His shirt collar was open by three buttons and the V of his chest was tan. He did look handsome in his way, in his loose black suit, although there was a badge-sized bruise on his left cheekbone below his glass eye, and he seemed far along in his drunk. Just moving back and forth along the bar he stumbled twice.

His good eye finally caught me watching, and after a beat came his smile.

I moved by slow inches through the crowd.

“Paige . . . Buensima. Someone said you might be in town.”

I nodded once, yes; afraid to say anything, what my voice might give away.

“You must want a drink. This is . . . somebody,” he said, and the girl with the dark mane looked as though her arm were being bent out of socket.

“And this is uh . . . an old friend of mine, Julio,” Raf said.

Julio had on a cowboy hat, and he held a thin umber cigar in his fingers. He pursed his lips at me, kissed three times.

“So, Paige,” Raf said. “A drink?”

“Not now, thanks. Could we . . . ?”

“I must decamp,” he told the dark-haired girl.

“Did our tanker come in? Is this our car?” he asked me. We had walked out into Facinita’s yellow parking lot.

“It’s just a rental,” I said. “Raf?”

“A rental,” he said and spat on the car.

I asked, “How bad off are you?”

He gripped my shoulders, backed me up against the door. I had one hand full of keys, the other opened on his chest, ready to shove him.

“Can you say how you are exactly?” I said.

He pressed into me, kissing my throat, my collarbone.

“I’m O.K.,” he said. “Me? I’m . . . you know.”

I drove on shut-down streets.

Raf liked the car’s stereo and liked stamping the control tabs for the radio. He was doing this now with the toe of his shoe as he sipped bourbon from a silver flask.

I recognized a bridge that spanned Bray’s Bayou and pulled off into what I thought was a public park. It was a cemetery.

“Uh oh,” Raf said.

“Mind if we do without the radio for a minute?” I asked him.

“Here’s where I get mine,” he said.

“What happened to your face?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Keep falling down. You know, I read there’s a once-in-a-millennium order of the sun and moon and all the planets of our . . . um . . . solar thing going on. Which could account for my imbalances, some of ’em.”

We were under high trees that were bearded with ashen moss. Raf lit a cigarette, shutting his good eye to the burst of flame. The hot night was talking—crickets or frogs or sighing snakes—I didn’t know.

“You’re too thin,” he said.

“Umm,” I said.

His head dropped back on the car seat and he closed his eyes and smoked.

I studied his profile.