“You reckon?” Daddy said. “Ain’t that her black car parked across the street? One we been following since New Orleans?”

“Engine still warm,” Dusty said. “Just walked over and touched it.”

“Anyone see you?”

Dusty shook his head, smelling the salt on that cold sea air blowing in. They could hear the waves from where they sat, Daddy blowing smoke up into the cracked windshield. Lord have mercy. They sure were a long way from Tibbehah County.

“I ain’t never taken your momma to the beach.”

“Just thinkin’ on that exact thing.”

“Me and her always working,” Daddy said. “Paying for you and your sister to have new britches and shoes on your feet. I think Momma might like to get out some time, get her big white-ass ninnies wet and her old toes in the sand.”

“Y’all deserve it,” Dusty said. “You’re like me. Swinging a hammer your whole life.”

“Didn’t have no other choice,” Daddy said. “My daddy kicked me out of the house after I knocked up your momma. Hell, I tried to explain I couldn’t help it. I was so goddamn horny, I would’ve screwed a sidewinder right in the mouth.”

“Y’all were just kids.”

“Momma was fourteen,” he said. “She done told me that if I held my breath and she prayed real hard no harm would come of it. And we did it each and every Sunday after church let out. Right there out in the woods by the Assembly of God like a couple animals in the rut.”

The flat gray clouds blanketed out the sky, turning everything around them cold as steel clear out to the Gulf of Mexico. Dusty wanted so bad just to close his eyes for a minute, the sound of the surf and the smell of the air soothing him.

“Don’t kill nobody this time,” Dusty said. “You hear me? No matter what happens.”

“This ain’t much different than me and you up on those rooftops chasing water,” Daddy said. “Sometimes it’s easy to see where it goes to hide, but it’s another to see where it sprung a leak.”

“You telling me to be patient?” Dusty asked. “Bide my time?”

“Little Goldilocks will come skipping down those stairs soon enough,” Daddy said. “I can almost smell her.”

Dusty kept on staring at the row houses and all those fancy boats parked up under them, something so damn foreign about it, feeling strange being so damn far away from their land. The unease of it made him feel like he wanted to reach for Daddy’s book of matches and burn something hot and fast.

“Remember what we did to that son of a bitch’s barn back in Parsham?”

“Ha, ha,” Daddy said. “How could I forget?”