Abadie listened hard. His old ears were still good, pretty good. “I don’t hear nothing, me, except my own fool voice.” Again he cranked the engine, his back muscles burning into the action, his legs this late in the day a rasping rain of sparks. He set the engine to a booming exhaust, then floated along in his envelope of light, which showed only marsh grass and onyx water as he traveled in the pattern of a lace doily.

Every fifteen minutes he would stop, even though it was painful for his arms and back to sling the cast-iron flywheel for a new start. In the quiet he would listen with his newly ironed khaki soul and hear nothing. At three in the morning, lost and forgetting, he nodded off against the stick, the skiff taking a long curve until it ran into a shell reef. The old man pitched forward and cut his cheek on a nail. The propeller chewed up oysters and the engine sputtered out. “Old fool,” he said as he tended to his face, digging through his cabinet for a Band-Aid and Merthiolate. The night was as quiet as the dark side of the moon, and he could see his breath. He lay back against the bow and said a prayer. A pressure formed on his thigh, and he put his hand out on the back of a huge snake crawling into the boat over him. Abadie picked it up like a stray kitten and dropped it back onto the bank. “Fish snake after that damned mullet.” Bending down, he felt for the fish and threw it out, too.

He blew his nose and listened, blew it again and listened harder. Turning around, he clicked off his spotlight, as though light itself made noise, and he closed his eyes and raised his head. In his ears was a whine, a musical monotone, far away and singing like an imagined mosquito in the dark bedroom of the marsh. He was afraid that he was dreaming, and he opened his eyes, as if they wanted to hear instead of see. What he heard put rhythm into the air, then disappeared, and the old man swore he’d never heard it. And then like the thinnest slice of birdcall, something was flying above the invisible marshland from the south and landing on his shoulder: A-ba-dieee. Aaaa-baaa-dieeee.

Chapter Twenty-five

Twenty-five

Colette was dreaming that she was gliding soundlessly down a northern California seacoast highway in her Mercedes. The air was cool and dry, and out on the ocean white trawlers sat and rocked like seabirds. She steered over a long bridge and looked down more carefully, discovering that the boats were not moving but were broken and on their sides, some disappearing partially in the white-tipped waves, men bobbing like insects around the spray-tortured hulls.