He sat in a scratchy, overstuffed chair in his parents’ living room. “The house is empty. It’s wood and glass, old furniture, a piano, and hundreds of pictures of you and your ugly brother.” He listened. She seemed to be quieting down. “You want me to come over?”

She thought a moment. “No. I want to go somewhere.”

“No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do, damn it.”

He closed his eyes and thought of what to say next. Out in the river, a trawler questioned the drawbridge with a tinny horn. “Colette, what would your mother want you to do?”

“That’s not fair,” she cried. “You’re using my ghosts against me.

He let out a pent-up breath. “Go to sleep.”

“I can’t. I’m lying in bed with the windows open because I don’t want to run the air conditioner. I expect the door to swing in and—”

“Shhh. Listen.”

“To what?”

“Did you hear?”

The line was silent. “A boat whistle? What do—”

“Shhhh. Picture a big trawler, Barrileaux’s new boat.”

She was quiet for a moment. “It’s southbound.”

“Here comes the bridge.”

“Four shorts. Why won’t it open?”

“You know.”

Again the line went silent. “A train.”

“That’s right,” he said. Sure enough, at the edge of the parish came a freight whistle, barely audible, like music across water, a diminished chord, rising and falling, two longs, a short, and a long. “Greenwood crossing,” he told her.

Another signal drifted in a minute later, and she said, “That’s the junkyard road.”

He waited until the next sound rode into town on an east wind. “Now, Grizzaffi’s shipyard. Listen to that whistle cut up. Must be some drunk taking the crossing too slow.”

After a full minute, another signal. “Now that’s the graveyard,” she said, her voice going hollow for a moment.

“Here,” he said quickly, “Tell me what’s next?”

“The box factory.” And he heard the whistle in the phone now as well. Along Railroad Avenue washed the coming thunder of a thousand wheels polishing the midnight iron through town.

The whistle was quiet for two minutes, then tore down River Street from the depot, the locomotive thumping out onto the bridge, the river quadrupling the rumble for ten minutes as the hotshot freight shone its light for Texas, blew its air trumpets for Beewick and beyond, little places announced by the two of them in turn.

“Cotton Road,” she said, yawning.

“Bayou Vista,” he told her, turning his head toward the open back door.

“Shadyside mill.” Her voice was small and drifting, like the distant chant of the train whistle, which maybe she only imagined she heard, figuring the train’s progress through the swamps and cane fields, guessing at the crossings.

“Patterson cut?” he whispered.

After a minute she murmured, “Bayou Triste,” and hung up, the train whistling off into the silent west of her dream.

*   *   *