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Show RIVER We got our parts and Durrell drove me back to the levee. "You got a buddy on that raft?" he asked me. "Uh, my girlfriend is back there." "Well, there ain't nothing wrong with that," he said with a grin. Skeet and the sheriff followed me over the levee and through the weeds to take a look at the raft. They even let us take a picture of them. I still couldn't get the starter to work right. I put the new spring in backwards, so we dropped down the river a ways to a ferry landing. I figured that if you wait around long enough at a ferry on the Mississippi in Louisiana, somebody who knew something about outboard motors would eventually come along, and it worked. We met an old Cajun named Claude Condell who put the starter together right and found a broken gas line that he replaced. All he'd take for payment was a dollar for the gas line. Very slowly we fought our way down the ditched, desolate river. The weather turned absolutely shitty, gray, wet, and cold. The ghostlike freighters played hell with the raft, slipping up the river as quickly and quietly as alligators. We ran out of gas above a nitrate dock and almost ended the trip on the stained bows of a Greek merchantman. The weather bore down hard on us: two days below Baton Rouge a great cold wind sprang up, stirring the narrow, deep river into a rage and freezing us beneath bitter skies. We crawled around Brilliant Point and out of Rich Bend into thirty miles of straight, east-flowing river that set us into the teeth of the wind. We'd fight the wind and the pounding river till the raft seemed ready to shake apart, and come nightfall we'd lay up behind a ferry or what limited shelter we could find. -102- |