He worked all day, imagining his ex-wife’s eyes on his back. He dragged in haul after haul, some brimming with shrimp, some choked with mud and trash fish. The farther they churned into the Gulf, the more worked up the water became, the sawtooth chop turning into rollers by three o’clock. Etienne ran his huge hand over the dials of their old shortwave set and got a weather report. A low-pressure system, which had been sitting dormant in the Gulf for three days like a cranky swamp bear, had awakened and was moving north. A possibility of a squall line, the announcer said. The voice was a woman’s, speaking in a drawl, her words overlaid with whistling static that sounded like a storm. Etienne took a swallow of coffee from an ironware mug and set it on the windowsill, staring across the waves to the horizon, studying the dark swirls at the edge of the world. The phrase “possibility of generating a squall line” perhaps ran through his mind, but if it did, he shrugged it off. A squall was a baby crying. Nothing to be scared about. He put his woolly head out the door and looked back. It was time to pull up the last drag. Then maybe they would hightail it north.

The final pass brought up pure pearly hills of jumbo shirmp, twelve to the pound, more than they imagined the trawl could hold.

“Whoa, baby,” Raymond sang, doing a bowlegged jig, flipping up shrimp with his white rubber boots. “Looka this. Money in the bank. We done hit on some serious shrimp here.” He held up half a dozen jumbos by their whiskers.

Paul’s father woke up at the noise, and Etienne gave him the wheel and walked back to check the catch. He asked Paul if he wanted to make another pass.

“Why the hell not? We got some daylight left.”

“The radio said they might be some squalls coming up.”

“Might? They mention anything showing on radar?” He looked up, not wanting to believe. “What’s ‘might’ mean?”

“Dunno. The weather people said a front might form some roughness up ahead.” He gestured with his right hand over the water, then ran it deep into his pants pocket.

Paul looked to the horizon and saw what appeared to be light rain about ten miles off, but no lightning. “We’ll try once more, at least,” he said. “Man, look at these shrimp.”

They paid out the net again and pulled a little harder this time as the old boat struggled through a rolling sea, a cloud of gulls scissoring along behind. A light rain came up, a dusty drizzle of wind-whipped particles, and with it a few whitecaps began to form.