happened?" I asked.
He flexed his lips back on his teeth, as though he were dealing with a profound idea.
"The man floated up in the headlights. Then he come up the levee, right up to the hard road where I was at. He was all wet and walking fast." He turned his face out of the sunlight again, retreated back into the shade of his cap.
