Leon's wife, Cecile, came down the dock in her rain jacket at five past three and found him casting off the lines he'd spent all morning doubling.
"Leon Fontenot," she said. "You are seventy-four years old."
"I know how old I am, chère."
"Then you know better."
"I do know better," Leon said. "That's why I'm going." He threw the bow line onto the dock. "Those boys are six miles south of Horn Island and they can't hear me. They're out of range of the harbor. Either their radios are down or they're too busy to answer, and neither one is good. The Coast Guard's going to have twenty boats calling them in the next hour. I can get close enough to hear those boys, and I know where to put them."
Cecile looked at the black wall of cloud on the southern horizon. Then she looked at him for a long moment.
"You call me every fifteen minutes," she said. "Every fifteen. Or I'm coming out there myself in a bass boat."
"Yes, ma'am."
The Miss Lena was fifty-two feet of steel and diesel, built in 1988, and she'd been through worse than this. Leon ran her out past the jetty at full throttle, into the long south swell, with spray coming over the bow.
He didn't head for the open Gulf. He headed for Horn Island.
Horn Island was a long, thin barrier island, twelve miles of sand and slash pine running east and west off the coast. On the north side of it, the side facing the mainland, there was a deep bend in the shore that the old shrimpers called the Hook. His daddy had shown it to him in 1966.
When a storm came up out of the south, the whole island stood between that bend and the open Gulf, like a wall. The water in the Hook stayed half calm when it was boiling everywhere else.
Every old captain in Pelican Bayou knew about the Hook. Leon wasn't sure any of the young ones did.
At 3:40, halfway to the island, his radio crackled.
"Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is the Second Wind." It was Cole, and he wasn't laughing now. "We're dead in the water five miles south of Horn Island. Our net's wrapped in the wheel. We can't clear it. Lucky Seven's standing by, but he can't get a line on us in these seas. Waves are six feet and building. We need help."
Leon grabbed the handset.
"Second Wind, this is the Miss Lena. I hear you, son. I'm forty minutes from you. Hang on."
There was a pause.
"Mr. Leon?" Cole said. His voice cracked. "Mr. Leon, is that you?"
"It's me. Danny, you there?"
"I'm here, Uncle Leon." Danny's voice was tight. "I tried to tow him. Line parted twice. My boat's too light. She's getting thrown around."
"You did right," Leon said. "Now listen to me, both of you."
He called the Coast Guard first, on sixteen, and told them who he was and where he was going and what he had. They were glad to hear it. They had a boat coming, but it was forty minutes out and they had three other calls along the coast.
Then he told the boys exactly what to do.
He came up on them at 4:20, in rain so hard he could barely see his own bow.
The seas were eight feet now, steep and gray and breaking at the tops. The Second Wind was rolling broadside to them, helpless, her outriggers swinging. The Lucky Seven was standing off a hundred yards, keeping her bow into the waves the way Leon had told Danny to.
Leon brought the Miss Lena around upwind of the Second Wind and let the seas push him down toward her. Close.
Closer. Cole and his cousin were on the bow with life jackets on, just as Leon had told them.
"Now," Leon said.
His heaving line, with a monkey's fist on the end that his daddy had tied in 1971, went sailing across the gap. Cole caught it on the first try and hauled the heavy towline across behind it.
"Make it fast to your bow bitt," Leon called on the radio. "Then get inside the wheelhouse and stay there."
He didn't try for the harbor. The harbor was twelve miles away, straight into the teeth of the squall line.
He towed them north instead, into the lee of Horn Island.
It was six miles, around the east end of the island. It took an hour. The Miss Lena pulled and strained and climbed every wave, with the Second Wind yawing and jerking behind her on the long towline and the Lucky Seven tucked in close off her quarter. Leon stood at the wheel with his feet wide and both hands on the spokes, and every fifteen minutes, he picked up the cell phone in the cup holder and said, "Still here, chère."
At 5:20, they rounded the east end of Horn Island, into the Hook.
The change was almost instant. The wind still screamed overhead and the rain still came down in sheets. But the island stood between them and the open Gulf, a twelve-mile wall of sand and pine, and the waves in the Hook dropped from eight feet to two.
Leon dropped his anchor in twenty feet of water, with plenty of chain. Then he brought the Second Wind alongside on her towline, and Danny brought the Lucky Seven up on his other side, and they lashed all three boats together with every fender and spare line they had.
The worst of the squall line passed over them at half past five.
For twenty minutes, it was the loudest thing Leon had ever heard. The rain came down so hard that the surface of the water in the Hook went white.
Lightning hit the pines on the island twice. The three boats strained against the anchor chain and against each other and creaked like an old house in a wind.
But they held.
Cole came across from the Second Wind's deck to the Miss Lena's in the middle of it, soaked to the bone, and stood in Leon's wheelhouse dripping on the floor.
"I laughed at you," he said. "On the radio. In front of the whole harbor."
"You did," Leon said.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Leon."
Leon handed him the thermos of coffee.
"My daddy laughed at his daddy too," he said. "Then one day the old man was right. That's how you learn the sky, son. There's no other way to do it."
By seven o'clock, the squall line had moved inland, and the Gulf behind it had gone gray and quiet.
The Coast Guard boat came by and checked on them, and the young petty officer at the rail looked at the three boats rafted up in the Hook and gave Leon a slow salute.
They rode out the evening there together, three boats tied side by side in the lee of Horn Island, waiting for the swell to lie down. A soft, steady rain was falling now, the kind that doesn't mean any harm, pattering on the wheelhouse roofs and dimpling the dark water all around them.
Danny cooked rice and sausage on the Lucky Seven's little stove and passed bowls across the rails.
Leon picked up the phone in the cup holder one more time.
"Still here, chère," he said. "We're all still here."