“Yeah. I like the pay.”

His father sniffed. “LeBlanc closed up. I was down there the other day and LeBlanc and Grand-père was just sitting on the bench, staring at the levee, cussing the Arabs.”

“Arabs?”

“T-Bub, the Arabs are pumping so much oil that nobody around the Gulf wants to bother to look for it anymore. The rig count is next to nothing.”

“Etienne wrote me about it, but I didn’t half-believe what he said.”

“Etienne who?”

“Etienne the giant.”

“You mean the big Partian?”

“That’s the one.”

“Lord, you must know everybody in the parish.” His father straightened up and waved for another round. The little bartender dipped into a cooler and two caps spat off in the opener. “You know lots of people in Los Angeles yet?”

“One or two.”

“I hear that. The more people in a town, the less of them you know.” The beers arrived along with cousin Sidney with a joke about a priest and a hamper of crabs.

The next night Paul’s father and grand-père rode with him to New Orleans to catch his plane. The black snake that was Highway 90 wound narrow and uneven through little swampy settlements, a slow road, poorly lined. Paul’s father let him drive, preferring to stare out the window. The grandfather sat in back and talked enough for everybody.

“Hey, T-Bub. You daddy here told me you think Tiger Island’s ugly. It wasn’t always like that, no.” He coughed. “It used to be a lot worse. But it was okay because there was always work. I used to pull lumber in the big mill and at night trapped muskrat.” He folded his arms slowly, as though they wouldn’t bend. “I worked from can’t see to can’t see, and still I didn’t make no money. Everybody was pretty much the same way, so it didn’t matter. Not many could afford a nice house, no. The streets was made out of dust and we had to burn our garbage in the backyard. After the war things got to where you could make a little money, but most people in Tiger Island, they were set in their ways. We was happy in our ugly little house.”

“That’s right,” Paul’s father said.

Grand-père Abadie continued. “A nice brick house is okay, but if you had one, you couldn’t take your car apart in the side yard. That wouldn’t look right.”

Paul laughed and steered around a pothole. “I guess not.”

“That’s a damned fact,” Grand-père told him. “Now you and Colette, you gonna be able to buy what you want. Everything’s gonna work out all right if what you buy is really what you want. Now you mama told me Colette bought herself one of those Adolf Hitler cars.”

“What? You mean the Mercedes?”

“Yas. That thing cost a skiffload of money, I bet.”