Purvis Naquin had been fetched, in record time, he concluded, given the bumpy, winding trip from Black Bayou to the end of the oyster-shell road where Jerry and Rubin had dropped him off, by a giant red hotshot truck. It was a hulking GMC diesel, driven by Ole Man Hebert's son, Neg. One thing Purvis already knew about the Heberts: they liked big-ass trucks.
Neg looked like a clone of his ole man but twenty-five years younger and fifty pounds lighter. Though not thirty yet, he had lost his hair and now took to shaving his head, same as his daddy did.
On Neg the bald thing looked kind of modern, like those pop singers Purvis sometimes saw on MTV. On Ole Man Hebert, it didn't look so hot, as Ole Man Hebert had such an astonishingly large head and jowls that his face reminded Purvis of a cartoon he'd once seen of the Man in the Moon rendered in cream cheese.
Neg reminded Purvis of Ole Man Hebert in one other way: he carried a perpetually grumpy look on his face. He rarely laughed, save when he repeated some ridiculous and stale Boudreaux and Thibodeaux joke. The Heberts were known as straight shooters who didn't cheat anybody and paid fair wages. But on the Cajun friendliness scale they were way, way at the lower end. Hell, the company didn't even throw an annual crawfish boil!
As soon as Purvis saw Neg, and the scowl on his face, he knew he was in for a rough shucking.
“Purvis, why you such an asshole, huh?” was the first thing that Neg said. “Daddy took a chance on you 'cause I told him to hire you, and now—man, you've fucked me up big-time.”
“Neg, it ain't what you think,” Purvis replied. “The mistake was hirin’ drunk-ass Romeo. Ain't nuttin’ I could do once I heard the water comin’ in. Lucky I got rescued, otherwise I could be at the bottom of that damned bay and my momma and daddy would be suin’ your sorry ass.”
Purvis had a feeling the gambit wasn't working when Neg replied, without even missing a beat, “You lyin’ sack o’ shit. We'll find out who's gonna sue who. You ain't gonna make a gnat on a bull's ass by the time we get through wit’ you.”
Neg didn't say another word for the rest of the trip.
Purvis was plenty nervous by the time he got to Hebert Oil Field Excavation's green-metal office complex on the outskirts of Black Bayou, and with good reason. As he entered Ole Man Hebert's office, he gulped to find not only Ole Man Hebert there, pacing the floor, but Ole Lady Hebert, too, sitting, arms crossed, at Ole Man Hebert's desk, a wicked scowl on her face. She was by reputation a tyrant, and she certainly looked the part. She had a beaked nose and dark eyes that reminded Purvis of a giant marsh eagle ready to spring and cause some serious harm.
But the very worst of all: sitting in a chair off in a corner was Romeo Duplantis!
Romeo clearly wasn't drunk anymore. He sat slumped with that flushed, bleary-eyed, hangdog demeanor of a guy who, for the moment at least, wondered what the hell was so great about drinking himself into a stupor every night. He looked like shit, which reminded Purvis that he looked like shit, too. He'd had neither breakfast nor coffee and was already feeling shaky.
Ole Man Hebert looked at Purvis with such dismissive contempt that Purvis almost bolted. He realized he was pretty close to a breakdown.
“Sit down, Purvis,” Ole Man Hebert said, and before Purvis could even find his way into the chair, the bombardment began. “You wanna tell me what happened out there? You wanna tell me why you spent the night in a friggin’ barroom while three crews—crews that cost tens of thousands of dollars, by the way—spent the night lookin’ for your sorry ass? You forget how to use a friggin’ telephone, Purvis? You wanna tell me why you abandoned your station when you had orders to stay put? You wanna tell me how my goddam barge filled up with water and sank? Ehn, Purvis? Ehn? Ehn?!”
Purvis looked warily at Romeo, then pointed a scrawny finger at him. “It was him!” Purvis blurted out. “He monkeyed with the ballast wheel.”
Romeo veritably snarled from his odd position in the corner—as though he'd been banished by some teacher for talking too much in class. “Purvis, you li'l dipshit, I mighta been drunk but I ain't crazy. I didn't do nuttin’ to that barge. I didn't monkey wit’ no valve. In fact, I coulda fixed the bastid if—”
“Oh, as if,” Purvis butted in. “You were drunker than a fish in a barrel of home brew. Everybody saw you, Romeo. I got plenty of witnesses.” Gaining confidence from the assertive sound of his own voice, he looked at Ole Man Hebert. “He sank your barge, Mr. Hebert. It wadn't me, no way. No damned way.”
Ole Man Hebert shook his head, which caused his jowls to tremble as if they were being struck by tiny earthquakes. There was a long and strained silence, then he said, “Purvis, you think I'm a dumb ass, don't you? I know what sank my barge. I know that 'cause I had a diver down in the barge lookin’ for you most of the friggin’ night—a goddam well-paid diver, too. He didn't find you, but he found a big-ass air pocket. And right, the ballast was open. It was wide open, in fact.”
“Well, there you go,” said Purvis.
Ole Man Hebert reached over to a pile of papers on his desk. He picked up a tube of rolled-up papers and shook it at Purvis. “You know what this is?”
“No, sir.”
“It's the schematic for that barge. It's got lots of detailed information, such as if you open that particular ballast tank as far as it can go, it'll tell you the rate the barge will take in water.”
Purvis didn't know what to say to that. He just nodded.
“Well, I called in our very well paid engineer, who did the friggin’ math. If that drunken sot in the corner over there had really opened the valve like you say he did when you say he did, that barge woulda sunk a lot quicker than it did. See, our boat got back there just in time to see the thing go down. We know exactly when it sank.”
Purvis, who wasn't good at math, wasn't exactly following this, but he knew it wasn't a good development.
Ole Man Hebert rose from his desk and came menacingly toward Purvis, the tube of papers raised like a club. He stopped a foot short, then swung violently, rapping the wooden armrest of Purvis's chair.
The sound was like gunfire.
Purvis flinched.
“Goddammit, Purvis! Somethin's not right here! You're lyin’ to me, you li'l bastid! Romeo didn't open that valve—you did!”
“That's right!” Romeo yelled from the corner. “It was him! He was just tryin’ to get the hell off the barge. He's a lazy li'l piece of shit, I can tell you that much.”
Purvis shot a glance at Romeo and wished, not for the first time in his life, that he was a big sumbitch like Neg Hebert so he could just get up and whip Romeo's ass. That part about him being lazy was a friggin’ lie.
But when he looked up at Ole Man Hebert's jiggling, crawfish-red moon face and saw rawboned fury, all thoughts of bravado were swept away.
He heard himself blurting out, “You crazy, Mr. Hebert. I did not! I wouldn't do such a thing! I ain't no crook. That fella told me it was…he said…he told me, he—”
Purvis knew he'd screwed the pooch when Ole Man Hebert leaned down and practically whispered in his ear: “Now, what fella, Purvis? What fella are we talkin’ about?”
To his credit, perhaps, Purvis held out another ten minutes. But under the relentless barrage of epithets and threats and shouting by Ole Man Hebert (and Ole Lady Hebert, too) he finally told the story pretty much as it had happened.
Purvis hoped that would be the end of it, but it wasn't. “Purvis,” Ole Man Hebert continued, “you're a pathetic li'l piece of rotten crawfish bait, and I don't know how I ever let my son here talk me into hirin’ you. But I'll humor you for a minute and assume that you, in fact, broke company policy and let a coupla fellas up on my barge. Can you tell me what these fellas looked like?”
Purvis knitted his brow as though he was going into deep thought. “Well, the Rubin fella—he was dark, real dark, like them shrimper guys you meet way down the bayou. The Jerry one, he was, well, he was just a fella. He had a mustache, kinda skinny, but not as skinny as me. Maybe Neg's height. Funny thing, though. They didn't look nuttin’ alike to me, but they said they was first cousins.”
He also provided a description of Rubin and Jerry's boat, though he was surprised at how few details he had retained.
Ole Man Hebert finally quit grilling Purvis, then looked at his son, who'd watched these proceedings in glum silence. “Neg, get Tom Huff on the phone and when the ornery li'l bastid gets done screamin’ at you, lemme talk to him. Now, Purvis here is an idgit, but me, I'm suspicious of these dogooder bastids who climbed on my barge. I think they were up to no good. I wanna find out if there's anybody out there who would want to ratfuck Tom Huff 's dragline.”
“Aw, Pop, do I gotta call the guy?” Neg replied.
“Yes, you do, son. You gotta call him and let the sawed-off li'l bastid scream at you. That's your penance for gettin’ me to hire Purvis here.”
“Damn, Daddy. How come I always gotta do the dirty work?”
“Son, you don't know what dirty work is. When I started this company—”
Neg threw up his hands as if he were warding off a vampire. “Daddy, please. No more stories about how hard it was to start the company. I'd rather call Tom Huff every damn hour for a week than hear that story again.”
Ole Man Hebert scowled at his son. “Y'all listenin’ to this? He won't be sayin’ that when he inherits my money.”
Neg stalked off to make the call in another office.
Purvis was hoping to use this outbreak of family discord to his advantage. “Can I go now?” he asked meekly. “I don't feel so hot.”
“Go?” said Ole Man Hebert. “You don't get it, do you, Purvis? Until we get to the bottom of this, you're a suspect in a crime, so you can just sit your ass right here till it mildews if that's what it takes. And by the way, you're fired. And you're not just fired now. I'm gonna fire you every hour on the hour till you're the most fired sumbitch in the history of the world.”
He then turned to Romeo. “You, too, you drunk bastid. You're fired one more time.”