In the afternoons he would check for a letter that never came. When he called her parents, they would tell him they had received only one letter, one brief call. She was working in a bank. No, she had not told them to tell him anything.

One night he dreamed his left arm had been cut off by the shop’s band saw. He woke lying on his side, his arm drained and asleep, and he leapt out of bed to turn on the light. He stood there panting and wet, his whole body feeling like a sleeve with no flesh in it.

The next day he woke with the idea that he had ruined his marriage. By noon he was sitting on the pew in the yard of the machine shop, thinking that it was Colette who had done the damage. Later, on the front porch of his parents’ house, his hand in the empty mailbox, he decided he would try to go out to the clubs in town, get a buzz on and dance. He needed to cheer up, burn some gas.

He began with a Dixie beer at a sedate paneled lounge in town called the Moonbeam, but he quickly tired of the flat black walls and of being ignored by the lesbian bartender. He stopped by René’s for a beer and then worked his way out to the levee road south of town. The more he drank, the more he craved to be in a place befitting his sinking self. He drove to the trash-lumber Big Gator, watched them rebuild the swinging doors to the dance floor, and then he drifted down the road to a lounge built like an apple crate, called Black Alice’s, a moldy place cooled by a giant homemade box fan that roared near the entrance and occasionally sucked in a drunken patron. Five minutes after he sat at the bar, the fan’s blades ripped a woman’s skirt off, and the men at the tables pointed and yelled, turning over one another’s drinks. The woman was dark-haired and slim. She cursed the men, pulled off her shoes one at a time, and threw them into the bar. He watched the ghostlike blur of her slip drifting across the dim parking lot.

Eventually Paul’s self-esteem tumbled enough for him to drive his truck slowly down to Scadlock’s Boiler Room, a one-time equipment shed near Tonga Bend, open twenty-four hours a day, windows cut into its sides with a chain saw and covered with nailed-up screens. The bar was hot and bug-infested in the summer, and drafty as a prairie in the winter. Zumo Scadlock had bought the building from a bankrupt shipyard and moved it to the edge of Bayou LaFont, propping it up on cypress stumps. The bar’s rear hung over the bayou. Inside, the walls were made of smoke-stained one-by-six lumber—wooden tables to the left, a dimly-lit bar to the right, two narrow rest-room doors at the end of the leaning bar, and one innocent-looking unpainted hollow-core door in the rear wall at the end of a short hall. Behind the bar was an entrance to a kitchen, where Zumo boiled crabs and crawfish. Paul went in and sat at the bar next to Zumo’s cousin Ray-Ray, who had just been paroled from Angola. He looked the cousin in the face for a long moment.