He laughed, and the baby looked up at the sound. “You been inhaling too many fumes out at the stink plant.”

“No, listen, hardhead. Oudry’s is buying them unskinned again. I saw a new sign. Two dollars each.”

“Ah,” he said. “Dog food plant’s buying again.” He smoothed down the baby’s hair and let a finger trail along its cheek. “You’d need a good skiff. Those rats weigh thirty pounds, some of them. All the good skiffs are out after the mud bugs. Nan’s husband had to scrounge all over the parish to rig up his.”

“What’s a good skiff?”

“An eighteen-footer with a broad belly to take the weight. A boat what won’t roll, with enough sheer in the front so it won’t tugboat with a load of rats.”

“Tugboat?”

“Dig its nose in the water.”

She took back the baby, who was starting to arch his back and whimper. “If we had a good boat, we could make some money at least. Oudry’s is buying channel cat and even water snakes for the laboratory in Schriever.”

He looked at her hard, as though trying to get at her meaning. “What’s this ‘we’ business?”

“T-Bub, all I’m interested in is being able to buy clothes and food and pay the light bill, is that clear?”

“No surprise to me,” he said, long used to the anvil-hard way she said things.

“So don’t start having any fantasies, all right?”

“That’s hard to do with you around.”

She smiled a little at that. “Listen to this. I called the conservation department’s office this morning. The swamps west of here are overrun because nobody’s hunted them for the past two years. There are three no-limit days next week that mostly the old swamp trappers know about. If we could get a boat, we might be able to make a couple days’ good money.”

He yawned. “Grand-père Abadie could tell us where there’s plenty nutria, but I don’t know how to trap ’em.”

She tried not to be brought down by the defeat in his voice, telling herself that it came from inside his pained bones. “When I was a little girl, I saw the trappers come in with boatloads of them shot through the head. Back when there was no regulation at all.”

“You’re not a trapper.”

She looked down at his leather shoes, which were wrinkled like an old man’s face. His shirt was a washed-out button-down, limp as dishrag. She did not know how to tell him that maybe you had to become what you weren’t, sometimes. Paul’s mother banged out onto the porch, saw the baby, and Colette passed him off and told her that yes, she could take him in the house and show him to his grandfather.