The sky began to lighten in the east. In the distance something buglike floated into the spotlight’s beam and out of it. LeBlanc yelped and hung on the whistle cord, trumpeting a blast over the Gulf. Colette watched a feeble spark grow into a bow light on the approaching boat and could hear plainly the heartbeat of the engine. Paul’s father and Raymond came into the wheelhouse, pulling on their shirts.

“Hey, man.” Raymond blinked and scratched. “What’s going on?”

LeBlanc turned and pulled him closer to a big square window. “Look at that old thing coming in. It’s got to be Abadie.”

“Hell,” Raymond said, “let’s go down and pull him out. The old rooster’s probably stiff as a axle.” He clopped down to the stern, Paul’s father close behind. Colette saw Emile come out of the crew boat’s cabin, and she started down, cut off by the barefoot Larousse twins and LeBlanc’s redneck coming out of the galley. Paul’s brother and her uncle stepped from the engine room, where they had slept on the catwalk above the engines. Uncle Lester grabbed her elbow. His face showed three days of white whiskers, and his button-down shirt was greasy and pulled out of his pants.

“Colette, what’s going on, baby? I can’t find my glasses.”

“We think old man Abadie came out to help us. Come on.” She guided him to the wide stern of the tug and then waited for the incoming sound, now clearly visible as a skiff with one person sitting upright. In two minutes the boat was pulling alongside, Grand-père Abadie’s “Comment ça va?” drifting up to the watching faces. It was then that LeBlanc turned on all the running and deck lights, and everyone could see that there was more than one man in the skiff. Paul and Etienne lay touching shoulders, their heads against the little cabinet in the bow.

Paul’s name exploded from Colette’s mouth as though she were trying to scream him back to life, and he opened his eyes, raising an arm to shield them. She jumped across three feet of water down onto the little bow and touched the men’s faces. Emile stepped from his crew boat onto the tug’s stern and looked down into the skiff. “Abadie,” he said, “what’s wrong with Etienne?”

Abadie put out a hand palm-down and rocked it back and forth. “He comes and he goes. He got him a fever and a bad bump on the googoon.” Abadie knocked the side of his head with a fist.