Chapter NINE
Sabine — August 23
Prejean’s gearbox goes back in the Saint Amelie at four and it goes in wrong, because the yard boy has left the alignment shims in the sun and one of them has curled, and I do not find that out until we are three bolts down and the coupling will not come up to the face.
So I am late.
I am late and I am filthy and I have a burn on the inside of my wrist from a wrench I put down on a manifold like an amateur, and when I come up the back steps at eight the kitchen light is on and there is a man sitting at my table who has let himself in and made himself nothing.
“You didn’t eat,” I say.
“I ate.”
“What did you eat?”
“Chips.”
“That is not eating, that is passing time with your mouth.”
I put my bag down and go to the sink first, because that is the order, and he watches me do it the way he always does.
“Saint Amelie?”
“Gearbox is in. Coupling’s an eighth out and I will fix it in a few days and Prejean will tell me it was in when he left.”
“Was it?”
“It was never in. He had it hanging on a chain fall for nine days telling everyone it was in.”
I dry my hands and turn around and lean on the counter, and there is a plate on the stove under a pot lid that he has put there.
“You cooked?”
“I got it from Naquin’s.”
“You went to Naquin’s.”
“I went to Naquin’s, and I put it on a plate, and I put the lid on it, and now you’re going to eat it.”
“That is not cooking, Dax.”
“I never said cooking.”
I eat it standing up, which he hates, and he does not say so, which is the thing about him.
It is red beans, which is wrong for today, and it is the third time in three weeks he has come here after something and put food in front of me.
The first time I thought it was because of the body.
The second time I thought nothing at all.
“Auguste Rochelle,” I say.
He does not stop with his beer halfway or put it down or any of that. He turns it a quarter on the table.
“What about him.”
“You went out there twice.”
“Who told you that?”
“Ovide.”
“Ovide.”
“Ovide Thibodeaux was on the Ardeen road on the sixteenth going to his sister’s and he saw a bike he knows going up an alley he knows, and Ovide has never in his life seen a thing and kept it in his mouth.”
I put the fork down. “And Nita told me you were out there the fifth, because Nita knows everything that happens in that yard within a day.”
“You’ve been asking about me?”
“I have not asked one person one question. That is my point. I did not have to.”
He nods slowly. He does not look caught, which is worse than looking caught.
“Yeah,” he says. “Twice.”
“What did he want?”
And this is where he tells me.
He sits back and he puts both hands flat on my table and he tells me a story that takes about four minutes, and I want to be very clear about what happens in those four minutes because I have gone over them since.
He tells me the route is down nineteen percent on the quarter and will be twenty-two by September.
He tells me Rochelle wants a point and a half on top of eleven, and what that is in dollars, and what that does to a table with fourteen men on it.
He tells me Escarra out of Veracruz has called Rochelle four times since June and that his father knew about two of them.
He tells me Rochelle offered eleven flat for five years and put the word paper on it, which nobody has ever done.
He tells me his father is fifty-eight with a bad valve and Micah Aucoin has been telling men in bars for two years that there is better money in the yard than in the water.
He tells me all of that. Every bit of it is true. I have checked all of it since, in the way you can check things in a parish like this one, and there is not a false fact anywhere in those four minutes.
“So what does he want for the eleven flat?” I say.
“He wants a commitment.”
“What is a commitment?”
“He wants to know who’s holding the gavel after Deuce,” Dax says.
“That’s the whole thing. He doesn’t care about the money. He’s watched three routes die in Alabama and none of them died from police, they died because a man got sick and his son was a fool. He wants to know who he’s dealing with the day after.”
“And who is he dealing with?”
“That’s up to fourteen men in a room.”
“That is not what I asked.”
He looks at me.
“Me,” he says. “It’d be me.”
“Then tell him it is you.”
“That’s not worth anything. That’s a promise, and a promise off a man in a club is a vote waiting to happen.” He turns the bottle back. “He wants something that isn’t a vote. That’s the whole conversation. That’s all it was.”
And there it is.
I want to describe the shape of it, because it is a beautiful piece of work and I did not see it for four years.
Everything he has said is true. The nineteen and the twenty-two.
Veracruz. The bad valve. The bars. Eleven flat on paper.
He has handed me nine true things and every one of them checks, and the whole four minutes is arranged around one hole about the size of a fist, and the hole is what a thing that is not a vote actually looks like when you write it down.
He never said no such thing was offered.
He said, he wants something that isn’t a vote. That is a true sentence. It is true the way that a hull is watertight is a true sentence about a boat with the plug out.
“So what did you say to him?” I ask.
“I said no.”
That, I will find out later, is the truest thing he says in my kitchen all night.
“He is going to come back at you,” I say.
“He gave me three weeks.”
“Three weeks to what?”
“To take the eleven flat.”
“Or?”
“Or he does the point and a half in September and Deuce pays it, and then in December he wants another half, and Deuce pays that too.”
I push the plate away.
“Then pay it,” I say.
“Sabine.”
“I am serious. Pay it. Twelve and a half is not the end of the world, and it is a number, and a number is a thing you can survive. Every year of my father’s life he paid somebody something he did not want to pay and he called it the cost of the water and he went to bed.”
“And in five years it’s fifteen. And in eight it’s twenty.”
“Then in eight years you are out of the water and you are a club that runs a tow yard and a union hall, and every one of you lives to be sixty.”
He does not answer that.
“You know what my father said about Auguste Rochelle?” I say.
“You never told me he said anything about him.”
“He said, that man will never ask you for money, and that is what makes him expensive.”
Dax’s face does something, quick, and shuts.
“When did he say that?”
“When I was about twenty-four. Rochelle wanted him to do a seventh boat and my daddy said no.”
“He said no to Auguste Rochelle.”
“He said no to Auguste Rochelle in that man’s own dining room, and he told me about it in the shed with the doors shut, and he laughed about it.”
I get up and take the plate to the sink.
“So I know it can be done, Dax. That is all I am saying. I know for a fact it can be done, because a man with a welding rod and no club at all did it twice.”
“And they never came at him for it.”
“Not for that.”
He hears it. I watch him hear it, and I watch him choose not to open it, and I let him, because I have opened it once in three weeks and it cost me my brother for a week.
I wash the plate. He comes and stands with his hip against the counter beside me with the towel, and I hand him things and he dries them and puts them in the wrong places, and I move two of them back after him without saying anything, and that is a thing we have done four hundred times.
“Sabine.”
“Mm.”
“If I brought you something,” he says, “would you rather have it late and true or early and half.”
I look at him.
“That is not a question,” I say. “That is a man building a door.”
“It’s a question.”
“Then late and true, and you know that already, and if you know it already then you are not asking me, you are telling me there is going to be a late.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“That is what you said with different words.”
He puts the towel down.
“I’ve got a thing I’m working out,” he says. “It’s club and it’s not mine to say yet, and when it’s mine I’ll say it.”
And that.
That right there is where I could have put my hand out and stopped a truck.
Here is what I do instead.
I am thirty-one years old and I have been on my back under a Detroit since seven in the morning and I have a burn on my wrist and a coupling an eighth out of true and a brother who has not been to my dock since a dead man came up on it, and I love this man, and I am tired.
Those are the three things. Those are all of them, and I am not going to dress them up later.
“Alright,” I say.
“Alright?”
“Alright. It is club and it is not yours to say.” I take the towel back off him and fold it and hang it on the oven door where it lives. “You have never once brought that table into this house and I am not going to be the one who asks you to.”
“That’s not.”
“Do not,” I say. “Do not stand in my kitchen and be relieved at me. If you are going to take the out then take it and shut up about it.”
He laughs. He puts his forehead down on the top of my head and laughs, and I stand there with my hands on his sides and I feel the laugh go through both of us, and it is late and the window unit is knocking and I have got to be at the yard at seven.
“Come to bed,” I say.
He comes to bed.
And it is good, and I am not going to say anything else about it except that afterwards he holds on longer than he usually does, and his hand is flat between my shoulders in the place it always is, and I fall asleep before he does, which almost never happens.
I wake up at ten past two.
I do not know why. There is no sound. The window unit has cycled off and the house is doing the thing it does at that hour, which is tick as it lets go of the day, and there is a man asleep on his front with one arm off the side of my bed and his breathing gone slow.
And I lie there and I start making a list.
I did not decide to make it. It arrives the way a number arrives when you have been looking at a gauge for an hour, and once it starts I cannot stop it, and the list is this.
He has hidden the yard money from me. In February he took two thousand out of his own end and put a roof on Fry Hebert’s mother’s house and he did not tell me and I found out from Nita in April, and when I asked him he said it was nothing.
He has hidden a hand. Three or four times a year he comes here with something split or scraped or swollen and he says it was the shop, and once he said it was the shop when I had been in that shop at four o’clock and there was nothing in there that could do it.
He has hidden certain nights. That one is not hiding, that one is the rule and I made the rule, so it does not count and I take it off the list.
He has hidden what happened to a man named Camille Doucet, because a boy went off a boat in July and my man stood on a dock and told me the word nothing, and I found out about that boy from Lorraine Sonnier at a gathering two weeks later.
And now Auguste Rochelle.
That is the list.
I lie in the dark and I go through it three times looking for a sixth thing, and I go all the way back, four years and one month, and there is no sixth thing.
Four years. Four years and there are five items on that list and one of them does not count, and one of them he told me about himself in April as soon as I asked.
And that is when it gets in.
Because a woman lying awake at two in the morning counting her man’s lies is supposed to find twenty.
That is the whole point of the exercise.
You count them and there are twenty and you say, well, there it is, he is a liar, and you have got a thing in your hands you can hold up and look at and make a decision about.
I have got four. I have got four in four years and I could put every one of them in one hand.
He does not lie to me.
That is the finding. That is the actual finding, arrived at honestly at two in the morning with the evidence in front of me, and I lie there in my own bed and it frightens me so badly that my heart goes.
Because if a man tells you the truth four hundred times, you stop weighing it.
You stop putting your hand on it. It becomes a floor, and you walk on a floor, you do not test it, nobody tests a floor.
And a floor that has held four hundred times is a floor you will walk out onto at a dead run in the dark without one single thought in your head.
I have been walking on him at a run for four years.
And I got a very short list tonight, and I thought, well, that is good, and it is not good, it is the opposite, because it means when he does it I will not see it coming.
Not because he is clever.
Because I am not looking.
I turn over. He makes a sound and moves his arm and does not wake up, and I lie there with my back to him and my eyes open and I try to take that thought and put it down somewhere and it will not go down.
At half past three I get up and go and stand in my kitchen in the dark.
The towel is on the oven door where I hung it. The two things he dried are back where I moved them. There is a plate on the rack upside down.
I stand there for a while.
Then I say it out loud, in an empty kitchen, at half past three in the morning, in the flattest voice I have got, because I have found in my life that a thing said out loud in your own house has to be looked at afterwards, whereas a thing thought in bed can be put away.
“He is going to do something.”
And then, because I am my father’s daughter and I do not leave a job half apart:
“And I am going to find out about it late.”
I go back to bed.
He is warm and he is asleep and he has taken all of the sheet, and I get in and put my feet on his shins because he hates it, and he says something that is not a word and gives me some of the sheet back without waking up.
I do not sleep again until the light comes.