He went on, his little engine going pump-pump and him trusting perhaps the map of feeling in his head. All day he slid along, zigzagging the channel, dodging speeding crew boats. In his mind was a lifetime of throbbing meanderings, and he daydreamed, memory and present becoming one time. Before long, Abadie found himself in a wide, peaceful waterway, straight and evenly lined by levees. His head turned this way and that, and he stopped the skiff, standing up and looking east and west. “Now, you know,” he said. Turning the boat around, he backtracked three miles to the Chieftan and turned south again into the correct channel. An hour later, plodding through a broad stretch of river, he fell asleep, navigating into a dream and waking only when the boat labored into a raft of hyacinth. Killing the spark to the engine, he pulled out his water jug and Vienna sausage, chewing himself awake.

The engine drummed slowly toward nightfall, pushing the skiff along the shore of the Gulf through a chilly wind and low, muddy breakers. He looked for an opening in the shore of his memory, and after a while, a minute or so before the sun set, he found it and steered the boat north into the smooth shallows behind Isle de Loupe. He threaded a narrowing bayou, slowing down the engine until the skiff grounded, and then he stopped it. In the light of his flashlight he read his watch. Low tide. He slapped on 6-12 against the bugs, sat in the skiff, and listened. Collapsing his nose with forefinger and thumb he blew hard, clearing his ears. He closed his eyes and listened harder. A few spiders were grinding, and one distant bullfrog drummed above the rustling of the millions of acres of grass. He clamped his eyes tighter and strained the old machine that was his brain. If they were alive, and if they were in this marsh, and if Paul still breathed, he had a chance to find them. Yards off, a nutria cried out like a baby, and Abadie made a face.