"Don't touch me again, no, 'cause I'm gonna hit you," he said. "Them kittens gonna grow up and kill the chicks, just like their mama been doin'. You gonna buy more chickens, you? You gonna put food on the table, you?"

He and my mother drove away one summer's day in a rooster tail of dust to Morgan City, where Mack got her a job at a beer garden. I didn't see her again until many years later, when I was in high school and I went to a roadhouse on the Breaux Bridge Highway with some other boys. It was a ramshackle gambling and pickup place, where the patrons fought over whores with bottles and knives in the parking lot. She was dancing with a drunk by the jukebox, her stomach pressed into his loins. Her face was tilted up into his, as though she were intrigued by his words. Then she saw me looking at her from the bar, saw my hand lift from my side to wave at her, and she smiled back at me briefly, her eyes shiny and indolent with alcohol, a vague recognition swimming into her face and disappearing as quickly as it came.

I never saw her again.

Monday morning the sheriff called me into his office. He wore a striped, black suit with a purple-and-white-striped snap-button shirt and a hand-tooled belt and half-topped boots. The windowsill behind his head was lined with potted plants that glowed in the thinly slatted light through the blinds. He had run a dry-cleaning business before he was elected sheriff and was probably more Rotarian than lawman; but he had been in the First Marine Division at the Chosin Reservoir and no one questioned his level of integrity or courage or the dues he had paid and never spoke about (except, to my knowledge, on one occasion, when he'd had a coronary and thought he was dying and he told me of pink air-bursts high above the snow on the hills and Chinese bugles blowing in the darkness and winds that could swell fingers into purple balloons).

His stomach hung over his belt and his cheeks were often flushed from hypertension, but his erect posture, either sitting or standing, always gave him the appearance of a much greater level of health than he actually possessed.