“Got to go.” When he was a quarter mile down the levee, he saw the old man still standing in the grass, hands in his pockets, looking after him.

As the church clock across the street rang seven, the high riverside door to LeBlanc’s Machine Shop thundered open on its rusty rollers. Maurice LeBlanc walked the sliding door to the side and hit the handle on a switch box with his palm, the lights coming on, the rooftop fans humming alive and pulling in wisps of fog onto the concrete floor among the milling machines and lathes. Paul headed for his tool locker, anxious to get busy at once and stay busy.

* * *

Around nine o’clock he was milling a keyway in a shaft, his mind filled only with the work. Mr. LeBlanc walked up, shadowed by a hunched man wearing overalls. Nobody in Tiger Island wore overalls. They were farmer clothes. LeBlanc yelled over the noise. “Hey, Thibodeaux. Bring Gatlin down to the icehouse to take the heads off number-two compressor.” Gatlin put a thumb under an overalls strap and frowned. The other men in the shop called him LeBlanc’s redneck. He was too tall and ruddy. His hair was the yellow of scrambled eggs. Gatlin was from up north, around Caddo Parish.

“I can do it alone, if you want to save labor,” Paul said.

“Nah. Work with this guy and teach him something.” LeBlanc tilted his head and an oiled strand of iron-gray hair fell out over an ear. “You hear?”

“Yeah. We’ll get it.”

Gatlin, who was either forty-five or had drunk his way to thirty, turned up his lip in a smile of sorts but said nothing. The two men loaded into the shop’s dusty truck and drove downriver a half mile to People’s Ice Company, a worn-down brick building with thistle and pigweed growing along its roof line. Paul parked the Dodge next to the compressor room and dragged a toolbox off its bed.

The old two-cylinder vertical-piston machine had not been keeping up pressure on the ammonia line. Paul walked into the building and looked over to the tall twin blocks of the overbuilt compressor, eighty years old and made of porcelain-finished cast iron and lathe-polished brass to last forever. He climbed the five-foot flywheel and sat on its rim. The head of the compressor was eighteen inches in diameter, an inverted cast-iron bowl held down by eight one-inch-diameter bolts. He put a socket over a bolt head and connected a three-foot breaker handle. Jake Gatlin came up on the other side of the head, waving an air wrench. “I’m hooked into the plant’s air,” he said. “Why bust your ass with a breaker bar when you can use this?” He pulled the trigger twice and the silver wrench rasped two breathy zips.

Paul looked at him for a long time. He remembered the lanky Gatlin drunk and fighting with two local boys who got him down on the dance floor at Scadlock’s and beat him like a drum. “I’ve seen you at the Big Gator,” Paul said.