AZURE

I HAD FORGOTTEN HOW BIG IT WAS. The end of the earth. The whole of river and sky and marsh and swamp, the wind and grass, and everywhere the woods.

My father’s woods. But he stared out the window, impassive, while he drove. No more stories.

What would I say to Victor now? I’d been telling him stories for days—and they hadn’t been enough. What words would make him throw away the gun and smile again? Make him say, “Fervid, fervent, feverish, dervish, derivative”?

A hundred miles from New Orleans to the mouth of the Mississippi, they used to say. When we crossed over the bridge to the west bank, the river seemed even wider than it had that morning. The river, the barges and tugboats, the ragged trees along the edge of the water—all seemed still in the midday heat as if under a glass dome.

The bridge was crowded with people leaving the city. We went south, on Highway 23 through Gretna. Traffic was like LA, both sides jammed. The windows were open on the Corsica, and the heat from exhaust, from the asphalt, and from the sky was all around us. Trucks were crammed full of faces, and cars full of boxes and black plastic trash bags like fat pleated slugs pressed against the windows. “You sure we can get back out before the hurricane?” I asked my father.

My father looked at the oncoming traffic. “They headed east to Missippi or west to Texas. When we find him, we go to Lafayette.”

We kept south, past English Turn, then into Belle Chasse. The gas stations were crowded with cars and people carrying gas cans.

“They look scared,” I said. “What about Azure? I don’t even know who’s there, besides Aunt Almoinette.”

“Everybody got generator down there,” my father said. “On the boats. Not like the city. They used to a storm.”

“Where did Albert go?” I asked.

“Went to buy his mama a new fan and get them some can food. Case that storm hit the city. Say he stay there with them case the power go out.”

What could they have said to each other at the kitchen table? Albert wanted to know exactly what happened in the ditch all those years ago, but he’d already figured out how he felt about it. Tony’s grandmother said, “So who cares how I got the son? I got one.”

My mother used to dismiss it, when they talked at night on the gallery and I listened from the bougainvillea hedge. “Temp-passé,” she said, scrolling it into one word.

You could only consider the past, and leave it.

The highway turned toward the river again. We followed the water and left everything suburban behind. It came back to me—the liquid smell permeating the air, while Glorette and I were in the truck bed chewing sugarcane stalks we’d gotten in Sarrat. The river to our left, invisible behind the sloping grass-covered levee and the thick woods between orange groves. But you always knew it was right there. You could feel it, hear the tugboat horns or barges banging against chains above you somewhere. To the west, on the other side of the highway, were more woods and groves, and just beyond miles of marsh and bays and canals and swamps where the men fished, trapped, shrimped, and dredged oysters. We had been out there, on my father’s old boat.

Plaquemines Parish was the long narrow strip of land that descended south of Louisiana, like the heel of the boot in southern Italy. Every time I looked at a map with Rick or Tony, I always glanced at the birdfoot delta reaching blank and fringed into the Gulf. A place where towns were too small to show up on the maps—they’d been old plantations, some of the wealthiest places in the country. Deer Range, Myrtle Grove, Gloria, Naomi. The river had left hundreds of years of earth along its banks, where sugarcane grew.

The finger of land was never more than a few miles wide. A private place, amid the endless expanse of flat earth and water mixed like a mosaic. Not like California, where the hills and canyons and boulevards and beaches were all so visible and public and famous—the whole world owned LA.

We passed satsuma groves, cattle grazing near the levee bank, and a few houses, some boarded up, some with people in the yards gesturing to cars or windows or just standing and looking at the sky. It was a sunny, clear day, with only a few clouds like dirty old lace to the west.

We drove in silence for twenty more miles. Brick ruins in a tangle of vines, close to the highway. “Sugar mill,” my father said, squinting. Past the ruins was a plantation house, white, two-storied, with a red tin roof and railed gallery.

“Woodland,” he said. “Somebody buy it.”

The house and grounds looked vaguely familiar. I’d seen them somewhere.

“Back by the river, they had the jail. Lafitte put the people he steal in there. Tell them girl, don’t wash clothes at the river or bayou. Lafitte men steal you.”

The sign showed a horse trotting smartly past. The Southern Comfort label—that’s where this house was preserved forever. A bed-and-breakfast. I could tell Rick. A good story, for someone else.

What was the word for a slave jail?

Barracoon. Lots of points for that.

We passed cypress swamp and acres of citrus. After another five miles, a dense stand of woods, with an old dirt road that led inside. My father pointed. “Comtesse,” he said. “Back there. House fall in the river, 1902.”

The Picard place. The owner called it Comtesse because his wife was a countess in France. He bought Marie-Therese from the pirates—after she left Azure.

I remembered one night when I’d seen Glorette at the Riviera, she’d said, “Hey. You remember when we went to Azure? They had a street named for Picard, and one for Antoine. Bayou named for that little white girl’s eyes. A trip, huh?” Then she stood up and pirouetted, and said, “They can name the alley for Sisia. Not me.”

The car was stopped. He was staring at the woods. I said, “Papa. Today Alfonso told me he was in the alley when Glorette got killed. He said some prostitute scared her or choked her, or she had a heart attack. And he never saw the woman again.”

My father said, “He never tell nobody? Not Victor?”

I shook my head. “I guess he thought there wasn’t any point.” I felt a shuddering breath roll through me. “Just like the kid in Burbank. No point. Just—” Something I couldn’t even name. “You gonna tell Gustave?”

My father looked past me, at the citrus trees on my side. He said, “A stranger.”

I said, “Some woman from New York who drove a van. He didn’t even know her name.”

My father began to drive again. Finally, he said, “Tell Gustave when we get back. But don’t tell that boy.”

Because randomness only bred anger. The woods and the alley. He didn’t look at me. After about five more miles, the road bent slightly. On the west side was Bayou Azure, which was wider than I’d remembered, with two white shrimp boats and several small aluminum skiffs tied to pilings at a wooden dock. My father turned east, toward the river. “A stranger,” he said, and shook his head.

Bordelon Road. A narrow asphalt lane, patched with white oyster shells, led into a thick stand of woods. The car bumped down off the highway, onto the rough pale pavement through the trees. The road curved around like a horseshoe, and at the far end was a small wooden cabin. Aunt Almoinette’s house, with a red tin roof, and a big yard under three huge pecan trees.

Her house was closest to the levee. We’d walked every day up the path behind her yard, through the woods grown up around the front part of the plantation—the river and the Azure landing, where steamboats used to stop. The abandoned main house was partly hidden in the forest. No one ever went inside—people said there were spirits there. That everyone who lived there had died unhappy.

On the other side, two more asphalt lanes were lined with homes. Antoine Road and Picard Road—about ten ancient wooden houses with hipped roofs of tin and spindly front porches, with wide yards between and a few small boats and some bicycles. Five double-wide trailers with decks and wooden steps. An aboveground pool, and two aluminum sheds near wooden worktables. There were five cars, and people carrying bags and boxes. A battered pale-blue pickup truck had a load of plywood, and three men were sliding off the boards. Then I saw the sheriff’s patrol car in the yard.

The officer was about fifty, with a pillow stomach but also big hands and arms, and a black baseball cap. He walked over as we got out of the car. My heart was hammering up in my throat. He didn’t even look at me. He went straight to my father and said, “That ain’t Enrique Antoine? That you? I thought you lived in California. What the hell you comin south for today, hanh? You head the wrong way.”

My father didn’t look scared. He leaned against the front fender of the car and said, “That me. How your uncle?”

“Oh, he got the boats all tied down at Empire. He and some old-timers down there say they stayin. I can’t make em go.” He glanced at me, but then pointed to the old house. “But your aunt needs to go. I’m checkin every house, and she refuses to evacuate. All her animals.” He shook his head. “You showed up just in time. These guys say they movin the boats down the Azure Canal to deeper water, but everybody else is just about gone. You need to get Monie out by tomorrow morning.” He looked at his watch. “It’s past three now. If the storm stays on course, it’s comin after midnight tomorrow.” He nodded at the men unloading plywood. “Look, this one’s the real deal, Enrique.”

My father was cool. He said, “Me and my daughter here start packin her up.”

“Get out by tomorrow morning,” the deputy said. “Most people are headed to Lafayette or Lake Charles. Cause New Orleans looks bad, too.”

He waved to the men at the truck and shouted, “Okay, Emile. Y’all get it together now.” He said nothing about Victor. He got into his car and headed back to the highway.

A large black dog with a fringy tail held like a flag ran at my father and me when we walked up the slight slope toward the pecan trees. Then three more dogs leapt from the porch of the small wooden house and barked furiously when I stopped. In a yard enclosed by a chain-link fence, red and gold and black chickens paraded around, and one peacock studied us balefully and then turned away. The dogs boiled around me, dancing and leaping, and I froze until a tiny woman came to the door. “Eh, Lord, no, they send you all the way from California? I ain’t go, me, so you turn back now. Pas aller, moi.”

The same wooden cistern beside the rain-gutter spout, the same sweet olive bushes on either side. And Aunt Almoinette was merely lower to the ground, one of those very small, very old women who were like children again—the entire world revolved around them, and their stories, and their wants. That was why Glorette and I had loved and feared her—she never cared whether we ate or washed or tied our shoes, as long as we listened to her stories.

How old was she? She turned around holding a polished stick. Not a cane. A thick walking stick. “You believe in God now?” she said, to me. “You was tite, temp passé. You say, I don’t know God. You say, The Bible just a book.”

I said, “I remember.”

The house was just one large room, with a small kitchen added to the back, and a tiny bathroom behind that. The front room had a double bed in the corner next to the antique wooden armoire, and an easy chair by the window. The wall was lined with transparent plastic bins of animal food and bowls. The same picture of Jesus from when I was ten: upturned face, soft beard, folded hands. On the fireplace mantel, a few pictures and two small decorative dishes. The wooden stand where you knelt to pray, with a rosary.

She said it again. “You believe in God now?”

“I do.”

She sat down and looked out the window, and we had to wait. I knew not to ask her questions, because they would only annoy her.

She used to speak in scripture, that summer, and I’d hated the words and singsong cadence. She said things like “Divided tongues as of fire appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.”

She stared at me now. Back then, I’d said, “How do you remember every word?” I had thought, Who talked like that? Who didn’t want to make up their own sentences?

And she said, “They beat me when I say it wrong. The nuns in New Orleans. Send me there when I tite, cause I’m so smart.”

“They beat you?”

I never forgot what she said. “Beat everybody. But some like to be beat. They cry and suffer when the cane comes down, but I see they do the same thing again so that nun get the cane. They like to stand in front and make a fuss, them girl. Agathe and Marie-Claude. Can’t memorize their own name. I memorize the whole book. They beat me cause I ask question. Like you.”

Now she reached down to her ankle and moved the string with seven knots. Red string. Like a tracing of blood along her skin. “Had one a these when I went up there, to New Orleans. My maman tie it on. Sister Agnes tell me take it off, and I say no. She cut it off. She make me memorize verses. When I say them, I leave out one word to see she listening. She hit me three times. With that cane.” She held out her forearm, and I remembered Glorette and me leaning forward to see the marks. So close I could smell the bleach washed into her sleeve. Her skin was unscarred. But she ran her fingers over the spot and said, “Like three snakes raise up under there. I want to cut them out. They stay three days. I memorize all of Ezekiel and Jeremiah in my room.”

My father moved into the room, and she turned to me. “Send you from California. Tu—l’intelligente. Ou est l’autre? Li soeur? La jolie?”

“Back in California,” I said. My sister. She meant Glorette. The beauty.

“You ask the question. She the one listen.” The dogs settled flat on the linoleum floor, their eyes fixed on her.

My father said in French, “We’re looking for her son. Glorette’s son. Victor.”

She shrugged and shook her head. She didn’t offer us coffee. She folded her arms as if we were just the last in a legion of people bothering her, and said, “Ecoutez, they ain’t take mesdames at no shelter. Pas aller, moi.”

Mesdames? The four dogs. Aunt Monie had always had chickens, rabbits, even a raccoon once, but only had one dog when we were here before.

“Is everyone else going?” I asked, looking at the men unloading plywood from the truck. Five kids were shooting at a portable basketball hoop. Two women had made a pile of food on a picnic table, and were packing coolers.

“Oui,” she said, nodding. “Go to Lafayette. Sheriff say I got to go. Mais he don’t remember—Betsy knock down some, Camille knock down them place at Woodland. But Azure la-bas—” She pointed toward the river. “Still there. And moi—icitte.” Her headscarf was the palest yellow—maybe white gotten old, or marigold gotten faded. Her skin was dark gold, like the oldest gilt frame in a museum, and her nose was strong, with a bump on the bridge. She wore black knit pants and a blouse with turquoise flowers. She pulled on the same short white rubber boots as the men outside. Shrimper boots.

The dog nearest to her, the one who seemed in charge, stood up and stared toward the door. “That Mama,” she said. “Les autres, c’est les filles. Coco, Lulu, Zizi.” She snapped her fingers and they all stood, electric with waiting. She snapped again and they shot out the door.

“Three thirty,” she said. “Mesdames tell time. Three thirty we walk. Toujours.”

My father touched her on the arm, and she shot him a look. “Tante,” he said. “The boy. Gustave grandson. Gustave fille—Glorette.”

“Sais pas, moi,” she said, brushing past him.

“La jolie.” He touched her arm again.

She stopped and squinted into the yard. “That boy? Mesdames smell his arm.”

The salt meat.

“He don’t say, Mo fam, he don’t say, Mo besoin l’argent. Like all them boy.”

He hadn’t asked her for food or money. “What did he say?” I asked.

“Say where the cimitaire? I say pourquoi, and he say bijou.”

Bijou? Sounded like a name for a little dog. Then I remembered. Bijoux. Jewelry. He thought the buried treasure was jewelry.

The blue truck came toward us. Emile, the one driving, looked vaguely familiar. He said, “We need to take care your house, Aunt Monie.”

She nodded, chin high, studying my father. “That Enrique. He the one live out there in California.” She shook her head and walked away. My father was not the elder here. He was not a griot. He was just a nephew. The one who left.

There were only two kinds of people. Those who stayed home, and those who left.

My father and I followed her. She walked quickly toward the levee, the dogs racing ahead on the dirt path, swerving into the trees to smell something.

I looked back at her house, the red tin roof and gray weathered wood, set apart now from the mobile homes and shotgun cottages. It had been an old slave cabin. Moinette and her mother, Marie-Therese, had been the plantation laundresses and seamstresses, so they were closer to the front. Aunt Monie had told us that the rest of the old slave quarters were on the other side of the highway, but those houses had all fallen apart over the years.

She called back to us, “I send him up here. See him walk there.” She pointed with her stick up the path, and we started up the slight rise.

If Victor was poking around the cemetery, would he still have the gun? Did my father have a gun, too, under his La Reina workshirt?

The main house was like Seven Oaks, and all the other plantation houses that died when their white people died. If a family had heirs, or a good location, they were bed-and-breakfasts or museums. But this was a darkened skeleton of wood, like a ghost ship marooned in the trees. Two stories, set on high brick piers for ventilation, and floods. The front gallery had faced the river, where the boats had landed to bring supplies, and take away sugar. And Moinette.

The back door was a blind keyhole up on the second floor. The stairs that had led to it were gone. The dogs ran under the house. Aunt Monie pointed with her stick toward a tangle of weeds and palmettos a hundred yards away. A small city of white in the weeds.

Cemetery. My father and I walked toward the crypts. My father’s eyes moved constantly over the trees, and when we got to the overgrown wrought-iron fence, he picked up a stick and started slashing away at the vines and brush. Victor hadn’t been here. No one had been here.

Three crypts. The carved letters blank-eyed as Greek statues. No one came here for La Toussaint and cleaned the gravesite, or painted the names. Bordelon. Bordelon. Bordelon. The blue-eyed girl was inside one.

Aunt Monie hadn’t stopped. I ran toward the levee, where she was following the dogs onto the levee road, and caught up with her. “But Marie-Therese isn’t buried there.”

“C’est Bordelon, la. Up at Comtesse.”

“Did you tell Victor that?”

She looked at me like I was crazy.

I bent to catch my breath. The heat and humidity swarmed into my chest. How would Victor walk to Comtesse, even if he figured that out? The levee wasn’t a grassy maintained slope here. It was just a mountain of earth, covered with scrub trees and vines and palmettos. But the levee road was clear. You could drive, or walk, for a while.

My father came up the slope. This was definitely high ground. The batture, the wild border of trees and driftwood and trash that stood between the levee and the water, was thick and lush. And the water spread out so wide the other bank was invisible.

I had thought it was the ocean when she brought me here the first time.

The Mississippi. Not blue like the Aare, or black with oil and garbage like the Thames in south London, or green as old jade like the Limmat in Zurich. No bridges or picnics or mallards or ancient walls. The Mississippi was every color. Brown with mud at the edges, green when a chop lifted in the breeze and a tongue of water rose, blue when a flat circle spun for a moment into an eddy.

Stare at the Mississippi too long and them spirit call you drown. That’s what Aunt Monie used to say. She ignored us, walking briskly along the levee toward the south, as she probably did every single day at exactly this time, behind the dogs that raced as fast as they could along the road. She was the one who’d made me see the river and the world underneath a world, the first time.

Aunt Monie had whispered, Attend! You don’t know the river, you get too close. But them whirlpool take you down. And them spirit hold you for themselves. Take a boat. Take a girl.

We walked in silence. If Victor had come up here, and looked at the names on the crypts, and seen that the house held nothing, where would he go next?

I knew the story, from Aunt Monie, but I didn’t know what he knew.

Monie had told Glorette and me: The river bring her. Amina. The one from Senegal. She hold her girl on the boat, all the way from Africa, so no one throw her in the ocean. Then they come up this water. And Amina die from the soldier blue. Marie-Therese live in my house. She have Moinette, and watch that girl all the time. Don’t wash clothes in the bayou. Trader steal you. Then Bordelon sell Moinette. Right there at the landing. Marie-Therese drown herself in Bayou Azure. But the spirit push her back up. Dya. The spirit in the water. They don’t want her yet. Them pirate come up the bayou and they catch her. Take her to Comtesse.

She was buried at the place we’d passed.

We reached the old landing. Rotted pilings and what was left of a boardwalk that led off to nowhere in the woods. Past that, along the levee road, cars and trucks were parked in a straight line. The dogs turned around, confused, and ran back toward us.

“She ain’t want to raise us,” my father said, back in the yard. “Me and Gustave.”

Aunt Monie. I said, “I better go to Comtesse and check out the graveyard.”

It was after four now, and the sky was leaden and gray. Three men pulled up in front of Aunt Monie’s house and unloaded plywood, propping it against the porch railing. “She won’t let us put em up till tomorrow, but leave em there now,” Emile called.

He leaned against the truck door and cocked his head. A player.

I put out my hand and said, “Fantine.”

He grinned and said, “Ain’t it F-X? Look like you, anyway.” He made my name a long two syllables, and his grin pushed deep into one cheek. “F-X.”

And just like that—like talking to Marcus, or my brothers—I laughed and the words flew out and my whole chest felt warm. “You ain’t gotta make it sound like I’m trying so hard,” I said. Emile, who had been fifteen when I was ten, who’d already had girlfriends hanging around Azure, sitting on the let-down gate of a pickup wearing shorts and swinging their legs. With his football player’s chest that summer, two flat plates of muscle that met along a pale line running vertically along his breastbone. His arms muscled from fishing and dredging oysters. I’d had a big crush on him, but Glorette and I were like little wisps of nothing. Feux follets, he called us, when we stalked him in the woods while he built a bonfire with his friends and the girls.

“Have you seen a kid in a yellow T-shirt? Wearing a bandanna around his arm? Walking? That’s Glorette’s son. He’s in trouble.”

“And he come down here? Who he hidin from?”

My father spoke in French to the other men. I said to Emile, “Looking for something.”

He said, “You don’t remember when I came to California? You only home for a hot minute that time. Dressed like some fashion model in college.”

I frowned. A faded red car pulled up behind him, and a woman shouted, “You gon park up on the levee, Emile? That where you tell Marceline put her car?”

He shouted back, “That blue Thunderbird? Yeah, up there by the old landing road.” He pointed toward the river. She drove down the shell road, followed by another woman in a white Suburban.

“My second wife sister.”

“Oh, the second one?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

So easy. “And where’s the third one?”

He grinned and lifted his chin up high. “I done gave up.” Emile raised his eyebrows. They were thick and winged, arched like Glorette’s. He wasn’t a Picard. But his skin was the same hammered gold as hers. His eyes were brown, though, and flecked with green. I remembered them. Like agate I’d found on a beach in Oregon once.

“Some funky bandanna tied around his arm? Just about purple? Like he a Prince fan?” Emile said.

“Yes,” I said. “And we have to find him. We really do.” I didn’t want to tell him about the gun—down here everyone had a gun, and a knife, for fishing and hunting. I didn’t want to tell him about Jazen, Alfonso, or buried treasure, because it sounded crazy.

Emile had teased me thirty years ago. That was all. But his eyes moved slowly over my face. I put my hand on his forearm, and I whispered, “He’s like a runaway child. Runnin wild. Serious.”

“Okay, catin. But he could be anywhere. You see how it is.” He picked up a piece of plywood. “Ain’t nowhere to go round here less you know. He ain’t got a boat.”

They started nailing plywood over the windows of another house, and I sat in the car, holding my phone, watching clouds move in fast from the south. Black and purple, full of rain. Emile called, “That just rain. But you better not be here tomorrow.”

Tony went straight to message. “It’s past four. Maybe you’re just landing in New Orleans. Tony, I’m not even there anymore. I’m down the river. But I really need you to get two hotel rooms in the city. When I find my godson, I’m coming back.”

My father came out of Aunt Monie’s house and looked up at the sky. The dangling moss on the cypress began to sway. As the first drops fell, the men kept hammering, and the white Suburban came down from the road. The woman shouted, “Emile! Marceline car ain’t on the levee. You got about ten cars up there, but not that one.”

Emile walked over to the passenger side. “I tell everyone leave the keys inside cause I might have to move them car after the storm. Who in the hell gon steal that old Thunderbird?”

“Did you see him drive away?” I asked her. “Glorette’s son?”

She shook her head. “So many boys round here. And I ain’t cook. Think ol lady toujou cook. I ain’t no grandmère.” Aunt Monie made coffee in a battered metal drip pot, and poured it into two tiny china cups. She pushed one at me and sat at the table. I drank five sips of darkness. “That boy say, My grandmère dead. I say, Well, I ain’t take her place, me. He say, You know where she bury? I say, You never read your Bible? Even the wise die, the fool and the stupid alike must perish and leave their wealth to others. Their graves are their home forever. Cimitaire, cipriere.”

Cemetery or swamp.

“He say, How many cimitaire? Azure, Petit Clair, Comtesse, Woodland up north. Say, Diamond, Port Sulphur down south. Dead people in the river, in the levee.”

He could be anywhere, if he’d stolen the Thunderbird. Aunt Monie listened to the rain, loud on the tin roof. She said, “Some people die in the water and never bury. Enrique know that.”

“Aren’t you afraid of the hurricane?” I said.

She gave me that imperious look—the one I’d seen on old men in Portugal, sitting outside a tobacco shop, watching young people walk past. An old man, Tio Wilfredo in Belize, who critiqued the way a grandson had brought in fishing nets from a cay.

She said, “So many people come. They all want me go to Lafayette. But I ain’t go. Your love to me was extraordinary,” she said. “The evening devotion. Samuel 1:26.”

“Your love?”

“Mesdames,” she said. She looked at the dogs, who lay with their heads up, watching. “Mesdames want love. Jamais money.”

The dogs leapt up. “Fantine,” my father said through the screen.

“And Enrique,” Aunt Monie said quietly, not looking at him but at me. “All day, I make quelque-chose live. All day he make them die.”

———

The rain had stopped, and the trees were dripping, the sun hard again. But we had only a few hours until nightfall. Victor didn’t even know how to drive.

“I’ll check out the cemeteries,” I said to my father.

A stolen car and a gun. A bandanna. A pathetic gangster looking for a mythical bracelet.

My father said, “Some them cimitaire you can’t drive. They in the woods.”

“When I come back, we’re going to a hotel in New Orleans. If I can’t find Victor, he has to be trying to drive back to California, and he’d have to get gas money.”

He shrugged. “I been in two storm. We ride on the boats.”

“Papa. We’re not riding out a hurricane in a boat. Maman would kill us if we lived. Tony’s getting a hotel room. And we should take Aunt Monie.”

Emile pulled the last sheets of plywood off the bed. He stretched his arms behind his head, and his muscles moved under the white T-shirt covered with oil, mud, and grime. “A hotel, huh?”

Only the four men, Aunt Monie, and I were left now.

Emile held out his hands wide. “She Aunt Monie! She just made ninety-nine. She ain’t gotta be nice. She ain’t gotta do nothing she don’t want to.” Then he bent to pick up the plywood. “But you from California. Your daddy be okay, but you? Regular rain scare the shit outta you. I seen you runnin just now.”

I said, “Seriously? You don’t even know me. I’ve been in a blizzard in Maine. I sat on a highway in the Austrian alps for eight hours with a friend after an avalanche. A heat wave in Naples where people were lying in fountains trying to stay alive. And I’ve been through four earthquakes.”

He waited for my father to pick up the other end of the stack. “That ain’t a storm.”

I pulled onto the two-lane highway. The sun was dangling lower, a blurry explosion in the filthy windshield. Marie-Therese. Slaves didn’t get last names. And where the hell would he think the treasure was—buried like some old ghost story beside a tree? Marked with a damn X?

Twice I went down dirt roads and ended up in yards, where brick ranch-style houses were boarded up. The second time, a man came out of the backyard, staring at me, a rifle held loose along his leg. I turned the car around quickly. He thought I was a looter.

My heart was pounding, and I’d had nothing to eat all day. I saw the stand of trees—the road, and went through a gap in cars again. Comtesse. The track was puddled and rough. The levee wasn’t far—much closer than Azure. This house had fallen into the river. I got out carefully, looking for a clearing, a grassy area, a cemetery that someone had visited. A black wrought-iron fence, like lace, and six crypts, white stone with angels and crosses and faded plastic flowers and names carved onto the doors. The grass had been mowed.

I looked through the fence. Louise Picard: 1870–1900. Philomene Picard: 1822–1865. Octave Picard: 1798–1821. And three more crypts whose etched names were blurred into nothing. Maybe Marie-Therese? But at those three, nothing was dug up, no marble was chipped or broken open.

Maybe he would look for the second Marie-Therese, Moinette’s daughter. I got back in my car and drove south, past Azure, into Diamond, which was a bigger community, with a church. St. Jude’s. This cemetery was very large and well kept, and the levee was grassy and bare nearby. It took a long time, but I found the gravestone. Marie-Therese Antoine. “She mechant. Voleur. That why she get what she want,” Aunt Monie had said when I was small. She was bad. A thief. She’d slept with whomever she wanted to. I touched the white marble of the crypt, the carved numerals. 1835–1935. The women in our family lived a long time.

I would be forty this year. Sixty more years? I’d be like Aunt Monie. Or I’d get a place in Zurich. Or someday move back to Sarrat, to my mother’s house? Not likely. I wouldn’t be an old lady anyone liked.

So I’d be Aunt Monie. Great.

I sat in the parking lot, watching the sun get less silver, more gold. I pushed the button. “Leave the digits.”

“Victor,” I said. “You’re in a Thunderbird. Pretty impressive. Except you took it from some woman who’s gonna need it after the hurricane. We’re running out of time.”

The air around the car was heavy as honey. I said, “I’m in the parking lot of the church at Diamond. Here’s the deal. Find whatever you think you’re looking for and then bring the car here. That way you won’t have to see anyone. Except me.”

I closed my eyes. “I’m gonna sit here for a while. I’m really tired. But I have one more story about your father. You think your dad played your moms and didn’t want you. Nope. You told me Professor Zelman made fun of the Floaters. The Delfonics, the Whispers. What brothers put on when they get serious. Your father hated them. He was a music snob, too. He told me the Floaters were simpleminded. Let me take you to love land. You think he went off to be a famous musician. But Grady, he killed your dad. He was obsessed with your mom.”

I thought of all the men, staring at her, thinking they knew. “It was hard to be her,” I said. “So hard.”

I heard car doors slam near me. Someone went into the church. “One night, Grady stole a car to impress her. She could not be moved, Victor. She loved your dad like that. And then she was a few weeks away from having you, and Grady caught your dad in the parking lot of a club and killed him. He took the body—”

Two little girls with black cornrows and white beads stared at me through the window. Victor didn’t need to know about La Paloma. “He took your dad out to the ocean. No one ever found him. I know you’re like, Nice story. But Grady told me all this five years ago. Grady’s homeless. Your mom left him and he lost his mind. Ended up on the street. I’m the only one he ever told.” I took a breath. “I never told anyone because I didn’t know which was worse—that your father got killed or that he just disappeared.”

The white beads swung like a hundred moons when the girls ran back to their mother’s car.

And Glorette? What Alfonso told me wouldn’t change how Victor felt. She had been killed for nothing, too.

“Victor. Everyone lost it over love. All three of them. And Danita—she fell hard for you. DJ Scholaptitude.” I lay the seat back all the way. “I’m sitting here in Diamond. I love you, okay? I didn’t know before. Come on. We need to go home.”

I must have slept so deeply that inside my mind went black, as if I were under layers of earth, and my chest felt full of dirt, and I couldn’t breathe.

A loud pounding woke me up. They were boarding the windows of the church, and it was dark.

A crown of blue in the dim light of the yard near Aunt Monie’s. A huge pot on a portable gas ring. The houses were all blind except for hers. The only light was from her porch, her front window, and two lanterns the men had put in her yard. The heat pressed down on us, but the biggest metal fan I’d ever seen—the size of a small trampoline—blew air over us and kept the mosquitoes away.

Emile said, “He runnin outta time. This boy.”

“I know,” I said. I looked at the complete darkness toward the levee and the river. There was no moon yet. Night here was night. Like being inside a weird black-velvet painting where only the light around us existed—the burner, the white plastic stack chairs like squat skeletons. Van Gogh but even darker, more blurred than his stars.

Emile said, “This my cousin Freeman and his son Philippe.” They shook my hand and sat back down on the chairs. My father came out of Aunt Monie’s house carrying a pot.

Emile said, “Guy sold us crab and redfish cheap. He wanted to empty the freezer before he left.”

Aunt Monie sliced white onion and green pepper on a cutting board, her fingers still nimble and precise. She gave my father a withering look. “Nobody live without onion. Pepper. And oil. Corn oil right there, in that pot. You call corn a bush or a grass?”

What the hell were they arguing about? He bowed his head and refused to look up.

“They been had this fight before,” Emile whispered to me. “She says women raise up things to live, little things, and men kill everything. Men think they’re the ones.”

She put a wide flat cast-iron pot on the gas ring and fried the fish with the onion and pepper. “Creole tomato. Easter lily. Grow em all here. Bien place, ici. Why go to Texas?” she said darkly. “Why go to California?”

She was still angry at my father for leaving. Just like my mother was angry with me.

Redfish and blue crab. What a title for a food piece. The fish was not blackened but seared in lacy char. The crabmeat was splintery white and filled with the tingle of salt and red pepper, so spicy my lips burned.

We had beer from an ice chest. Jimmy Taco would die. All those guys who wrote about food—this was what they lived for.

Suddenly, just like the day before, I saw other people sitting here, in this circle.

The old woman from Venice—Signora Passoni, at her long dining table with the most delicate, perfect handmade fettuccine like a nest of gold. An elderly woman named Jean in Southstoke, a village outside Bath, who’d saved every plastic bag and rubber band since the war, whose dark cottage was cluttered and airless but whose apricot preserves were like golden nectar. A woman about seventy with a red headscarf, grilling kielbasa at a church festival in Chicago—the best bursting-open browned thing I’d ever eaten.

What would they say to Aunt Monie, pulling crabs from the pot? The ancient woman in the mountains outside Brienz? Her granary built on layers of flat black stones to keep out the rats. Her tiny wooden kaase-hutli. The cheese had its own house for summer.

“Hey,” Emile said. “You left the planet?”

I shook my head. “Just sleepy.”

He said, “I gotta move the big truck up to the levee in the morning. Tante Monie, you got your generator set up, right? We got gas. Where we takin your animals?”

“You not—”

“Poulets, Aunt Monie. Where you want them?”

She straightened her narrow shoulders in the print shirt. “Take them on the boat.”

He shook his head. “No poulet on my boat.”

“Then they go in the truck.”

I could see that they’d bargained like this before.

“Peacock on his own.”

She nodded. “He fly up to the old house. Where he come from.”

My father said quietly to me, “Victor must be sleep in that car.”

Aunt Monie took the dogs, who’d been lying at the edge of the yard, down the street, her pale scarf floating and their dark forms swerving like fish around her.

———

My father stood up and looked down the narrow road. “I take a ride. See he have a light on. Make him easy to see in the dark.”

“He could be anywhere in fifty, sixty miles,” Emile said. “You ain’t got that much gas left, and ain’t no more.”

“I find gas,” my father said. He started up the Corsica and went toward the highway.

Emile shook his head slowly. “Ain’t no more wood left at the store, either, and we got two more house.”

“We gotta get that old wood,” Freeman said. “Tomorrow.”

Freeman and Philippe left in the blue truck, headed down to the dock to their boat. The phone rang inside my pocket, and I jumped. Tony. “Hey,” I said. “You made it.”

“My flight was delayed. What time is it? I am so out of it.”

“Almost nine.”

“Shit. Where are you? I’m heading into the Quarter with a guy from CNN. Every reporter in the world is flying in.”

“Tony. I’m not in the city. I had to go south. I’m where my dad was born.”

“What? That boot of Louisiana thing? You’re in the fucking Naples of Louisiana?”

“Yeah. But no mountains and rock.”

Emile had turned off the gas ring. He was watching me in the darkness. “So what the hell?” Tony said. “You said everything was out of control.”

“Oh, it is.” The fan hummed like a giant hive. “Can you get us a hotel in a safe place? Wherever these reporters are going? We’ll be there tomorrow.”

“This is crazy,” Tony said. I heard a lot of noise. “Great shots, though—people are partying like hell. Their faces—this veneer of desperation under the alcohol.”

“Tony!” I turned and whispered so Emile couldn’t hear me. “Victor’s hurt. He’s losing his mind. This isn’t an adventure. I’m scared.”

Tony said, “You don’t get scared.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“Okay. I’ll find a safe hotel.”

When I turned back around, Emile said, “Your husband made it, huh?”

“He’s somebody else’s husband,” I said. “He’s my best friend.”

“What they call it? The kids. He your friend with something?”

“Benefits,” I said. “Not those benefits.” He was pouring something dark as syrup from a blank bottle into a cup, and he handed it to me. Rum? He ran his hands through the loose brown-black curls at his neck.

He leaned back in his chair. “You come all the way down here to find this hardhead? And he don’t want to be found?”

Evening Devotion. But my love hadn’t been extraordinary. It had been bumbling and random and too late.

The rum was sugar and fire. I drank another cup. The world was hot and black and shivering. There was no moon. Nothing. Only Emile’s hand on my elbow, guiding me down the oyster-shell road. The shells crunched like old white pistachios.

“Isn’t your house boarded up?”

“Mostly my house is the boat.” He grinned. “My first wife left me right before I came to California. She said I love my boat more than I love her. So she lit it on fire.”

“On fire?”

“Yeah. Burnt that lil boat up. Your papa’s old boat.”

“The One—” I caught myself.

“The Almoinette.” He laughed. “The name he paint over the other name. They sent me out by y’all cause they thought she would kill me next. But she took my boys and went to Lafayette.”

“Then you got married again.”

“Yeah. And I got this boat in ’92. But I got divorced in ’95.”

“You loved the boat more.”

“Nothin wrong with that.”

“I need to stay here in case Victor shows up.”

“Your papa find him.”

The water was black, too, but with spokes of silver from the other boat. The bayou headed out to sea. The boat was tall, painted white with black trim, and named Lady Chance. “Cross between Bonne Chance and Lady Luck,” he said.

“Why isn’t it named for your wife?”

“Real funny,” he said, helping me onto the deck.

There were nets, buckets, a huge empty ice chest, and winches that looked like tow-truck equipment. “In the morning, I gotta move the boat down to deeper water. This one spot where the cheniere protects from the wind. We gotta tie em down exactly right, but it’s better to be on the boat than in a house. Your daddy told Tante Monie. But she don’t like him.”

“Why?”

We sat in the cabin, in the two chairs, facing cypress trees swung with tangles of gray moss like hundreds of old women, and the onyx path of water. “I guess she never did,” he said. “They had some fight. He was runnin liquor, and then he went to Texas a few times. They say he come back and killed some dude from New Orleans tried to steal his money. He left and she had to hire somebody to help with the grove.”

The third man. She’d said dead people were everywhere.

He poured another drink. The rum was like sweet mesh inside my chest. Gold armor. Somewhere on this bayou, the first Marie-Therese had tried to drown herself.

He kept the lights off in the cabin, but he turned the ship’s radio on. Static and voices and men talking. “Ain’t nobody came to California to get me that one time. I was twenty-four. I thought my wife would come after me.”

“She was a Bordelon?”

“Yeah. Bordelon come from one lady. Phrodite. She was here back then. Eighteen and some. She had ten boys. They marry girls from across the river—Nero and Harlem and Bohemia. Them white Bordelon dead—all of em. But the rest of em stay here. You got two, three Picard. Only Antoine left is Aunt Monie. Her sister die, her mother die. Only your daddy. And he gone.”

“Aunt Monie’s mother—that was Anjanae. She was so old when we came.”

He nodded.

“But her mother was Marie-Therese, and her mother was Moinette Antoine.”

“Yeah, her mother. But not blood. She came out the woods.”

I paused, confused. “The woods? What are you talking about?”

“Yeah. They say some white trader had them on a cart, camped in the woods. Up there by Opelousas. Marie-Therese was five when Moinette bought her. Moinette didn’t birth them two girls, she was already old when she got them. She was free.” He drank the rest of his rum. “Aunt Monie told me one time. I was a kid. Maybe she tried to scare me. Said somebody could sell me in the woods.”

An animal screamed in the water. Then a night bird answered. My father and I were not descended from Moinette Antoine, the woman who got herself free, who learned to read. We were descended from a girl who came from the woods, who probably never knew her own parents.

“And she told you about the pirates?” I said finally.

“Pirates came by here all the time, yeah. Pirates just some dudes with guns and boats. Just gangsters, yeah?”

If the first Marie-Therese, the one born in Senegal, had a child with the Picard pirate, then Victor was her blood. Not me.

“Suppose to be treasure buried all over Louisiana, catin. Yeah, like people used to dynamite places up there around Bayou Teche. You look at tourist books, Lafitte stay everywhere. Everywhere they want to make some money.”

Perfect tourist stories. Pirates, swords, jewels, buried chests of coins.

Emile stood up and pulled on my hand. It was like being a teenager again. I stumbled into the steering wheel, and he caught me around the waist. “You look good,” he said into my neck. “How you look so good? Not a line on your face.”

His lips were on my shoulder. I had no lines because I had no one to worry about. No frowns. I was no one.

“Come on. Down below.”

“What?” My own lips brushed his neck when he lifted his head. I could barely stand up.

“You gon sleep in the hotel tonight?” He guided me toward the stairs. “You sure that ain’t your man?” His voice was an inch from my earlobe. His breath was warm. “Cause I checked you out way back in California. But you ain’t had time for me.”

I put my arms around him quickly, spread out both my hands on his shoulder blades. Scapula. Angel wings. That’s what my mother called them. You too thin—I see them angel wings. I ran my fingers down the ladder of his ribs, and that made him shiver.

He grinned, his dimple deep into that left cheek again. “Come on,” he said.

We lay on the bed below deck. His hands were calloused, the palms lined with tiny hard pillows of skin. He pulled off my tank top, and then lifted off his own shirt. I held his arms in the air and ran my fingernails softly down the outside of his biceps, then along his ribs again, and he bent down like a wire had loosened.

I started laughing, and he said, “Oh, you think you know everything?”

He put his hands on either side of my face and traced my ears over and over, then my eyebrows, until I was nearly asleep. Then he circled my waist and lifted me up.

He called at exactly midnight. The phone was in my jeans, on the floor, and I leaned out of the bunk to grab the sound. “I got my ticket right here. You got yours?”

“What?” My eyes felt taped shut, and my hair fell around my face. Wait—Dave Matthews. The ticket that had fallen in the hallway. “Yeah.”

He was crying. “It’s nine o’clock in LA. They’re warming up the crowd. I haven’t been this pissed since the SAT. I had a ticket for that, too.”

I got up and held my hair off my face. Emile had tangled his fingers in it. He lay on his side, watching me. I put on his T-shirt and grabbed a sheet. Mosquitoes. I went up to the deck, but the utter darkness around the boat was scary, so I sat with my back against the metal door propped open.

“Why’d you have to talk about Zelman?” His voice was mangled with anger and swallowed tears. “You had to bring it up.”

“What?”

“Class!” Then he was crying openly. “Zelman would be assigning that essay now. The one where you pick an instrument from your heritage. Something obscure. They just started fall session and he likes to tell you about it the first week so you can think about it all semester. But he’s in fuckin Brazil.”

“Where are you?” Tears streamed down my face, too, into my mouth.

“Some trees. A ditch.”

“Can’t you see anything to tell me where you are?”

“No.” He was quiet. “I loved school. When my moms would be passed out, I’d get my pack, my granola bar, and walk to school. First day after we moved, I’d follow some kids my age.” He sniffled and said quietly, “Once I followed a bus. I was like—seven. We had just packed up and we came to the Riviera. It was yellow. Like vanilla pudding yellow. And I saw a school bus stop at the corner and all these kids got on. I was scared to get on cause the driver wouldn’t know me, so I ran behind it. Ain’t like it was going that fast—not around there. But then it got on Palm Avenue and took off. I was runnin and then I didn’t know where I was.”

“Oh, baby, those kids were getting bused across town?”

“Yeah. So this cop stops. I thought he would just shoot me. Take me out. Cause that’s all I ever heard.”

“A white guy?”

“Brother. Real light. Said, Your mama Glorette, right, son? Like that. I said, Yeah, and he said, Where y’all stayin now? I told him we just moved to a yellow place. He took me to my old school. It was only six blocks.”

“He did know her.”

“Yeah.”

I heard movement in the water. Something swimming. I pulled the sheet tight around me. The air was warm and wet as a tongue, but I wanted to be covered. “You charged the phone in the car lighter?”

“Yeah.”

“What did you find?”

“Nothing. I went to sleep. All those songs about the levee. It’s so quiet down here. In the woods. Water everywhere. I can’t see shit except the phone.”

“Let me come get you.”

“Nope. It’s my treasure. I’ma find it in the morning. I’m the pirate. Not you.”

“I heard.”

“I’m her blood. The one from Africa. With the pirate. All those years, you were the smart one, the famous writer, and you told me it was because of Moinette. The smart one. But I remembered my moms told me it was me.”

“It is you.”

“Aunt Monie told her your mama was like a foster kid.”

“Well, my papa is looking for you right now. Maybe he’ll see your phone light. You’re the tribe.”

“Yeah, don’t say it. He’d kill for you, boy! I hate when people say that. He’d lay down his life for you, boy!”

“He would,” I said. “And all I can do is give you a ride. If you don’t believe it’s for you, believe it’s for your grandpère. They would die for each other.”

“Except you live in LA. And I can’t go back to the tribe.”

“You mean back to Sarrat?”

“Rio Seco.”

“Because of Jazen.”

“Because of everything.”

“You’re coming to LA with me.”

“Jazen’s been to your place, remember?”

“You think he’s gonna hunt you down in LA?”

“I don’t know.” He hesitated.

I said, “With what warriors? Not Alfonso.”

But then he said, “He’ll get Tiquan or one of the younger dudes.”

“They won’t come to LA. And you’ll be on the road with me.”

“If I went to London or Paris with you, I’d still be a nigga. I’d have to keep it real and all that shit.”

Before I could answer, he said, “What’s a poinciana?”

“A flower? No. That’s poinsettia. I don’t know.” I squinted in the darkness. I couldn’t tell him how she died.

“So you thought I wanted to be another version of you.”

“I didn’t know what you wanted to be.”

“Maybe last week. Now I’m done. I heard these little rappers between buildings in the Lafitte. They were singin, My time to leave out this earth. I like that.”

“Stop exaggerating.”

No music behind him. Nothing but water whispering against the boat.

“So my pops was weak. He got killed by a trashman who wanted to be my daddy. But my moms taught me to be a writer.”

“Oh—I thought—”

“You thought I grew up reading your magazines and took some notes, huh? Yeah. But check it—my moms used to lay on the carpet with me when I was little, and we’d look at the pieces of, like, yarn. Imagine being small enough to walk in the forest of the carpet. We saw the crows in the branches and they had purple and gold under their feathers. She told me about the Mississippi when she gave me a bath. Like five freeways of chocolate milk all headed south. That’s how big she said it was. And she was right.”

“So you’re by the river.”

“No. I’m in a ditch. Don’t ask me where cause I don’t know.”

We were quiet together for a moment. Then Victor said, “Tonight I was thinking expatriate. You. Like James Baldwin or somebody. You’re kinda sad. I wanted to go to college, but then I wanted to come back to Rio Seco. Be Zelman and Thompson at home.”

“Why? Why would you want to stay there?”

“Cause I like seein all the places where my moms was. I still sit on the balcony at the Riviera or the Villas. If somebody doesn’t look like they want to shoot me.”

“But she left you there.”

“Yeah. But I remember how it looked, when I sat there. The palm tree and the moon.”

The full moon had to be clean, like winter, and trees had to be washed clean by rain, and when the moon rose behind the fronds, and when the breeze moved them, the silver light jumped and leapt from the fronds as if an invisible god held a sparkler.

“I like to walk around and see what she saw. Jimsonweed in the alley. Where she got killed. Those flowers.”

“They open up at night. Like a fairy tale.”

“Yeah.”

His voice was sleepy and faint now. “Your moms, and Auntie Clarette and Cerise, they would feed me, and give me a ride, and wash my clothes. But you were like—an idea. That was cool. But now I’m out.”

I was pissed. “An idea? I’m down here the night before a goddamn hurricane chasing you, and you’re feeling sorry for yourself and being—fucking histrionic and calling me an idea when I’m right here?”

I sounded like Clarette, and Cerise, and Michelle Meraux when she yelled at Danita.

He was quiet. I imagined him lying in the front seat of the car. “When we were little and there was a freeze, we had to be out all night with the smudge pots. But one night, we couldn’t get enough oil so we had to wet down the fruit with hoses. I fell asleep in the truck, and I woke up out there just when the sun was coming up. The light was coming sideways, you know, hitting the ice. Like thousands of ornaments.” I saw it as vividly now. “You just carry scenes around in your head, and you try to make them into something. Music or stories or commercials or whatever. That’s what you do when you’re done with school.”

“Yeah,” he said, after a long time. “Mine is the palm tree sparkler. But every time I try to see it, there’s no moon, or it’s cloudy. I see it, like, once a year, and then it just makes me sadder.” He wasn’t crying again, but his voice was thick with worse than tears. “Makes me want to just kill myself now. I didn’t have a gun before.”

“Don’t say that.”

He finally said, “You didn’t even try to stop me.”

“At the Lafitte? You had the gun!”

“The gun was for Jazen.”

“A gun is for anyone it’s pointed at, even accidentally. After Dimples, you should know that. Did you get rid of it?”

“No.” His breath rustled into the phone. “I was gonna throw it in the river. But I got it right here. If there’s no treasure, fuck it. I’m out.”

He closed the phone so gently I didn’t even know he was gone.

Emile was asleep, his back turned to the stairway. I curled up in the other bunk while the boat rocked slightly in the current. No idea where Victor was, or my father, and nothing to do but wait for the light.

Emile was gone when I woke up. The sun was bright and hot in a line across the floor, and it was stifling inside. On the deck were several cases of water, a box filled with canned food, and candles.

No one was on the dock. I had to walk down the road like a guilty teenager, my hair stuffed into a ball, my clothes wrinkled. Freeman and Philippe were hammering plywood onto Aunt Monie’s kitchen window. My father came around from the back of her house, carrying a board. No Victor.

I ducked into the house and stood in the tin shower, feeling the thin skin of metal separating me from the voices outside. Aunt Monie had Lifebuoy soap and Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. My hair felt like matted straw. My ant bites were pricks of puckered skin now, like copper rivets on faded jeans. Lovely.

I put my hair in a wet braid and put on the clothes she’d left on the chair. Her clothes. Knit pants in a turquoise shade, and a printed blouse with twirling flowers in the same shade, along with pink and yellow.

She’d left me a pair of rubber boots, too. White. Just to the middle of the shin. Sexy.

I was her.

My clothes were hanging on the wash line next to hers. My white shirts hung upside down, sleeves like broken arms.

Emile stood up from measuring a board and looked at me gravely. He wore faded jeans, boots, and a black T-shirt that said SAINTS FOR LIFE. Fleur-de-lis on each sleeve.

“Saint, huh?” I said.

“Just my team,” he said. Not smiling. “Your car on the levee road. We hid it cause the sheriff come by again. You need to go. I don’t want him yell at me if you die.”

“I’m not his problem.” Under his shirt were half-moons from my fingernails. He thought I was his problem now?

He frowned. “You in the parish, you his problem. Aunt Monie!” He called to her, where she was filling water bowls. “Fantine gonna take you. About three hours to New Orleans, and her husband got a hotel room. He told her all about it last night.”

“Yeah, cause I’m really dressed for that romantic interlude,” I said. “That was Victor last night. I have a kid now.” I stopped. Clarette, Cerise, Bettina—all those children. “Yeah. All of a sudden, nothing’s up to me.”

Aunt Monie looked over her shoulder at me like I was headless. “She don’t like dogs, so I ain’t go with her, me.”

“I don’t mind dogs.”

“She spend the night with Emile like all them.”

All them women? Or she thinks I spend the night with all them men?

“I spent half the night talking to Victor!” I said.

She cocked her head at me. “She talk to him half the night and he don’t come, vrai?”

I put my hands on my hips. “If I wanted to go home, I’d be gone. Trust me. I know how to get around, and I know how to find a hotel or an airport. I’m not leaving without him. I’m just as fucking stubborn as she is.” I lifted my chin toward Aunt Monie, who blew air from her nose and said, “Ça c’est bon.”

She coaxed the chickens into cages with cracked corn. The peacock ignored us. There were twenty-five chickens, in ten cages, and we loaded them onto the blue pickup. My father drove slowly toward the levee road, and we put the chickens into the large refrigerated truck with EB handpainted on the driver door that Emile had parked last in the row of vehicles. “This how he haul the seafood,” my father said. “Some men come up from Buras this morning, say them oyster bed already stir up from the current.”

The chickens were quiet in the cavernous dark space. They didn’t scream, like I thought chickens would. They mumbled, confused, and even I could feel the slight change in the air pressure, somehow, as if the river were breathing harder.

Then we drove the pickup through the weeds and down the narrow path to the old Azure house, knocking down baby palmettos. Emile and Philippe were already there, inside the second floor of the skeletal house, moving like shadows. My father had a crowbar and an ax and a claw hammer. He handed me the hammer and said, “Take wood from here.”

In the shell of the old house, we hoisted ourselves up to the second floor, using the studs to climb. The wooden floor was full of animal droppings. Emile was prying boards from the hallway floor, and my father handed them to me. Long pieces of wide dark wood. “Cypress,” he said. “Singalee men cut them tree. They build the house back then. 1800. This hard wood. You can’t get wood like this. Termite now and different air.”

I touched the wall, where the plaster had been eaten away by animals. Inside were smaller boards and between then, what looked like black hair. I shivered violently, all the way through my bones.

My father looked up. “Cheval,” he said.

Horsehair and plaster and mud. I didn’t want to touch it. I crouched down and stacked up the boards my father halved with the ax.

When we got back to Aunt Monie’s, Freeman was sitting in her doorway. “Sheriff come. I tell him you gone.”

“Me?” I said.

“Almoinette, too.” He kept his eyes on my face.

“I’m staying.”

He got up and carried the shotgun he’d had beside him to the truck. Looters.

We nailed the long boards over her front window, and nailed two boards in a cross over those. It was after noon. We ate cold boiled crab and drank the rest of the beer. The heat was suffocating, and the sky looked gray and green at the edges of the south.

My phone made the sparkling sound of a message. It had come in while I was up in the old house with my father. Tony. “I found a room at this hotel on Camp Street. A dump. But it’ll work. There’s nothing but media and crazy people. You better get your adventurous ass here, though. They’re opening the Superdome.”

I looked up at my father. “Victor told me he was in a ditch.”

He said, “I look in Port Sulphur, I drive down to Buras. He don’t know where he goin. Down past Venice, only water. But he come back here. He see the sky.”

Aunt Monie said, “Allons. Fini.”

Emile and my father left for the boats.

The dogs lay on the porch, their tongues rolling out like pink carpets at a Barbie fashion show, their maple-gold eyes watching every move Aunt Monie made. The house was dark as a cave. Aunt Monie said, “Echelle—ce-la.” She pointed to the back of the house, where the bathroom door led onto the tiny back porch. But that had been nailed and boarded shut, too.

“What?”

She mimed climbing. The ladder. It was in the kitchen.

I opened the trapdoor to the attic. She handed up plastic bins of dog food, rawhide bones, and dog biscuits. Then one more medium-sized clear plastic bin, with a blue top. She laid the Bible inside, the rosary, and two small decorative plates. Pheasants and vines. And a carved wooden box, very plain. “C’est tout. Ma vie,” she said.

It must have been photos and letters and important papers. I pushed the boxes under the rafters of the shallow attic. There was about three feet of space along the spine of the roof, which was fairly new. Plywood covered with tin.

She filled the kitchen sink with water, and then two five-gallon plastic jugs.

From the trunk of my car, I brought the Octoroon cigar box, my laptop, Victor’s laptop in the messenger bag, and his backpack. I put them all in a large plastic bin which she emptied of chicken food in the yard.

“Les poulets très heureuses après la tempête.” She actually smiled, looking out into the yard.

Snails and bugs would be everywhere. The tempest. She was still smiling.

We walked across the highway to the orange groves. The boats had been moved further down, vague shapes in the bayou. Aunt Monie picked up a white bucket, and she and the dogs walked the groves. She touched a few green satsumas, working her way to the back, where I couldn’t see her anymore.

I sat in the plastic chair near the metal sheds. They gutted and cleaned fish here, and put them on ice. They sorted the oysters, and the shrimp and crabs. The smell was in the wood. The water was like tinted windows. Black. Impenetrable.

Nothing moved.

An engine started, a wasp whine. An aluminum skiff came down the bayou to the dock. My father and Emile got off and went to the metal sink to wash their hands and faces. “Twenty-four lines to tie em down,” Emile said. “Right there, the water’s deep enough. And the old cheniere is to the west.”

The hump of land with hundreds of years of oyster shells and a few bent oaks, where my father had taken us. Where the Indians had lived.

I washed my face with cold water, looked into the speckled mirror. My hair a thick black rope across my shoulder when I wet it and braided it again. The faded ink blossom on my arm. Glorette and I pressing our wrists together. Our hair in one braid, our shoulders tight to each other.

The dogs came first, sniffing the sink and dock to see if anyone had brought fish. Then Aunt Monie. “Regardez—trash,” she said, tilting the bucket. “All over the back row. Somebody drive down there.”

In the woods at the edge of the grove, near the standing water of the swamp, were two pits, one shallow, one deeper, surrounded by a crumbled brick foundation. Two empty ramen packets, Gummi Bears, and Gatorade. That must have been what was in the Thunderbird. He was eating what he had lived on before. But how long ago had he been here?

Aunt Monie pointed to the pits. “This indigo, here. Where they make the blue for the soldier. That smell, kill the women.” Then she pointed down the dirt road. “He ask about cimitaire, I tell him so many dead people, and even a horse bury back here. By the slaves. The quarters back over there, and they bury the people on the other side.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that yesterday?”

She frowned. “You say you look. You say you look here.”

I’d looked in the cemeteries near the big homes. Where white people were buried. I was ashamed to even say out loud how ignorant I still was. I turned toward the trees, heavy with green fruit like ornaments camouflaged in the leaves, my face burning.

My father said, “Too late now.” Emile said, “Too dangerous to get stuck on the road with a flat, or in the woods.”

It was dusk, and the air turned to the mottled heavy silver of old pewter. The dogs lay down on the dock, confused about why there was no walk. At the far southern horizon, there was an eerie wash of green—not vivid, but like water hyacinth and lichen and moss rising up into the sky.

We stayed in the shed. The small TV showed people lining up at the Superdome. Most of the people carrying plastic bags and crates and children were black, but there were some tourists from other countries, interviewed in halting, jaunty English. I looked for Claudine, Albert, Juanita in the crowd. Had they boarded up their windows in the Lafitte, or would they all go up to the second floor?

Where would Alfonso have gone? And Jazen? Maybe their grandmother and mother had said, No guns, no fighting for tonight. Get your asses in here right now.

My phone still worked. I left a message for Tony. “I’m still here, down in Plaquemines. I’m staying. We’re safe. They’ve done this before.”

Then Victor. “Come back here. This hurricane is real. Get the car out of the ditch and bring it back to the levee road. I’m going there right now to leave mine.”

———

Aunt Monie headed up the path with the dogs as if nothing were different. I drove my car, tires popping on the crushed shells of the road, to the levee. It felt strange to gun it up the grassy slope. No one would ever drive up a freeway embankment back home, crash through bougainvillea and ivy that sheltered homeless encampments and rat nests.

At the top, I parked behind Emile’s blue pickup, which was behind the refrigerated truck. Chickens would sleep forever if it stayed dark forever, they told us when we were children. If the sun never came up, they would fall over eventually and die.

I turned my car around, carefully, on the levee road so the Corsica faced north. I’d be the first to drive back off the levee tomorrow, when the storm was gone.

Aunt Monie and the dogs were small figures walking north on the road. The batture of trees and driftwood and trash was washed with muddy brown water, but only a few feet. That was just the tide coming in. This used to be the front. I had looked at the gravestones in front. Where them blankitte bury. The slaves and free blacks were buried in the back. Nearer to the cypress swamp.

I looked out at the river, and prayed. Dya—what Aunt Monie called the water spirits. I said to the river gods that it had been hundreds of years since Marie-Therese came up the passageway, and not to let her blood descendant go back down.

You believe now?

I left the keys in the car, and then I sat on the hood, white boots out in front of me like someone else’s feet, waiting for her.

The old landing, where Moinette had been taken away with a rope tied around her wrist. A little goat. A little girl. Fourteen. I’d sat here, watching the tangles of driftwood come down the river, imagining I was Huck Finn.

A girl in a white dress walked up out of the trees further down, where the path led to Azure. A teenaged girl. She was white.

Behind her was a fat old white woman in a black dress, huge and slow. A man followed her, black coat long and skirted around his legs, and then a pale woman, her head down, as if she looked at her feet.

They moved up the levee and then down the other side, into the batture’s trees and debris and they walked across the matted tangle of someone’s old fishing nets and I couldn’t see them after that.

Blankittes. What did Aunt Monie call them at night, when she told stories?

Bright people. Ghosts.

I couldn’t run in the boots. The people were gone. I stumbled fast down the levee road in the darkness that seemed to grow from the trees themselves, to rise from the water, and to have nothing to do with the air. The shaking gathered at my neck like an animal tossed me. Then Aunt Monie’s boots were visible, and her scarf, and the dark dogs, who stopped and stared toward the river.

“Eh, Lord,” she said, when I told her. “Eh, Lord, nous allons. Rien pour faire—nous allons.” She lifted her shoulders to her ears like a frightened child and crossed her arms over her chest.

We’ll go.

But it was too late. We’d still be in the car when the storm actually hit. “People see ghost all the time,” Emile told her. “You ain’t ever paid attention before. Ain’t no big deal.”

Aunt Monie spoke to him in such rapid French I couldn’t follow, and he shook his head. “Fantine and Freeman stay in the house with you, then, and me and Enrique and Philippe run the engines here. I can’t lose this boat,” Emile said. He wouldn’t look at me, or anyone else. He looked toward the west, at the marshes. “All I got.”

I had nothing.

I wished I could lie beside him, on the boat. But I lay beside Aunt Monie. She had told Glorette and me stories in the dark. Marie-Therese, she eighteen. French man come here, to this house. This house. Blond man. Fight or don’t. She cadeau. A gift for a week, while he buy the sugar. And she get Moinette.

Phrodite mama call Moinette a bright hardship. She say, That your only chile? And Marie-Therese say, Take one candle light a room.

I thought I heard rain. But it was Lulu’s claws against the linoleum, clicking as she dreamed and whimpered and chased what ran behind her eyes. I wondered if my father paced on the boat. What if it sank, and this house, which had seen so much, stood? He didn’t care. Maybe he thought he was on his boat again. One Nigger.

“What happened to my father in Texas?” I whispered to Aunt Monie. “Did he ever tell you?”

She was quiet, and then she said, “He tell Emile grandpère. He run that rum, in a truck, and in Texas they take his truck. Take him in the bois. Take his clothes and tie him to a tree. They play with him, chat y souris.”

Cat and mouse.

“They play with him,” she whispered. “With a stick. Say how big. Like the toy.”

I turned my head to the side. My father riding through those woods.

“When he come back, he kill that boy from New Orleans,” she said, and then she turned away from me.

The power went out sometime before midnight. The darkness was complete. We were inside our own eyelids. Freeman turned on the battery-powered lantern and went back to sleep in the easy chair, though because he was younger than my father and not used to decades of drowsing upright, his body splayed stiffly and his mouth fell open like a puppet’s, his wispy goatee a black cirrus cloud.

Marie-Therese had slept here in a chair waiting for someone to take away her child.

Aunt Monie dozed beside me, but every time the dogs whined or paced, she murmured words to them, and they lay back down. In my small leather purse, diagonal across my chest as if I were walking miles through a strange city, I had my cell phone, my wallet, and my little notebook. She had helped me wrap them in plastic, like sandwiches, in case we had to walk through high water.

The rain started and then stopped, hammering the tin roof. I felt terrified as a child—what if the bright people came here, the only house where there was light?

I couldn’t breathe. Not like being strangled, but as if a huge mouth covered me, sucking hard. The whole house vibrated, like a plane rising and falling crazily in the atmosphere. No air. My eardrums felt as if they would burst from the pressure. Emile had bolted boards over the chimney with masonry screws.

“Aunt Monie,” I said. “I can’t breathe.”

“And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire appeared among them,” she said, her eyes open to the ceiling.

The house shuddered, sighed, and swelled again. Then the wind hit the side of the house like a bus, and the cistern slammed against the door. Then moaning, moaning—the gods of air and water moaning. A sound no one could imagine. A million throats moaning and filling the world with sound that erased everything else.

Things hit the house. Big things. The house shuddered, bent, absorbed the blows, shuddered again like a person being beaten. Freeman stood at the door, listening. “Trees down. Light pole, gotta be.”

Aunt Monie and I got up. She held her walking stick, and went to the kitchen, fumbling for something. She came back with four leashes, clipped them to the dogs’ collars, and sat down in the wooden chair like a priestess, facing the cypress-wood-covered window as if she could see something.

The wind tore at the tin roof, screaming metal, and then water came under the front door, sliding inside as if magically, a ghost able to swim through wood and walls. The dogs whined and pulled, and she said, “C’est bon, c’est bon, c’est bien, c’est bien.”

Freeman looked at the leashes and said, “We got some rope.” He took it off the kitchen table and tied it around his own waist, then mine, and he was reaching for Aunt Monie but the dogs swerved around his legs, staggering him.

Then the back of the house blew off. The bathroom addition. And something so large hit the house that the walls turned and groaned, as if dizzy. The house twisted, and then the water came from the front door and the window, poured into the back from the gaping entry. The dogs were up to their bellies within minutes, swimming.

Aunt Monie was shouting in French—praying or arguing—and while Freeman was tying the rope to her waist, around her bulky blouse, the water rose to our thighs. He tried to grab the ladder, but the lightweight metal floated away, into the kitchen, and then out the back. The chairs, the bed, everything was floating. I grabbed her heavy walking stick and pushed at the trapdoor.

The dogs were swimming frantically, and she called their names, over and over. Freeman still had his feet on the floor. He grabbed Aunt Monie and pushed her toward the attic. The water lifted me in a rush, as if it were alive. I was treading, pushed against the armoire. I grabbed Aunt Monie’s elbow and held on, but she was pulled by the dogs, who were trying to get to the floating mattress.

“Hold her!” I screamed to Freeman, and I pulled myself into the attic, my shoulder muscles burning. The water was over his shoulders now. I grabbed Aunt Monie’s wrist. It felt like I pulled her arm out of the socket when I dragged her into the attic.

The dogs followed her as soon as she called their names. They leapt up into the space, jostling one another, and then ran frantically over the rough splintery beams, stumbling and barking, knocking over the food containers and not even noticing the food. Fluffy pink insulation flowed in rivers between the rafters, and they waded there and then leapt out as if that were worse than water.

It was dark and stifling in the small space below the roofline. Freeman pulled himself up, his jeans sodden, and lay on a rafter.

The wind moaned and sobbed. Ghosts and obliteration. Sheets of sound that tore into my ears. Then a section of the tin roof tore off, and the dogs barked in looping hoarse circles at the storm itself.

Freeman crawled over to the edge of the hole. I was too afraid to see the air making those sounds. I thought I knew—fierce Santa Anas leaving palm fronds and downed eucalyptus everywhere. My father said we were fleas on the earth and the wind tried to shake us off. Foehn in Switzerland, the rattling hot summer wind of southern France, sandstorms in the desert.

I crawled a few feet to the trapdoor, the rope pulling at my hips. The water was swirling inside the house, choppy as if outside. The furniture was floating. The refrigerator was on its side, stuck at the top of the kitchen doorway like a white coffin.

The water was about a foot from the ceiling.

I crawled to the wooden vent at the front of the attic and broke one of the slats. The dawn was not light—just sheets of rain and howls of air I could see now. The water outside was brown, gray, whitecapped, churning just below the eaves. It was river and ocean and rapids. But actual waves, about three feet, came toward the house, pushing and shoving, and then one pushed the house off the foundation and we spun.

The refrigerated truck. As the house turned, I saw that was what had hit us first—the white truck was impaled on the branches of the huge oak behind the house, cab facing down, like an elephant bowed on its knees.

The house spun again in the current, and Aunt Monie prayed in French. Freeman yelled, “We gotta get out and find a boat. Emile said if it get bad wait for the eye.”

The house moved in jerks and shudders and washed up against the pecan trees. It was wedged between two trunks, and we stayed there.

Hours. The wind sucked and pulled at the roof, and the waves pulled at the walls. Then everything calmed as if in a movie. As if a biblical hand had swept over the turbulence. And the sun came out, pale and bobbling, weak apricot, but blinding us in the open hole of the roof.

The eye? The sun?

Freeman and I climbed out onto the slick tin roof and held on to the chimney. The water covered everything except the tops of the oaks and hackberry and cypress. The houses were gone, pushed back toward the levee road, only two roofs visible under the water that still heaved and surged with invisible tides. The dogs surged out of the hole in the roof, and Aunt Monie screamed, “Coco! Non!” Coco tore the leash from her hands and leapt into the water, swept into the current. Then Lulu followed her, and Aunt Monie slipped on the metal roof. Freeman grabbed her by the rope and then tied the excess to the chimney.

Aunt Monie held Zizi in her left arm. And Mama stood stiff-legged, watching the other dogs swim away and then disappear. “Tournee!” Aunt Monie screamed, her voice giving out. “Tournee!”

Come back.

Cows were everywhere, floating on their sides, and other dogs, bellies already filling with air. Snakes swept past, swimming toward trees, moving away like writing in the water. Dead chickens.

A horrific scream. Like a woman dying, being killed again and again. The peacock was alive, somewhere.

A red-brown circle floated close to the roof, glistening in the sun. The mass bubbled and shifted, and I saw white rice inside. Pupae. A raft of fire ants, floating to a new home. I shouted at Aunt Monie to get her legs up and away. I felt faint—the island of ants was eddying near the eaves. If they touched the roof they’d swarm up. I pushed Aunt Monie’s stick into the mass and the ants boiled up the wood and I let go. The stick swirled away in the current, pulsing with movement.

The air was completely still. The heat radiant. But then a cow made a strangled sound somewhere, and a boat motor droned like a june bug.

Emile came down the flooded road, level with the tops of the oaks that lined the street. The flat-bottomed aluminum boat—he shouted, “Hurry!” He pulled me off the roof and onto the boat, and then Aunt Monie, who kept holding tight to Zizi’s collar. Mama leapt into the boat, and he said, “Hold her!” Then Freeman slid in.

“Coco!” Aunt Monie pointed. Coco had managed to get up onto the cab of the white truck, howling now, and Emile throttled the motor.

“Goddamn,” he whispered. “My truck. Two-ton truck. Thirty-five thousand dollars.”

Coco howled and whined until we got close, and then she snapped and bit at the air, baring her teeth at Aunt Monie. Freeman reached for her, and she latched on to his forearm with her teeth. Emile said, “She gone crazy,” and hit her on the ear. She let go and snapped again, and he pulled the boat away.

Aunt Monie lay flat, facedown, in the boat, tiny and shapeless as a paper doll, her arm around Zizi and Mama, who lay flat as well.

I looked behind us. Azure was gone. Only Aunt Monie’s roof was even visible, and two cars that were floating south. A horse swam past, hooves flailing. I closed my eyes. Coco’s barking was hoarse and regular now, desperate and chest-deep as the night Victor had croup.

I held on to Emile’s back, my face against the wet cloth, and sobbed. Victor was drowned in the car, in the woods, or floating out to sea.

When we reached the boat, the wind had begun again, as abruptly as before. Freeman handed us up to the Lady Chance and then went to help Philippe. Emile sent us down to the galley, where we lay on the floor while the boat pitched and tossed and rose up against the ropes again and again. Aunt Monie held the dogs’ collars with her gnarled fingers, her face a mask. My father and Emile shouted at each other for what felt like hours. The wind was from the other side now, screaming and tearing at the boat, and the engines chugged beneath us, hot and throbbing, until I threw up again and again in the water sloshing at our feet.

Hours later, the wind finally calmed. Again, the sun came out immediately, hot as a floodlight. I stumbled up the galley stairs.

The world was shredded and drowned. Debris was caught in the cypress trees along the bayou—clothes and plastic and another cow caught in the branches, dead, bloating even now, its neck stretched out like a horrific caricature. To the south, the satsuma grove was gone, leaving only the round tops of trees already brown and dead from saltwater floating like thousands of tumbleweeds. Marsh grass and gas cans and boxes and dead fish moved out in the current, and then the body of a man, floating down the bayou toward the marshes and the Gulf, his T-shirt a transparent bubble of white on his back. My father stared into the water after the body, and leapt into the flood.

Emile and I jumped in after him. The current was strong, but we swam after him. He wasn’t swimming. He was floating. He wanted to die. I kicked hard and something submerged cut me on the ankle, a searing pain. I floated in the water, and a gasoline slick lifted fumes into my nose. Then I kicked again. Emile caught him, turned him toward me. We grabbed his shoulders and swam toward the boat.

On the deck, away from the side, Emile wrapped a rope around my father’s waist and tied him to a pole. My father opened his eyes, looked at me, and passed out. I sat next to him in the sun, cupped my hand under his nose to make sure he was still breathing. He slumped against the post, and then his chest heaved.

The water. He saw his mother, and the dead cows and pigs and chickens from 1927. The white people swollen and black, the black people washed of pigment white.

Aunt Monie squatted near me and whispered in my ear. “That boy from New Orleans come take Enrique liquor money. Up at Woodland, the jail by the river. Enrique put the knife on his neck. Push him in the water. He go under and Enrique turn his back.”

The third man he had killed. A boy. I stayed with my father, while the kaleidoscope that must have been inside his head whirled and slowed.

By late afternoon, sounds rose only from the water, and still nothing from the sky. Drowned egrets hung by their beaks from the chain-link fence around one shed, and I couldn’t look off the deck anymore to see what floated past.

My father slumped to the side and slept. Emile and I bailed out the nasty water belowdeck and opened up the door for air. Emile carried my father and aunt to the twin beds, where they both slept, dogs stunned and silent between them.

I sat with him on the deck, in the small shade of nets and winches. He poured Bacardi onto my ankle. I could see the perfect white of my bone. I took one long drink. He wrapped a torn T-shirt around the cut. Victor’s bandanna, Kelli’s gunshot wound, Michelle and Inez. I stared at the water. No sound except our own breathing. No threads of music from a distant radio, no cars, no bees, no laughter, no bouncing balls, no thumping stereos, no children. No sparrow or hawk or nasal grunt of a coot.

Emile’s voice was raspy and guttural, like his throat was lined with stones. He must have shouted all night, trying to keep the boats from capsizing. He took off his shirt and lay on his back and said, “Nothing left.”

I nodded. But so little of it had been mine. Except Victor, who had become mine, tied to me now through the stories and whatever love I had tried to give him each time we talked, under the encampment’s cloth tent, near a fire, in the tribe. I couldn’t believe he survived in the Thunderbird, when trucks had been tossed into trees, and I couldn’t bear to imagine him gone. I reached out and put my hand on Emile’s chest, and he put his fingers on top of mine.

Oil floated down from the north in veils of black and rainbow slick, then huge slides of tarry thick skin. Rafts of marsh grass collected against the boat, and more fire ant islands. Emile sprayed the fire extinguisher until the foam sank the floating masses that held each other tightly.

His radio snapped static, and came to life. He spoke to someone down in Empire, who said hundreds of boats were wrecked, and two giant menhaden boats had floated onto the highway. Emile said, “Anybody come for you?” and the man laughed.

“Nobody even knows we’re down here!” he said. “You think the government cares about us? They worried about the city. New Orleans floodin now. Levees broke.”

“How you hear?”

“Goddamn if someone didn’t call me. Some cell phone satellite must not a gotten blown out the sky.”

Emile stared at me, and then up to the top of a mast. “I’ma climb up here and see,” he said. “Go get your phone.”

I pulled it from the leather bag, still in the plastic cocoon. I unwrapped it and rubbed it against my filthy print blouse.

When Emile made it to the top, the phone made the sparkly sound of a received message.

“Somebody call you,” he shouted. “Call last night at eight seventeen. Say he found it. The treasure.”

Comtesse, to the north. The slave cemetery, on the other side of the road, away from the river. The only place left to look.

We took the little skiff. The water was so full of debris that Emile had to maneuver slowly around dressers and stoves and pieces of metal roofing and hundreds of broken tree branches. My chest was hot from the rum. We stayed on the western side of the flooded highway. The cipriere. Where the black people would have been buried.

The boat motor was the only sound. A zipper in the silence.

If he were alive, he’d hear us.

There were no landmarks. No canals, no roads, no barns, no roofs here. But Emile said, “Still got trees.”

“You know where you’re going?”

“I know. When we go out in the bay, we got trees, and chenieres, to see where the oysters are. Now the whole damn place like a bay.”

Then he said, “Oh, damn. No.”

At first I thought they were small boats. Metal oblongs, bobbing in the current. With handles. They were coffins. One palest blue, one silver. Then one more, turned on its side against a utility shed. A sleeve, a hand, a leg in black suit pants.

I buried my head in my lap until the motor had whined for a long time.

“That’s not Comtesse,” he said finally. “Those new coffins. A different cemetery. We got about another two miles. Take forever like this.”

It must have been another two hours. We were in a strange foreshortened forest, where Emile had to steer around gas grills and trucks and tires and tangles of clothing in every color snagged up against the oak branches. We had to circle and backtrack around huge tree trunks. Then I saw a dirty yellow rag on a raft of marsh grass. Black coral.

“Is that his shirt?” I whispered. I screamed, “Victor! Victor!” Emile gunned the motor, and I shouted again and again.

A row of black iron spikes, separate, floating in black water. A rise in the earth. A cheniere. Oyster shells and sediment. An island. Oak trees, and three white crypts like tiny garages with their doors left wide open.

Victor was splayed out on a branch of an oak tree, toward the top. His left arm was tied to one part of the branch with a bandanna, his left leg anchored at the knee with a leather belt. His jeans were still on, but his shirt had been torn off. “Victor!” I called, but he didn’t move his head. We came closer. His shoulders heaving. He was breathing. Crying. On his back, scars like white rosettes in a pattern. Two circles—the eyes. And five more, in an arc—the smile.

Emile pulled the boat close. I climbed up, the bark scraping my arms. I put my hand on his neck, the burned-red thin neck, holding up the bare shorn head, his cheek etched with scratches black with dried blood.

I couldn’t untie the bandanna around his wrist, sodden and knotted so tight. I pulled hard with my fingernails, but Emile handed me a knife and I cut it carefully. Then I undid the belt around his knee.

He didn’t look at me. He looked up into the higher branches and said hoarsely, “Where’s the other guy?”

I looked up, too. There were snakes coiled in the branches like elaborate jewelry, and above that, a raccoon that stared at us with impassive black eyes.

Victor nearly fell into the boat. He looked terrified of Emile. “Was that you? In the tree last night?”

Emile said, “What?”

Victor stared at me as if he were blind. I felt his forehead. His skull. The place I had been afraid to touch all those years ago. The sun flashed white from his black pupils, and he blinked.

Then he pointed toward the crypts. He said, “She was in there. Then the water knocked out the front, and the box floated out. Like it had a motor. Went all the way down there and disappeared.” He pointed east, toward the river.

Marie-Therese. Headed to the ocean, finally. The wind that began in Africa wanted her back. Dya, the water spirit, lifted up by Faro, the god of wind.

When we got back to the boat, my father and Aunt Monie were on the deck, the dogs quiet by her side. Emile and I put Victor in one of the beds belowdeck. He closed his eyes. Emile touched my loose hair. “Jolie,” he murmured, and bit his lips. He gathered it in his hands, clumsy and rough, and I pulled back. But he divided my hair into three bunches and braided it loosely. Then he handed me the Bacardi and went upstairs.

I poured rum onto a towel and wiped down the cuts on Victor’s face, his chest, and his right arm. Tree bark and pounding wind. On his back, below the horrible grin, were two deeper cuts, about five inches long.

“Things were hitting me,” he said softly into the sheet. “Metal things.”

He turned over. I took his left arm, where the bandanna had been. The wound was still infected, a long red line like thick-twisted licorice. Inez had taken the bullet out from the swollen part near his elbow, where the skin had crusted over. I poured a few drops of rum there. Victor whispered, “Man, I held my hand up like a Supreme. Like, ‘Stop in the Name of Love’!” Then he closed his eyes. “And he shot me anyway.”

I dabbed more rum on the bullet wound, and then started looking in the cabinets for bandages. When I turned back to the bed, he was reaching with his good hand deep into his pocket. He pulled out a bullet, and a bracelet, and put them into my hand.

The bullet was small and heavy. Dull gold. On the butt, the word Super imposed over an X.

The bracelet was dull and gold, too. A heavy cuff, inlaid along the center with five large rubies. Old rubies, dark red as claret, not the bright created jewels you find in stores now. These rubies had come from somewhere far away, on a ship.

“Tuition,” he whispered.

“How are you not my child?” I said.

“I want to be that dude wandering around the library with a beat-up old briefcase, workin on my third Ph.D.”

“I had a present for you. Messenger bag. Leather. Soft as butter, from Zurich.” I looked up at the sky in the open galley door. “It’s in the Gulf now. With my car. And our laptops.” That sounded so selfish. “And everything Aunt Monie owned.”

“That dude’s pissed about his wife’s car, huh?” he said, lifting his chin toward Emile.

“Nobody’s pissed about a car right now. And it’s his second wife’s sister.” Then I said, “We’re only alive because of Emile. And my papa, and the other guys.”

“ ‘Out here in the fields,’ ” he sang softly, eyes closed.

“Those bandannas saved you,” I said. Claudine’s bandanna, and Michelle’s.

“Maybe.”

“Your father was watching you.”

“From the ocean? Yeah. Right.”

Emile came downstairs again. He sat on the other bed.

I said, “Come on, Victor. It’s amazing that you lived. Your maman was here all the time, too. She made you come down here to look for the bracelet. If not, you’d be in New Orleans. It might be worse there.”

“Worse than here?”

Emile said, “On the radio, they said it’s bad.”

“Well, I’d rather have her alive and—”

I grabbed his face. Made him look at me. “Cooking elaborate meals for you? Taking you to the library? Who put you up into that tree?”

“Some dude.”

“What?” Emile said. “The other guy you talking about when we found you?”

“Some dude was up in the tree. I had dug up this metal box next to the grave. There was a circle carved into the side of her—her little house.”

“Crypt.”

“Yeah. Aunt Almoinette told my mama about some circle that meant a bracelet. There was only one crypt—wait, tomb, right? There were a lot of old wooden crosses and little graves. But I found the circle, so I dug right there, and I found a box. Inside the box was another box, and the bracelet was inside. With some kinda stuffing. Like moss. And it was already getting dark, so I sat there on top of the—tomb.”

“Where was the Thunderbird?”

“I wrecked it in a ditch. That first night. I was trying to find the cemetery and I went off the road. I slept all day in the car.” He put his arm over his eyes. “I was layin on her tomb. I figured she wouldn’t be mad. It was hot as hell.”

He was so thin that his cheekbones were right there, sharp under the scratched skin. “I fell asleep, and then the wind came up, and the water. It wasn’t even like a tidal wave, like in the movies. It just, like, came up outta the earth. Like—bad magic. It got up to her name, and I heard a noise, and this dude was in the big old tree. He was, like, waving at me to come up. I jumped into the water, and it was up to my chest, and the wind was trying to kill me. I climbed up on the trunk and there was a hole for my foot, and then a branch. Like the tree in your yard.”

The three sycamore leaves on my table at home. Big as hands.

“I didn’t look up till I got a branch, and he was up there. He waved for me to come up higher. Then big-time wind. I had the belt. And the bandannas.”

“Saint Joseph,” Emile said. “He likes oak trees. My grandmère told me about him. He saved her cousin during Camille.”

“What did the guy look like?” I said.

Victor said slowly, “It was dark. But he whistled for a while. He sounded really far away. And then he musta fell.”

“Or flew.” Emile nodded.

He rolled his eyes. “You mean some angel? You believe in that stuff?”

I opened the box of bandages. Emile turned on the battery-powered CD player. Some old song came on. “Maybe it was some guy loved your moms and never could have her. Maybe it was some guy loved Marie-Therese.” I put the first bandage on his arm, and then looked again at his back. The burn scars, the cuts, the scapula just under the skin. “Maybe it was your imagination.”

I dabbed rum once more on the two deep cuts, and lightly touched the pink rosettes of burn on his shoulder blade—long healed. “You can see the palm tree sparkler in my courtyard, too,” I said, to the side of his neck. “It’s never as bright, though.” His head dropped to his chest, and I ran my hand over the faint soft down of hair growing back.

“Cool,” he whispered, and then he lay with his face against the wall.

When I went back up to the deck, I saw pecan trees lying drowned, satsumas’ top leaves barely showing, but the biggest oaks were implacable, strung with marsh grass and old Mardi Gras beads and tangles of cloth. The music drifted over us. We are people of the mighty—mighty people of the sun. My brothers used to play that song in the barn.

Emile was heating beans on the gas stove. He said, “Them kids hate the old stuff we listen to. They always telling me turn it off.”

I called back, “Not Victor. The Dread Prince. He’ll give anything a chance.”

He was below us. Maybe he was listening.

Emile said, “Look like a knucklehead.”

“He’s my knucklehead now.” In the nearest oak, I could see animals huddled inside the branches, their eyes glittering like black sequins, and in the distance I could hear faint laughter, and I truly didn’t know who had saved him.