Chapter 7: The Levee

He drove me to the river instead of home.

I didn't ask why, and he didn't offer.

We parked at the foot of the levee in Chalmette, where the old shipping lights burned orange down the bank, and walked up the steps in the dark.

At the top the Mississippi lay wide and slow below us, with a tanker moving down the channel.

Gaspard stopped at the rail and looked at it the way other men looked at their wives.

"That's the Aegean Pride," he said. "Eight hundred feet. I took her up in November."

"You can tell by looking?"

"I can tell by the sound of her."

I stood beside him with the lace in my coat pocket and my hand wrapped around it.

My knees had started to shake about ten minutes after the Monteleone, and they had not stopped.

"You were something in there," he said.

"I was scared to death."

"I know. I held your elbow at the door, and it was jumping."

"Then why did you let me go up alone?"

"Because it was yours to do."

He said it plainly, to the river.

I had been waiting six years for someone to say that to me, and I had never once pictured it in a levee wind.

"Gas," I said.

He turned his head.

Nobody had called him that since I was nineteen.

"You said you'd say I told you so once," I said, "and I could throw something."

"I did."

"You haven't."

"No."

"Why not?"

He looked down at his hands on the rail.

"Because I'd rather have been wrong," he said.

The wind pushed my hair across my mouth.

A small, dangerous heat was gathering low in my body.

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