Chapter 2 #2
"What do you think we have?"
"I don't know. Boats."
"Torren, there's a Costco in Metairie."
"There is not."
"There is a Costco in Metairie and it is the busiest Costco I have ever been inside and there is a man out front selling boudin out of a cooler in the parking lot, in defiance of that Costco, and nobody has ever stopped him."
Torren considered this. "So it's both."
"It's both. Everything down there is both. That's the whole state in one sentence and I want you to hold on to it, because you're going to need it around Thursday."
The one who worried me was Amos, because Amos is sixty-one years old and has lived in the desert since 1984, and there is a specific thing that happens to a desert man's body when you put it in Louisiana in June, and it's not a joke, it's a medical event with a joke around the outside of it.
"You drink water," I told him.
"I drink water."
"You drink coffee and you call it water."
"Coffee's mostly water."
"Amos."
"Bishop, I have been hot before."
"You have been dry before," I said. "You have never once been hot. You don't know what hot is. Hot is when you sweat and it doesn't go anywhere. Hot is when your sweat just — stays. Sits on you. Like a coat you can't take off."
Amos considered this for a long moment.
"That's disgusting," he said.
"Yes."
"Why do people live there?"
"The food."
"Better be some food," he said.
We rolled out at four in the morning to get the desert stretch done before the sun really committed.
Twelve bikes and one truck and Ghost riding in the truck with his head out the window like a dignitary, because Ghost is a dog who has decided he's on the payroll and nobody has been able to prove otherwise.
Marisol found me at the last light in Cerro Vista, engine idling, and leaned over.
"I pulled the parish records," she said.
"I didn't ask you to."
"You didn't ask me to do Nevada either and I found the mine." The light was still red. She has a way of using a red light like an office. "Thibodeaux. There's forty of you in Jefferson Parish."
"Sounds low."
"There were four hundred in 1910." She looked at me. "You went from four hundred to forty in a hundred years and none of you left. That's not migration, Bishop. That's attrition."
The light went green.
"Ride," I said.
"I'm just telling you what the paper says."
"I know what the paper says. I lived in the paper."
I rode point, which is my job, but for the first four hundred miles I wasn't really navigating. I was doing something else.
I was building a list.
Everybody I'd have to see. My aunt Ines, who would feed me and then say one devastating sentence at the door.
Adrien, who would want money. The people who'd been at my father's sentencing and had made a point of being visible.
The names I'd spent fifteen years not saying, that were about to come up out of my mouth like they'd been idling in there the whole time.
And under all of it, low, like a bad bearing you can only hear at certain speeds:
a tin box with a pelican on it.
We stopped in Ozona for fuel and Ghost got out to conduct an inspection of the pumps, which he does at every stop, thoroughly, like a man with a clipboard.
A kid at the register looked out the window at twelve bikes and a truck and said, "Y'all a gang?"
"We're a salvage company," Reyes said.
"That's what a gang would say."
"That's what a salvage company would say. That's the problem with the sentence."
The kid thought about it. "You got a website?"
"We got a website."
"That's disappointing," the kid said.
Reyes came out genuinely wounded. "He's disappointed we have a website."
"He's sixteen."
"I'm forty-one and I have a 401(k) and he made me feel bad about it in eleven seconds."
There's a thing that happens when you go back somewhere after long enough, and it happened to me around hour eleven.
Your accent comes back before you do.
I stopped in a place outside Sonora for a cup of coffee and I said "thank you, ma'am" to a woman and heard my own vowels come out of my mouth wearing clothes I hadn't put on them in a decade and a half. Fifteen years of flattening it out for Arizona, gone, in one sentence, over a coffee.
I stood in that parking lot and said a few words out loud to myself like a crazy person just to hear which ones had come back.
Bayou. Came back.
Barataria. Came back with a running start.
Thibodeaux I said last, and it came out the way my uncle said it, and I had to put the coffee down on the seat and stand there for a minute.
Somewhere past Junction, Texas, the country started to change. Not much. Just enough. The green got a little more serious about itself. The air came in through my collar warmer than it went out.
Amos pulled up alongside me at a gas stop in Schulenburg, took his helmet off, and stood there for about eight seconds.
"Bishop."
"Yeah."
"What is happening to the air."
"That's Louisiana," I said. "That's Louisiana from four hundred miles away, reaching out to say hello."
"It's touching me."
"It's going to get worse."
"How much worse."
"You know how it feels when you open a dishwasher too early?"
Amos put his helmet back on without another word and rode the next ninety miles like a man fleeing a diagnosis.
We stopped in Beaumont for the night, which Rene would have found hilarious, and which I did not choose and would not have chosen and which happened because it was where the motel was.
Amos stood in the lot at nine at night, still sweating, and said, "It's dark and it's still doing it."
"It doesn't stop at night."
"When does it stop?"
"November."
"Bishop."
"Late November."
He went inside and I heard the window unit in his room come on and then, forty seconds later, heard him say something to it that I won't write down.
We crossed the Sabine at dusk the next day. I felt it go under me. I've crossed a thousand rivers and I felt this one go under me like a hand under a mattress.
And I thought: Come back on time.
Fifteen years, one week, and four days.
We'd see what he called on time.