Paul had never been more than two hundred miles from home. He had attended a local college for a year and had done well, despite the jammed and windowless classrooms. He’d soon realized that if he ever graduated from the dinky school, he would wind up holding an indoors job, unable to spit on the ground, forever looking for a window, forever sitting at a desk, filling out paperwork and swallowing snot.

Colette had made straight A’s in her two-year associate program, getting on at the bank and leaving everyone there in awe of her brains and looks. Paul was sure the tellers were talking about her at this moment, for they went to lunch in a gaggle at twelve-thirty.

* * *

At four o’clock everyone in LeBlanc’s Machine Shop began replacing tools and turning off grinders and drill presses. Paul picked up his airy lunch box and mounted the weed-ridden levee, listening to the exhaust fans wind down and the riverside door grind closed as LeBlanc grunted against it. On his left was the wide Chieftan River, and floating near the edge was his grand-père’s gray cypress skiff tied to a willow.

Paul’s father was in a plastic chair on the screen porch, reading the New Orleans paper. He was a small, dark man who never said much but who found pleasure in listening to others. “Hey, T-Bub,” he said, lowering one corner of his paper.

“Hey,” Paul said, putting down his lunch box and settling into a rush-bottom rocker. “Has the mail come?”

“I don’t think Colette would write this soon.” He drew his face close to an article about Norway.

“Well, did you check?”

“Nobody writes to me.” His father wet a finger and turned a page.

Paul walked out to the front porch and thrust his hand down into the tin pocket of the mailbox, feeling only dead leaves.

* * *

Colette had been gone six weeks. It was now the end of August and the weather turned vicious, hot and steamy as an overworked engine. The machinists at LeBlanc’s labored wet as retrievers at their lathes and band saws. In the afternoons, he would sit on the front porch, red-faced and dehydrated. He saw no reason to keep renting a house, and his parents got used to having him around again like an extra piece of furniture. After supper he would go out and play cards with the old men at the Little Palace or meet a friend at a local lounge. He would dance only with the date of another man, avoiding single women as though they were made of hot iron. Once, he went into the Big Gator, saw Clarisse waltzing with a pipe fitter from Pierre Part, and left before the bartender returned with his beer.

That same night he went home and tried to watch television, but a thunderstorm rolled up from the Gulf and knocked the power out. In the dark he thought of something Colette had said, that Louisiana was a land of limited ambition. He suddenly wondered if he would ever own LeBlanc’s Machine Shop. Was that ambition, to want to own a machine shop? Two machine shops? A chain of machine shops strung out along the Chieftan River like franchise hamburger stands? Colette would like that. MacLeBlanc’s, over one billion crankshafts repaired.