“Naw, I can’t take that.” He waved her off.

She looked down at the ground, at the imbedded spark plugs and piston rings paving his drive. What had Paul told her to say? “Has that engine got the old shear-pin system?”

“Yes. It’s got the old pain-in-the-ass shear pin.”

“Cash money. Three hundred and fifty. No ‘I’ll pay you next week,’ no ‘Twenty dollars a week,’ no ‘I’ll pay you when I fish.’ Right now, Mr. Shapley.”

He took an interminable drag. Colette imagined that his lungs were going to catch fire. She backed away another two steps. “Can’t do it,” he finally said.

She took the money from her front pocket slowly, three crisp hundreds and a fifty. She held the bills up so he could see the way the number 100 curled around the corners. “Take this and put the engine in your truck and bring it and me up a few blocks on River Street.”

“No. No, I … I don’t think so,” he stammered.

“That’s fine,” she said, turning and walking down his lumpy driveway.

When she put her foot in the street, she heard Shapley’s smoky voice rising behind her. “Three sixty-five,” he shouted. She put on a nasty face and turned around.

“What would you say to three sixty?”

He nodded, throwing his cigarette down in the drive. “I’d say Paul Thibodeaux’s luckier than I thought.”

*   *   *

Colette put her motor on the aluminum johnboat and tooled around the banks of the Chieftan above town while Abadie hung on to the middle seat and showed her the best place to rig trotlines and drop her crab traps. “Colette,” he called over the noise of the engine. “Not so fast. This t’ing’s so light, I feel like I’m riding in a pie pan.” Each day for a week she sat in his chicken yard while Abadie showed her how to bait the traps, how to tie them off to empty Clorox jugs, how to tie the knots for the trotlines. He went with her one morning when the sky was only a beaten sheet of lead. They put out the first lines, sank the first traps, but by eleven o’clock Paul’s grand-père had a spell and she brought him in and helped him across the levee, his spotted hands held over his heart.