Soon they were throbbing over the dark cut of water between the islands of hyacinth, a boil and squash of water sounding around the low-riding boat. The engine labored, its heavy exhausts rebounding like shots off the invisible levee. Colette stood in the bow, holding the light straight ahead, watching for stumps. There was no moon, and the skiff cut through oil-black water. Near the mouth, the canal widened out, the channel becoming indefinite. A cypress grew in the middle of the stream. At the moment they passed the cypress, she leaned left and shone the light down on the bow swell, then back along the rail to see if they were taking water over the sides. It was then that the right side of the hull skidded up on what felt like a sunken log, and she went over, her light illuminating an instant of lacy splash, then going out. Paul was in darkness, listening to a gasp of water come over the left side. The hull slid off whatever it had struck, and he grabbed the plug wire from the engine, killing it, taking three sharp pulses of electricity from the buzz coil. Lost in the sudden blackness of the overgrown canal, not knowing if the boat was still moving or not, he shouted her name. Thrusting his arms over the side, he felt for her, leaning until he heard water lazing into the nearly sunken boat. He listened with his sensitive ears for her struggle in the water but heard only the hiss of the hot engine. He jerked off his boots, feeling the water in the boat up to the middle of his rubbery calves. Not knowing if he could still swim, he fell off the stern, out of blackness into blackness, swallowing a gulp of brackish water and coughing it back up. He started to swim like an old water spider on the water, clearing his lungs so he could cry out for her again, not knowing if he was swimming up or down the canal. One high overhand stroke caught his hand in a branch, and he let down his legs to the mud bottom, sensing the left bank and at the same time yearning to climb into the shallows and breathe. A terrible weariness flowed like poison through his arms and chest, but he turned and swam back away from the bank. He gasped and went under, splaying his arms like a gull’s wings and flying through the terrible water after her. He came up for air, blowing like a whale, and then sounded again. On the second long trip under, he could feel himself blacking out, and when he tried to get to the air, he came up beneath the slick broad hull. When his head broke water, he hung on to the rudder brace, took several breaths, and then swam west, back up the canal. Taking the middle, he pulled his flaccid arms through the surrounding night, calling her name, hearing nothing but the crash of water in his ears and the rush of his own breath coming fast and desperate. He swam until he felt sure that he was going to drown. Then he swam through that feeling and out of the other side of it, because he knew he would never stop spending the swaying, reaching strokes, would swim out of this life and into the next looking for her in the long canal, her black hair, her dark frowns. There was nothing else he could do.