Black Bayou: Chapter I
Power walking through the South Louisiana night was like wading up to his neck in viscous tepid water. Sweat streamed from Allan Guidry’s swinging hands complete the sensation as he strode through the steaming twilight. “The sweatshirt,” Allan thought. “Th’ cloth. It too thick. Is too much, yeah.” His pace slowed. His small rented house was still so close he could have seen the television he’d left on playing silently through a side window. He wished he’d worn a t-shirt.
Even though he was a native Louisianan, Allan was suffering in this heat. Record highs had been recorded for the past year, ever since Hurricane’s Katrina and Rita had torn through the Gulf. The winter had been balmy, unusual even for the normally sub-tropical coast. The spring had been dry and too warm. The summer, now at an end, had begun brutally and had remained so. As Allan slowed to a stroll he absently thought that it was late September, and well past time for Mother Nature to deliver a few daily hours of milder temperature.
Ever since his wife had gone to stay with her sister he had been walking at night. A stout man, he tended toward round with each passing year. Almana had been unhappy for months; ever since he’d started working at the shipping warehouse at the port. The pay was good, especially for someone not trained in aspect of the region’s higher paying oil field industry. The warehouse job itself, in fact, was an ancillary company of an offshore diving firm that paid wages so astronomical to its deep sea welders that even the trickle-down pay for a worker like Allan seemed a fortune.
But the pay was hard earned. Allan’s job consisted of helping two other men unload supplies from a never-ending caravan of trucks and vans, then assembling them into packages within larger containers, and transferring the unending stream of material out to waiting boats bound for offshore delivery. The hours were long, 12-16 hours, and the days were scheduled around the offshore crews. 14 days on and 7 days on-call was the typical schedule, meaning the majority of Allan’s waking hours were spent moving painfully through the gloom of a sweltering metal warehouse.
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