Chapter TWELVE
Dax — September 14
I am in Larose with my father buying a forklift.
That is where I am. That is the true answer and I have never once been able to say it out loud without it sounding like a man reaching for something, so I will put it down flat and leave it.
On the fourteenth of September I am standing in a lot in Larose with Deuce and a man named Cheramie looking at an old Hyster with eleven thousand hours on it, and my father is doing the thing he does where he says nothing for so long that the other man drops his own price.
My phone goes at ten to three. I do not hear it.
It goes again at three and I am in the seat of the forklift with the mast up and I do not hear that either.
At twenty past three we are in the truck and I look at it and there are four missed calls and they are all from T-Boy Landry, who is a prospect and who has never called me in his life.
I call him back on the shoulder of 308.
“Dax. Dax.”
“Slow down.”
“She come to the yard.”
“Who came to the yard?”
“Miss Sabine. She come with a pump for the Ida Ray, Bones called her out for it, and she.” He stops. There is wind on his end and a bad connection and a nineteen-year-old boy trying to build a sentence he has no words for. “Dax, she seen it.”
I do not say anything.
“She seen it,” T-Boy says. “Miss Odette had it on.”
“Had what on.”
“You know what.”
“Say it.”
“The cut,” he says.
I stand on the shoulder of the highway with a truck going past close enough to move my shirt.
“When.”
“Half two. Maybe two-forty.”
“It’s twenty past three.”
“I called you at ten to.”
“How long was she there.”
“Ten minutes. Maybe not that.” He is talking fast now that the worst word is out.
“She never hollered. She never said nothing loud at all, that’s what. She talked to Nita and then she carried that pump on down to the bench and told Ro where the wear plate at, and she left her tools. She left her tools on the bench, Dax.”
“She what?”
“Left the whole roll. Ain’t nobody touched it, it’s still setting there.”
I hang up on him.
Deuce is standing at the driver’s door with his hand on the top of it and he has heard all of it, because Deuce hears everything and does not pretend otherwise.
“Sabine,” he says.
“Yes.”
“She alright?”
“Don’t.”
“I’m asking.”
“Do not ask me if she’s alright.”
He looks at me across the roof of the truck for a second, and then he gets in, and I get in, and he drives us out onto 308 and does forty-five in a fifty-five for the first two miles because that is what he does when he is thinking.
“I told Odette Rochelle not to come out here,” he says.
“You told her.”
“A few days ago. I told Sylvain and I told her both. I said, that ain’t a place for that yet, give it a month.”
“A month.”
“A month. Two months. Long enough for me to sit down with that girl myself and say it to her face.” He puts his hand at the top of the wheel. “I had it in my head to go out to that dock and do it myself.”
“You were going to do it yourself.”
“I was, and I’d have done it too.”
And I sit in the passenger seat of my father’s truck doing the arithmetic, and it is four days, and four days would not have made it better. It would have made it survivable. It would have been her hearing it out of the mouth of the president of this club, in her own yard, with nobody watching.
“Why was she at the clubhouse at all,” I say.
“Who, Sabine? Remy called her for the Ida Ray.”
“No. Odette.”
Deuce does not answer for about a quarter mile.
“Auguste sent her,” he says.
The yard is quiet when we come in at four.
Not empty. There are still eleven vehicles on the shell and the food is still out under the awning with foil over it, and there is nobody sitting in the chairs.
Nita comes off the steps of the clubhouse before I have the kickstand down.
She has been crying and she has stopped and started again, and she comes at me across that shell with her finger already up.
“You,” she says.
“Nita.”
“Don’t you Nita me. Twenty-nine years I’ve cooked in this yard and I have never in my life had a day like this one.”
“Where is she.”
“She’s gone home, where do you think she’s gone.”
Nita stops about a yard off and her voice drops down to something worse than shouting.
“She stood right there. Right there, Dax. Where you’re standing now. With that pump on her hip like a sack of feed and she stopped walking and she went about the colour of that shell.”
“Nita.”
“And she asked me how long.”
“Don’t.”
“She asked me how long and I told her the sixth, and she counted it out loud.” Nita’s mouth goes. “Eight days. She stood in this yard and counted eight days on me, and then she asked me did my husband come home from that table and tell me, and did I cook for these people after.”
I do not have anything.
“She never raised her voice one time,” Nita says. “Not one. That’s what I’ll be seeing at three o’clock in the morning for the rest of my life, and I want you to know that, because I raised you as much as anybody did and I am not going to spare you.”
Then she goes back up the steps and shuts the door.
Ro Sonnier is at the bench with the pump housing in front of him and the Jabsco beside it and he has not put a hand on either one, and the tool roll is there on the wood, tied, exactly the way she carries it.
“Don’t touch that,” I say.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Nobody touches that.”
“Dax, I said I wasn’t going to.”
He wipes his hands on a rag that is already clean.
“She told me where the plate was,” he says. “Up at Prejean’s. Shelf, box, fan belt on top of it. Told me not to let the boy with the ears do it because he’d torque it dry.” He shakes his head slowly. “She’s standing there with her whole face gone and she’s telling me about a fan belt.”
Bones comes out of the shed and stops when he sees me.
“You called her out here,” I say.
“The Ida Ray’s due in a few days.”
“You called her out here.”
“I called her at eight o’clock this morning and there wasn’t a soul in this yard, Dax, and I did not know what any day of this week was going to look like because nobody tells me nothing.”
Remy Guidry does not raise his voice either.
“And if I’d have known she was coming at half two I’d have stood at that gate myself and turned her around and taken the pump off her and carried it in, and I’d have done it if she’d hit me for it.”
“Alright.”
“I’d have done it.”
“I said alright.”
He stands there for a second.
“That’s a bad thing that happened out here today,” he says, and goes back in the shed.
Odette is sitting on the tailgate of a truck that is not hers, on the far side of the shell, with her shoes in her hand.
The cut is folded on the tailgate beside her.
She does not get up when I come over and she does not say anything for a while, and I stand there in front of her with my hands at my sides.
“Deuce said you were told not to come.”
“I was told not to come.”
“Then why are you here?”
She looks up.
“My daddy put me in the car,” she says.
“He put you in the car.”
“He came in the kitchen at half past one and said, get dressed, Sylvain’s taking you to the Landrys’ yard for the afternoon. And I said no. I said it twice.” She turns her shoe over in her hands. “And he said, wear it or Sylvain will tell me why you didn’t.”
I do not say anything.
“So I wore it in the car,” she says. “And then when we got out here I was going to take it off at the gate and carry it, and Sylvain stood at that gate and watched me walk all the way in, and he was still standing there at two o’clock and he was still standing there at half two,
and he did not leave until I was in that yard with it on my back where twelve people could see it.”
“He’s gone now?”
“He went at quarter to three.” She almost laughs and it comes out wrong. “About four minutes after she drove off. That’s how I know somebody rang him.”
I look at the cut on the tailgate.
New black. New letters. It has been out of the bag eight days and it looks like it came off the machine this morning.
“He said you weren’t coming,” she says.
“What?”
“That’s what I said to her. Twice.” Odette rubs her thumb along the edge of her own shoe. “I said, he told me you weren’t coming. Which is true. You did tell me that. A few days ago you said she was at Prejean’s every weekend until six and there was no reason on this earth she’d be at the yard.”
“That was true when I said it.”
“I know it was.”
“Prejean shut the yard for the holiday. I didn’t know that.”
“I know you didn’t know that,” she says. “That’s not the part.”
“Then what’s the part.”
She looks up at me and there is nothing unkind in her face at all, which is what makes it possible for her to say it.
“The part is that you knew where she’d be,” Odette says.
“You had it worked out to the hour. You’d been working it out for eight days. Which day, which yard, who’s where, what she’d be doing. You’ve been running a schedule so that a piece of leather and a woman never end up in the same forty feet, and you were proud of it,
and you thought that was managing it.”
“That’s not.”
“And the whole time you were running that schedule,” she says, “you were telling yourself it was going to sit in a bag.”
I stand there.
“You told me that in a bedroom at six in the morning,” she says. “It’ll be a piece of paperwork. That’s all it is. It sits in a bag.”
“I know what I said.”
“You ordered it, Dax.”
“I know.”
“Nobody made you pick up a phone. Not my father, not yours, not one man at that table. You called a man in Bayou Blue and you said a size and a colour and you said your own name out loud, and you paid extra to have it in a week.”
Her voice does not go up either. Neither of these women will raise their voices at me, which I would not have believed a month ago was a thing I could resent.
“A thing that sits in a bag doesn’t get rushed.”
She puts her shoes down on the shell and gets off the tailgate and puts her feet in them.
“I’m not sorry the way you want me to be,” she says.
“I’m sorry it was her that walked in and I’ll be sorry about that for a long time. But I’m not going to stand here and tell you I got tricked into a yard, because I got in that car, and I could have not got in that car, and I would have paid for it and I decided I wasn’t going to pay for it.”
“Odette.”
“That’s mine,” she says. “You’ve got your own.”
She takes the cut off the tailgate and folds it over her arm.
“Are you going out there tonight?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve got nothing to say yet.”
And Odette Rochelle looks at me for a long second and says, “That’s the only smart thing anybody’s done all day,” and walks to her car.
I ride out to Ardeen Marine at seven and sit at the gate.
Prejean has it chained for the holiday and there is not one vehicle in that lot, and I sit on the bike outside a locked yard for about ten minutes and then I ride to her road and I go past her house twice.
The truck is there. The kitchen light is on. There is no other light in the house.
I do not stop.
I go back to my own place and stand in my own kitchen in the dark, which is a thing I am doing more of, and at some point I put the light on and get a beer and do not open it, and I sit down at the table with the phone in front of me.
And I do the arithmetic. Out of habit. Because it is the only thing my head knows how to do.
Eleven flat for five years, on paper, and Auguste will honour it.
Sixty miles of water. Fourteen men. A hundred and forty boxes a month.
A table that did not vote and a father who would not let it.
Four hundred bikes in November.
And on the other side of it, one column, and there is one thing in that column, and it has been in that column since the sixth of September, and I have been writing eight days’ worth of schedules to keep from having to add it up.
I sit there until about eleven.
Then I pick up the phone and call Boudreaux in Bayou Blue, and it rings nine times, and his wife answers and says he is in the bed for the night, and I apologise and hang up.
I do not know what I was going to ask him for.
That is the truth of it. I sat there for four hours and worked myself all the way up to a phone call and I did not have one single thing to say on the other end of it, because there is no version of that call that ends with a piece of leather never having existed.
You cannot unmake a thing off a machine.
That is the entire trade I made, right there, and it took me until eleven o’clock at night on the fourteenth of September to see it.
A vote can be unvoted. That was the whole reason.
That was the sentence that got into my chest in a kitchen in August and never came out, that a room can change its mind and a man cannot hold a room.
So I bought a thing that could not be unvoted.
And it turns out that works both directions