Chapter ONE
Sabine — July 24
The number three injector on this pump has been seized since April and Ovide Thibodeaux has been lying to me about it since April, and now I am lying on my side in eleven inches of space between a Detroit 6-71 and a bulkhead,
holding a heat gun on a fitting that should have been changed before I was born.
“Sabine.”
“No.”
“I have not said anything yet.”
“You are going to say the tide,” I tell the bulkhead, because that is what I am looking at. “And I am going to say the tide does not care and neither do I.”
Ovide’s boots move on the deck plates above my head. He is sixty-one and he has been shrimping out of Port Ardeen since he was eleven and he has never once in fifty years put a wrench on anything before it broke.
“The tide,” he says.
“There it is.”
“Four o’clock, me. Bones say four o’clock.”
“Then Bones can come down here and hold this gun.”
He laughs. It turns into the cough he has had since March and I lie still under the engine and listen to it and think about telling him again to go to Ardeen General, and then I do not tell him, because I have told him four times and a fifth is just noise.
The fitting gives. I feel it before I hear it, that small dead surrender in the metal, and I get the wrench on it and break it loose and the whole line comes free with a smell of old diesel and older gasket.
“There,” I say.
“There what?”
“There, your number three has been running on prayer since April, and the prayer ran out.”
I push out from under. The Marie Delphine’s engine room is four foot six at the crown and I have known that since I was fourteen, and I still crack the back of my head on the same rail every single time, and I do it now.
“Merde.”
“You want a cushion?”
“I want a boat built by somebody who liked people.”
Ovide is standing at the bottom of the ladder with a cup of coffee he is not going to offer me. He looks past me at the engine the way men look at things they are afraid of.
“He fix?”
“She fix.” I hold the line up. “This is a fuel line, Ovide. Not a suggestion. When it cracks at sea you are dead in the water twelve miles out with a following sea and no steering and I will be on the radio listening to it happen.”
“Bah. Twelve mile.”
“Twelve miles is the whole point of twelve miles.”
He drinks his coffee. Behind him the bilge pump kicks on and runs eleven seconds and shuts off, which is one second longer than last week, and I file that away where I file everything about these boats.
“Your daddy,” Ovide says, “he never talk to me like that.”
“My daddy talked to you exactly like that. You just liked him better.”
That gets a real laugh out of him. He goes up the ladder and I hear him on the deck talking to somebody, and I get back down on my side with the new line and start the part of the job that nobody sees, which is the part where I work around what is not on any plan.
Because there is a compartment behind this bulkhead.
You cannot see it. There is no hatch, no seam, no bright weld, nothing a man from the Coast Guard could find if he came down here with a flashlight and forty minutes and a bad attitude.
There is a piece of hull that looks like a piece of hull, and behind it there are eleven cubic feet of nothing, and my father put it there with his own hands the year I turned nineteen.
He did that in six boats. The Marie Delphine, the Bonne Chance, the Ida Ray, the Petit Frère, the Saint Amelie, the Lucienne.
Six hulls, six voids, and every one of them was cut and doubled and faired by Lucien Fontenot in his own yard with the doors shut, and he did the arithmetic on the frames himself, which is the part nobody understands.
You cannot just cut a hole in a boat. You take out a frame and you put the load somewhere else or you have made a very expensive way to drown.
My father took out the frames and he moved the load and he wrote none of it down, and then he died two and a half years ago in his own kitchen at fifty-eight with a heart that four different doctors had called fine.
So there is a fuel line and a lift pump and a raw water pump on that side and there is no room to swing a wrench because the void takes the room, and every mechanic on this coast who has ever tried to work on these boats has come out swearing about the layout, and one of them started asking why.
That was the Pascagoula man last year. He came down here for ninety minutes and then he came up and said, who built this, and Bones paid him and he went home.
I am the only person alive who can put a hand in that space and know why it is there and not care.
It is not a comfortable thing to be.
I get the line seated and I torque it and I sit back on my heels in the dark with the heat coming off the block and my shirt stuck to me, and I am, and I will admit this to nobody, happy.
That is the thing about it. Down here it is one problem at a time and the problem does not lie to you.
The fitting is seized or it is not. The pump primes or it does not.
There is no version where you do everything right and it goes wrong anyway because a man in a room somewhere decided something about you.
“Ovide says you’re being rude to him.”
I know the voice before the words. Boots on the ladder, unhurried, and then the light from the hatch cuts and there is a shape in it.
“Ovide is a liar and a coward and his boat is going to kill him.”
“He said you’d say that.”
“Then he was not lying that time.”
Dax comes down the last three rungs and stops, because there is nowhere for a man his size to stand in here that is not on top of something.
He is in a T-shirt and his cut, and the cut is the reason he cannot get past me, because there is exactly one path through this engine room and I am lying in it.
“You are in my light,” I say.
“I’m always in your light.”
“You have made it a discipline.”
He crouches. Puts his forearms on his knees. There is a mark on the back of his right hand that was not there a few days ago, a scrape gone to a scab, and I look at it for one second and then I look at the pump.
“Hand me the eleven.”
He finds it without looking, which he should not be able to do, and he presses it into my palm.
“You know my tray.”
“I know your tray better than I know my own kitchen.”
“That is because you do not have a kitchen. You have a room with a stove in it.”
“There’s a difference?”
“There is a difference, Dax.”
I get the eleven on the bracket and start winding it down and he watches me do it. He always watches. Four years and he has never once picked up a tool in this engine room and never once tried to tell me a thing about a boat, and he sits there like a man at a window.
“How bad,” he says.
“The number three was seized. The line was original. The bilge pump is running eleven seconds and it was running ten last week and in six weeks it will be running twenty and then he will call me at two in the morning.”
“He’ll call you at two in the morning either way.”
“Yes, but then I will be right, which is the only thing I get out of it.”
He laughs. Low, in his chest, and I feel it more than hear it because we are eleven inches apart.
“Say it again,” he says.
“Say what.”
“The bilge pump thing. Eleven seconds.”
I stop winding. “Why.”
“Because you say numbers like other people say I love you.”
“That is a terrible line.”
“It landed though.”
“It did not land.”
“Your ears went red.”
“It is a hundred and four degrees in here.”
He reaches over and takes my chin between two fingers and turns my face and kisses me, and I have three days of diesel on me and a smear of grease on my jaw where I have been pushing my hair back with the wrong side of my hand, and he kisses me like I am something that just came out of a river.
I put a hand on his chest to stop it and then do not stop it.
When he sits back I say, “You are going to have grease on your mouth all day and I am not telling you which side.”
“That’s cold.”
“That is what you get for coming down my ladder.”
He does not move. He is looking at me the way he looks at me, which took me about a year and a half to get used to and which I still cannot describe except to say that it is the way people on this coast look at the sky in August.
Not fondly. Carefully. Like something they are trying to read before it decides.
“What,” I say.
“Nothing.”
“Dax.”
“You’ve got a whole boat on your back and you’re happy.”
“I am not happy. I am busy.”
“Sabine.”
“Do not.”
“You’re happy.”
“I am hot and I have Ovide Thibodeaux’s fuel system in my hands and my father would have thrown this pump in the bayou years ago.” I wipe my hands on the rag and it does nothing. “That is not happiness. That is employment.”
“Your daddy would’ve thrown Ovide in the bayou.”
“My daddy did throw Ovide in the bayou. Years ago. Over a trawl door.”
“You’re lying.”
“Ask him. He tells it better than me. He puts a alligator in it.”
Dax leans back against the bulkhead and there it is, that space between his shoulders and the steel, eleven inches of nothing behind him and he does not know it, or he does know it and has trained himself out of thinking about it. I have never asked which.
“Bones is up there,” he says.
“I know. Ovide told me about the tide.”
“They want her out by four.”
“She will be out by four. She would have been out by four last April if any of you had listened to me about the line.”
“I listened to you about the line.”
“You listened. Nobody paid.”
“Different departments.”
“Same club.”
He does not answer that. He picks up a socket I do not need and turns it over in his fingers.
“Theo’s up there too,” he says.
“Then I will stay down here.”
“Sabine.”
“He wants me to come to the thing and I do not want to go to the thing, and if I go up there he will ask me in front of Bones so that saying no is a whole conversation instead of one word.”
“He misses you.”
“He sees me every day of his life.”
“That’s not the same and you know it.”
I do know it. I put the wrench down.
Theo is twenty-nine and he has been patched three years and there is a version of my brother that existed before that and I am the only person who remembers him.
Our father put a wrench in my hand and a rope in Theo’s and never worked out why one of us went quiet and one of us went looking.
And Theo went looking, and he found sixty men who tell him he is somebody, and now he sits at the low end of a table and I fix the boats that make the table possible and we are, technically, on the same side of everything.
“He is happy,” I say. “I am not going to be the thing that makes him not happy.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“It is what Sunday is.”
Dax lets it go, which is one of the four or five reasons I am still here after four years.
“Prime it,” I tell him. “Key’s up. Give me thirty seconds and then turn her over and do not, Dax, do not touch the throttle.”
“I know how to start a boat.”
“You know how to start your bike. Which is a boat with an opinion.”
He goes up. I get my hand in behind the block and work the primer, feeling for the change, the little firmness that comes when there is fuel where fuel should be, and it comes on the ninth stroke.
“Now,” I shout.
The starter grinds and catches and the 6-71 comes up out of nothing and fills the whole world. The compartment behind the bulkhead does what it always does with sound, which is take it and give it back one beat late, and I put my hand flat on the steel and feel for a shake that is not there.
Smooth. She runs smooth.
I stay down there another minute with my hand on my father’s weld and the engine running through it into my bones, and I think, this is a boat that will get twelve miles out and come home, and I did that.
Up on deck the light comes at me like a slap.
Ovide is at the wheelhouse door and Bones is on the dock with his arms folded and his cut on in this heat because Remy Guidry would wear that cut in a house fire.
Theo is sitting on a fish box with his hat back, and he sees me and his face does the thing it does, the open thing, and I make myself smile at him because he is my brother.
“Four o’clock,” I tell Bones. “You have got your boat.”
“You cut it fine, Fontenot.”
“Ovide cut it fine in April. I just cleaned it up.”
Dax is coming down out of the wheelhouse and he has grease on his mouth and Theo has already seen it and is grinning, and Ovide is saying something about the alligator, and for about nine seconds the dock at Ardeen Marine on the twenty-fourth of July is the best place I have ever stood.
Then the radio goes.
It is the wheelhouse set, turned up because Ovide is deaf, and it comes out over the water flat and stripped the way voices come out of those speakers, and it is not a voice I know.
“Ardeen, Bonne Chance. Ardeen, Bonne Chance.”
Nobody moves. That is the first wrong thing. On any dock in the world four men would keep talking and one would go answer it, and instead every man on this dock stops.
Bones goes up the ladder. Not fast. That is the second wrong thing.
“Bonne Chance, Ardeen.”
Silence. Long enough that I count it, because I count everything.
Then: “We’re coming in heavy on the port side and I’ve got a number for you.”
Bones says, “Say the number.”
More silence. The gulls carry on. Somewhere across the yard a grinder is going and going and then stops.
“Nine,” the radio says.
I am watching Dax when it happens.
His face does not move. That is what I will think about later, for four years and then some.
Not that he went white, not that he looked at his father’s man on the ladder, not that he swore.
His face does not move at all, and he does not look at me, and he is already looking at the channel where the Bonne Chance is going to come around the point, and his hand has gone to the back of his neck, and he holds it there.
“Sabine,” Bones says from the wheelhouse door, without turning around. “Go home.”
“I have got a pump on that boat.”
“Go home, Sabine.”
Theo is already off the fish box. Theo will not look at me.
“Dax,” I say.
“Do what he says.” Still not looking. Still watching the water. “I’ll come by tonight.”
“What is nine?”
And now he does look at me, and there is nothing in it, and he says, “Nothing. It’s a count. Go on home.”
I go.
I get in my truck and I sit in it with the door open and my hands on my knees, and out past the fuel dock the Bonne Chance comes around the point riding low on the port side, and every man on that dock walks down to meet her, and not one of them walks back.