Chapter FOUR
Dax — July 29
There is a wooden box on the wall outside the chapel with fourteen slots in it and a hasp with no lock, and every man puts his phone in it before he goes through that door, and no man has ever asked why.
Chief counts them. He is the Secretary and he has counted them for nineteen years and he does it out loud.
“Thirteen.”
“Ro’s on the water,” Bones says.
“Then it’s thirteen and a proxy and I’ll write it.”
Inside there is one table and it is a hatch cover off a Liberty ship that somebody dragged up here decades ago, and it is eleven feet long and four inches thick and the grain has gone black where hands go.
There are no papers on it. There is no ledger and no roster.
There is a gavel that came off a courthouse in Terrebonne Parish and my father’s forearms on either side of it.
Prospects stand outside in the heat. Prospects do not speak at that table and one of them is going to be Landry’s nephew, and I have watched that boy work eleven months and he still moves like a man who thinks somebody is going to thank him.
Deuce hits the wood once.
“Money,” he says.
Fry Hebert reads it off nothing, because Fry does not write it down either. He is fifty-one and he has been Treasurer since before I patched and he has a memory like a filing cabinet in a house nobody has cleaned.
“Dock’s up. Hall’s flat. The tow yard’s down eight hundred because the Simoneaux boy quit and we’re paying overtime to a man who don’t do overtime speed.” He shifts. “Route’s the thing.”
“Say it.”
“Route’s down nineteen percent on the quarter.”
Nobody says anything.
“Nineteen,” Sundown says.
“That’s what I said.”
“Say it again for the room.”
“Micah, you heard him,” Deuce says. Not sharp. Just placed.
Sundown puts his hands up an inch off the wood and puts them back down. He is forty-five and he has been VP for six years and he has a way of asking questions he already has answers to.
“So the nine,” he says. “That’s settled.”
“It’s settled,” Deuce says.
“Settled how? Because Sylvain went home with a number and Auguste’s been quiet for five days, and Auguste ain’t quiet.”
“It’s settled,” I say.
Sundown looks down the table at me.
“Ain’t asking the Road Captain.”
“You’re asking about my route.”
“I’m asking about a hundred and ninety-one kilos, and where nine of them went, and I ain’t heard one word in this room about where they went. I heard about a boy off the Bonne Chance.”
“That’s what I said.”
“You said a boy. You didn’t say nine kilos.”
“Micah.” Deuce does not raise his voice. He never has to. “You want to make a motion?”
The room gets very still, because that is what it is for.
A motion means a vote and a vote means fourteen voices and everybody at this table knows what a motion against a Road Captain looks like when the Road Captain is the president’s son, and everybody knows it would carry about six votes, and six is worse than none.
“No motion,” Sundown says.
“Then it’s settled.”
Bones says, “Rochelle’s not settled, though.”
“No.”
“He called you?”
“He called me last night.” Deuce turns the gavel around a quarter with one finger. “He wants a point and a half.”
Chief makes a sound like a boat hitting a piling.
“A point and a half on top of eleven,” Fry says. “That’s twelve and a half to a man who don’t touch water, don’t touch steel, don’t take one hour of risk in his life.”
“That’s right.”
“On a quarter that’s down nineteen.”
“That’s right too.”
“So tell him no.”
“And then what,” Deuce says.
Fry does not answer, because there is only one answer, and it is that Veracruz has been calling and Auguste Rochelle takes their calls.
“I told him we’d talk in August,” Deuce says. “That’s what I told him.”
“August is six days,” Chief says.
“I know how long August is.”
Deuce lets it sit. Then he does the thing he does, which is change the temperature of a room by talking about something else entirely.
“November,” he says. “Anniversary run. Forty-eight years. I want it big, Chief. I want the Baton Rouge boys down and I want the two Mississippi charters and I want the Pensacola crowd if they can behave themselves.”
“That’s four hundred bikes.”
“That’s four hundred bikes.”
“In this yard?”
“In this yard.” He turns the gavel back. “It’s a good year to have everybody looking at us. And there’s things I’d like said in front of a crowd instead of said in here, because a thing said in here is a thing this table did, and a thing said out there is a thing everybody saw.”
He does not look at me.
That is the whole trick of it. He says a sentence like that with fourteen men at the wood and he does not look at anybody, and every man in the room does the arithmetic at the same time.
Sundown’s jaw goes tight, one time, and lets go.
Theo, at the low end, is watching me with his face wide open.
“Anything else,” Deuce says.
“Container in a few days,” Fry says. “Box out of Cartagena, on the water now, and the yard wants a name on the gate for it.”
“Whose box?”
“Sylvain’s paperwork.”
“Weight?”
“They didn’t send a weight.”
“Fee?”
“Fifteen.”
Something happens in the room and it is not silence, because it was already quiet. It is that eleven men find something to look at.
“Fifteen thousand,” Fry says again, because he is a Treasurer and he cannot help himself. “For one box.”
“Then it’s a good box,” Deuce says. “Dax’ll sign for it.”
“Yes sir.”
“Anything else.”
Nothing else. He hits the wood.
Outside, the heat comes off the shell like a hand on your face and the prospects have the beer up and somebody has the radio on, and Theo is at my elbow inside four seconds.
“Four hundred bikes,” he says.
“Theo.”
“That’s what he means though, right? That’s what November is?”
“That’s not what he said.”
“That’s what he said, Dax.”
“He said he wanted the Baton Rouge boys down.”
Theo grins at me like a kid who has found a key.
“Sabine’s gonna have to come to that one,” he says. “Four hundred bikes, she can’t say no to that.”
“Ask her yourself.”
“I ask her every week.”
“Then you know the answer.”
I get the box a few days later.
The container yard is on the north side of the ship channel and it is nine hundred acres of stacked steel and it never stops, day or night, cranes going and reach stackers going and a hundred and forty trucks a day through a gate where a man in a booth looks at a number on a screen and looks at a
number on paper.
The man in the booth is ours. Everybody in that booth for eleven years has been ours. That is what the union hall is for, and that is what my father built, and there is not one gram that moves through this port that does not have a Cottonmouth somewhere in the paperwork.
The box comes off the stack at four in the afternoon and it goes on a chassis and the driver is not ours, which is the first thing I do not like.
Sylvain is standing at the fence.
“Mr. Landry.”
“You don’t usually come to the yard.”
“I do for this one.”
I sign the gate sheet. It says forty-foot high cube, it says a seal number, it says produce, and in the weight column there is a line drawn through it in pen.
“There’s no weight.”
“No.”
“Every box in this yard has a weight, Sylvain. That’s how the crane knows what it’s picking up.”
“The crane knew,” Sylvain says. “The paper did not need to.”
I look at the box.
It is a red box and it is filthy and it has been at sea, and there are two hasps and a bolt seal and there is nothing about it that is different from four hundred other boxes within a hundred yards of where I am standing.
Then a truck goes by on the row behind us, and in the two seconds after it passes there is a sound.
It is very small. It could be a stacked box settling, because they do that, they tick and groan all day in this heat. It could be a gull on the roof of it. It could be a chain.
I look at Sylvain and Sylvain looks at the chassis.
“Fifteen,” he says. “Your father knows the arrangement.”
He walks away.
I ride the box out to the north gate behind the chassis and I hand the driver off at the ramp and I do the thing that I am going to keep doing for nine years, which is nothing.
That night I ask my father one question and only one, at the shed, with the door open and a beer in his hand.
“What’s in the box, Deuce?”
He drinks. He is a slow drinker and he has been for as long as I have known him.
“Freight,” he says.
“There was no weight on the sheet.”
“There’s no weight on a lot of sheets.”
“There was a sound out of it.”
“Boxes make sounds.”
“Deuce.”
He turns and looks at me, and there is nothing in his face except patience, and that is what finishes it.
“It’s freight,” he says. “You want to make it something else, then you’ve got to stop, and you’ve got to tell fourteen men why they’re not eating, and then you’ve got to explain to Auguste Rochelle why the Cottonmouths turned down a box.” He drinks. “So it’s freight. Say it back to me.”
“Freight.”
“That’s right.”
And he puts his hand on the back of my neck the way he did on the dock five days ago, and I let him.
The salvage yard is nine minutes from the shed and it is where things go that nobody is coming back for.
Hulls up on stands with the bottoms out of them.
A crane with a magnet. Four acres of parts under a shed roof where Prejean’s boys come picking twice a month, and behind all of it a concrete slab with a drain in the middle of it and walls on three sides that used to be a wash bay for trawl gear.
There are four trucks on the slab when I get there and the lights are on.
Bones is standing at the tailgate of his with his cut off and folded, which Remy Guidry does not do for anything.
“What is this.”
“Your daddy’ll tell you.”
Deuce is inside. There is a man on the floor of the wash bay with his hands zipped in front of him and blood on his mouth and I know him, everybody in this parish knows him,
because Alcide Poche has driven a reefer truck out of the ice house for twenty years and he is at every funeral and every christening and he has a laugh you can hear across a yard.
“Alcide,” I say.
“Dax.” He says it fast, like I am a door opening. “Dax, cher, tell them, tell them, hah, you know me, me, twenty year I run that ice.”
“Tell them what?”
Deuce says, “Ask him about the eighteenth.”
“What’s the eighteenth.”
“Ask him.”
And Alcide Poche stops looking at me.
That is how I know. That is the same thing I looked for in Camille Doucet’s face at four thirty-eight in the afternoon on the twenty-fourth of July and did not find, and I find it here in one second, a man going into another room to fetch something.
“Nine,” Deuce says. “Off the ice truck at the fuel dock before that boat ever put her lines off. He took it out of the hold on the eighteenth in the ice, and Sylvain counted a hundred and ninety-one because a hundred and ninety-one is what sailed.”
The floor of the wash bay is very slightly sloped toward the drain. I am looking at that.
“It never went out on the water,” I say.
“No.”
“It was gone before she sailed.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Then the boy.”
My father looks at me.
“The boy,” he says, “was a number Auguste needed on the twenty-fourth. This here is the truth, and the truth took five days, and Auguste don’t wait five days.”
Nobody says anything for a while. Somewhere out in the yard the crane is ticking as it cools.
“Get him up,” Deuce says.
They get him up. There is a bench in there, a steel one, bolted, from when this was a wash bay, and Bones puts him on it and Bones is not rough about it, and that is the part that stays.
Then Bones goes to the tailgate for the bag.
“Deuce,” I say.
“Stand there.”
“Let me do it.”
“No.” He does not look away from the bench. “You did yours on the dock. This ain’t yours.”
“Then let me wait outside.”
And my father turns his head and looks at me, and he says, quietly, so that only I can hear it:
“You stood on that dock and put a boy in the water for a number. Now you stand here and see what the number cost. A man who don’t watch the second one is a man who’ll want the first one again.”
So I stand there.
It takes a long time. That is the thing they never tell you. Bones is not fast and he is not enjoying himself and he does not say one word the entire time except to tell Alcide to be still, twice, in the voice you would use on a horse.
Alcide talks for a while. Then he says a name over and over, which is his wife’s, and then he says nothing at all, and it goes on after that, and my father stands with his arms folded and his chin down and watches every second of it, and once he says, “Left one too.”
The drain does what a drain does.
When it is finished, Bones sits down on the tailgate and takes his gloves off finger by finger, and Chief comes in from the trucks with a cooler and hands out beers, and somebody, Fry I think, says, “Well. He always did say he had a hand in everything.”
And they laugh.
Four men in a wash bay with the lights on and a dead man ten feet away, and they laugh the way men laugh in a yard when the work is done, easy, from the belly, with their heads back.
And I laugh too.
One breath of it. Out of me before I know it is coming, because it is my father’s yard and these are my brothers and it is a joke, and I hear myself do it, and I hear how it sounds in a concrete room.
Deuce looks over at me and gives me half a nod.
“Theo,” he says.
Theo Fontenot is standing at the mouth of the bay and he has been standing there the whole time and his face is the colour of a fish belly.
“Yes sir.”
“You and Chief take him out. Past the shoals. And weight him proper, not the way you done that dog last year.”
Theo says, “Yes sir,” and gets four steps out into the dark and I hear him being sick behind the shed.
I finish my beer.
Bones puts his cut back on. He does it carefully, both arms, the way you would put on a jacket in a church, and then he claps me on the shoulder on his way past and says, “Long week, brother,” and gets in his truck.
I stand in the wash bay by myself for a minute after that.
There is a hose coiled on the wall. The drain is running clear now.
Out past the stacked hulls the flare at the refinery is standing straight up again, no wind, same as the twenty-fourth, and I think about a yellow house on Beaulieu Street with a plastic chair in the carport, and a woman I have not gone to see yet, and a thing I promised a boy I would tell her.
I ride home instead of to Sabine’s.
That is the only decision I make all week that I am not ashamed of.