Etienne’s face was set against the weather as if he were fighting the storm in a barroom brawl. Paul knew that Etienne could pilot a dredge through a hurricane, so he walked down the steps, opened the door to the engine room, and stooped in to listen. He saw the dark wink of water sliding under the deck boards and he threw a knife-blade switch to run the pump. All their money was here, he thought, every cent and then some. Colette’s uncle Lester had helped to buy the ice. There in the shuddering compartment, he tried to imagine what it would be like to lose the Saxon, somehow survive, and then be brought under the eyes of the most beautiful woman in town, who had roughened her fine skin in fish guts and dead rats to buy the boat. If that happened, he thought, everything would be over for them.

He checked the bilge level again, then climbed into the wheelhouse, catching Etienne in midstory. “And when we pulled that net up, we had shrimp running four to the pound.”

“Damn,” Raymond said. “You musta kept ’em on a leash.”

“That’s a fact. And the crabs in that trawl was big around as the steering wheel on a dump truck.”

“No shit. They had four claws each, too, huh?”

Etienne turned and looked at him hard. “Hey, I was there pulling ’em in.”

“You musta been dragging the Lake Charles canal where that nuclear power plant has its discharge pipe.”

“Yeah, man. They glow in the dark. One night a running light burnt out and we just climbed the boom and hung a Lake Charles crab on the end.”

Paul went out in the rain, checking nets and hatch covers. The wind was stiff from the south, but ahead the clouds were like pulled-apart cotton. By eleven they were in light seas and the thunderstorm was a black gilded racket off the stern. Paul and Raymond fed out the net, threw over the trawl boards, fought the corroded machinery and booms. They made a pass, drew in the net, and dumped the catch into a sorting platform on deck. Raymond turned the bill of his polka-dotted cap to the rear and waded into the catch, tossing out trash fish and crabs, cursing his tight welder’s jeans.