Chapter SIX
Dax — August 5
The Rochelle house sits on nine acres of high ground off the Ardeen road with an oak alley in front of it that somebody planted before the Civil War and a man on the gate who has been on that gate longer than I have been patched.
“Mr. Landry.”
“He’s expecting me.”
“Mr. Rochelle went to Houma this morning.”
“He’s expecting me at two.”
“Yes sir.” The gate goes. “Go on up.”
Which tells me everything, and I ride up the alley anyway, because there are two kinds of men in this world and one of them turns around at a gate.
The front door is open before I have the kickstand down.
“He’s not here.”
She is standing in the doorway with a dish towel over her shoulder, in jeans, barefoot, hair up off her neck, and she says it like a woman telling a delivery man the wrong house.
“Your man on the gate mentioned that.”
“Then why’d you come up?”
“Because he told me after he opened it.”
Odette Rochelle looks at me for a second.
“That’s true,” she says, and steps back out of the doorway. “Come in, then. It’s a hundred and one out there.”
The hall is forty feet long. I know that later. Right now it is just a hall with a red runner and a table with a bowl on it and a photograph on the wall of a girl about nine holding a redfish nearly as long as she is, and she is not smiling in it.
“That’s you.”
“That’s me.”
“You don’t look happy about the fish.”
“I wasn’t. I caught it off the Pointe and I wanted to put it back and my daddy said no, you hold it up, we’re taking a picture.” She goes past me toward the back. “Then he sold it to a restaurant in Houma. Eleven pounds. He told me what he got for it, too.”
“How much?”
“Forty dollars.” She looks over her shoulder. “I was nine. He wanted me to know the number.”
The kitchen is at the back and it is the size of my whole house. She takes a pitcher out of the icebox and sets two glasses on the counter without asking me anything.
“It’s tea,” she says. “You can have a beer if you want but you rode here and it’s a hundred and one and you’re going to want the tea.”
“Tea’s fine.”
She pours. She does it the way people do who have poured for a lot of men in that kitchen, which is without watching the glass.
“He’s not in Houma,” she says.
“No?”
“He is in Houma. He’s also not going to be back by two, and he knew that when he told you two.” She slides the glass over. “Sit down, Mr. Landry.”
“Dax.”
“I know what your name is.”
I sit down.
There are eleven feet of counter between us and she stays on her side of it with her hip against the drawer and her arms folded and the towel still over her shoulder, and she looks at me for about the length of time it takes to check a weld.
“You came for the point and a half,” she says.
“I came to talk to your father.”
“About the point and a half.”
“About the arrangement.”
“Same sentence.” She tips her head. “You were going to offer him half a point now and the other half in January.”
I do not say anything.
“Or you were going to offer him a point flat and a longer term. Two years instead of one. Something with the word commitment in it.”
I still do not say anything.
“It was the second one,” she says.
“How.”
“Because you took a breath when I said the first one and you didn’t take one when I said the second.”
I put the tea down.
“He’s not going to take a term,” she says. “You could offer him five years, he wouldn’t take it. You could offer him ten and a wedding cake.”
“He’s had a term with us for eleven years.”
“He’s had an arrangement with you for eleven years. That’s not a term. That’s a thing that happened every month until it became a habit, and he’s been sitting in that house for two years now watching the habit get thinner.”
“The route’s down nineteen percent on the quarter.”
“Nineteen,” she says. “That’s the first true number anybody in your club has said to anybody in mine in about eight months.”
“That’s not true.”
“Fry Hebert told Sylvain twelve in April.”
“Fry said twelve in April because in April it was twelve.”
“It was fourteen in April.” She reaches behind her and pushes a drawer shut with her hip that was not open.
“It’s alright. I’m not saying it to catch you. I’m saying it because you should know that when your treasurer talks to my father’s man, my father hears the number and then he hears the other number, and the second one is what he thinks about.”
I sit there.
“You keep his books?”
“No.”
“Then how do you know what’s in them?”
“Because I’m the one who’s home,” she says.
“Twelve years. Men come up that alley and they sit in this kitchen and they talk to him in the dining room with the door shut and then they come back through here to leave, and by then they’ve had two drinks and they’ve had a bad hour and they want to tell somebody. So they tell me.”
She shrugs one shoulder. “Nobody’s ever once thought about that. Not one man in twelve years.”
“I’m thinking about it.”
“You’re thinking about it now because I told you. That’s not the same.”
There is a clock in that kitchen and I can hear it, which means neither one of us has said anything for a few seconds.
“Alright,” I say. “Then tell me what he wants.”
“You know what he wants.”
“He wants twelve and a half.”
“No,” she says. “He’ll take twelve and a half. That’s not the same as wanting it.”
“Odette.”
“He wants something he can hold.”
She comes off the counter and gets the pitcher and tops up a glass that does not need topping up.
“Look at what your club has got,” she says.
“You’ve got sixty miles of water. You’ve got a man in the booth at the north gate and a man in the hall and a boat crew that’s been in the same four families for generations, and that is the best route on this coast and my daddy knows it. He is not looking for a better route. There isn’t one.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“The problem is that everything you’ve got, you’ve got because fourteen men in a room agree to it at church.”
I look at her.
“That’s what he says,” she says. “Word for word, in the dining room, in March, to a man from Tampa. He said, they’re good, they’re the best, and every single thing they have got is a vote. He said, a vote can be unvoted. He said, a president dies and the next one has ideas.”
The window over the sink has the alley in it, and the oaks, and the heat standing on the shell like water.
“And a contract with a family,” I say.
She stops with the pitcher in her hand.
“Is worth everything,” she says. “Yes. He’s said that one to me since I was fourteen.”
“To you.”
“To me.” She puts the pitcher down. “I’m not being coy, Mr. Landry. I have known what I am for a very long time and I’d rather not spend an afternoon pretending, so I’ll say it plain and then we can go back to numbers. My father has three things. He’s got the pipeline, he’s got Sylvain,
and he’s got me. Two of those he pays.”
I do not have anything to say to that.
“Don’t do the face,” she says.
“What face?”
“That one. The one where a man decides he feels sorry for me.” She picks her glass up. “It’s a bad face on you and it’s not useful to either of us.”
“Alright.”
“You want to know the actual problem,” she says. “The actual problem is Veracruz.”
And there it is.
“Escarra,” I say.
“They’ve called four times since June. Twice to Sylvain and twice here.”
“He tell you that?”
“Sylvain told me the first one. My daddy told me the last one, and he told me on purpose, because he wanted it to end up somewhere, and I’ve been sitting here for three weeks waiting to see which one of you would come up that alley so I could put it there.”
“Why.”
“Why what?”
“Why would you put it anywhere. What do you get.”
She sets the glass down and looks at me properly for the first time since the doorway.
“I get to keep living in a house where the men who come up the alley are men I’ve known since I was nine,” she says.
“You want to know what Escarra is? Escarra doesn’t rent. That’s the whole thing about them, that’s the entire sentence. They don’t take twelve and a half percent and go home. They come and they look at what a man has and they take it, and then the man works for them,
and if he’s very lucky he keeps his house.”
“And your father knows that.”
“My father is sixty years old and he has been the smartest man in every room he has ever walked into, and he thinks he’ll be the exception.”
She folds her arms again. “So no. He is not going to sell to them this month. He is going to keep taking their calls, and he is going to use their calls on you, and every quarter your number goes down he is going to squeeze you a little harder,
and one day the squeeze and the calls are going to cross over each other and he will do it in an afternoon and tell me at supper.”
“How long.”
“I’d say a year. Maybe less.”
“And you’re telling me this because.”
“Because the Cottonmouths are the only thing standing between my father and a decision he’s too proud to be scared of.”
The clock again.
“You’re not offering me anything,” I say.
“No.”
“You’re not asking me for anything either.”
“No,” she says. “I’m telling you what the water looks like. What you do about it is not my business and I don’t want it to be.”
“You know what he’s asking for.”
She does not answer that.
“He asked my father for a tie,” I say. “Blood or bed.”
“I know what he asked for.”
“Did he ask you?”
“He doesn’t ask me things, Mr. Landry.”
And she says it so evenly, so completely without heat, that it takes me a second to hear what it actually was.
I stand up.
“Thanks for the tea.”
“You didn’t drink it.”
“I drank half of it.”
“You drank a third and you’ve been holding the glass for ten minutes so I’d think you were comfortable.”
I put the glass down on the counter.
“You do that to everybody?”
“Do what.”
“Read them. Off a breath.”
“Everybody who comes up that alley reads somebody,” she says. “Your daddy reads a room. Sylvain reads paper. I read men in a kitchen because that is the only room I have ever been given, and if I was any good at anything else I promise you I’d be doing it somewhere else.”
She walks me out.
At the door she says, “One more thing and then I’ll stop.”
“Go on.”
“When you tell your father what I told you about Veracruz, don’t tell him it came from me.”
“Why not.”
“Because he’ll thank me for it, out loud, in front of Sylvain, and then Sylvain will tell my father, and then I will be a woman who talks.” She holds the screen. “Tell him it came from Tampa. There’s a man in Tampa who talks to everybody and my daddy knows he does.”
“You’ve thought about this.”
“I’ve thought about it for three weeks.”
I get on the bike and she is still standing in the doorway with the towel on her shoulder, and she does not wave and she does not smile, and when I come back around at the bottom of the alley the door is already shut.
I ride the long way home.
Down the Ardeen road and then out onto the causeway with the water flat on both sides and the flare standing up off the refinery, and I go slow, which I do not do, and I get all the way to the far end before I turn around and come back.
Because there is a thing in my chest and I cannot name it.
I try the obvious one first, honestly, straight out, the way you check the simple fault before you pull the whole pump.
A kitchen and a woman with her hair up and eleven feet of counter, and I hold it up and look at it and it does not fit.
It is not that. There was not one second in that room where it was that, and she never once made it that, and I would know.
So it is the other thing.
Twelve years, she said. Men in a kitchen.
And in those twelve years there has been one person in that house who has known what every man who came up that alley was worth and what he was frightened of, and my father has been talking to Auguste Rochelle across a dining table the entire time, and my father is the smartest man I have ever met.
A vote can be unvoted.
That is what will not sit down. Not her. That sentence. Because I sat at that hatch cover and watched Sundown decide not to make a motion, and I did the arithmetic on how many hands he would get, and I was pleased with myself about it. Six hands. He would have got six.
And a man in a dining room in Houma has already done that same arithmetic, about all of us, and he has been doing it for eleven years, and he has decided that fourteen men who vote are worth less than one family that does not.
By the time I come off the causeway I have got it down to a thing I can say in a sentence, and the sentence is this.
The club has nothing Auguste Rochelle wants except promises.
Everything else we have, he already has the use of. The water, the gate, the hall, the crews. He rents all of it for eleven percent and he wants twelve and a half. The only thing in the entire Cottonmouth MC that is not already his is the one thing a vote cannot take away from him afterwards.
I do not go to Sabine’s.
She is at the yard until seven and I could go at eight and she would open the door and take my cut off me at the shoulders, and I stand in my own kitchen at twenty past eight with the light off, thinking about that, and I do not go.
That is the second night I have not gone, and I am aware that I am counting.
I call Deuce instead.
“You see him?”
“He was in Houma.”
“Course he was.”
“Deuce, Veracruz has called him four times since June.”
There is a pause on the line that is about two seconds long, and two seconds is a very long time from a man who does not hurry.
“Where’d that come from,” he says.
“Tampa.”
“Mm.”
“You knew.”
“I knew about two.” My father breathes out. “Alright. Alright, son. That’s good. That’s a good thing to know.”
“What do we do about it?”
“We think about November,” he says, and hangs up.
I stand there with the phone in my hand in the dark for a while.
Then I go and wash my hands, which nobody has asked me to do, in a house where there is no one to see it.