He poured a dispenser of liquid soap down the throat of a button man in the men’s room of the New Orleans airport. He handcuffed a drunk congressman to a fireplug on St. Charles Avenue. He opened up a fire hose on a hit man in the casino at the bottom of Canal Street and blew him into a toilet stall like a human hockey puck. He destroyed a gangster’s house on Lake Pontchartrain with an earth-grader, knocking down the walls, troweling up the floors, and crushing the furniture into kindling, even uprooting the shrubbery and flowers and trees and grading them and the lawn furniture into the swimming pool.

An average day in the life of Clete Purcel was akin to an asteroid bouncing through Levittown.

Child molesters, pimps, dope dealers, and men who abused women got no slack and feared him as they would the wrath of God. But Clete’s role as the merry prankster and classical trickster of folklore had a price tag. A succubus lived in his breast and gave him no respite. He had carried it with him from the Irish Channel in New Orleans to Vietnam and to the brothels of Bangkok and Cherry Alley in Tokyo and back home to New Orleans. In Clete’s mind, he was not worthy of a good woman’s love; nor did he ever measure up in the eyes of his alcoholic father, a milkman who took out his anger and low self-esteem on his confused and suffering firstborn son.

His two visitors had parked their car on Decatur and walked up Pirates Alley, past the small bookshop that once was the apartment of William Faulkner, then had mounted the stairs of Clete’s building, where one of them banged loudly on the door with the flat of his fist.

It was evening, and Clete had just showered after an hour of lifting barbells by the stone well in his courtyard. The sky was mauve-colored and filled with birds, the banana plants in his courtyard rattling in the breeze that blew from Lake Pontchartrain. He had just dressed in new slacks and white socks and Roman sandals and a Hawaiian shirt, his skin still glowing with the warmth of the shower, his hair wet-combed, all the time whistling a tune and looking forward to sitting down at his table over a bowl of crawfish gumbo and loaf of hot buttered French bread.