“Ça va,” she replied from the little table under the crucifix. She waved him in and rose to fix another cup of coffee. She told him what Colette had done, and he frowned, rubbed his chin absently, looked old and useless. He sat down at the dinette and saw a box of photographs she had been digging through. He picked up a creased shot of an eight-year-old Paul taken in the front yard. He looked hard at the paper. Halfway down the block was his own narrow house, out of focus, a white hen pacing the front porch. In the photo, Paul was a soft, kind-faced boy, leaning on his Schwinn, a smudge of oil on the bridge of his nose. The old man frowned more and drank from a cup of coffee that had appeared at his elbow. He fretted the picture, turning it in several directions to give the paper more light. He touched other pictures of Paul in the box, of Paul’s brother, of other children in the neighborhood, most of whom were in other towns now, earning money for their bills. He saw a photo of Paul in diapers and remembered the baby-oiled heat of him in his lap. Abadie gulped his coffee and stood too quickly, holding on to the table. His daughter, who had just joined him, looked up.

“T’a oublié quelque chose?”

“Je crois que c’est ça,” he said, turning for the screen door.

In an hour he was wading out to his cypress skiff, a burlap sack on his back filled with six cans of potted meat, six of Vienna sausage, one can of Spam, one large box of crackers, and one jar of Spanish olives. He went back for four gallon-jugs of drinking water and a roll of toilet paper. He spun the wheel on the glossy black Ferro, and it spat to life, pushing the boat out of the shallows and downriver, where he stopped at the ice house for gas.

Berrard Larouquette, a wiry, sharp-featured man in his fifties, passed down the nozzle for him to fill both the tank behind the engine and two flute-sided cans in the bow. “Monsieur Abadie, you going back fishing some more, hanh?”

“Yas, baby, I got me a big one I want to catch.” When Berrard was six years old, he had ridden with Abadie to bait lines. “When you haul up this hose, don’t bam me in the head, now.”

He sat in the skiff with a set of twenty-year-old charts and looked and looked, running his brown forefinger down the Chieftan, around the islands and passes, to its mouth in the Gulf and along the shoreline to the east. His skiff would take no open water, but it drew only ten inches to the propeller tip, so he could stay close to shore and, when the tide was right, go into the maze.