Chapter EIGHT
Dax — August 16
Auguste Rochelle keeps a dining room he does not eat in.
Twelve chairs, a table with a runner down the middle of it and nothing on the runner, and a sideboard with a decanter that has been in the same position every time I have been in this house.
There is one window and it faces the alley, so that a man sitting at the head of that table can see who is coming up it while the man he is talking to cannot.
He is at the head of it when Sylvain shows me in.
“Dax.”
“Mr. Rochelle.”
“Auguste. We’re eleven years past mister.” He does not stand. “Sit down there. Not that one, that one. That one’s got a leg.”
I sit in the chair he points at.
He is sixty and he is a small man, which people do not expect. Reading glasses pushed up on his head. Short sleeves. Hands folded on the runner and a wedding ring on a hand that has not had a wife on the other end of it in years.
Sylvain pours two coffees and goes out and shuts the door.
“Your daddy sent you.”
“I asked to come.”
“Mm.” He turns his cup a quarter. “That’s better. That’s a better answer than the one I expected.”
“What’d you expect?”
“I expected him to come himself, in about three weeks, when the quarter closes and the number’s worse.”
“It’ll be worse.”
“It’ll be twenty-two,” Auguste says.
He is right and I did not know it yet. Fry will say twenty-two in September and he will say it like a man reading his own death certificate, and this man in short sleeves knows it in August.
“Alright,” I say. “So let’s do the point and a half.”
“No.”
“I’m authorized to do the point and a half.”
“You’re not authorized to do anything, son, you’re authorized to bring me back a sentence.”
He drinks. “But that’s fine. I’ll give you a sentence to bring back. Sit still and let me talk for a minute, because I’ve been putting this in order for two years and I’d like to say it once and say it right.”
So I sit still.
“Eleven years,” he says. “I came to your father in ninety-nine with two boats and a man in Cartagena and I told him what I had, and he told me what he had, and we did it on a handshake in that yard by the shed. You would have been about twenty-two.”
“Twenty-three.”
“Twenty-three. You were prospecting.”
“I was.”
“You were carrying a cooler and looking at me like you wanted to ask a question and knew better.” He almost smiles. “Best eleven years of business I ever had. I want that said before I say the rest, because a man ought to say the good part out loud and not just think it.”
“Alright.”
“Not one seizure. Not one. Eleven years through the busiest port between Houston and Mobile and not one box, not one hull, not one man of yours in a room with a federal in it. You know how rare that is?”
“I know.”
“You don’t. You know it from inside.” He puts his cup down.
“From the outside it’s a miracle. I’ve had three routes in Alabama in that same time and every one of them died, and none of them died from police. They died because a man got greedy or a man got scared or a man got sick and his son was a fool.”
“So keep it.”
“I want to keep it,” Auguste says. “That’s what I’m telling you. I don’t want Veracruz. I don’t want a room full of people I can’t call by name. I want the thing I have got.”
“Then take the point and a half and we run it another eleven.”
“With what?”
“With the same thing we ran the last eleven with.”
“A handshake,” he says.
“Yes.”
“With who?”
“With Deuce.”
“Thibault Landry is fifty-eight years old,” Auguste says, “and he has got a bad valve and a worse temper and a chapter of fourteen men, and I have got a business that will be sold or inherited inside of ten years, and I need to know what happens on the day after.”
“Nothing happens. The club runs.”
“The club votes.”
There it is. In her voice, in her kitchen, eleven days ago, and here it is out of him at the head of his own table.
“Every single thing your club has got,” he says, “it has got by a spoken vote in church. Am I wrong?”
“You’re not wrong.”
“Then let me put it to you like a man who’s had to think about it. Say Thibault dies tonight.”
“Auguste.”
“Say it happens, because it happens. Who takes that gavel?”
“Sundown’s VP.”
“Micah Aucoin.” He says the name like he is turning something over to look at the underside. “Micah Aucoin who has been telling men in bars for two years that the route is thin and the risk is heavy and there’s better money in the hall and the yard than there is in the water.”
I do not answer that.
“You didn’t know he says that.”
“I knew.”
“You knew he thought it. You didn’t know he says it.”
Auguste lets that sit for a second. “So Micah gets the gavel, and Micah brings a motion in that room to come off the water, and he doesn’t even have to win the vote. He only has to make the vote. Because the day it’s a question, it’s a question forever,
and I’ve got a hundred and forty boxes a month sitting on a thing that’s a question.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“That’s exactly how it works. I’ve watched it work three times.”
He picks the cup back up and does not drink from it.
“A contract with a club is worth nothing, son. I don’t say that to insult you. It’s worth nothing the way a promise from a town is worth nothing. There’s no one there to hold. There’s just a room, and rooms change their minds.”
“And a contract with a family.”
“Is worth everything,” he says, “because family don’t vote.”
The window has the alley in it. From this chair I cannot see it.
“So say the number,” I tell him.
“There’s no number.”
“There’s always a number.”
“Not this time.” Auguste sets the cup down for the last time and pushes it an inch away from himself.
“I don’t want the point and a half. I’ll take eleven flat. I’ll take eleven flat for five years and I’ll put it in writing, which I have never done for any man in my life, and I’ll carry the loss on the down quarters and not say a word about it.”
“For what.”
“For a tie.”
There it is.
“Blood or bed,” he says. “I don’t care which and I’m not going to be delicate about it because we’re both grown. Blood is your side. You’ve got no sisters and your daddy’s got no brothers left, so blood means a child, and a child takes time I might not have. Bed is my side.
I’ve got the one daughter.”
“Odette.”
“Odette.” He says it flat. “And before you say the thing you’re about to say, no, I am not selling my child. There’d be no ring and no church and no paper, and she’d not be moving into any man’s house unless she wanted it. I’m not that. What I want is for it to be known.”
“Known.”
“Known in your yard and known in my house and known by Sylvain and known by every man who comes up my alley. That’s all. That there is a thing between the Rochelles and the Landrys that is not a vote.”
“That’s it.”
“That’s it. That’s the whole of it. That’s the entire price and there is not one dollar in it.”
I sit there in the chair without the bad leg.
“Why,” I say.
“Why what?”
“Why does that hold? A man can walk away from that same as anything.”
“Because a room can vote to come off the water in one afternoon and feel fine about it,” Auguste says.
“Fourteen men, and every one of them goes home and eats his supper. But there is not a man alive who can sit in a room and vote to walk out on a thing his own is standing in the middle of. That’s not honour. That’s just how men are built.
You give a man a reason he’d have to explain at a funeral and he’ll find a way to keep the deal.”
And it is a good answer. That is the thing I would like to be able to say it was not. It is a very good answer and it is true, and I have watched it be true in that chapel my whole life.
“One more thing,” he says, “and then you can talk.”
“Go on.”
“It has to be you.”
“Deuce is president.”
“Thibault is fifty-eight with a bad valve.”
Auguste puts one finger down on the runner.
“I’m not tying myself to a man who’s leaving. I’m tying myself to the man who’ll hold that gavel after him, because the whole point of the thing is the day after, and there is no point at all in a contract with a family that ends when the old man does.”
“You don’t know I’ll hold it.”
“Don’t I?”
“There’s no line of succession in a motorcycle club, Auguste. There’s a vote.”
“There’s a vote,” he agrees. “And there’s also a man’s son who’s been Road Captain eleven years, and there’s four hundred bikes coming into that yard in November, and there is a reason your daddy is putting four hundred bikes in that yard in November, and it is not the forty-eighth anniversary.
Nobody celebrates forty-eight.”
I say nothing.
“So.” He sits back. “That’s my price.”
“No,” I say.
He does not move.
“No,” I say again, because the first one came out too quick to be worth anything and I want the second one to be mine. “I’ll take you the eleven flat and the five years to my father and he can put it to the table. The rest of it, no.”
“You want to think about it.”
“I don’t want to think about it. The answer’s no.”
“Because of the girl.”
And there is the first thing all afternoon that gets in under my ribs, because he says it without any weight on it at all, the way you would mention a hull number.
“Sabine Fontenot,” he says. “Lucien’s daughter. Four years, and she has never taken a patch off any of you, which I will tell you plainly is the most interesting fact I know about your club.”
“Don’t say her name in here.”
“I’ll say it once more and then I won’t.”
He leans forward maybe two inches. “I liked her father. That is a true thing and I don’t say it to work on you. Lucien Fontenot came in this house twice and both times he told me no about something, and he was right both times,
and I never got a straight bill out of him in eight years because he’d rather be owed than paid.”
“He never took a dollar off you.”
“He took plenty off me. He just never took it in a way you could write down.” Auguste sits back again. “Alright. That’s your no. I heard it and I’m not going to argue with you about it, because a man who argues with a no is a man who thinks the other fella didn’t mean it.”
“Then we’re done.”
“We’re done today.”
He reaches up and pulls the reading glasses down off his head and puts them on and looks at the empty runner in front of him like there is something written on it.
“Three weeks,” he says.
“What’s three weeks?”
“The offer. Eleven flat, five years, on paper. That’s good until the first week of September and then it’s gone, and I won’t bring it back up, and I’d rather you didn’t either.”
He looks over the top of the glasses. “And then in September I’ll do the point and a half instead, and your father will pay it, and we’ll go on. And the quarter after that I’ll want another half, and he’ll pay that too.”
“Until.”
“Until one day a man from Veracruz is sitting in that chair you’re in,” Auguste says, “and I am too old and too tired to tell him no, and I will tell myself I had no choice, and I will be lying, same as everybody who ever said that.”
He stands up. I stand up.
At the door he puts his hand out and I take it, and he holds it about a second longer than the handshake needs.
“You’re a better man than your daddy,” he says. “Don’t take that as a compliment. I’ve been doing this a long time and the better ones cost me more.”
Sylvain walks me out through the hall.
Forty feet of oak and a red runner and a table with a bowl on it and the photograph of the girl with the redfish, and there is nobody in the kitchen and no sound in the house at all, and I want that on the record too, that she was not there and did not come out and did not stand in any doorway.
The gate goes and I am on the Ardeen road at twenty past four.
I do not go home and I do not go to the shed and I do not call my father, because there is a thing I have got to do first and I have known it since Beaulieu Street was four miles behind me on the twenty-fourth of July.
The yellow house has the plastic chair in the carport.
Odile Doucet answers the door in a housecoat with her hair set, and she is about sixty and she is smaller than her son was, and she looks at my cut and then at my face and she says, “Dax Landry.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Come in out the heat.”
The front room has a window unit and a sofa with a sheet over it and eleven photographs on the wall in a stagger going up, and one of them is a man carrying a coffin and one of them is a boy on a bike with no chain guard.
“Sit.”
“I’ll stand, ma’am.”
“You’ll sit, because I’m standing and I’ll not have a man taller than me in my house today.” She does not sit either. “You come about Camille.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Then say it.”
And I say the thing I promised him I would say.
“It was the boat,” I tell her. “He was working the hold and she took a sea over the quarter and he went, and it was fast, and there wasn’t anybody could have got to him.”
Odile Doucet looks at me.
She looks at me for a long, long time, and she has her hands folded at her waist, and there is nothing in her face at all, and I understand about halfway through it that I am standing in a front room being weighed by a woman who has buried a husband out of the same water.
“That’s what Ro Sonnier said,” she says.
“Yes ma’am.”
“That’s what Remy said, and the priest, and now you.” She nods slowly. “Four of you. Word for word, near enough.”
“Ma’am.”
“Sit down, son.”
I sit down.
She goes and gets a photograph off the wall, the one of the boy on the bike, and she puts it in my hands and stands over me while I hold it.
“He was nine there,” she says. “That was on the shell road going down to Naquin’s. You were maybe seventeen and you used to run him off, you and the Guidry boy, because he’d follow y’all.”
“I remember.”
“He worshipped y’all.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Alright.” She takes the photograph back and hangs it up and straightens it with two fingers. “Then I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, and you can carry it back to whoever sent you, and don’t tell me nobody sent you because somebody always sends somebody.”
“Nobody sent me.”
“I’m going to say it was the boat,” she says. “That’s what I’m going to say at church and that’s what I’m going to say to my sister and that’s what I’ll say when the ladies ask me in the Winn-Dixie. Because I got two other children, and one of them is at LSU, and I would like her to stay there.”
I do not say anything.
“Now go on,” Odile Doucet says. “And don’t come back here. Not at Christmas and not at Easter and not when somebody dies. You send somebody else.”
I get on the bike outside the yellow house and I sit on it for a minute with the engine off.
Then I ride home the long way, and somewhere on the causeway the arithmetic starts, and it is not a decision and it does not feel like one. It is just numbers arriving in the order numbers arrive.
Eleven flat for five years, on paper.
Twenty-two percent down and a treasurer who says twelve when it is fourteen.
A VP who tells men in bars that there is better money in the yard.
Four hundred bikes in November.
Three weeks.
I get to my own kitchen and stand in the dark with my keys in my hand and I say it out loud to nobody, because it is true and because saying it makes it a thing I have said instead of a thing I am thinking.
“I told him no.”