“Yeah. I guess.”
Nick untied the boat and then carried his gear into the cockpit. He loaded the larger of the two pistols, put it in the holster, and clipped the holster to his belt in the back. He practiced drawing it a few times, but he saw Jason looking at him, and he quit. It’s not like he was going to turn himself into a gunfighter overnight.
He worked the action of the rifle, dry-fired it a few times, then loaded it and the shotgun, leaving the chamber empty in each instance so that the gun couldn’t fire accidentally. He left the long guns on one of the bench seats that ran the length of the cockpit, then moved forward to sit in the bucket seat next to Jason.
“Have you ever used firearms?” he asked.
“No. My parents just didn’t—don’t—have them around. Muppet and I were going to go shooting over the levee when the water dropped but—” Jason swallowed. “We never got to it.”
“In that case, I don’t want you touching the guns.”
“No problem.”
“I really don’t want you touching them.”
“Okay!” Jason said, his voice loud over the roaring engine.
“I need to confirm this, Jason. Because your record at following orders isn’t very good.” Jason glared at him, his cheeks reddening. “I won’t touch your guns, okay?” Nick took a long breath. Maybe his insistence on this would just make Jason mess with the guns out of sheer contrariness, but he thought he needed to make his point. “Maybe I can teach you how to use them when we get the time,” he said, conciliating, “but until then I want you to take this very seriously.” Jason nodded again. Then he turned to Nick and said, “What are we doing, exactly?” he said. “Are you trying to get into a fight or something?”
Nick looked at Jason in surprise. He had been so absorbed in his own grim thoughts that he hadn’t considered how this would look to the boy. Finding his in-laws murdered, loading the boat with guns, then heading down the bayou, all without a word of explanation.
Jason probably thought that Nick was involved in some kind of gang war and bent on vengeance.
“No,” Nick said. “No, not at all. I’m trying to get to Arlette and her family, and protect them from the robbers who killed her relations. Those robbers might still be around, and I don’t want Arlette to be without help.”
A look of relief crossed Jason’s face. “Okay,” he said. “I understand.”
“Good.”
Jason looked ahead and steered the boat around a tangle of cypress trees that the quake had cut off just above water level.
“Faster,” Nick said, and Jason looked surprised again. “We need to go faster.” They found the place where Toussaint Bayou opened out onto Lopez Bayou, then instead of turning left, to retrace their path, they turned right, following Arlette’s map. Nick kept wanting Jason to go faster. Jason didn’t mind: he liked standing in the cockpit as he boomed up the quiet bayou, scattering ducks and herons and sending the boat’s big wake surging out among the trees.
Nick was nervous and had a hard time sitting still in the passenger seat, and eventually he took over the driving.
Jason went to the back of the boat and ate his lunch out of cans, and looked thoughtfully at the guns that sat on the bench seat opposite his own.
In the movies, he thought, there were a number of things that happened during every big disaster. And one of these involved some bad people with Really Great Hair, who, the very first thing broke into biker stores and stole all the cool leathers. And then they got some guns and some wheels and went on a general rampage until the good guy chilled them out in the last reel.
Something like those bad guys had happened to Nick’s in-laws. The cinematic prophecy seemed to be coming true.
Jason looked at the guns and wondered if Nick was the hero who was destined to destroy the bad guys at the end.
No, he thought. He knew who he and Nick would play in the movies. We’re the bad guys’ victims, he thought. The people the bad guys kill on their way to dying at the hands of the hero. That’s who they were. Corpses.
He turned away from the guns and looked ahead, at the still, silent bayou ahead. He didn’t want to think about the guns anymore.
It proved fairly easy going up the bayou. The obstructions had been cleared away by chainsaws and axes, presumably by the David party, and for the most part this left a channel wide enough to take their craft upstream. On occasion Jason was called to shove some piece of wreckage out of the way, and Nick tapped the steering wheel impatiently until the obstacle was clear and he could gun the engine ahead.
By late afternoon they came to a two-lane road that dead-ended on the bayou. This, Nick said, was where the David party had turned south, and turned south himself.
The road was narrower than the bayou, and choked with debris. Some of the debris had been cleared by the Davids, but some had just been shoved aside and drifted back, and other debris had floated into place since the Davids had passed. The road, though flooded, was elevated several feet above the surrounding country, and Nick tilted the Evinrude forward to keep the propeller from striking the roadway.
It was hard going. Jason stood on the foredeck and tried to clear away the obstructions with his pole. Within minutes he was bathed in sweat. Nick detoured off the roadway and around the obstructions where possible, but often this just led them into dead ends, or areas where the trees were too thick to permit passage.
When Jason was exhausted, Nick took his place on the foredeck, and Jason steered. The sun was far to the west when they came to a debris field, hundreds of tree trunks piled over and across each other into a huge lumber raft that stretched as far as they could see. It looked as if a thousand beavers had labored on the dam for a thousand years. There was no way through the mass, and no indication that anyone had ever tried.
Nick looked at the obstruction in despair. “Did they go around?” he asked. “Or did they turn back?” Jason looked left and right in the fading light. “Let’s see if we can go around.” They tried, but every attempt to leave the roadway was blocked, either by falling or standing timber. It didn’t look as if anyone had tried to get through.
“Where did they go?” Nick moaned. Shiny cables stood out on his neck, and sweat made big blotches on his T-shirt. “Where did they go?”
“They had to have turned back from here,” Jason said. “They probably went farther up Lopez Bayou, then tried to cut south on another road.”
Nick bit his lip. “If they’d gone the other way, to the White, we’d have run into them,” he said.
“Right.”
“Turn the boat around, then.” Anger entered his voice. “We’ve wasted the whole day.”
“It’s getting dark, Nick.”
“Just go!”
The return journey began. Jason turned the boat around, banging into the trailing bass boat in the narrow passage, and crept forward toward the first obstacles. Nick stabbed furiously with his pole at the floating debris until it was completely dark and he couldn’t see it anymore.
“Flashlight!” he called. “Give me a flashlight!”
Jason passed forward one of the two flashlights. They kept going down the roadway, while Nick juggled his pole and the flashlight. Jason could hear Nick cursing under his breath as the bow ground against debris. Finally Jason saw Nick’s shoulders sag in the fading light of the flash.
“God damn it!” Nick jabbed at a floating tree trunk as if it were an enemy to be impaled on his spear.