He adjusted the drip oilers and turned down the grease cups on the crankshaft, then played with the spark and carburetor until he had the skiff pushing downstream at a good fifteen miles an hour. Colette sat in the bow and looked ahead. He noticed that she had trimmed her hair up to her shoulders, as though long hair was a luxury she could no longer afford. She turned, feeling his eyes on her. “You sick yet?”

“I’m alive—that’s all,” he yelled over the engine noise. He glanced astern at a crew boat gaining and his heart skipped. He put the skiff into the dead water next to the bank and the big vessel sliced by, several oil workers waving their hard hats and pointing at Abadie’s boat.

Paul and Colette chugged under the railroad bridge and rounded the point below town on the west bank, passing a raft of tied-up tugs and mud boats. The water was as brown as café au lait, heavy with silt from the previous week’s rains. Paul cut around an abandoned rig boat listing away from its moorings; two miles up the channel, they passed a few trappers’ shacks, abandoned plywood hulls dotted with nests of paper wasps. Another mile and there were only willows on the bank, and later, not even a bank, but a deep raft of hyacinth-filled swamp and a brake of second-growth cypress.

About five o’clock Colette moved into the bow and loaded the rifle. “Time to make money,” she called.

Paul cut the engine speed to an idle, watching her scan the edge of the channel, which had narrowed to one hundred yards. She knelt down and drew back the hammer, aiming at something on the bank Paul could not see. The gun spat, and she put its butt down and pointed for Paul to nose into the bank. She put on a canvas glove and reached over the bow, drawing up into the boat a brown twenty-pound rat, its arms and legs splayed out, two-inch orange fangs flashing once in the sunlight. A small red hole shone behind the rodent’s eye, and the animal was still, as though it had been dead for hours. “Two dollars,” she said, poking the webbed feet and thick coat with the gun barrel. With the oar, she shoved the boat away from the bank and Paul started the engine and ran it dead slow, keeping thirty feet off the tree line, looking for the cane field diversion canal Abadie had sent them to find.