He looked at the money, then back at her face. “You can string line and pick up crabs, but you don’t know a damned thing about buying a used outboard.”

She sat on the bed next to him, conscious that she smelled like mud. “You can tell me right now.”

One hand rolled on the bed, palm-up. “I’m tired. I know you can’t understand that, but I’m tired past the bone.”

She put a cool finger lightly on the back of a flushed hand bearing a needle. “What horsepower?”

Chapter Sixteen

Sixteen

Old lady Fontenot came by complaining of cutworms in her tomatoes and Colette snagged her to watch her father and Matthew for an hour or so. She walked up River Street, noticing that the clock in the brick tower of city hall read seven o’clock. She was on her way to see Nelson Shapley, an old Yankee who worked on outboard motors. In spite of the fact that he had moved down from Cleveland to Tiger Island forty years before, he was still known as “the Yankee.” He lived in a boxy house covered with greasy asbestos shingles. In the front yard was a thirty-foot Lafitte skiff turned upside down over several dismantled inboard engines. Not a blade of grass grew from the oil-soaked yard.

She knocked and had to wait five minutes, listening to grunts, cans being knocked over, a television being turned off. He appeared behind his screen door like a foul cloud. She saw his huge bare feet, his dirt-colored T-shirt and smudged khakis.

“Yeah?”

“Do you have any rebuilt outboards for sale? Around a twenty horse?”

He opened the door a crack and flicked an ash from his cigarette at her shoes. “I got a nice big seventy-five back there in the shed. Got a nine-nine.”

“Too big and too small,” she said, staring him in the eye.

“Well, you know those middle-sized engines don’t burn much gas. I can’t keep ’em on the place. Have to charge a good price for one like that.” He blinked something out of his eyes and looked her over slowly.

“Let’s see a middle-sized one, as you call them.”

“I didn’t say I had one.”

“So long, then. I’ll go see Bobby Lodrigue.”

He stepped out into his carport and scratched a tattoo of a spiderweb on his left bicep. “Wait a minute. Lodrigue just sells junk. I guarantee my engines.”

“You got one like I need?” She had a foot turned away, ready to follow.

Shapely flicked his cigarette onto his bald lawn and reached into his pocket for a ring of keys. In a tin shed was an array of used outboards mounted in fifty-five-gallon drums full of orange water. He walked up to a Johnson twenty. “This here’s a damn good engine. Overbuilt and heavy. Got more power than a modern twenty.”

“Start it.”