His eyes dropped and they listened to a train heading west. “Family name.”
“Who are your people?” She knew she sounded like all the other Cajuns who thought the sun rose and set on their bayou. Eureka didn’t think that, never had, but there was something about this kid that made him seem like he’d appeared spontaneously next to the sugarcane. Part of Eureka found that exciting. Another part—the part that wanted her car repaired—was uneasy.
Car wheels on the gravel road behind them made Eureka turn her head. When she saw the rusty tow truck jerk to a stop behind her, she groaned. Through the bug-splattered windshield, she could barely see the driver, but all of New Iberia recognized Cory Statutory’s truck.
Not everyone called him that—just females aged thirteen to fifty-five, almost all of whom had contended with his roving eyes or hands. When he wasn’t towing cars or hitting on underage or married women, Cory Marais was in the swamp: fishing, crabbing, tossing beer cans, absorbing the marsh’s reptilian putrescence into the crags of his sunburnt skin. He wasn’t old but he looked ancient, which made his advances even creepier.
“Y’all need a tow?” He leaned an elbow out the window of his cloud-gray truck. A wad of chewing tobacco sat lodged in his cheek.
Eureka hadn’t thought to call a tow truck—probably because Cory’s was the only one in town. She didn’t understand how he’d found them. They were on a side road hardly anybody drove on. “Are you clairvoyant or something?”
“Eureka Boudreaux and her five-dollar words.” Cory glanced at Ander, as if to bond over Eureka’s strangeness. But when he looked more closely at the boy, Cory’s eyes narrowed, his alliance shifted. “You from outta town?” he asked Ander. “This kid hit you, Reka?”
“It was an accident.” Eureka found herself defending Ander. It bothered her when locals thought it was Cajuns versus the World.
“That’s not what ol’ Big Jean said. He’s the one said you needed a tow.”
Eureka nodded, her question answered. Big Jean was a sweet old widower who lived in the cabin about a quarter mile off this road. He used to have a hellish wife named Rita, but she’d died about a decade ago and Big Jean didn’t get around too well on his own. When Hurricane Rita bulldozed the bayou, Big Jean’s house was hit hard. Eureka had heard his hoarse voice say, twenty times, “The only thing meaner than the first Rita was the second Rita. One stayed in my house, the other tore it down.”
The town helped him rebuild his cabin, and even though it was miles from shore, he insisted on propping the whole thing up on twenty-foot stilts, muttering, “Lesson learned, lesson learned.”
Diana used to bring Big Jean sugar-free pies. Eureka would go with her, play his old Dixieland jazz 78s on his floor console hi-fi. They’d always liked each other.
The last time she’d seen him, his diabetes had been bad, and she knew he didn’t make it down those stairs often. He had a grown son who brought his groceries, but most of the time, Big Jean stayed perched on his porch, in his wheelchair, watching swamp birds through his binoculars. He must have seen the accident and called for the tow. She glanced up at his elevated cabin and saw his robed arm waving.
“Thanks, Big Jean!” she shouted.
Cory was out of his truck and hitching Magda up to his tow. He wore baggy, dark-wash Wranglers and an LSU basketball jersey. His arms were freckled and huge. She watched the way he connected the cables to her undercarriage. She resented his low whistle when he surveyed the damage to Magda’s rear.