The big Crown Victoria ate up desert for two days. As he backtracked through the cactus and stone, Paul felt like a broken-down pioneer who couldn’t take the frontier anymore. Coming out of the burned stone facade of New Mexico, he stopped the car on the side of the road and walked out into the oven. Standing behind a saguaro, he urinated and watched a tarantula bustle over a rock. He looked over the cholla and prickly pear at the trillion-thorned desert, every plant armed, every rock blistering hot, then turned back to the car, which waited at the edge of the melting asphalt like a cool white mint.

Two days later he crossed the border into Louisiana, and the humidity began to mix with nose-itching emissions from the chemical plants. Isolated clots of black cloud hung in the sky, and as he drove, the day became ugly, rain crashing down on him in Lafayette like gravel. But at least everything was green and nothing was thorned. The rice fields were green, the fallow fields were roaring with willow, marsh alder, and honeysuckle, the sugarcane fields spread out as endless mesas of green, and even on truck-haunted Highway 90, a slender fuzz of grass stood up in cracks against the mowing traffic.

By the time the smokestack of the first sugar mill poked out of the vapor, the sun broke through, pulling wraiths of steam from the fields. He turned on the radio and the reedy complaint of a diatonic accordion buzzed into him, the sound of homeland. The music made him think of food and loss.

Many kinds of loss showed at the side of the highway. Oilfield offices sat empty, their parking lots blowing with weeds. Pipe yards showed only empty racks; hangarlike equipment buildings were padlocked and chained. On the outskirts of Tiger Island, one of the biggest offshore fabrication yards in the world was now a moonscape of white clamshells, crows racketing about the empty construction bays. Two barrooms were burned-out hulks, erect thistles mocking the parking lots. When he crossed the bridge into town, he looked down the Chieftan River and saw rafts of tugs and offshore supply boats tied side by side in the willows.

There was no traffic on River Street, and the only person at his parents’ house was his grand-père Abadie, rocking on the front porch and drinking a Schlitz in the heat. Paul gave the old man a hug.

Abadie looked up at him carefully with his coffee-colored eyes. “You ain’t heard the bad news.”

“What?” He sat down in a ladder-back chair and turned toward the old man.

“Vera, she’s dead.”

Paul leaned forward. “What? When?”

“Two days. That’s where your daddy and mamma is, the burial. They should be back anytime.”

“But what did it?”