At four-thirty they pulled the net in and cleaned the catch. It was as good a haul as the last one, and the crew scampered about in a steady rain, getting the shrimp on ice. A steady south wind began to rattle the loose panes in the wheelhouse; a few minutes later, a thunderstorm banged away over the boat. The wooden decks were slippery with trash fish and mud, so the young men made Paul’s father go inside before he was pitched overboard by the rocking seas. When the sky got black, everyone crowded behind Etienne at the wheel. Raymond fought with the shortwave, dialing up a report that told them they were in an intensifying system of low pressure. Etienne tuned the boat due north and notched the engine up to full speed. A phosphorescent lightning strike flooded the windows, the thunderclap following at once. “Hail Mary, full of grace,” Etienne sang.

Raymond frowned. “Looks bad when the wheelman starts saying the rosary.”

Another bolt hit and every man jumped. Paul sniffed and turned around in time to see a funnel of smoke come from the radio cabinet. “Hey, this thing just fried like an egg.”

Then the rain came on firehose fashion, and the boat pitched and creaked like an old rocking chair under a fat man. Waves broke like plate glass over the bow. The squalling wind heeled the boat over on one side, then the other. Paul’s father opened the door that led down to the engine and saw an inch of water over the boards. He passed a hand over his hair. “Ain’t no kind of money worth this,” he said.

The two-inch bilge pump was doing all it could. Raymond got on the hand pump, and Paul pulled up a section of decking to work on the bilge with a bucket, throwing the water out on the side deck through a sliding port. They worked until past dark, and when the wind did not die down and the rain did not let up, they figured they were hung in something larger than a line of thunderstorms. By eight o’clock the sea was made of valleys of gray water. Etienne kept the wheelhouse spotlight trained ahead and was running at half speed. He was not sure of their location and was trying to keep from smacking into an oil platform. The three men below were holding their own with the leaks, though the heavy seas were working the hull planks like slide rules. “You know,” Raymond began, resettling his polka-dotted cap, “this storm ain’t really that bad.”