"It was a bad time for Breeze to run, Mout'. The prosecutor's office might have cut him loose," I said.

He mopped his face with a blue filling-station rag and slid the bag of birdseed off his shoulder and sat down heavily in an old barber's chair with an umbrella mounted on it. He picked up a fruit jar filled with coffee and hot milk from the ground and drank from it. His wide mouth seemed to cup around the bottom of the opening like a catfish's.

"He gone to church wit' me and his mother when he was a li'l boy," he said. "He played ball in the park, he carried the newspaper, he set pins in the bowling alley next to white boys and didn't have no trouble. It was New Orleans done it. He lived with his mother in the projects. Decided he wasn't gonna be no shoeshine man, have white folks tipping their cigar ashes down on his head, that's what he tole me."

Mout' scratched the top of his head and made a sound like air leaving a tire.

"You did the best you could. Maybe it'll turn around for him someday," I said.

"They gonna shoot him now, ain't they?" he said.

"No. Nobody wants that, Mout'."

"That jailer, Alex Guidry? He use to come down here when he was in collitch. Black girls was three dollars over on Hopkins. Then he'd come around the shoeshine stand when they was black men around, pick out some fella and keep looking in his face, not letting go, no, peeling the skin right off the bone, till the man dropped his head and kept his eyes on the sidewalk. That's the way it was back then. Now y'all done hired the same fella to run the jail."

Then he described his son's last day in the parish prison.