Chapter 7
Delphine
The Bayou Rest Motel in Lafitte has nine rooms, a Coke machine that takes your money and thinks about it, and a sign out front that says VACAN Y in pink neon that goes on and off at a rate I timed at four and a half seconds.
Pink, and off. Pink, and off.
We had four rooms. Eleven bikers, one dog, and a curator, and Amos negotiated the rate down eleven dollars by telling the owner a story about Tucson that I heard three sentences of and would like to hear the rest of before I die.
Camille had driven down with a duffel of my clothes and stayed for exactly one hour, during which she:
Called Bishop "Sad Elvis."
Called him "the Cypress Prince."
Called him "Gumbo Batman."
Was answered to, without comment, on all three.
"He responds," she said to me in the parking lot, delighted. "That's the thing. He doesn't acknowledge it and then he turns around. Watch. Hey, Gumbo Batman, can you get the cooler?"
Bishop got the cooler.
"That's a machine," Camille said. "That is a fully operational machine and I'm going to keep pressing buttons on it."
Before that, though, she sat on the tailgate with me for twenty minutes and did the other thing my sister does, which is stop.
"You slept with him."
"Camille."
"I'm not judging. I'm impressed. I want to be clear that I'm impressed and also that I have follow-up questions and also that you've known him nine days."
"Eleven."
"Oh, eleven, well." She swung her feet. "That changes everything. That's practically an engagement in Baptist."
"We're Catholic."
"That's worse and you know it."
I didn't say anything.
"Delphine."
"Mm."
"Look at me for a second." She turned. "The house burned nine days ago. And I have watched you go from a woman on a curb to a woman running an operation, and I know you, and I know that's not healing, that's scaffolding, and I know you hate that word now."
"I do hate that word now."
"So here's my one question and then I'll go back to being funny." She held up a finger. "If you found the book tomorrow and it all ended and everybody went home — would you still want him?"
I looked out at the motel and the nine doors and the pink sign that hadn't come on yet because it wasn't dark.
"Yes," I said.
"Fast answer."
"I've had it ready for four days," I said. "I've just been waiting for somebody to ask so I'd have to hear it out loud."
Camille nodded once, businesslike, and hopped down off the tailgate.
"Okay," she said. "Then I'm going to go be extremely rude to him about it for the rest of my life. That's my role. I've accepted it."
She hugged me too hard and told me to eat and got on the highway.
Then it was eight o'clock and everybody went to their rooms, because we were going into the bay at four in the morning and Marisol had a plat spread over a truck hood with three overlays on it and had said, in the voice of a woman who has stopped taking questions, "It's here or it's nowhere."
The briefing was in the parking lot at seven, on a truck hood, in a heat that had barely bothered to go down for the evening.
Marisol laid it out. Tide at 4:40. Two hours of workable water. Torren on the hookah rig, Amos on the pump, Reyes on the skiff, everybody else on the bay boat, and a plastic tub of distilled water on the bow that was mine and that I intended to defend with violence.
"Question," said a man named Whitlock, who I had spoken maybe nine words to. "Are there alligators."
Everyone looked at me.
"Yes," I said.
"How many?"
"That's — I want to be careful here, because I don't want to alarm anybody, and also I'm not going to lie to men who are about to get in the water.
" I put my hands on the hood. "There is not a number.
There is not a number, Mr. Whitlock. It's not a population you count, it's a background condition, like humidity. "
"Ma'am."
"They don't want you. You're loud and you're large and you taste like sunscreen. The rule is you don't get between anything and the water and you don't swim at dusk and you don't, under any circumstances, feed anything, which I say because a tourist did it in 2019 and I still think about it."
Amos, from under the hat: "What did the tourist feed it?"
"A hot dog."
"His own?"
"That's the part nobody can establish."
Bishop ran through the rest, flat and precise and completely unlike a man who'd buried nobody yet and slept nothing. Coordinates. Contingency if the Gallery showed. Contingency if the box was compromised. Contingency if somebody got hurt, which had four steps and a hospital name and a route to it.
He was excellent. That's the thing. He was so good at it that nobody but me noticed he had not once, in ninety minutes, sat down.
And Bishop went into room six and shut the door.
He hadn't slept in thirty-eight hours. He hadn't cried. He'd made nineteen phone calls. He'd arranged a funeral for the following week, found a dive tank supplier in Belle Chasse, reconciled two sets of survey coordinates, and eaten, as far as I could establish, one sandwich.
At nine I knocked on room six.
"Yeah."
"It's me."
The door opened. He was still dressed. The bed hadn't been touched. There was a legal pad on it with the whole operation laid out in a hand I'd seen on the back of a hospice menu, timings, tide tables, three contingencies.
"I'm working," he said.
"I see that."
"I've got the marker resection down to about forty meters, but the '38 survey's got a datum problem, so—"
"Bishop."
"—so I want to run it against the oyster lease, because the lease lines don't move, and if Marisol can—"
I took the legal pad out of his hands.
He looked at me.
"Give that back," he said.
"No."
"Delphine."
"No."
He stood there in a motel room with the window unit going and the neon coming through the curtain gap, pink and off, pink and off, and he was so tightly held together that you could see the seams from across the room.
"I need to work," he said.
"You need to put it down."
"If I put it down—"
He stopped.
"Say the rest of it," I said.
"That's your line."
"It's a good line. Say the rest of it."
He didn't. He turned around and put both hands on the dresser and stood there with his head down, and the air conditioner made a noise like a dying animal, which it did approximately every ninety seconds, and I want it on the record that at one of the most emotionally significant moments of my life I was competing for the room's attention with a Fedders unit from 1994.
"Then let me work."
"No."
"Delphine, I have to have the resection by four or Marisol's guessing, and if she's guessing we burn the tide, and if we burn the tide it's tomorrow, and tomorrow those boats are already out there—"
"Bishop."
"—and I'm the road captain, that's the job, the job is I know where everybody is and when they're going to be there, and if I don't do it nobody does—"
"Marisol did it two hours ago."
He stopped.
"What?"
"She finished the resection at seven. She's got it inside forty meters and she's got the datum reconciled and she came and found me instead of you, because she took one look at you at the truck hood and made a decision.
" I said it gently, because it was not a gentle thing.
"Everybody out there made the same decision tonight, Bishop.
All eleven of them. That's why nobody's knocked on this door for two hours. "
He stood there.
"They think I'm—"
"They think you buried a man this morning."
"He's not buried. That's next week. That's the whole—" His voice went and he caught it. "He's in a drawer in Marrero, Delphine, and I have to call a woman on Monday about a plot."
"I know."
I set the legal pad on the nightstand. Face down.
I crossed the room and put my hand flat between his shoulder blades and I felt what was going on under there, which was everything, at once, held still by nothing but posture.
"Hey," I said.
"I'm alright."
"You're not."
"I'm alright, cher—"
"Bishop." I turned him around. I had to, physically, both hands, and he let me, and that was the first give.
"Your uncle died four hours after telling you your father's in prison because you left, and you have not stopped moving since, and I've watched you do it for two days, and I have been very patient because it wasn't my turn. "
"And now it's your turn?"
"Now it's my turn."
I put my hands on the sides of his face like I did on the porch — same way, deliberately, because I wanted him to recognize it — and I kissed him, and I felt the exact second it went from him holding still to him not.
He kissed me back like a man who'd been under water and hadn't wanted to say so.
The neon came through the gap and put a stripe across the bed and then took it away. Pink, and off. His hands were shaking when he got them in my hair and he knew it and I didn't mention it and that mattered.
"I don't want to do this if it's—" he started.
"If it's what?"
"Pity."
"Bishop Thibodeaux," I said, "I have never pitied anyone in my life. I'm the younger sister of Camille Broussard. Pity was not on the curriculum."
He laughed. It broke halfway through and turned into something else, and that was the second give.
I was slow with him. Deliberately, and he noticed, and at one point he said, "You don't have to—" and I said, "Stop telling me what I have to do, you are terrible at delegating and I'm not going to be your next project," and he made a sound that was mostly agreement.
The bed was better than the cot. It made no editorial comments whatsoever.
The air conditioner did. It kicked over at the worst possible moment with a rattle like a bag of forks going down stairs, and Bishop said, into my shoulder, with enormous feeling, "I will pay for a new one."
"Don't stop."
"I'm going to buy this motel."
"Bishop."
"I'm going to buy this motel and I'm going to fix that unit and then I'm going to sell the motel—"