After breakfast, he gave Angela a shooting lesson. He started her out firing one of the AK-47s at a big cypress knee perhaps twenty yards away. Gradually she worked up to a smaller knee at fifty yards. By the time she had shot a hundred rounds, she was hitting most of the targets. He told her for the time being semiautomatic would be fine. He did not like to contemplate the idea of her panicking with the selector switch on automatic. Now anyone who planned on causing them trouble would have to deal with two instead of one. She would no longer be all bluff. He did wonder if she could actually shoot someone.
“You have to use that rifle, you just think about that bartender,” he said.
“I will,” she said. “I won’t let you down.”
“I don’t want to have to shoot another person. But sometimes there’s no choice.”
“I don’t want to die.”
“Me neither.”
She chambered a round and then worked the bolt to eject the round from the chamber. She dropped the magazine and then reinserted it and chambered a fresh round.
“See, I could do it blindfolded,” she said.
“You’re ready,” he said.
“Thanks.”
He hoped she was ready. He hoped he was never going to have to find out if she was.
After he took his position in the bow, Angela maneuvered the boat out of the swamp and into the flooded creek. They had traveled a mile or so when they came around a bend and saw a barge moored on the slack-water side of the creek. It had a house built on it. Someone had given the house a fresh coat of white paint. It shimmered before his eyes in the sunlight, a stark contrast against the muddy water of the creek and the rusted metal of the barge. A couple, dressed in white bathrobes, were standing at one end of the barge with coffee cups in their hands. First the woman and then the man waved. He waved back. The couple were all smiles. They looked relaxed and peaceful.
“Go in slow,” he told Angela.
He settled the Saiga into a comfortable position. As far as he could see, they were not armed. When they got closer, he stood up and slung the shotgun over his shoulder to appear less threatening. Angela steered the airboat up to the side of the barge and put the engine in neutral.
“You the ones doing all the shooting?” the man asked.
“That was us,” Stephen said.
“Any trouble?” the woman asked.
They were tall and blond. The woman had long straight hair that fell down her back. The man’s hair was long and curly. They were two of the most beautiful people he had ever seen.
“No trouble,” he said. “Target practice.”
“Target practice?” the man said.
“She’s learning to shoot,” he said.
“He says I’m already a good shot,” Angela said.
“I imagine you are,” the woman said.
He wondered if they knew what had been going on in the flooded countryside around them. Surely they had spotted bodies floating down the creek. He wondered if they had a radio. If they had weapons, they were keeping them out of sight.
“Come aboard,” the man said.
They climbed aboard. He took the Saiga with him, and Angela her AK-47.
The man’s name was Fred, and the woman was Holly. They were locals who had been living on the barge for a year. Holly had a teaching degree from LSU, but she had temporarily taken a break from teaching. Fred did some commercial fishing. A johnboat was moored to the barge with a stack of hoop nets in it. A blue kayak was sitting on the deck at the far end of the barge. They had a garden, now underwater, on a strip of high ground between the creek and the swamp. They had a generator and some solar panels set up on one end of the barge. And a cistern for drinking water. They had recently painted the house and replaced the windows broken by their brushes with the hurricanes.
“We’ve decided there aren’t going to be any more hurricanes,” Holly said.
Fred laughed.
“I hope so,” he said. “We’re out of glass.”
Stephen imagined his father would have been pleased with their setup.
“Honey, you can get yourself a shower,” Holly said to Angela.
Angela started to cry. Holly put her arm around her, and they walked off into the house together. Angela still had the rifle slung over her shoulder.
He told Fred how Angela and he came to be on the airboat together. Fred had not heard anything of what was going on in New Orleans or Baton Rouge. There was dry land and access to the highway far upstream, but he cautioned Stephen that it was too dangerous to go up there.
“Bunch of drunks with automatic rifles,” he said. “I watched ’em through field glasses. They never knew I was there.”
“Aren’t you worried they’ll come down here?” Stephen asked.
“Too much fallen timber in the creek. If you go through the swamp, you have to know the way. We’re safe here.”
“I hope so.”
“You can depend on it.”
Fred thought it would be some time before the army started restoring order.
The creek flowed into the Mississippi. They were well north of I-10 and west of I-55. There had been many breaks and overtoppings of the levee, flooding the flat cropland and swamps. They had seen dead bodies of both people and animals in the creek.
“You might could get to Baton Rouge,” he said. “But who knows what you’re gonna find there. We’d be pleased for you to stay with us until the water goes down. The army will be back in here, and people will have to do right.”
Stephen wanted to tell him he was lucky no one had showed up to kill them both and take their water and food. But he said nothing. Fred was a grown man, perhaps thirty or thirty-five years old, and he was just a boy. He would not be eager to listen to a boy’s opinions.
“I’ll stay for a while,” he said. “I don’t know about the girl.”
“You do what you want,” he said. “I know you want to find your mother.”
He did want to find her but not necessarily live with her. He just wanted to make sure she was all right.
Holly and Angela came out on the deck. Angela’s hair was still wet. She was dressed in some of Holly’s clothes.
“I thought she was going to take a shower with that rifle,” Holly said.
“You’re safe here,” Fred said.
Angela looked like she was going to start crying again. He imagined she was thinking of her parents. He supposed he would do the same if he thought too hard about his father. But he also believed he had done all his crying.
He went off to take a shower, leaving the Saiga on deck. He showered with his clothes on before stripping them off and wringing them out. None of Fred’s clothes were going to fit him, all of them way too big. He lingered in the shower, feeling the pleasant drum of the hot water against his skin. He began to think of how his father would have been proud of the way he had conducted himself. Even his father could not have prevented Byron from killing the family. Then he found himself thinking of his father lying there on the sand, and he began to weep. He sat down on the floor of the shower and sobbed, his whole body shaking.
Then he tried to focus not on his father’s body on the sand but on the grave, colorful fish darting about over it. He seized on this image. Gradually, as he concentrated, he grew calm.
He put on a bathrobe and went back out onto the deck. As he walked through the house, he took a close look at it for the first time. One whole wall was mostly windows, stained-glass ones scattered among the clear panes. There were skylights in the ceiling. It had the feeling of being outside. He liked it that they had found a way to live amid all this chaos in such a beautiful space. But he knew just one random passing of a boat with the wrong people in it, and all of this would disappear.
He went out onto the deck and found them having wine. They offered him some, but he said no. He had had his first glass of wine last Thanksgiving in New Orleans. It was something he did not care for. Then Holly produced a bottle of Coke and ice. They had ice. It had been a long time since he had had a Coke with ice.
As he sat there drinking the Coke slowly and watching the older people drink their wine, he realized that he was quickly slipping back into his status as a boy. He put his bare foot on the Saiga resting at his feet. And he knew that he was never going to be that boy again, not since the night his father was killed.
At dinner that night he did drink some wine. They had dinner with candles. First it was turtle soup and then wild boar Fred had shot.
“Better than anything you could buy at the store,” Fred said.
They all agreed it was.
The table was covered with a white tablecloth. They had cloth napkins. There were several forks and knives for him to choose from. He was glad his mother had taught him what to do. No one mentioned the flooded countryside around them where dead bodies floated. Instead Fred told funny stories about catching big catfish. Stephen did not know if he believed the story about the catfish that towed the johnboat down the creek and wrecked it on a cypress knee. But it was funny, and he laughed along with the others.
That night he was awakened by the sound of music. It was Bach. His mother played it on the piano. He supposed for a moment it was a recording, but then it started and stopped again. He slipped out of his room and followed the music. Holly, dressed in her white bathrobe, was sitting in a dining-room chair, her back to him, playing a cello. He listened for a long time before he went back to sleep. As he lay in bed, he knew he wanted to leave soon. There was no future for them here.
The weather was hot but calm, the sky blue and filled with harmless-looking white clouds. They learned from the radio no hurricanes were wandering about in the Gulf. New Orleans had been totally evacuated, and people had been forbidden to return. Baton Rouge was filled with refugees. For the first time he recalled his mother had friends in Baton Rouge.
He and Fred listened to the radio one night after Angela and Holly had gone to sleep. Without telling Fred, he tried to dial in the mystery station. But for his efforts he was rewarded only with static.
“Nothing much up at that end of the dial,” Fred said.
So he tried the Texas station, but that failed to come in too.
“Whose idea was it to live on this barge?” he asked.
“Holly’s,” Fred said. “We were thinking about building a cabin on a patch of high ground further down the creek. Then she heard about the barge for sale.”
Stephen wondered if he could persuade Angela to live with him in his father’s house. It could be that the water would go down and the march of the hurricanes cease and the sea rise no further. He could work on motors, just like his father, in the shop. He wondered if Angela would want to go back to the little town if the water went down. He doubted if she could ever stay in the house where her parents were murdered. She might be willing to come live in his father’s house. But with a boy like him?
They tried the radio a few more times but then gave up and went to bed. But he found himself unable to sleep. He sat on the edge of his bed in the darkness and searched for stations on the radio. The result was the same: nothing but static. He wondered, if he climbed to the top of one of the big poplars on the creek bank, would that be enough to draw in the mystery station or any station at all? Finally he gave up and went to sleep.
Every day he made sure to keep the Saiga close and listen for sounds of gunshots or motors in the creek. But there was nothing. He did not even hear an airplane fly over. At night he slept in a real bed with the Saiga by his side. Angela was sleeping in another room. He wondered if she slept with the AK-47. He had heard Fred and Holly making love. That made him think of his mother and her young men. It also made him think of Angela. He wondered how many lovers she had had. He wondered how it would feel to put his hands on her. Because that was something he had never done with any girl, he found it hard to imagine.
At breakfast one morning, Stephen talked about going to Baton Rouge.
“Why not stay here until the army returns,” Holly said.
“Yes, then it’ll be safe,” Fred said.
He told them what he thought, that they had been lucky so far. One day someone was going to come down the creek and kill them.
“My father thought we were safe,” Angela said.
“But that was in a town,” Fred said. “No one has a reason to come here or even think someone would be living on a barge.”
“We came here,” he said. “If we were some of those people, you’d be dead.”
He imagined Fred and Holly floating facedown in the creek, borne by the steady current toward the Mississippi.
Holly and Fred argued against their leaving for a time but finally gave it up.
Angela wavered about his decision.
“They’ve got plenty of food,” she said.
“Someone can come here at any time and take it,” he said.
“The army could come.”
“Like I said, anybody could come here and take it.”
“You don’t trust the army.”
“Not when folks are hungry.”
She finally agreed that maybe he was right.
When they left one morning, Fred gave Stephen a six-pack of Cokes.
“You’ll have to drink them warm,” he said.
“I don’t care,” he said.
It was not going to be pleasant to return to a diet of rice and beans. But if all went well, they should be in Baton Rouge in a few days.
They headed down the creek. He planned to cross over into the swamp when they got close to the river and then follow the levee down to Baton Rouge. They had traveled two or three miles when he looked back and saw a plume of black smoke against the sky. He told Angela to run the airboat into an eddy next to the bank and cut the engine.
The only sounds were those of the birds. Far off toward the river, he thought he might hear the sound of an airplane. He asked Angela if she heard it, but she said she did not. Angela thought the plume of smoke seemed to be back off toward the pine-covered ridges, not along the creek at all. He wanted to believe that, but he was not so sure.
“Should we go back?” she asked.
“For what?” he said.
He explained that if the smoke was coming from the barge, whoever started the fire might decide to continue on down the creek. They would be better off when they were out of the creek and into the swamp.
Angela lowered her head into her hands and sobbed.
“Those people,” she said.
He knew what she meant. They were so beautiful. Amid all the chaos, all the death and suffering, they moved as if some god had placed a magic spell on them.
“Nothing’s happened to them,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean that I think you’re right. That smoke is more in the direction of the ridges.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do.”
But he was thinking of all those windows shattering: blood on bathrobes, white tablecloths floating in the brown water.
“I’m going to believe you,” she said. “Don’t you be lying to me.”
“When have I done that?” he asked.
She had to admit he had not.
“I’m telling no lies now,” he said. “But we need to get down this creek and into the swamp.”
She started the engine. Before she turned the boat back out into the creek, she looked in the direction of the smoke one more time. It was still thick and black and showed no signs of diminishing. She turned her back to it and concentrated on piloting the boat.
He took up the Saiga, glad talk was now impossible. He was pretty certain they were far enough from the barge so no one could hear the sound of the engine. But he would not relax until they were out of the creek and into the swamp.