“Molly said you remembered hearing this guy’s name.”

“When I was eighteen, I was in a parish can on the Texas-Louisiana line. The electric chair traveled from parish to parish in those days. I was there when it was brought in on a flatbed truck, the generators all tarped down so people wouldn’t see their tax dollars at work. They electrocuted this poor devil thirty feet from the lockdown unit I was in. The next morning I got in the face of a hack who had been a gunbull at Angola.”

I kept my eyes straight ahead and didn’t speak.

“He cuffed and leg-chained me and frog-walked me down to an isolation cell. It was almost fifty years before I told anybody what he did to me. I saw him in a feed store in Beaumont once, when I was about twenty-one. He was a foreman on a cattle ranch. He had no idea who I was, the man who was to give me bad dreams for a half-century. He asked me why I was staring at him. When I didn’t answer, he told me it was rude to stare at people and I had better stop.

“I was buying a weed sickle. It had an edge on it that could shave hair off your arm. I wouldn’t let go of his eyes. He laughed because he couldn’t stop what was happening. He said, ‘Boy, whatever it is you’re thinking, you’d best take it somewheres else.’

“I stepped close to him and touched his hip with the point of the sickle. I said, ‘I was thinking about killing you. If I see you again, I expect I’ll do it.’”

I looked at the side of Albert’s face. It reminded me of a dead fire after all the heat has gone out of the ash and stone. “You ever see him again?” I asked.

“At the Wellstone ranch outside Beaumont, when I went there looking for work. They were oil-and-natural-gas people and ranched on the side. They were also mixed up with tent-religion groups that were just starting to expand into television.”

“I’d let Wellstone and the past go,” I said.

“I did, a long time ago. But Wellstone gashed a hole in my fuel tank. I called his house about it last night. A woman hung up on me. I think it was the gold-haired one who was sitting in the back of his limo.”