The next afternoon after work, he got into his truck and rode around Tiger Island looking for ugliness, hanging a sour face out the window. He saw the strip of plywood bars on Water Street, the Blowout, the Dropped Anchor, and, in the woods where the road gave out, the No-Name Inn, a flat-black box of a building without windows or a sign of any sort. At night the building disappeared, making it hard for the police to find when they received a complaint. Battered iron trash barrels overflowing with beer cans lined the edge of the parking lot. In the four blocks of Water Street were eleven honky-tonks. When Paul was a boy, these blocks had been occupied by the bank, dry-goods stores, a hardware, and a dime store. Now all those had moved to the dusty strip mall at the edge of town, and Water Street went over to the oil-field rednecks who had moved in from the backwoods of Texas and Arkansas, bearded, longhaired welders, roaring roughnecks and roustabouts come down looking for big pay for dumb work.

The curbside door to the Black Rig was open, a dust-caked fan roaring in the door, and as he drove by on his slow inspection, he could smell cigarettes and sour beer buoyed in an aura of deodorant cakes stewing in the urinals.

Next, he drove the neighborhoods. The town’s streets were humpbacked asphalt lanes draining into grassy ditches. The chief landmark of the black neighborhood across the tracks was the Club Satellite, a cinder-block slab painted with dirty handprints. Most of the houses were bleached-out low wooden rectangles propped up on concrete piers and jammed together as though hiding from the sun. Some were armored with asbestos siding; a few were brick-veneered against the daily thunderstorms. Nowhere was there a street without an engineless, abandoned truck, without wavering packs of mixed-breed dogs. Paul had never seen a purebred dog in Tiger Island. Every animal seemed to be half collie and half beagle.

At seven-thirty he stopped at the Little Palace, an old man’s bar next to the auxiliary power plant, a place of unvarnished wood floors, dusty cardboard beer signs, and a pressed-tin ceiling dropping ringlets of sea-green paint. He sat at the bar, and his grandpère came up and asked him in French for five dollars so he could stay in a bourrée game in the back room. Monique LeBlanc, his boss’s sister and bookkeeper, pestered him about a crankshaft for Ledet Towing Company. His cousin B.J. fell out of the rest-room door, fussing with the zipper on his coveralls. He asked Paul if he wanted to play pool with him and another cousin—Claude, the depressed one—but Paul waved him off, said that he was burned out from work. The stoop-shouldered bartender came up and squeezed him on the arm, beginning a joke. “You know how to make Mogan David wine?”

“No.”

“You pinch him on the nuts.” The old man let out a long, rattling laugh, bent down at the knees, and then crab-walked off. Paul’s cousin Ted and his great-uncle Octave came into the bar, playing Alphonse and Gaston with the door. They had been drinking and were yelling. Octave spotted him and filled the bar with his voice. “Heeeey, T-Bub. I heard you whipped your wife’s boyfriend’s ass, yeah.”