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Batist had finished his lunch and was peeling the cellophane off a fresh cigar. The humor had gone out of his face.
"Dave, I ain't one to tell you what to do, no," he said. "But there's people that's always gonna be axin' for somet'ing. When you deal with them kind, it don't matter how much you give, it ain't never gonna be enough."
He lit his cigar and fixed his eyes on me as he puffed on the smoke.
I put on my raincoat and hat, hitched a boat and trailer to my truck, and headed down the dirt road under the canopy of oak trees toward the general store where Elrod had made his call. The trailer was bouncing hard in the flooded chuck-holes, and through the rearview mirror I could see the outboard engine on the boat's stern wobbling against the engine mounts. I shifted down to second gear, pulled to a wide spot on the road, and let a car behind me pass. The driver, a man wearing a shapeless fedora, looked in the opposite direction of me, out toward the bayou, as he passed.
Elrod was not at the general store, and I drove a quarter mile farther south to the bend where he had managed to put the cabin cruiser right through the limbs of a submerged tree and simultaneously scrape the bow up on a sandbar. The bayou was running high and yellow now, and gray nests of dead morning-glory vines had stuck to the bow and fanned back and forth in the current.
I backed my trailer into the shallows, then unwinched my boat into the water, started the engine, and opened it up in a shuddering whine against the steady clatter of the rain on the bayou's surface.
I came astern of the cabin cruiser and looped the painter on a cleat atop the gunwale so that my boat swung back in the lee of the cruiser. The current was swirling with mud and
I couldn't see the propeller, but obviously it was fouled. From under the keel floated a streamer of torn hyacinth vines and lily pads, baited trotline, a divot ripped out of a conical fish net, and even the Clorox marker bottle that went with it.
Elrod came out of the cabin with a newspaper over his head.
"How does it look
?" he said.
"I'll cut some of this trash loose, then we'll try to back her into deeper water. How'd you hit a fish net? Didn't you see the Clorox bottle?"
"Is that how they mark those things?"
I opened my Puma knife, reached as deep below the surface as I could, and began pulling and sawing away the flotsam from the propeller.
"I 'spect the truth is I don't have any business out here," he said.
I flung a handful of twisted hyacinths and tangled fishline toward the bank and looked up into his face. The alcoholic shine had gone out of his eyes. Now they simply looked empty, on the edge of regret.
"You want me to get down in the water and do that?" he asked. Then he glanced away at something on the far bank.
"No, that's all right," I said. I stepped up on the bow of my boat and over the rail of the cabin cruiser. "Let's see what happens. If I can't shake her loose, I'll tie my outboard onto the bow and try to pull her sideways into the current."
We went inside the dryness of the cabin and closed the door. Kelly was sleeping on some cushions, her face nestled into one arm. When she woke, she looked around sleepily, her cheek wrinkled with the imprint of her arm; then she realized that little had changed in her and Elrod's dreary morning and she said, "Oh," almost like a child to whom awakenings are not good moments.
I started the engine, put it in reverse, and gave it the gas. The hull vibrated against the sandbar, and through the back windows I could see mud and dead vegetation boiling to the bayou's surface behind the stern. But we didn't move off the sandbar. I tried to go forward and rock it loose, then I finally cut the engine.
"It's set pretty hard, but it might come off if you push against the bow, Elrod," I said. "You want to do that?"
"Yeah, sure."
"It's not deep there. Just stay on the sandbar, close to the hull."
"Put on a life jacket, El," Kelly said.
"I swam across the Trinity River once at flood stage when houses were floating down it," he said.
She took a life jacket out of a top compartment, picked up his wrist, and slipped his arm through one of the loops. He grinned at me. Then his eyes looked out the glass at the far bank.
"What's that guy doing?" he said.
"Which guy?" I said.
"The guy knocking around in the brush out there."
"How about we get your boat loose and worry about other people later?" I said.
