Inside, the seats are soft as glycerin, the old leather smelling both sharp and sweet, like the limey mint of a julep. Clipped to the visor is a photo of my mother, young, in Germany, and next to that is the garage door remote, which makes me hear those birds again. I creep out of the garage on idle, and even though I’m just driving around to the front approach, you can feel the thumping pressure of the engine. The SS floats, hood raking, when I touch the gas.
At our front landing, I back up to my mother’s Lincoln so the cars are parked trunk to trunk. She’s loading watercolor paintings into the backseat when I climb out. All her potted flowers have been pulled out onto the porch.
“What am I going to do with these orchids?” she asks me, then realizes I’m in jeans. “Oh, honey, he’s not going to show, is he?”
“Randy’s busy,” I say. “He’s got an important job.”
Mom lifts her eyebrows. “Looks like you’ve picked up the fine art of making excuses for the shortcomings of men. From me, no doubt.”
“Oh, don’t get heavy on me, Mom.”
She throws up her hands, which is twice as bad as rolling your eyes, and we start loading up the Super Sport. As I stack cardboard boxes in the trunk, I realize they’re not filled with china but ordinary junk like cleaning supplies and closet hangers. Then there’s a whole crate of utensils from the kitchen, including a thing of ketchup and mustard.
“Mom, there’ll probably be sauces at Clara’s. I mean, do we really need to take this stuff? It’s not like the ATF is coming here to grill burgers or anything.”
“Would you just pack?” she asks. “Just trust me and pack?”
Berlin comes down and sits on the front steps. His shirt cuffs are unbuttoned, and his hair is dripping wet from the sink, something he does when he has a headache. “I opened all the doors and windows,” he says, then runs his hands through his hair.
“You drive the Lincoln,” she tells me. “Berlin will want to go in the SS, I’m sure.”
There’s a few more boxes standing on the porch, but I can tell Mom has lost her thirst for loading. Without any ceremony, they climb in the Super Sport, Dad sitting shotgun with a flower pot and a painting of a pink flock of roseate spoonbills.
I stick my head in the window, tell Dad to lean the seat back and get some rest.
“It’s no use,” he says. “I won’t sleep again tonight.”
My mother looks like she is going to say something comforting to me because of Randy, and though I know this is how she feels, she only says, “Drive safe. See you at Clara’s.” She puts the car in gear, but every time she even touches the gas pedal, the car leaps forward, tires spinning, sending a shower of gravel onto our porch.
“This car is simply inoperable,” I hear her say, lurching down our shale drive.
When they’re gone, I sit behind the wheel of the ivory Continental and clunk it into gear. Though the sky is clear, the air smells of oak pollen and storm, so that lumbering down the drive, I have the urge to turn on the wipers. Instead, I adjust the rearview mirror, aiming it back at our house, which is black, with a deeper black standing in the open doors and windows, waiting for something big that may or may not come.
I follow our weaving, tree-lined drive, and I know before I hit the parish road that I’m not going to aunt Clara’s just yet. I’m headed to the Black Bayou, to Randy’s oil-recovery vessel.
Flying south a couple miles, I turn onto the Bayou Works road, and across the levee, I can see the silver ship, with its orange rafts and black booms, looking from here like it is parked in a grassy field. A group of oil companies pitched in to buy it in hopes of preventing a Valdez-like spill on the Gulf, but they can’t agree on a name or even a color to paint it. The ship sits silent under coats of galvanized primer, fixed to a mooring it has never left. Pulling up to the fence, I hit the high beams and honk.
Randy comes to the gate wearing boots, a black tee, and khaki pants with black stripes down the sides. There’s a walkie-talkie in his back pocket. He pulls out a ring of keys and starts trying them, one-by-one, in the gate’s padlock.
I hang my fingers in the chain link and look at him.
“They’re serving a search warrant on my house tomorrow.”
Randy pauses, a key about to enter the lock. “Who is?”
“Who? Who do you think? BATF.”
“What for?” he asks.
“It’s a long story. Did you know about it? I mean, are you going to be there?”
“Serving warrants is serious business — there’s site containment, infra red, metal detection teams, void sweeps. They don’t let me near that, and I don’t really hear any news. Who the hell am I? I can’t even pass my entrance test.”
I hold his eyes. I get a feeling from him. I suppose I’ve always felt it, that he has no secrets, that I can believe him. “There went your one excuse for standing me up.”
“Come on,” he says, popping the lock. He shakes open the gate.
There’s a huge concrete dock with a yellow-striped helipad. At the edge of the deck, an anhinga dries its wings under the floodlights.
On the gangway, I stop him. “So tell me why you blew me off.”
“I had to work. I told you I’d probably have to work.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“You don’t get it, do you? I have a job. What if there was a spill? Who’d open the gates? Who’d turn on the deck lights for the helicopters? Someone has to prime the tanks for the recovery crews.”
“You should have called.”
“What would I have said?” he asks. “You only hear what you want, anyway.”
He turns and walks up the stairs. It takes me a moment, but I follow him, climbing behind, up four flights of grating. We enter the bridge, a dark, angled room filled with tall chairs that have shock absorbers and shoulder harnesses. Looking through the windscreen, you can’t see anything. It’s like being up in the Custer, flying out past the oil platforms, where there are no landmarks and the dark of the sky and the dark of the sea are one. This view has the same spookiness as flying in a dream, when you don’t know what’s keeping you afloat or how long it will last.
Randy flips all the equipment on and mans the console’s island, where a Raytheon radar screen warms up and then ticks out a green-and-blue map, showing everything from the Intracoastal towers to the humped blips of the Sabine power station, thirty-five miles away.
Randy explains how radar works, and I listen, as if I didn’t grow up around it.
There is a button-tipped joystick on the console, and Randy turns it on. Somewhere atop the boat a searchlight ignites, and it is like nothing I’ve seen. Through the windscreen, we suddenly see marshlands unfurl toward open water, while cloud banks drag their asses along glades of sawgrass and cane.
“This thing’s made by Boeing,” he says.
The light is bright enough to leave insects stunned and turn mist into steam, so that the beam is like a smoky tube extending to the horizon. Randy hands me a pair of pale yellow binoculars, and I follow as he trains the beam on a skiff, far in the distance. On the small boat, deep in the marsh grass, I make out a man with a police flashlight and a compound bow, poaching alligators in the dark.
“He’s out there every night,” Randy says. “I call Fish and Game, but by the time they get out here, he’s gone. That’s an endangered species, you know.”
He aims the light west, pointing it toward Texas. “There’s the city of Vidor, world Ku Klux Klan headquarters. And here’s Toomey, dog fights, hate crimes, waterway piracy, and nine unsolved murders this year, a per-capita record, even for Louisiana.”