Chapter TEN
Dax — September 5 to 7
Chief counts the phones and gets fourteen, which he has not got since April, and he says so.
“Fourteen. Full house.”
“Then write it,” Deuce says.
Everybody knows why it is full. Ro Sonnier is off the water in the middle of the week for the first time in two years and Landry’s nephew has driven back from Lafayette, and there is not a man at that hatch cover who has not spent nine days hearing about Auguste Rochelle’s three weeks.
Deuce hits the wood once.
“Money.”
“Route’s twenty-two down,” Fry says.
“Say it slow.”
“Twenty-two percent on the quarter, and that’s with September’s boxes counted early, which I done to make it look better and it don’t look better.”
“Alright.”
“Dock’s flat. Hall’s flat. Tow yard’s up four hundred because we got the Simoneaux boy back at his old rate, which I want on the record as a thing I told y’all would happen.”
“It’s on the record,” Chief says. “Nobody cares.”
“I care.”
Deuce puts his hand flat.
“Auguste,” he says.
And the room goes.
I have sat at that table eleven years and I have never once heard it like that.
Everybody talking at the same time and nobody shouting, which is worse than shouting, and Chief with his hands up saying one at a time, one at a time, and Bones telling Fry that eleven flat on paper is not a real thing because there is no paper in this world that either of them could carry into a
courthouse.
“It’s not that kind of paper,” Fry says.
“Then it’s not paper.”
“It’s paper with Auguste Rochelle, Remy. What do you want, a notary?”
Deuce lets it run.
That is a thing he does that nobody understands until they have watched him do it for twenty years. He lets a room say everything it has got, all of it, until it is empty, and then he speaks into an empty room.
It takes eleven minutes.
“So say the price,” Chief says finally, because Chief is Secretary and Chief needs a thing he can put in his head.
“He wants a tie,” Deuce says.
“What’s a tie.”
“He wants it known that there’s a thing between his house and this club that ain’t a vote.”
“Known how?”
“Blood or bed.”
Chief sits back.
“Blood,” Fry says. “Blood’s what, a marriage?”
“Blood’s a child,” Deuce says. “And there’s no sisters and no brothers and it takes time he says he ain’t got.”
“So it’s the other one.”
“That’s right.”
Sundown says, “And the man in question.”
“Say it plain, Micah.”
“I’m saying it plain. He don’t want just anybody. He wants the man who takes that gavel.”
“That’s right.”
“So he wants your boy.”
“That’s right.”
There it is, out on the hatch cover in front of fourteen men, and I sit there with my hands where everybody can see them and I do not say one word, because there is a thing about being talked about at a table you are sitting at, which is that the moment you speak you have made it a negotiation.
“Well,” Ro says. “It ain’t the worst thing I ever heard asked.”
“Ro.”
“I’m saying. There’s men at this table been asked worse for less. I got asked to sit eleven months in Angola for this club and I done it.”
“That’s different.”
“How’s it different?”
“Because you volunteered,” Bones says.
“I volunteered because Deuce asked me.”
“That ain’t the same as a vote.”
“It’s exactly the same as a vote,” Ro says, “because y’all voted on it and then he asked me.”
And the room does that thing again, and Chief says one at a time, and it runs another four minutes.
Landry’s nephew says, from the low end, “Ain’t the girl gonna have something to say about it?”
“Which girl,” Fry says.
“Either one.”
Nobody answers him.
“I’m just saying, that’s two women and neither one’s at this table.”
“Sit down, T-Boy,” Chief says, not unkindly.
Theo has not said anything. Theo is at the low end with his hands under the wood and he is looking at a point about a foot in front of his own beer, and he has been looking at it since the word bed.
“Alright,” Sundown says. “Then let’s do it the way we do things.”
Deuce looks up.
“I’ll say it, since nobody wants to.” Sundown puts both forearms on the wood. “I move that this chapter accepts Rochelle’s terms, eleven flat, five years, and that the tie be met.”
“Micah.”
“That’s a motion, Chief. Write it.”
Chief does not pick anything up, because Chief does not write anything down.
“Second,” Fry says.
And it is out. It is out on the table and there are fourteen men and I do a thing I have done my whole life which is count votes before they are spoken, and I get eight.
I get eight, maybe nine, and one of them is the man who put his forearms on the wood, and the arithmetic on that is so ugly that it takes me a second.
Because if that motion carries, then in five years, when Auguste Rochelle is dead or gone and the tie is not worth anything anymore, there is a table full of men who voted for it, and the only man in this parish who has to live inside it is me.
And Micah Aucoin gets to have moved it. He gets to be the man who saved the route without ever once being the route.
Deuce puts his hand flat on the hatch cover.
“No,” he says.
“It’s been moved and seconded.”
“No.”
“Deuce.”
“There will be no vote,” my father says.
And the whole room stops, because that is not a thing that has ever happened in there. You can vote a man out of this club at that table. You can vote to take a dock, vote to bury a man, vote a patch on or off, and my father has never once in nineteen years told that room it could not have a vote.
“There is no motion,” he says, “because it ain’t a club matter.”
“It’s the route,” Sundown says. “The route’s a club matter.”
“The route’s a club matter. That ain’t the route. That’s a man’s bed.” Deuce says it flat, the way you would read a draft off a chart. “No man gets voted into a bed. Not in this chapter. Not while I’m sitting here.”
“So we lose the route over a technicality.”
“It ain’t a technicality, Micah, it’s the only line this club’s got.”
“Since when?”
“Since always. Since Boots. Y’all want to know why nobody has ever put a hand on any woman in that yard at one of these gatherings? It ain’t because we’re good. It’s because everybody in this club knows there is one thing that don’t go to a vote,
and the day it goes to a vote there ain’t nothing left that don’t.”
Nobody says anything.
“Now.” Deuce stands up. He takes the gavel and he does not use it, he just picks it up and puts it down again an inch from where it was.
“The offer’s there. It’s there till the end of the week and every man in this room knows it. And I’ll not have it said I stood in the way of a thing that keeps y’all eating.”
He looks at nobody. That is the thing. He looks at nobody at all.
“But it ain’t going to be this table that does it,” he says. “This table don’t get to decide it and this table don’t get to be relieved about it after. Whatever happens, happens outside that door, and it’s a man’s own.”
And he walks out.
He leaves the gavel on the wood and he goes out into the yard and the door bangs and nobody moves for about four seconds, and then Chief says, “Well, church is over, I guess,” and gets up to get the phones.
I sit there while thirteen men file past me.
Bones puts a hand on my shoulder on the way out and does not say anything. Fry does not look at me. Sundown stops in the doorway with the light behind him and says, “That’s the cleanest thing I ever seen a man do,” and I do not know for certain to this day which one of them he meant.
Theo goes out last and he is still not looking up.
I sit at an empty hatch cover for a long time with my father’s gavel four feet from my hand and nobody in the room, and I do the arithmetic, and it is the same arithmetic it has been since the sixteenth of August, and it comes out the same way it has come out every single time.
The difference is that now there is nothing on the other side of it.
Nobody ordered me. There is no motion, no vote, no minute in a book that does not exist, and my father stood up in front of fourteen men and refused to let it be anything but mine, and he did that to protect me, and I know he did that to protect me.
And I sit in that chair and I understand, completely, that he has handed me the only thing I ever wanted, which is a way to buy the gavel without any of them being able to say I was given it.
Two nights later I ride out to the Rochelle house at ten o’clock, and Sylvain is not there, and the gate is open.
The light comes into that room grey and then yellow, and I am awake for all of it, and at some point I get up and start putting my clothes on with my back to the bed.
“You’re going to want to sit down for a minute,” Odette says.
“I’ve got to be at the yard.”
“You’ve got to be at a yard at six twenty in the morning.”
I sit down on the end of the bed with one boot on.
She sits up against the headboard with the sheet across her and pulls her hair off her neck and holds it there, and she looks at me the way she looked at me across eleven feet of counter in August, which is like a woman checking a weld.
“Do you know what you just bought?” she says.
“The route.”
“Yes. You did.” She says it without any weight. “Eleven flat for five years, and he’ll honour it, and he’ll honour it past five if you don’t do anything stupid. So I want to say that first, because it’s true and because nobody else is going to say it to you in a nice room.”
“Alright.”
“Now the rest of it.” She lets her hair go. “You didn’t buy it with tonight.”
“What does that mean?”
“Tonight’s nothing. Tonight is a thing that happened in a house at the end of an alley and there’s two people in this world know about it and both of them are in this room.”
She looks at me steadily. “My daddy doesn’t want a thing that happened. He said it to you at his own table and you didn’t hear it. He wants it known.”
I have got my other boot in my hand.
“Known,” I say.
“Known. In your yard, in this house, by Sylvain, by every man who comes up that alley. That was the price. That was always the price and there was never one other thing in it.” She tips her head. “You thought the price was me.”
“I thought.”
“You thought if you did the hard part you’d get to keep the rest of your life the way it was.”
I do not answer that.
“So he’ll ask for proof,” she says.
“He’ll ask you.”
“He’ll ask me and I’ll tell him the truth, and he’ll believe me, and it won’t be enough.” She pulls her knees up under the sheet. “Because I’m his daughter. Anything I say is a thing he told his own child to say. He needs it out of your side.”
“Meaning what.”
“Meaning something that everybody can see and nobody has to be told.”
She watches me. “You know exactly what that is. You’ve known since he said the word tie in that dining room. You just haven’t said it out loud yet because saying it out loud makes it real, so I’ll say it and then it’s mine and not yours, and you can be angry at me instead.”
“Don’t.”
“A cut,” she says.
The room is very quiet.
“With your name on it,” she says.
I put the boot on.
“Dax.”
“I heard you.”
“I want to say the other half now,” Odette says, “and then I’m done and I’ll not bring it up again.”
“Say it.”
“I never asked for this. I want that on the record between us, because there’s going to be a time when you need somebody to be at fault and I’m the nearest thing.”
She keeps her voice completely level. “I’m not going to wear it in front of her. I’ll not do that. If it’s got to be worn, it gets worn where it does the work, in this house and at that yard when she isn’t there, and I’ll take it off before anybody has to look at anybody.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“Then make it how it works. You’re the one who’s going to be holding that gavel.”
I stand up.
“It’ll be a piece of paperwork,” I say. “That’s all it is. It sits in a bag.”
Odette Rochelle looks at me for a long moment.
“Alright,” she says.
And that is the only time in her life that woman ever let me get away with anything.
I make the call at ten past seven from the shell road with the engine off, sitting on the bike, in the sun.
Boudreaux does the leatherwork for this club and he has done it for thirty-one years out of a shop behind his house in Bayou Blue with two machines and a dog.
“Yeah.”
“It’s Dax Landry.”
“Hah. Your daddy’s boy. What you need, you need a repair?”
“I need a property cut.”
There is a pause on the line, and Boudreaux is seventy-one and he has made every one of these for three decades and he does not ask one single question, ever, which is why he is still doing it.
“Alright,” he says. “Small or regular?”
“What’s the difference?”
“Small’s for a small girl.”
“Regular.”
“Black?”
“Black.”
“Name?”
And I sit there on the shell road with my thumb on the throttle and the sun coming up over the tow yard, and there is one second, one, where the thing is still not done.
Boudreaux is seventy-one years old and half deaf and he would forget the call inside a week and never say a word about it to anybody, and I could say wrong number and put the phone in my pocket and go to work.
“Hollow,” I say.
“Property of Hollow?”
“Property of Hollow.”
“Two weeks.”
“Make it one.”
“Make it one,” Boudreaux says, “and it’ll cost you eighty more and my wife’ll be mad at you.”
“That’s fine.”
“You want it delivered or you coming to get it?”
“I’ll come get it.”
I hang up and I sit there for a while with the phone in my hand.
Then I ride to the yard and I sign for two boxes off a ship out of Cartagena, and one of them has a weight on the sheet and one of them does not, and I do not ask about the second one,
and by nine o’clock I have got my hands in a chassis coupling with the sun on the back of my neck and I have not thought about any of it for eleven whole minutes.
That is the part I did not expect.
How quickly it goes back to being an ordinary day.