It happened on a Wednesday in early October. He was across the levee from the machine shop, lying under a steam engine on the bucket dredge Gruenwald, an obsolete thing the town operated to keep the channel deep near the docks. Paul was the only machinist who cared to work on the dying machinery aboard. The boat had just been run in from working a sandbar above town, where it had blown a packing gland on a piston rod. After walking from engine to engine, putting his hand on the bearings, feeling to see if any were running hot, he adjusted the gravity drip lubricators for the farsighted engineer and then tended to the broken gland. Paul lay on his side and backed out the stripped studs and put in two new ones, replacing the packing rings and drawing the gland down with new nuts. At the end of the job, he felt the boat shudder, and he rolled onto his back, feeling like the needle of a compass that had subtly turned. He realized that the boat was being towed away from the landing at the machine shop, and he remembered that LeBlanc intended for him to stay with the dredge all day to perform maintenance and then to come back at night with the crew. He lay in a slurry of hot water and steam oil, staring at the bottom of the cylinder casting, feeling trapped in a mechanism, as dead as gray iron. He tried to think of something soft and living, then he tried to think of perfume, but the valve oil, kerosene, and boiler fuel around him would let him have none of it, and he scrambled from under the drain cocks, wiping his hands with a shop cloth as he ran toward the stern, coming out between the anchor spuds and glancing once at the rolling water, which was glossy with sun and broken into a million facets in the quarter mile between him and the riverbank. Big Rat, the tug that tended the Gruenwald, was pushing it back out to the sandbar, and past it he could see the tin roof of LeBlanc’s drifting, and he thought of the black phone in the storeroom and of how Colette’s voice once sounded on it. Without thinking, he jumped the gap between the dredge and the bow of the tug, climbing up to the wheelhouse, where he found Etienne the giant at the controls, his huge hands covering the steering levers.

“Etienne, you got a skiff on this thing?”

“Hallo, dogmeat. Non, but I got a dingy in my pants you can have.”

Paul sat on the deck, pulling off his boots. “Will you throw my clothes on the wharf when you tie up?”

“What? You gon’ fly back to the bank?”

“Swim,” he said, shucking his coveralls, emerging in striped boxer shorts.

Etienne looked through the wheelhouse door. “We a long ways from the bank, neg.”

“I got to get going.” He wadded up his clothes and shoved them behind the narrow door.