We shook the gar out of the ruined net on the bank and watched it flop and gasp for air and coat its gills with sand. Its teeth could cut a bass in half like a razor slicing through it. My father got behind it, hit it once on the head with a brick, then drove his skinning knife through a soft place between the head and the armored shell, pushing down with both hands until the knife point went through the throat into the sand and blood roared from the gar's mouth and gills. But the gar continued to flop, to twist against the knife and flip sand into the air, until my father crushed its head and its eyes became as suddenly lifeless and cold as black glass. Then he brought the knife straight back along the dorsal fin, and the black-green armor cracked away from the rows of pink meat as cleanly as pecan shell breaking.
It wasn't a good day. The gar wasn't a commercial fish, and we couldn't afford the loss of a net, but my father always put the best light on a situation.
"We cain't sell him, no," he said, "but he gonna be some good garfish balls. You mess with Aldous and Dave, you gonna get fry, you gonna get eat, you better believe, podna."
We cleaned and filleted fish in pans of bloody water until evening, when the mosquitoes started to boil out of the shadows and purple rain clouds gathered on the horizon and lightning flashed far out on the Gulf. We packed the fish in the ice bin, so tomorrow we could take them downriver to sell in Morgan City. I went to sleep in my bunk bed with the wind blowing cool through the window from across the bay, then I woke to a smell that shouldn't have been there. It was thick and gray, as fetid as excrement and sweet at the same time. But we had thrown all the fish guts and heads and piles of stripped mud-cat skins into the current and had washed the deck and all the pans clean. I kept the pillow over my head and tried to push myself deeper into sleep, but I could feel the stench against my face like a rat's breath.
In the first blue light of dawn I went out on the deck, and Annie was leaning against the rail in the mist, dressed like a Cajun fisher girl in sun-faded jeans, tennis shoes without socks, a khaki shirt with the arms cut-off. The smell was everywhere. She pointed toward my father, who waited for me on the sandbar, a shovel over his shoulder.
Don't be afraid, she said. Go with Al.
I don't want to this time.
You mustn't worry about those things. We both love you.
You're about to go away from me, aren't you?
Her face was kind, and her eyes moved over my face as though she were an older sister looking at her younger brother.
I followed my father into the marsh, our tennis shoes splashing through the sloughs, the wet willow branches swinging back into our faces. The early sun was big and hot on the edge of the flooded woods, and the cypress trees looked black against the red light. The water was dead and covered with green algae; cottonmouth moccasins were coiled on the low branches of the trees. The smell became stronger, so that I had to hold my hand to my face and breathe through my mouth. We came up out of a slough onto a hard-packed sandbar, and lying stretched on the sand, huge divots cut out of its back by a boat propeller, was the rotting carcass of the biggest bull alligator I had ever seen. His tail drag and the sharp imprints of his feet trailed off the sandbar back through the trees. I could see the open water where he had probably been hit by a commercial boat of some kind, or the screw on a seismograph drill barge, and had beached himself and begun his crawl to this spot, where he had died on high ground and turkey buzzards and snakes had begun feeding on his wounds.
"Mats, that stink," my father said, and waved at the air in front of his face.
"You start dig a hole." He handed me the shovel, then he grinned as he sometimes did when he was about to play a joke on me.
"Where you gonna dig a hole, you?"
I didn't understand him. I started to scrape in the dry sand with the shovel's tip.
"Que t'as pres faire cher? Tu veux travailler comme un neg?" he said, and laughed. ("What are you doing, dear one? You want to work like a Negro?") I pressed down again into the hard sand, felt it grate and slide over the blade. He took the shovel out of my hand, walked to a dip in the sandbar where the water from two sloughs had washed a small channel, and dug deeply and easily into the wet sand and flung it out into the sunlight, his face grinning at me.
"You do it where it soft," he said.
"Ain't you learned nothing from your old man?"
I woke to a clatter of birds in the trees outside the window, my head thick with afternoon sleep. I rinsed my face in the bathroom sink and looked at the tight purple lump that ran down through my hairline. The dream made no sense to me, other than the facts that I missed my father and Annie, that I feared death, and that I conducted a foolish quarrel with the irrevocable nature of time.
Al, what are you trying to tell me? I thought, as the water streamed off my face in the mirror's silent reflection.
Shortly before three o'clock I walked down to the school and waited for Alafair by the side of the playground. A few minutes later the doors of the building were flung open, and she came running across the small softball diamond with a group of other children, her Donald Duck lunch box clanging against her thigh. Her elastic-wasted jeans were grimed at the knees, and there were dirt and sweat rings around her neck.
"What did you guys do today at recess? Mud wrestling?" I said.
"Miss Regan let us play dodge ball It's fun. I got hit in the seat. You ever play it, Dave?"
"Sure."
"What happened to your head?"
"I hit it when I was working on the truck. Not too smart, huh?"
Her eyes looked at me curiously, then she put her hand in mine and swung her weight on my arm.
"I forgot," she said.
"Miss Regan said to give you this note. She said she'd call you anyway."
"About what?"
"About the man."
"What man?"
"The one at the school yard."
I unfolded the piece of paper she had taken from her lunch box. It read: Mr. Robicheaux, I want to have a serious talk with you. Call me at my home this 'afternoon Tess Regan. Under her name she had written her phone number.
"Who's this man you're talking about, Alafair?" I said.
A bunch of children ran past us on the sidewalk. The sunlight through the maple trees made patterns on their bodies.
"The other kids said he was in a car on the corner. I didn't see him. They said he was looking through, what you call those things, Dave? You got some in the truck."
"Field glasses?"
"They called them something else."
"Binoculars?"
"Yeah." She grinned up at me when she recognized the word.
"Who was he looking at, Alafair?"
"I don't know."
"Why does Miss Regan want to talk to me about it?"
"I don't know."
"What time was this guy out there?"
"At recess."
"What time is recess?"
"First- through third-graders go at ten-thirty."
"Is that when he was out there?"
"I don't know, Dave. Why you look so worried?"
I took a breath, released her hand, and brushed my palm on the top of her head.
"Sometimes strange men, men who are not good people, try to bother little children around schools or at playgrounds. There're not many people like this, but you have to be careful about them. Don't talk with them, don't let them give you anything, don't let them buy you anything. And no matter what they say, never go anywhere with them, never get in a car with them. Do you understand that, little guy?"
"Sure, Dave."
"That kind of man will tell you that he's a friend of your father's. That your father sent him to pick you up, maybe. But if he was a friend, you'd recognize him, right?"
"They hurt children?"
"Some of them do. Some of them are very bad people."