"El's going to get fired, Mr. Robicheaux."
"Tell Elrod you're staying here. That's about all I can suggest."
"He'll go anyway."
"I wish I could help you."
"That's it? Au revoir, fuck you, boat people?"
"In the last two days Elrod told both me and my wife he'd like to go to an AA meeting with me. Now it's ten in the morning and he's already ripped. What do you think the real problem is—the boat, your director, the rain, me, or maybe something else?"
She turned around as though to leave, then turned back and faced me again. There was a bright, painful light in her green eyes, the kind that comes right before tears.
"What do I do?" she said.
"Go inside the shop. I'll try again," I said.
I climbed back down into the boat and went into the cabin. He had his elbows propped on the instrument panel, while he ate a po'-boy sandwich and stared at the rain dancing in a yellow spray on the bayou.
His face had become wan and indolent, either from fatigue or alcoholic stupor, passive to all insult or intimidation. The more I talked, the more he yawned.
"She's a good lady, El," I said. "A lot of men would cut off their fingers with tin snips to have one like her."
"You got that right."
"Then why don't you quit this bullshit, at least for one day, and let her have a little serenity?"
Then his eyes focused on the cooler, on an amber, sweating bottle of Dixie nestled in the ice.
"All right," he said casually. "Let me borrow your fly rods, Mr. Robicheaux. I'll take good care of them."
"You're not going out on the salt?"
"No, I get seasick anyway."
"You want to leave the beer box with me?"
"It came with the boat. That fellow might get mad if I left it somewhere. Thanks for your thoughtfulness, though."
"Yeah, you bet."
After they were gone, I resolved that Elrod Sykes was on his own with his problems.
"Hey, Dave, that man really a big movie actor?" Batist said.
"He's big stuff out in Hollywood, Batist. Or at least he used to be."
"He rich?"
"Yeah, I guess he is."
"That's his reg'lar woman, too, huh?"
"Yep."
"How come he's so unhappy?"
"I don't know, Batist. Probably because he's a drunk."