Gatlin’s face brightened. “Yep. I seen you there, too, in the restaurant part. You was with a nice-looking woman, if I remember right.”

“Yes.” He pulled a slow strain on the breaker bar.

“Real pretty. What’s her name?”

“Colette.”

“Local gal, huh? I’m not one for dark hair, but she’s the smoothest-looking bitch I’ve seen in this town.” He put a socket on the air wrench and proceeded to place it on a head bolt.

“Great gal,” Paul said. He wondered if he should let Gatlin snap a head bolt in two pieces and get himself fired. As he drew back on the breaker bar, he looked Gatlin in the eye and saw what a rawboned redneck he was, and he also thought of what a burden it was to be that way. Gatlin had been beaten up by the Larousse twins, the best fighters in Tiger Island. Anyone in his right mind should have known better than to tangle with a set of muscular twins. He recalled a girl he had seen Gatlin with that night, a beanpole blonde who worked at the truck stop over in Beewick.

“This engine was made before your grandpa was born, Gatlin. The bolts might be crystallized or froze up in the block, and you’ll break them with that air wrench. They need to be backed off careful, by hand. Watch.”

He put both hands on the end of the bar and leaned away slowly, pulling with his waist and shoulders at first, then drawing back his arms as though rowing in slow motion, willing all the strength in him to flow into the bolt. He could feel the bolt shaft twisting, the threads not moving, so he held his pull on the bar steady, waiting for the threads to follow the power. And it happened. Slowly as a minute hand at first, the bolt relented, and his arms turned to rock as he drew harder, bringing it around a quarter turn.

“Damn,” Gatlin whispered. “I never seen nobody have sex with a engine before.”

* * *

When the lunch whistle from the Louisiana Sawmill Company moaned out, Paul was back at the shop. He sat with his grand-père Abadie on a church pew under a live oak in the shop yard. From a thermos in his lunch box, he poured nose-snapping coffee into a plastic cup for the old man, who told him merci and wiped his eyes and took a sip. Paul stared at a cloud shaped like a locomotive and wondered what sights Colette had seen through the train’s windows, what she was thinking at that moment.

“You know,” his grand-père began, pausing to chew a section of sandwich Paul was sharing with him. He was a simple old Frenchman who said only what he meant, and Paul could tell what he was going to say seconds before he could get out the words. “Sometime a man can make a mistake and not know he did that.”

“Is that right?” Paul nodded politely, wondering whether anyone in town was talking of anything else. He studied the ground where the shadows of millions of leaves leapt and ran. A gust of wind rolled over the levee, and the two men faced west, letting the breeze leech the heat from their moist shirts. The old man finished eating and struggled up the levee, and Paul walked into the equipment room, a jumbled storage area containing thousands of pieces of machinery and a greasy oak desk where a black rotary phone rested in a nest of invoices. He often sat in there on his lunch hour among the cables and gears, reading old machinery manuals, learning about steamboat engines and windmills. Placing his hand on the phone, he imagined it ringing and heard Colette’s voice singing in from the West Coast like a silver arrow.