Soul Survivor Read Online Free Page A

industrial basin of Lafayette.
    It was only a layover, just until the moving van arrived on Saturday, just until Andrea had enough time to go over and make
     her new home livable—which, in her case, meant spotless. Because this time, she told Bruce with clenched determination, she
     intended to stay put. “I’m not moving again,” was the way she laid it down.
    In spite of that firm declaration, she still had to get through that long weekend at the grubby Oakwood Bend Apartments; which
     was where OSCA gave temporary shelter to the soiled and tired oil workers coming off month-long shifts on the deep rigs that
     lay far out in the Gulf of Mexico.
    Andrea could hardly believe that Bruce had been living in this squalor since November.
    When she turned on the light, she felt as if the filth were crawling up her legs. The layers of dirt and the layers of dust,
     encrusted over the years by layers of crude oil, had become some new and scary variety of muck.
    Even the ceilings were thick with the aftermath of all that unwashed traffic. The inside of the shower curtain was black with
     mold and mildew. When Andrea turned on the fan, the dust flew off in fat clumps. Her first thought was that a cat had jumped
     off the blades.
    “Don’t let James touch anything,” she told Bruce. “I’m going to the store and load up on cleaning supplies.”
    First she cleaned the temporary home enough to make breathing possible, if not to make things comfortable. Then, in the middle
     of it all, the movers called—their truck had broken down on the interstate and they couldn’t get to Lafayette until Monday.
    Well, there was nothing else to do but make the best of it—a family shrug that became like a nervous tic, a gesture the Leiningers
     used to get through the hassles of life.
    Finally, they piled into the car and headed for their new home. As they tried to navigate their way there, the traffic slowed
     to a crawl. Both the big roads—Johnston and West Congress Street—had been narrowed to one lane. They were snarled with barriers
     and the construction of gaudy food stands. It was Mardi Gras.
    Bruce and Andrea knew that Lafayette was in the “Cajun Heartland”—territory originally settled by the Acadian French who were
     booted out of Nova Scotia in 1755 when they refused to swear allegiance to the British. But they had no idea that the intensely
     Catholic French Cajun culture was still sunk so deep. The descendants of the Cajuns took the pre-Lenten bacchanalia very seriously.
     New Orleans was world famous for its Fat Tuesday festival, but Lafayette had its own riotous pride. In Lafayette no one delivers
     the mail on Fat Tuesday. The schools close for a week, and for five days the main streets are blocked off two and three times
     a day for the elaborate parades.
    After the heavy-duty cleaning, stalled traffic, and the pressure of tricky timing, the Leiningers were all exhausted by the
     time their moving van arrived early on Monday, March 5. Still, Andrea sent Bruce off to work—she would handle the unloading
     and placement of the furniture by herself. No need to have Bruce underfoot as well as James. She had planned exactly where
     she wanted everything placed.
    But even her supercharged energy had to give out. She simply couldn’t be everywhere at once. She kept losing track of her
     son. She had told James to stay inside the house while she directed the movers. But the twenty-three-month-old tyke, who was
     still in diapers, slipped out of the house while the moving men brought in the cartons and furnishings—the door had been left
     open.
    Andrea was like a shortstop, directing the moving men and plucking James out of the hedges and off the lawn, and finally—the
     last straw—out of the moving van itself. When she began to imagine her little guy crushed and bleeding under someone’s boots
     or a dropped sofa, she knew it was more than she could handle. That’s when she called Bruce on his cell phone and told