Butcher

50

New Levee Barrow and Route W

Ferris and Donnie Meuller and Donnie's oldest boy Scott were in Donnie's big silver V-boat. They'd played out the catfish around Stocker's Store and were letting the current take them back, fishing their way back in the fast-moving floodwaters, letting the current scrieve the boat, propelling them downstream.

A man could get into the big, heavyweight outlaw cat real good if he knew where to fish. Hit ‘em about half an hour before dawn, go back around five and catch another fine mess before suppertime. They were hitting livers the way the rich gobble caviar—they couldn't get enough of it.

The water gushing through Lyman Hole Lateral sluiced into the St. Petersburg Ditch and overflowed the banks, moving out over 221 and the tree-clogged drain canals where the big boys liked to hang out and feed. From the bottom of the canal, which was Lateral Three on the maps, the St. Pete Ditch carried about eight and a half feet of moving river water, and as the drainage ditches continued to overflow into this fast-moving stream it became a rushing nine-foot-tall wall of water that buried everything in its path.

At the outskirts of Bayou City the nine-foot moving wall, with the power of the Mississippi, Ohio, and Tennessee rivers behind it, smashed across the fifty-four-inch drainage culvert, flooding the banks of the ditches adjacent to the already full Bayou City sewer lagoon, moving out across 218 and the highway bypass that was now the bottom of a swiftly moving lake.

An ever-building, merging, growing wave of water overflowed the Cedar Isle Slough, Old Route 17, Catch-basin Ditch, and the set-back levee itself, joining the backwaters of the Cumberland, Platte, Missouri, and God-only-knows how many overflowing tributaries. This entire mass with a life all its own now swirled, flowed, and intermixed, becoming an unstoppable force of nature, spreading, moving, inching inland over what was no longer dry land, the water seeking its own level, moving higher and higher, putting everything it touched beneath it.

“Oh, shit!" Ferris screamed.

"Lookout!" Donnie screamed at Scott, and the three of them tried to strike out at the black thing suddenly looming in the pathway of the V-boat. The first to hit it was Ferris, who caught a good shot on the blade of the oar, catching it against the unyielding steel. The oar splintered as it smacked back into Scott's paddle, knocking it into the water, then smashing him down into the boat as the broken oar whacked him in the nose. Donnie got a halfway good stance but the oar slid over the slick metal as their prow collided with what was later discovered to be the left front fender of a Mercury Marquis. The boat took a hit, shooting Donnie Meuller out into the water, where he plunged over his head, beginning to panic as he could not move in the coat that now felt as if it weighed two hundred pounds, caught in a current too strong to swim against, and only a lucky probe with the broken oar saved him from drowning.