After dark the air became cool again, and he remembered that an impossible front had forced its way down as far as Kansas, last time he’d checked. The forecasters had said the air would never make it to the coast, and again he laughed at the government, because it was the government that made the weather on TV, he thought. He stood up to walk into the bow, and nothing was there, not even a boat. He had a spell. When he came out of it, he was seated next to the engine, his arm over the side, in the water. “Ah,” he said, “what in the world I’m doing out here?” It was several minutes before he realized that the singing in his ears was the buzzing of mosquitoes. Crawling to the cabinet in the bow, he fished out his repellent and a battery-powered spotlight, which he fixed to the bow with a rusty C-clamp. He shook out a little blood-pressure pill and washed it down with water from a jug. Soon he was running slowly, weaving around in the marsh night, the engine steaming in the cool atmosphere. Anyone watching him would have sworn he was lost, and maybe he was. He kept a small compass in his hand, checking it with his flashlight, trying to head generally northwest, back into the most tangled part of Bayou Entrelac, which wound around like the ridges of a brain.

At midnight, his engine hiccuped and stopped, and he found that his fuel tank had gone dry. He poured gas from one of the fluted cans, the sloshing sound the only noise around him. The land, if it could be called land, absorbed him in its silence, and he talked to himself to prove he could still hear. “All the bugs is quiet. The frogs done backed down in the mud.” He replaced the can and sat on the bench seat. “If T-Bub is out here, he’ll hear this old Ferro engine for sure. He’ll know it’s me, yeah.” He swung the flywheel around and the engine whistled through its priming cup, spat, and started running, the skiff swinging left around a grove of palmettos, then drunkenly right into the blackness lit feebly for fifty feet by the battery light. Abadie retarded the spark on the engine so its exhaust would grow loud and slow, would sail across the marsh for miles, the only heavy-flywheel, slow-beat one-cylinder inboard motor in this water for thirty years. The blackness retreated before his light like a wall and closed in behind. Coming around a small island of wind-crippled oak trees, the skiff rode up onto a submerged log, and he reached the kill switch before the boat could roll over. He found the oar and pushed clear, then listened. A mullet splashed once, twice, then jumped into the boat, flipping around on the footboards before accepting that he could not swim in air.