The old man smiled, jerking a thumb over his shoulder as he walked Colette to the door. “That priest is a couillon. I’m too old to even make a sin.”

Colette pulled Paul up the levee and walked him home. “I’ll get the licenses and we’ll go tomorrow.”

He shook his head. “No. This is a bad idea.”

“Damn it, you’ll feel better if you work.”

“If I fall overboard, I’ll be too weak to swim.”

She stepped in front of him and put a fingernail into his sternum, not the first time she had done this. “If you’re not ready when I come tomorrow, I’ll drown you myself in your own lavatory.”

Chapter Fifteen

Fifteen

By three o’clock the next afternoon, they were ready to go. The baby cried when Colette gave him over to Aunt Nellie’s flabby arms. For two blocks, Colette imagined she could hear him squalling after her. Borrowing money for gasoline from Paul’s brother, Larry, fees for a license from his sister, Nan, and a handheld spotlight from Colette’s uncle Lester, they were already in debt. Paul was afraid of setting off in the wide river and fighting the wheel wash of big tugs with his grand-père’s antique boat. He waded gingerly out to the skiff, stopping when the water threatened to boil into his knee boots. Colette sloshed along behind him, put the shiny Winchester in the bow, and slung herself in. They had decided to make an evening run and come back after dark.

Colette pushed them out of the shallows with an oar while Paul set the spark on the engine so the flywheel wouldn’t kick back and break his arm. He opened the hinged door of a cypress box next to the engine and checked the lantern battery and buzz coil, opening the knife-blade switch that fed spark to the plug. Into a priming cup on the engine’s domed head he poured a sip of gasoline, opened a valve, and rolled the flywheel back and forth to suck the fuel into the cylinder and mix it with a good charge of air. Closing the knife switch, he cranked the engine up past dead center. It sneezed, banged once like a pistol, and spewed a bar of blue smoke from the two-inch exhaust pipe, which ran straight back over the stern. It started to run with a slow throb like an iron heart, and he advanced the spark and pushed the steering stick over, aiming for midchannel, remembering the engine’s sound like a song heard in childhood and not since, four beats a second, pounding out toward town over the broad plain of river, turning the heads of all the old fishermen in Tiger Island.