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crude. The Eagle Otome had already been spirited away for repairs, and the mood was
calm—pastoral-industrial.
The channel's surface was unremarkable from a distance, but closer inspection revealed
that a not-yet-unnoticeable sheen of oil persisted near the shore. I crouched on a sloping
concrete slab that formed part of the bank and watched the filmy rainbow burble over the
rocks.
There was a man standing on the bank just up the channel. He was short, with blue-tin-
ted glasses and a suede cowboy hat jammed down on his head. And he was fishing.
His name was Nelson. Originally from El Salvador, he said he had been in the United
States for ages. He owned a dump truck in Beaumont and made his living hauling dirt and
gravel for road construction jobs. In a drawl that was half Texas and all Salvador, he told
me this was his favorite spot to fish.
“Last weekend, they had that spill?” he said. “I show up here, a lot of oil. A lot of oil. I
went further up the channel. Where it was clean.”
We looked at the edge of the channel below our feet, where the waterline curled in
colored wavelets of petroleum.
He frowned with approval. “Today, though…I think is okay.”
“It doesn't bother you at all that there's still oil on the water?” I asked. “I mean, there's
still guys in orange suits.”
“No, man!” he said, and waved at the channel. “If you fish like this, with some oil there,
then you don't have to use no oil when you cook it!” He cackled. “That's a joke.”
He had extra fishing rods. I probably hadn't fished in twenty years, but it came back
after a pair of somewhat hazardous casts, and soon we got on with the business of letting
the crabs of Port Arthur steal Nelson's bait from our hooks. The Oil Mop boats continued
their rounds, and Nelson cracked open his supply of Coors Light.
He seemed glad to have me there, and soon we were talking about his divorce, about
how much he missed his sons. He told me he wanted to find a girlfriend from overseas,
and about his complicated attempts to find one over the Internet. It sounded less like online
dating and more like a Nigerian banking scam, but that didn't seem to bother Nelson.
What about you, man? You got a girlfriend?
I told him I did.
As a matter of fact, I was engaged. The Doctor and I were getting married. And once
we were married, we were going to India, to take the world's first pollution tourism honey-
moon. That she considered this even tolerable seemed like further proof of true love. Cruis-
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