Chapter TWO
Dax — July 24
The Bonne Chance comes around the point at ten past four riding four degrees down on the port side, and Roland Sonnier brings her in like a man walking into a room where somebody has already been shouting.
“He’s slow,” Bones says.
“He’s careful.”
“He’s slow.”
Bones is right and I am not going to say so on the dock. Ro takes eleven minutes to do a five minute berth and every one of those minutes is him buying something, and the only thing left to buy out here is time to think of a better way to say it.
There is a man standing at the head of the dock in a pressed shirt with no sweat on it.
That is Sylvain. Auguste Rochelle sends him and only him, and in three years I have never heard him raise his voice or seen him touch anything.
He carries a small notebook and a mechanical pencil and he stands where the shade is and he waits, and he is waiting now with his hands folded in front of him like a man at a graveside.
“He was here before the radio,” I say.
Bones spits over the side. “You noticed that too.”
“How long before.”
“Half hour.”
Deuce comes out of the shed then and everything on the dock arranges itself around him without anybody moving.
That is a thing my father does and I have never worked out the mechanism.
He is fifty-eight and he is not the biggest man out here and he has not raised his voice in front of me in eleven years.
“Ro,” he says.
“Deuce.”
“Tie her off and open her up.”
The offload is ice first, always. Six men and a hose and a conveyor and forty minutes of nothing while the hold comes down, and the whole time Sylvain stands in his shade with his notebook shut.
Theo is on the rail passing baskets and he is talking too much, the way he does when he is nervous, and nobody is answering him.
Then the ice is out and the hold is dry and Bones goes down and comes up with the first of them, and after that it is quick.
They come out wrapped and taped and each one is a kilo, and they come out in fours, and they go on the plastic sheet by the shed door in rows, and Sylvain walks over from his shade at the exact moment the first row is straight, which tells you what kind of man Auguste hires.
He opens the notebook.
“Two hundred,” he says. “Two hundred was the load.”
“Two hundred was the load,” Deuce says.
Sylvain counts. He does it out loud. He does not do it fast and he does not do it to be cruel, or he does not do it to be cruel in a way you could point at, and that is worse.
He walks the rows with the pencil and he says the numbers in a flat clean voice and the gulls carry on over the fuel dock and the grinder starts up across the yard and stops again.
At one hundred and ninety he stops walking.
He does not say anything. He goes back to the beginning and he counts the whole thing again, all of it, one to a hundred and ninety-one, and it takes four minutes, and nobody on that dock says one word for four minutes.
“One hundred and ninety-one,” Sylvain says.
“Count it again,” Bones says.
“I have counted it twice.”
“Count it a third time.”
“Remy.” Deuce says it quietly. Bones shuts up.
Sylvain closes the notebook and puts the pencil in the spiral and looks at my father with a face like a wall in a hallway.
“Nine,” he says. “Mr. Rochelle will want to know where.”
“He’ll know tonight.”
“He will want to know tonight.” Sylvain puts the notebook in his shirt pocket. “That is not the same as knowing.”
He goes to his car. He does not hurry and he does not look back and he does not need to, because the whole dock is watching him go, and that is the entire point of the pressed shirt.
The car turns out onto the shell road and the dust hangs and settles.
“Ro,” Deuce says. “Who was in that hold.”
“Me. Camille. Verret’s boy for the ice.”
“Verret’s boy’s fourteen.”
“He never went below with it. He come on at the fuel dock, him.”
“So it’s you and Camille.”
Ro Sonnier is forty-four years old and he has a wife and a mortgage and he has run for us for nine years and he says, “It ain’t me, Deuce.”
And he does not say the other half of it. He does not have to. It sits there on the plastic sheet with the hundred and ninety-one, and every man on this dock has already finished the sentence.
Camille Doucet is standing by the conveyor with a hose in his hand.
He is twenty-two. He has been on that boat since he was seventeen and I have known him since he was a kid running the shell road on a bike with no chain guard, and he weighs maybe one seventy soaking wet, which he is.
He is looking at Ro with his mouth slightly open, and then he looks at me, because he has known me longer.
“Dax,” he says.
Deuce turns his head and looks at his son.
That is all he does. He does not say a name and he does not tip his chin and he does not make any of the little signals that men make in films. He looks at me for about one second and then he looks back at the water, and I feel the whole dock come around behind me like a current changing.
I am the Road Captain. It is my route. That is what the look means and it is the only thing it means, and every man here can read it, including Camille.
“Come walk with me,” I say.
“Dax.”
“Put the hose down, Cam.”
He puts the hose down. It kicks on the deck plates and lies there running and nobody shuts it off, and we walk, and behind us I hear my father say, get the rest of it inside, and I hear the work start again.
The Ardeen dock runs out two hundred and forty feet and the last sixty of it are old, from before the club, from when this was a shipyard and men punched a clock.
There are cleats out there the size of a dog.
The water on the end goes down twenty-two feet at low and the current comes around the point and pulls right along the face of it.
We get about halfway before he starts.
“I never touched it. Dax. I never touched none of it, me, not one time in five years.”
“I know how long you’ve been on that boat.”
“Then you know.”
“Cam. Look at me. Did you take it.”
“No.”
“Alright.”
We keep walking. He has his hands out in front of him like he is showing me they are empty.
“Ask Ro. Ask Ro who counted the ice. Ask him who was on the wheel at Southwest Pass, he was on the wheel, I was in the hold two hours by myself and if I wanted to take nine kilos off a boat I would take one, me, I would take one a trip for nine trips and nobody would ever.”
He stops.
He hears it the same time I do.
“That is not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant.”
“That is not what I meant, Dax.”
“Cam. Second time. Look at my face and say it. Did you take it.”
He looks at my face. And there is a thing that happens in a man’s eyes when he is about to lie to you, a little movement inward, a man going to fetch something from another room, and it does not happen. He looks straight at me out of the front of his skull and he says:
“No.”
And I believe him.
That is the thing I am going to have to carry, and I do not know it yet, or I do know it and I have already put it down somewhere I do not have to look at. I believe him at four thirty-eight in the afternoon on the twenty-fourth of July on the end of the Ardeen dock and I keep walking.
Because the arithmetic does not care.
Sylvain went back to Auguste with a number.
That number gets told tonight. And what Auguste hears is either nine kilos went missing off a Cottonmouth boat and something happened, or nine kilos went missing off a Cottonmouth boat and they are still talking about it.
One of those is a route. The other one is Veracruz calling my father in a month with a better offer and a shorter conversation.
Nine kilos is thirty-one hundred a kilo to us, which is twenty-seven thousand nine hundred dollars, which is nothing.
Nine kilos is not the number. The number is sixty miles of water and nineteen years and a table with fourteen men at it who have notes and trucks and kids, and every one of them eats because ships come through this port and nobody looks in the ice.
And there is another number under all of it that I do not say out loud even inside my own head, which is that in November my father is going to talk about the gavel, and the man who lost nine kilos and held a meeting about it is not the man who gets it.
“Dax.”
“Yeah.”
“Can I talk to Deuce.”
“You’re talking to Deuce.”
He is quiet for four steps.
“Please. Just let me. He known my daddy. He carried my daddy’s box, him, at the church, I got the picture in my mother house.”
“Cam.”
“Let me talk to Deuce.”
“You are talking to Deuce.”
And that is when he stops asking.
I have thought about that more than any other part of it.
Not the water. The stopping. Because he did not shout and he did not run and he did not swing at me, and any one of those would have been easier and he had every right to all three, and instead he heard the sentence the second time and he understood what it was, and he did the arithmetic too,
and he got the same answer I did.
He looks out at the channel. The Bonne Chance is behind us with her hold open. Across the water the refinery is burning off and the flare is standing straight up because there is no wind at all.
Bones comes down the dock with the chain.
He does not hand it to me. He sets it down on the boards about ten feet back and he turns around and he walks away, and that is Remy Guidry telling me it is mine, and it is the only respectful thing anybody does the entire afternoon.
“Is my mother going to know,” Camille says.
“No.”
“You gonna tell her something?”
“Yes.”
“Tell her it was the boat.”
“Alright.”
“Tell her it was the boat, Dax, because she gonna ask everybody in that church and she gonna keep asking, and if she keep asking somebody gonna tell her the other thing.”
“I’ll tell her it was the boat.”
He nods. He is crying now but quietly, the way you cry when you are twenty-two and there are men watching from two hundred feet away.
“I never took nothing off nobody,” he says.
“I know.”
“Then why.”
I do not have an answer that is not the arithmetic, and I am not going to say the arithmetic to him, because there is one mercy left in the world and it is that.
So I say, “Give me your hands, Cam.”
And he gives me his hands.
He does not fight it. Not when the chain goes on and not at the end of the dock and not when I take a fistful of his shirt at the shoulder because I am not going to let him do it himself and I am not going to let it be a slip either.
He looks at me for about a second and a half and there is nothing in his face at all by then, and I put him in.
It is a very small sound.
Twenty-two feet of water and a current that comes around the point and runs along the face of the old dock, and I stand there and count to sixty and then I count to sixty again, and the flare burns straight up across the water, and the gulls do not stop for even one second.
When I come back up the dock they have the sheet folded and the shed shut. Theo is sitting on a fish box with his hat in his hands and his face grey, and he stands up when I get close and then does not know what to do with his body.
“Sit down, Theo.”
He sits down.
Deuce is at the shed door.
“Call Sylvain,” he says. “Not Auguste. Sylvain. Tell him the club found it.”
“Yes sir.”
“Then go home.”
He puts his hand on the back of my neck for a second, the way he did when I was nine and a dog I had raised got hit on the shell road, and he says, “You did that right.”
And I want it. That is what I would like on the record. My father’s hand on my neck and four words, and I stand there in it like a man in the sun.
I ride out at six.
The shell road, then the highway, then the causeway with the water flat on both sides going the colour of an old nickel.
Camille’s mother lives on Beaulieu Street in a yellow house with a carport and a plastic chair in it, and I slow to about twenty going past and I look at the carport and the chair, and I do not stop,
and I tell myself it is because you do not knock on a door at six in the evening with a thing like that, you go in the morning, you go with your hands clean and your voice steady, and that is even true. It is also not why.
Sabine’s porch light is on at seven.
She has the window unit going and the door open behind it, which she says is how you can tell a person grew up in a house with money and she did not, and she is standing at the counter with a beer she has not drunk any of.
“You’re late.”
“I said tonight.”
“You said tonight like a man who meant six.”
She comes and takes my cut off me at the door.
She does that. She has done it since about the fourth month and she does it the same way every time, up over the shoulders, one arm and then the other, and she hangs it on the hook by the switch and she does not fold it and she does not put it on and she has never once in four years asked to.
Then she puts her face in the side of my neck and stands there.
Ten seconds, maybe. Long enough that I get both arms around her.
She does not ask.
She lifts her head and looks at me for about as long as Camille looked at me, and my hands are on her back, and there is river on them, and I have not washed them since the dock because there was nowhere out there to wash them that was not the same water.
“Come here,” she says.
She runs the sink. Hot, too hot, the way she always has it, and she puts her own hands in first and then pulls mine in after, and there is a bar of orange shop soap on the sill that has been there since I met her, and she works my knuckles with her thumbs like she is getting a bearing clean.
“Ovide’s number three was seized,” she says. “Since April. I told him in April.”
“You told everybody in April.”
“I told everybody in April and everybody said the tide, and now his line has cracked and I have got a gearbox at the yard that Prejean has had apart for nine days and he has put the shims back in the wrong order twice, and when I said so he told me his uncle ran a boat.”
“What’d you say.”
“I said my father built one.” She turns my hand over. “Then I went and put them in myself at lunch and I did not tell him, and he is going to find them right and think he did it.”
“That’s mean.”
“It is efficient. The two things look alike from far away.”
She lets the water out. She dries my hands on the towel with the ducks on it that she has had since before me, and she keeps hold of the right one afterward and turns it and looks at the scab across the back of it from Tuesday, and does not ask about that either.
“Theo wants me at the thing Sunday,” she says.
“He told me.”
“He is going to keep asking.”
“He is.”
“I know.” She lets go of my hand. “I will probably go.”
I kiss her.
She smells like diesel and Prejean’s gearbox and the orange soap, and my hands are clean and hot and they are on her face, and she kisses me back with her whole self the way she does, and behind her the window unit is knocking and outside it is still light and it is the twenty-fourth of July.