"Where is Cool Breeze now, Mout'?" I said into the phone.

"You t'ink I'm gonna tell you that?"

"Then why'd you call?"

"Cool Breeze say they gonna kill him."

"Who is?"

"That white man run the jail. He sent a nigger try to joog him in the ear with a wire."

"I'll be over in the morning."

"The morning? Why, t'ank you, suh."

"Breeze went down his own road a long time ago, Mout'."

He didn't reply. I could feel the late-summer heat and the closeness of the air under the electric light.

"Mout'?" I said.

"You right. But it don't make none of it easier. No suh, it surely don't."

At sunrise the next morning I drove down East Main, under the canopy of live oaks that spanned the street, past City Hall and the library and the stone grotto and statue of Christ's mother, which had once been the site of George Washington Cable's home, and the sidewalks cracked by tree roots and the blue-green lawns rilled with hydrangeas and hibiscus and philodendron and the thick stand of bamboo that framed the yard of the 1831 plantation manor called The Shadows, and finally into the business district. Then I was on the west side of town, on back streets with open ditches, railroad tracks that dissected yards and pavement, and narrow paintless houses, in rows like bad teeth, that had been cribs when nineteenth-century trainmen used to drink bucket beer from the saloon with the prostitutes and leave their red lanterns on the gallery steps when they went inside.

Mout' was behind his house, flinging birdseed at the pigeons that showered down from the telephone wires into his yard. He walked bent sideways at the waist, his eyes blue with cataracts, one cheek marbled pink and white by a strange skin disease that afflicts people of color; but his sloped shoulders were as wide as a bull's and his upper arms like chunks of sewer pipe.