Paul shrugged. “One time he told me that as long as he had a boat, he was still a fisherman. Without it, he would just be an old man.”

“Can you run it?”

He closed his eyes and shook his head. “No.”

“A machine you can’t make work. I’ve found one at last.”

He shifted his weight. “I mean it’s cranky. I haven’t ridden in it since I was a kid.”

She came up out of the water and slipped her white feet into her shoes. “You think he’ll let us use it?”

He pursed his lips and stared at the tarp. After a long silence he said, “We could ask. He could tell us if the bottom’s too soft to trust.”

“The engine’s a real cast-iron antique, huh?” she asked, watching him. “What about it? Tell me.”

“Nicely made,” he said without looking at her. “Lots of brass fittings. Low compression. Not too hard to start.”

“It’d be fun to run, wouldn’t it?”

Across the levee they let themselves into Abadie’s chicken yard, coming through the cypress picket gate into a pungent square of ground, barren and dark. They walked up to his house, a narrow shotgun on brick piers, and mounted the gray steps to knock, but he had seen them, and he opened the door as Paul reached out to touch it.

“Comment ça va?” he called. “Vous voulez du café?”

“Mais yeah,” Paul said, looking into the kitchen, where Father Clemmons was seated at the porcelain table, out on one of his morning visits.

“Don’t mind me,” the priest said in his big preaching voice.

Abadie jerked a thumb toward him. “He thinks he gonna save my soul. I told him I didn’t think I was losing it.” The old man’s hair was uncombed, but his T-shirt was tucked into his khaki pants, which pooled over his veined feet. He sat and leaned back against the cypress boards of the kitchen. “What you babies up to now?” He rubbed his nose and gave Colette a half-smile, waving for them to sit.

She flipped her hair behind her shoulders. “I’m trying to get Paul to come out with me after a boatload of nutria.”

Abadie looked at the priest, who shrugged. “Little girl, all you know is fancy pants and pretty perfume. How you gonna mess with them big orange-tooth rat?”

“I can shoot.”

“Oh yah. So that’s why you come around. So you can borrow my rifle, hanh?”

“No, your boat.”

He raised his white eyebrows and looked out through the window again, as though something of great interest was in the chicken yard, as if thinking of how to say no. But then he turned to Paul. “T-Bub there, he knows how to make the little engine fire. He knew how to crank a Ferro when he was ten years old, yeah.”