“All right, man. I’m gon’ cut the engines until you clear the wheel wash. Okay?”

He didn’t answer. He climbed down hot steel rungs to the first deck, ran aft, and sprang over the stern, his bronze chest hitting the water like a flat stone. A few strokes out from the boat, he heard the engines rev as Etienne gave them the throttle. Paul swam for the dead water above LeBlanc’s landing, where the swimming would be easier, and he chopped along with steady swings, scissoring the river apart. He went a quarter mile before reaching a sandbar below where his grand-père tethered his cypress skiff, and he climbed out, panting, the river rolling off his back in diamonds as he jogged along the batture and up the levee to LeBlanc’s. His grand-père, seated under the oak tree, eating half of Maurice LeBlanc’s sandwich, could not swallow a big bite in time to think up a question. Paul ran into the storeroom and sat before the greasy phone, staring at it until his eyes adjusted to the darkness, then picked up the receiver and asked the operator for the number of the train station.

* * *

He wanted to ride the railroad as she had, as though taking the same trip might help him understand how she thought. At nine o’clock the station agent set the semaphore to flag the train, and when it stopped, he told his parents good-bye for the third time as the impatient conductor cupped his elbow, tempting him off the ground, the step stool floating from underfoot at the same moment he lifted his shoe from it. The coach lurched and he was moving away from Tiger Island, wagging his hand gravely from the vestibule as though returning the waves of strangers. Walking back to the diner, he sat next to the window, his face against the black glass. After the train thundered across the river, it moved along like a shimmying boat, so fast that lights flew by like pale fireworks. Crossing warnings were bloody smears; buildings and cars next to the track blew by like blasts of dust. In a few minutes the coach hit flat farmland, thousands of acres of moon-silvered sugarcane. Colette would have noticed this. She could spend an hour splitting up a big purple stalk with his pocketknife, biting the sucrose out of the woody fiber and spitting the wads of pulp off the porch.

The conductor tapped on his shoulder and asked for his ticket. He handed it over and asked, “They got any sugar plantations in California?” The young conductor punched his ticket and did not look at him.

“In California they have whatever you can pay for,” he said.

Six

The next morning he woke up in a nubby coach seat and rubbed a crick out of his neck. Later, in the diner, he listened to an old lady talk about how her son’s oil-field supply business was going bust, and her words were like the wheels under the train, background noise for watching east Texas unroll, mile by deadening mile—flat grazing land, tin barns, and blacktop roads melting in the sun. He went back to his seat and watched the country dry out, and over the horizon rolled little gritty towns: Rosenberg, East Bernard, Glidden, Flatonia. At Harwood he watched a biplane buzzing alongside the train like a huge fly, then sailing off, visible for ten minutes in the biggest sky he’d ever seen.