West awkwardly took the wine from him, acutely conscious of his reaction to her tousled hair, to the red marks on her neck and her blouse buttoned crooked. Brazil’s smile faded as his eyes wandered around her crime scene. Raines appeared behind his woman and looked down the steps at Brazil.

“Hey, what’cha know, sport?” Raines grinned at him. “Like your stories . . .”

Brazil ran back to his car as if someone were chasing him.

“Andy!” West yelled after him. “Andy!”

She hurried down the steps as his BMW roared off into the setting sun. Raines followed her back into her living room as she buttoned her blouse properly and nervously smoothed her hair. She set the wine on a table, where she did not have to look at it, and be reminded of who had brought it.

“What the hell’s his problem?” Raines wanted to know.

“Temperamental writer,” she muttered.

Raines wasn’t interested. He and West had several downs yet to go, and he tackled her from behind, grabbing, fondling, and working his tongue into her ear. The play was incomplete as she broke free, leaving him yards behind and taking the ball with her.

“I’m tired,” she snapped.

Raines rolled his eyes. He’d had enough of her poor sportsmanship and penalty flags.

“Fine,” he told her as he ejected his bloopers tape from the VCR. “Let me just ask you one thing, Virginia.” He furiously strutted to the door, pausing long enough to fix smoldering eyes on hers. “When you’re eating and the phone rings, what happens after you hang up? Do you go back to your meal, or do you forget that, too? Do you just quit because you had a tiny interruption?”

“Depends on what I’m eating,” West told him.

Brazil’s dinner was late and spent at Shark Finn’s, on Old Pineville Road, at Bourbon Street. After roaring away from West’s house, he had driven around, getting angrier by the moment. It had not been one of his wiser moves, perhaps, to stop by Tommy Axel’s Fourth Ward condominium with its blush rose front door. Brazil noticed a number of men noticing him during his approach from the parking lot. Brazil wasn’t especially friendly to them, or even to Axel.

What Axel considered a first date and Brazil considered revenge began in Shark Finn’s Jaws Raw Bar, where a mounted sailfish caught in a net protested with an open mouth and startled glass eyes. Wooden tables were uncovered, the plank floor unvarnished. There were faces carved on coconuts, and curled starfish and stained glass. Brazil nursed a Red Stripe beer and wondered if he might be going insane as he considered the senseless and impulsive behavior that had landed him here in this place at this moment.

Axel was burning holes in him, living a fantasy, and fearful the vision would vanish if he looked away for even a second. Brazil was certain that other people slipping down raw oysters and getting drunk had figured out Axel’s intentions and were miscalculating Brazil’s. This was unfortunate since most of the men drove pickup trucks and believed it was their higher calling to get women pregnant, own guns, and kill queers.