Chapter THREE
Sabine — July 26
Prejean put the shims back in the wrong order a third time, which means he found them right on Monday and decided he had made a mistake.
That is the kind of thing I am thinking about at nine at night with a parts catalogue open on my kitchen table and a pencil behind my ear, and it is a good thing to be thinking about,
because the alternative is thinking about the fact that the Bonne Chance has been tied up at the far end of the yard for two days with her hold open and nobody working on her.
The back screen goes.
“You could use the front like a person.”
“Front porch light’s out.”
“The front porch light is not out. I changed it in May.”
“Then somebody’s stealing your bulbs.”
Dax comes into the kitchen and stops just inside the door the way he has done since the first month, like the room is smaller than he remembers. He has his cut over his arm instead of on him, which he never does, and he hangs it on the hook himself and it goes on crooked and he leaves it crooked.
His hair is wet.
Not shower wet. Wet at the ends and dried stiff at the crown, pushed back with a hand and left, and there is a grey line of dried salt above his ear where it ran and stopped.
“You want a beer,” I say.
“I want a chair.”
“There are four.”
He takes the one facing the door. He always takes the one facing the door and I have stopped moving my catalogue off it.
“Prejean,” I say.
“What about him.”
“He has put the shims back wrong three times. Three. I put them in right and he found them right and took them out.”
“Why would a man do that?”
“Because his uncle ran a boat.”
He laughs, one breath of it, and then it goes out of him like somebody shut a door on it.
I get him a beer he did not ask for and put it in front of him and sit down.
“Somebody called me your old lady today.”
He looks up.
“At the fuel dock. Lorraine Sonnier. She has known me since I was six and she called me Hollow’s old lady to a man from the ice house like it was my name.”
“What’d you say?”
“I said the pump he was asking about is a Jabsco and it will cost him ninety dollars.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It answered the question he asked.”
He turns the bottle a quarter turn on the table. He does that when he is deciding whether to say a thing.
“Nita asked me about it,” he says.
“About what.”
“When you’re getting patched.”
“Ah.”
“She’s asked me twice this year.”
“And what did you tell her twice this year?”
“I told her it wasn’t mine to answer.”
I put the pencil down.
“Good,” I say. “That was the right answer.”
“I know it was the right answer. I’d still like to know what the answer is.”
And there it is, out on the table between the catalogue and the beer, and he has been carrying it up my back steps for probably eleven months.
So I tell him. Once. I am not going to do this twice in my life.
“You know what my father did in that yard in ninety-four.”
“Sabine.”
“You know it, so I am going to say it out loud one time in my own kitchen and then we can go back to Prejean.”
I put my hands flat. “Six boats. He cut the frames and he moved the load and he faired the doubling by eye, and there is not one line of it on paper anywhere in this world. Not a drawing. Not a note. Nothing in a drawer, nothing in a safe, nothing with a lawyer. He did that on purpose.”
“I know why he did it on purpose.”
“Then you know what he told me. He sat me down at this table when I was nineteen and he said, if it is written down it belongs to whoever holds the paper. He said, they can burn a yard and they can burn a man but you cannot burn a thing that was never wrote.”
“That’s about the boats.”
“It is about all of it.” I look at him. “A property cut is paper, Dax. It is the only paper this club keeps. There is no ledger in that chapel and there is no roster and there is no list of who owns what,
and there is one document in the whole of the Cottonmouth MC and it is a piece of leather with a man’s name on a woman’s back.”
He does not answer.
“And I know what it is for,” I say. “I am not stupid about it. I know it means she is not to be touched and I know what happens to a man who touches her,
and I know for half the women in that yard it is the only protection they have ever been given in their lives and they earned it and I will not say one word against it, not one, not ever.”
“But.”
“But my father did not raise me to be anybody’s paperwork.”
The window unit knocks and catches and settles.
“I will stand next to you,” I say. “That is not a small thing and I am not offering it small. I will stand next to you in front of your father and in front of that whole table and I have done it and I will keep doing it. I will not be a document.”
He is quiet for long enough that I hear a truck go by out on the road and turn at the end.
“Alright,” he says.
“That is it?”
“What did you want, an argument?”
“I had one prepared.”
“Save it.” He turns the bottle back the other quarter turn. “I don’t need my name on your back to know what you are.”
“That is a better line than the one about the bilge pump.”
“That one landed too.”
“It did not.”
“Sabine.”
“It did not land.”
He is smiling now, barely, and it does not get all the way up his face, and I look at him properly for the first time since he came in, at the salt line above his ear and the two days on his jaw and the way he is sitting.
“Come here,” I say. “Bring the beer.”
The bathroom in this house is the size of a locker and the tub is cast iron and my mother chose the tile decades ago and it is a green that does not exist anymore. I put the plug in and run the hot until it fogs and I take a jug off the shelf that has been on that shelf since I was a child.
“Sit down.”
“On the floor?”
“On the floor, on the towel, and put your head back.”
He sits with his back against the tub and his legs out and his boots on and he tips his head back over the roll and looks up at me upside down.
“This is undignified.”
“You are a grown man with the channel in his hair. Dignity has already left.”
“It’s just water.”
“It is not just water. It is Port Ardeen water and it has been in there two days and it has dried in twice.”
I get the jug under and pour, and the first one comes off him grey.
He shuts his eyes.
That is when I decide not to ask.
I want to be honest about this because I am going to have to live with it for a long time.
It is not that it did not occur to me. It is that I stood there with a jug in my hand and my fingers in his hair and I ran the whole thing forward the way I run a job forward before I start it, and I saw the shape of every road out of that question,
and there was not one at the end of which I was better off.
If I ask and he lies, then I have his lie and I have to decide what to do with it.
If I ask and he tells me, then I know a thing I cannot unknow, and knowing it makes me a person who knew.
And if I ask and he cannot answer, then he has to sit in my bathroom with his eyes shut and be a man who cannot answer his own woman, and I will have done that to him for nothing, because it will not change one single fact about the past two days.
So I pour the second jug and I say, “Prejean also told me I should think about buying the yard.”
“He what?”
“He says Ardeen Marine will not be his forever and I am the only one there who knows both ends of a boat, and I should think about it.”
“With what money?”
“That was my question. He did not have a good answer. He said, you find money.” I work my thumbs at the base of his skull where it is tight enough to be a bolt. “He is sixty-seven and he wants somebody to say the word yard back to him.”
“Would you want it?”
“I would want the lathe.”
“That’s a no.”
“It is a maybe about a lathe.”
I get the soap in and work it through and his whole head goes back another inch and the muscle under my hands lets go all at once, which I have felt in exactly two things in my life, this and a seized fitting.
He does not talk for a while. I do not fill it.
The water goes from grey to clear and then it is clear twice and I keep going anyway. My arms are wet to the elbow and the tile is running and the room is so hot the mirror is gone completely, and I stand there and rinse a man’s hair for longer than it needs and neither of us says anything at all.
When I stop, he says, with his eyes still shut, “Say something with a number in it.”
“What?”
“Anything. I don’t care.”
“The bilge pump on the Marie Delphine ran eleven seconds this week and ten the week before, and the impeller is original, and by October it will be twenty and Ovide will call me at two in the morning.”
“Eleven.”
“Eleven.”
He opens his eyes and looks up at me and there is something in his face I do not have a name for, and I would like, very much, to be the kind of woman who asks.
I towel his head roughly, both hands, until he swears at me.
Then I take him to bed.
My house, my bed. There are rules and I made them in the first month and he agreed to all of them without arguing about a single one, which is what told me who he was before anything else did.
The lamp stays on. Both boots come off outside the room. Nothing of the club comes past that door, not the phone, not a word about the table, not one name of any man in it, and if a man calls, he goes out to the porch and shuts the door behind him and does not come back in still talking.
And no hands until they are clean.
That last one he thought was about grease. It is not about grease. I have never told him what it is about and he has never asked, and every time in four years he has gone to that sink first without being told, and every single time it has meant more to me than anything he has said out loud.
He is careful with me, which is a strange word for it.
He is a hundred and ninety pounds of a man who does not have a careful thing anywhere else in his life, and he takes my wrist like it is a thing that could be damaged, and he says my name once at the start the way you say a word you are checking you still know.
I do not let him rush. I hold his face and I make him look at me and I say the rules the way I always say them, not because he needs telling but because he likes hearing them, and he says yes to every one of them and then says my name again, worse.
Afterwards he keeps his hand flat between my shoulder blades. On the bare skin. Right where a patch would go, and neither of us says that, and I think both of us know it.
The lamp is still on.
“Your ceiling’s cracked,” he says.
“It has been cracked since Hurricane Andrew.”
“It’s getting longer.”
“It is a house. It is allowed to move.”
“That’s not what you say about a boat.”
“A boat is a machine. A house is just a pile of things agreeing to stay together.”
He laughs into my hair. Then, after a while: “I’d fix it.”
“You would not fix it. You would look at it, and then you would find a prospect who is scared of you, and he would fix it wrong.”
“He’d fix it scared. That’s better than wrong.”
“Those are the same thing, Dax.”
The window unit knocks. Out on the road a bike goes past, not stopping, one of the Cottonmouths going home the long way, and I feel him hear it and I feel him decide it is not for him.
“Sabine.”
“Mm.”
“Four years in July.”
“Four years on the twelfth of July, and you did not know that until Theo told you.”
“Theo did not tell me.”
“Theo told you at the fuel dock and I was standing there.”
“Alright.” He shifts. “Four years.”
“What about it.”
He does not answer straight away. His hand is still flat between my shoulders and I feel him take a breath to say something and then let it go and take another one.
“Nothing,” he says. “Just four years.”
I could ask about that too.
I lie there in my mother’s green bathroom light coming down the hall and my father’s ceiling crack over my head and a man in my bed with clean hair and clean hands, and I make the same decision I made an hour ago with a jug in my hand, and I make it the same way,
which is the way you decide anything at eleven o’clock at night when you are not tired enough to be honest.
“Turn the lamp off,” I say. “You are closest.”
“You’re closest.”
“I am comfortable.”
“So am I.”
Neither of us moves for about a minute and a half. Then he reaches over me and gets it, and the room goes dark except for the hall, and he settles back down and pulls the sheet up over both of us because he has always been cold in a house I keep at seventy-eight.
“Say the number again,” he says, half asleep.
“Eleven seconds.”
“That’s the one.”