What the Levee Keeps
A levee inspector walks the Mississippi at night. Something under the grass is walking with him.
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Every spring the Corps of Engineers sends Remy Guidry to walk forty miles of levee below New Orleans and write down what he finds: sand boils, soft spots, crawfish holes. This spring he finds a boot in the grass, still laced, pointing up the slope. Then he finds another, a mile on, pointing the same way. Then he starts hearing footsteps on the river side, where there is nothing but water. A slow, cold Southern gothic about what a river takes and what the levee is built to hold back.
Remy Guidry started walking at dusk, the way the old inspectors had taught him, because sand boils were easier to see when the light went flat and the water on the land side stopped reflecting sky. He carried a flashlight, a clipboard in a plastic bag and a can of orange paint for marking soft ground. The river was high for April, brown and quick, and it made a sound against the batture like somebody breathing through their teeth. At mile marker nineteen he found a boot in the grass. It was a wh
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S. L. Marchand
I spent thirty years in the engine rooms of Mississippi riverboats, mostly at night, mostly alone with a lot of machinery that knocked when it wanted attention. You learn to listen down there. You learn that a river has moods and a boat has opinions. I retired to a shotgun house in the Bywater with a porch, a fig tree and a neighbor who tells me every ghost story she has ever heard, twice. My books are not about blood. They are about the sound in the wall that stops when you stand up, and the streetcar that comes by one stop too many. I write at the kitchen table after midnight, which my wife says is the problem.
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