Soon men were getting the various machines warmed and ready for the day’s search. The main engines kicked over below-decks, the crew boat shuddered to life, and the Unsinkabelle’s outboards jittered and sneezed, warming up before the Larousses spun off toward the shallows in the northeast. The lack of purposeful talk was frightening, but still everyone kept moving, handling ropes, turning on radar, radios, pumps, compressors. The men spoke about everything but the possibility of finding anyone alive, as though they were doing all this not for a concrete purpose but as a ritual. She untied the crew boat’s lines and went into the cabin. Her eyes hurt and already she wanted more coffee, but she settled for two bitter aspirin washed down with a hot cola.

The crew boat bellied into a light chop, wave tips drawn up by the wind, which was brought out by the sun itself. She looked ahead in the distance at the Larousses banging away at the little waves, then back at a puff of black smoke from the stack of the tug as LeBlanc backed from the oil platform. LeBlanc’s redneck came out of the engine room wearing overalls and no shirt. She wondered if he was ready to quit. She knew that she and Emile were not, and that was all that mattered.

All day they ran through the Gulf in patterns, as if the ocean were really a logical thing that would yield to geometry. The morning stretched along slow and glaring, and at noon she could tell that Emile was washed-out and glazed in the eye, and once, when she stopped the boat to retrieve him on the roof, she found him asleep. A Coast Guard helicopter hovered over the marsh where they had found Paul’s father, flattened the saw grass for a half hour or so, then disappeared in a whopping roar to the west. The Larousses kept to the shallows, beating their brains out in a rocking surf until a blade broke off a propeller. At three o’clock they ran out of gas, and she came upon them dead in the water, Vincent watching her respectfully, holding a towline as if it were a rosary. Still later, she watched the tug parade its winding path on the horizon like a toy as they continued their own route, the Unsinkabelle bobbing on a towline in the crew boat’s wheel wash, the Larousse boys asleep on its cushions.