I disconnected the sections of my fly rod and set them in the bottom of the boat. When I lifted the outboard and yanked the starter rope, the dry propeller whined like a chain saw through the darkening swamp. I didn't speak again until we were at the dock. The air was hot, as though it had been baked on a sheet of tin, the current yellow and dead in the bayou, the lavender sky thick with birds.
Up on the dock, Clete peeled off his shirt and stuck his head under a water faucet. The skin across his shoulders was dry and scaling.
"Come on up for dinner," I said.
"I think I'm going back to New Orleans tonight."
He took his billfold out of his back pocket and removed a five-dollar bill and pushed it into a crack in the railing. "I owe for the beer and gas," he said, and walked with his spinning rod and big tackle box to his car, his love handles aching with fresh sunburn.
THE NEXT NIGHT, UNDER a fan moon, two men wearing hats drove a pickup truck down a levee in Vermilion Parish. On either side of them marshlands and saw grass seemed to flow like a wide green river into the Gulf. The two men stopped their truck on the levee and crossed a plank walkway that oozed sand and water under their combined weight. They passed a pirogue that was tied to the walkway, then stepped on ground that was like sponge under their western boots. Ahead, inside the fish camp, someone walked across the glare of a Coleman lantern and made a shadow on the window. Mout' Broussard's dog raised its head under the shack, then padded out into the open air on its leash, its nose lifted into the wind.
* * *
NINE
MOUT' STOOD IN THE DOORWAY of the shack and looked at the two white men. Both were tall and wore hats that shadowed their faces. The dog, a yellow-and-black mongrel with scars on its ears, growled and showed its teeth.
"Shut up, Rafe!" Mout' said.
"Where's Willie Broussard at?" one of the men said. The flesh in his throat was distended and rose-colored, and gray whiskers grew on his chin.
"He gone up the levee to the sto'. Coming right back. Wit' some friends to play bouree. What you gentlemens want?" Mout' said.
"Your truck's right yonder. What'd he drive in?" the second man said. He wore a clear plastic raincoat and his right arm held something behind his thigh.
"A friend carried him up there."
"We stopped there for a soda. It was locked up. Where's your outboard, old man?" the man with whiskers said.
"Ain't got no outboa'd."
"There's the gas can yonder. There's the cut in the cattails where it was tied. Your boy running a trot line?"
"What y'all want to bother him for? He ain't done you nothing."
"You don't mind if we come inside, do you?" the man in the raincoat said. When he stepped forward, the dog lunged at his ankle. He kicked his boot sideways and caught the dog in the mouth, then pulled the screen and latch out of the doorjamb.
"You stand over in the corner and stay out of the way," the man with whiskers said.
The man in the raincoat lifted the Coleman lantern by the bail and walked into the back yard with it. He came back in and shook his head.
The man with whiskers bit off a corner on a tobacco plug and worked it into his jaw. He picked up an empty coffee can out of a trash sack and spit in it.
"I told you we should have come in the a.m. You wake them up and do business," the man in the raincoat said.
"Turn off the lantern and move the truck."
"I say mark it off. I don't like guessing who's coming through a door."
The man with whiskers looked at him meaningfully.
"It's your rodeo," the man in the raincoat said, and went back out the front door.
The wind blew through the screens into the room. Outside, the moonlight glittered like silver on the water in the saw grass.
"Lie down on the floor where I can watch you. Here, take this pillow," the man with whiskers said.
"Don't hurt my boy, suh."