Gatlin nodded glumly. “I heard he’s got the sheriff in his pocket, but even so…” He looked over to a tanker lurching off the scale, its hatches steaming in the rain. “If the bastard didn’t try to rake up all the bad shit in the universe, I don’t think nobody would of noticed us.” He folded a soggy french fry into his mouth. “The government shuts this place down, we’ll go back to eating out those little cans with keys stuck on the back.”

The rain kept up, and by three o’clock the trucks were sending wheel wash rolling up into the boiler room’s floor. Paul put on a slicker and waded over to the office. The only one in the building was Colette, who was looking out her window, a hand on her stomach. The rain hammered the metal roof like gravel as they looked at each other the way strangers do. Paul had talked to her about supplies at least once a week, but about nothing else. He had seen her three times in town while she was out with Bucky Tyler, and each time he had turned his head as though he’d been slapped. He’d tried to put her out of his mind and was getting good at doing that. Catholic boys had often been told about how to avoid dwelling on sexual thoughts, and Paul found the discipline worked well on other types of thinking as well. He tried to forget her by dating another woman, a divorcée from Labadieville with two pale, sweet-faced children, but though she was his age, she seemed a generation older. She had been someone else’s, and it occurred to him that she might have the same feeling about him, that he was like a used car that smelled of its previous owner. He tried to give himself to this woman and discovered that he was not his own to give to her.

He walked up to Colette’s doorway and knocked on the frame. “You seen Bucky?”

She looked at him with a coolly interested stare. “He rode the hotshot truck over to Patterson to get a pump. What do you need?”

“I need him to tell the worms over by the ditch to get a few sandbags to the south side of the boiler house. I don’t want the ash pits to fill up with water.”

“You could ask the yard foreman for his crew.”

“He won’t listen to me. He’s got his own problems trying to contain that green rock. What is that stuff, anyway?”

She sat back in her chair. “You don’t want to know what half the crap is back there.”

“You feeling all right?”

“I’m slowing down, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“How’s your daddy?”