As he steered the boat into a diminishing sun, Druby Chabert couldn't remember a more miserable day in the long years he had spent as a crewboat captain for Hebert Oil Field Excavation. Everything that could go wrong had gone wrong, but finally here he was, not ten minutes from his target, the godforsaken Big Tex dragline. The replacement mechanic for that jackass Romeo Duplantis was in the seat next to him; the parts, the mechanic had assured him, were the right parts. The day would be over soon.
Druby peered ahead and liked what he saw—a pristine sky, no troublesome wind or weather. The bayou was blissfully devoid of traffic, save for a sportfishing boat that followed at a languid pace a couple of hundred yards behind. All Druby had to do was get to the dragline, drop off the new guy and the new parts, then haul ass back to the docks. Indeed, with things going right for the first time all day, he felt exalted in his captain's chair, and likewise felt sorry for the two bastards—the new mechanic and the punk kid—who would spend the night trying to fix the miserable, leaky, motorized barge. To labor for hours and hours and hours in grit, oil, and grease, tediously unfastening bolts and screws, disassembling parts, figuring out how to put them all back together again— what a boring, thankless, impossibly filthy way to make a living!
It was only when Druby made a wide turn into the bay that he knew held the dragline and scanned the sunlit horizon for his prize that he realized he had wasted his sympathies on the mechanics.
Druby, in fact, could hardly believe his eyes.
The dragline's attitude was all wrong. Instead of towering above the barge, the thing seemed to be listing forward, with the ass end of the barge up in the air.
Druby wiped his eyes and peered again, instinctively throttling back his engines, as if quieting his twin diesels might help him better understand what he was seeing.
The dragline seemed to be slowly bowing toward the water.
He found himself elbowing the mechanic. “Do you see that?”
“That sumbitch is dancin’,” the mechanic said.
Druby put the boat into neutral and stepped from his cabin. “What the hell?” The words had barely cleared his lips when the barge and dragline, as if taking a final bow, pitched up precipitously, then did a slow-motion, nose-down tumble.
The splash was unbelievable, reminding Druby of a humpback whale breaching the water that he'd once seen on a TV wildlife show.
The wake was enough to rock the crewboat.
It was only then that it slammed into Druby—the kid was aboard!
Druby regained the captain's seat and nudged the boat into forward, scanning the water in the rapidly diminishing light, hoping against hope that he might spy poor Purvis flopping around on the surface.
But there was no Purvis.
Of course not. Either the kid had already drowned or he was stuck in the snakebit barge.
Druby circled the toppled dragline twice, then got on the radio and called for help. He had no choice but to sit and wait.
Druby wasn't going to eat gumbo tonight. He wasn't going to get drunk. He wasn't going to get laid. He was going to sit and wait God knew how long for some flotilla of rescue boats, probably involving the slow-ass Chacahoula Parish Sheriff 's Department and, for all he knew, the even slower-ass Coast Guard, to come search for the dumbass kid.
The rescue boat, true to Druby's prediction, showed up three hours later, with grappling hooks and a diver whose job it was to try to get into the toppled barge. Maybe Purvis was trapped inside, in an air pocket.
Druby was there all night. They searched and searched and searched, but no Purvis.
And with good reason.
Purvis had, in fact, not bothered to report in when Justin and Roulin had dropped him off at the landing. He'd made straight for the bar across the road, where Roulin had assured him he would find a pay phone. Instead of heading to the phone, he had immediately struck up a conversation with a friendly and winsome Cajun bargirl who poured him seven fifty-cent drafts of Bud Light.
In a couple of hours, Purvis fell asleep, facedown on the bar. His new girlfriend naturally assumed that the sixty dollars in crumpled bills that Purvis had put on the counter was her tip, and she pocketed it without bothering to wake the lad.
Purvis was roused at 8 a.m. by the arrival of the morning shift (the bar was only closed four hours a day) and realized that he had gotten a surprisingly good night's sleep, all things considered. And his hangover was not nearly as bad as some he'd experienced, though he was at a loss to explain why his wallet (and pockets) were totally empty except for a few greasy nickels and pennies.
It was only when he scrounged a quarter from a bartender (who was not nearly as friendly as his girlfriend of last night) and phoned the office to meekly explain the strange circumstances of his whereabouts that he knew he was going to have a bad day.
He was put on hold, and in a moment the thunderous voice of Ole Man Hebert himself was screaming through the phone. Screaming like no screaming Purvis had ever heard in his entire young life.