Vernon Wolfe stood over six feet tall with salt-and-pepper hair beginning to thin on top and a cleft in his chin where his mother used to tell him that God had rested his finger before sending him down to earth. At 58, he retained the marks of a “good-looker.” Ladies had always been glad to keep him company for as long as he remained in town. But after years of travel, he now worked around reclamation ponds, a place where backhoes and four-wheelers piled ash from the dregs of a paper mill into reddish-brown mounds that got covered up with a layer of what his crew called cake.
Every weekend, Vernon cut the grass back down to two inches and surveyed his property. At the end of summer, the butterfly bush behind the southern oak had just about reached the telephone wires. He gazed past the ditch to the bayou, a silver stretch of water where you could throw out a fishing line and, despite everything, still catch a spotted bass; he loved to see the white egrets stalking mussels along the shoreline. If he looked long enough, he could catch the flash of a snake or turtle.
Vernon turned on the faucet and waited for the water to get hot. Time to shower, shit, and shave. He was planning to start his Monday by asking Rae-Ann Thibodaux if she’d like to go out. He couldn’t remember the last time he had, probably after he worked in the finishing department where paper was cut and stacked into five-hundred-ream packages making their way to a palletizer where they were wrapped in plastic and forklifted to a staging area for shipment throughout the country. He knew a guy in safety who’d helped him to transfer into the environmental department. Now, he was Rand- Atlantic’s Lead Environmental Officer, a company man.