Chapter FOURTEEN
Dax — September 22
The Bonne Chance lets go at four in the morning nine miles southeast of the Pointe with a hundred and sixty kilos in her ice hold and Ro Sonnier on the wheel.
He calls it in at four eleven.
“Ardeen, Bonne Chance. I got steam.”
Chief is on the base set at the shed because Chief is always on the base set, and he is fifty-four and he has done this two thousand times and he does not put any hurry in his voice.
“Say your temperature.”
“It’s off the peg.”
“Shut her down.”
“She’s shut down. She shut herself down.” There is a pause with wind in it. “Chief, I got white out the stack and I got water coming out my dipstick tube, me.”
“Head gasket.”
“That’s what I’m saying, yeah.”
I am standing in the shed doorway with my boots on and no shirt because Chief called my house at four fourteen, and Bones is out on the shell in his truck with the engine running and the door open.
“Where’s the tow?” I say.
“Broussard’s got a boat at Cocodrie.”
“Broussard’s not touching that hull.”
“I know Broussard ain’t touching that hull. I’m telling you where a boat is.”
Here is the problem with a boat with a compartment in it.
You cannot let anybody tow her. A tow means a stranger comes aboard, and a stranger comes aboard, and even if he never goes below, there is a log and a name and a number and a man in Cocodrie who tells his wife about the Cottonmouth boat that broke down at four in the morning with nobody wanting to
talk to him.
So you go and get her yourself, with your own boat, and that costs you seven hours.
We use the Petit Frère, because the Petit Frère is Fontenot and has the fittings, and Bones does not say anything about that and neither do I.
They get her in at eleven forty.
Ro comes up that dock grey in the face and Deuce is standing at the head of it with his arms folded.
“How long’s she been running hot?”
“She ain’t been running hot.”
“Ro.”
“Deuce, she ain’t run hot one time all season. I’d have said.”
“Then what’d she do.”
And Ro Sonnier, who has run that boat nine years and who sat eleven months in Angola for this club, says, “I don’t know.”
Nobody has anything to say to that.
Fry comes down at one with the load off and into the shed and says, “Alright. What’s it going to cost.”
“Head gasket’s four hundred,” Chief says. “It’s the head. If she’s cooked the head it’s a machine shop.”
“Which machine shop?”
“Houma.”
“So a stranger.”
“So a stranger, or we pull the head and take it to him ourselves and he never sees the boat.”
“How long?”
“Ten days.”
“Ten days,” Fry says. “That’s two runs.”
Sundown is leaning on the door frame with his coffee and he does not look up from it.
“Ask him who pulls the head,” he says.
“What?”
“You said we pull the head and take it to Houma. Who’s we.” He drinks. “Because I’ve been standing here forty minutes and nobody’s said a name, and every man in this shed has been not saying the same one.”
The Ida Ray goes on the twenty-second.
Not the engine. That is the thing that makes it worse. The Ida Ray is due out at six in the evening and Bones has T-Boy Landry and the Simoneaux boy loading ice at four, and at half past five she comes off the dock to swing her and the wheel spins.
Just spins. Lock to lock, no pressure, nothing.
Steering ram. The hydraulic line to the ram runs down the port side of that hull, behind a bulkhead, in about nine inches of space, because there are eleven cubic feet on that side of the boat that are not on any drawing.
I go down there myself.
I am not a mechanic. I want to be honest about what I am. I have had my hands in engines my entire life the way every man on this coast has and I know a fitting from a fitting, and I get down on my side in that space with a light in my teeth for forty minutes and what I find out is this.
There is a union about two thirds of the way aft that I cannot see and cannot reach.
I can get four fingers on it. I cannot get a wrench on it, because the only way to get a wrench on it is to come at it from the other side, and the other side is a piece of hull that looks like a piece of hull.
I come up with my shirt through and rust in my hair.
“Well?” Bones says.
“There’s a union I can’t get to.”
“Can’t get to how?”
“I can touch it, Remy. I can’t turn it.”
“Then how’s it ever been turned?”
And I stand on the deck of the Ida Ray with the light still in my hand and I do not have an answer, because in eleven years I have never once thought about it.
Somebody has been turning it. For eleven years somebody has been getting into a nine inch space with a wrench and coming out and not mentioning it, and every single one of us has been paying an hourly rate through Ardeen Marine and never once asked how.
Chief calls Prejean at seven the next morning.
He puts it on speaker in the shed and there are five of us standing around it.
“Ardeen Marine.”
“Prejean, it’s Chief Naquin at the Cottonmouth shed.”
“I know who it is.”
“We got a steering ram on the Ida Ray. Line’s gone somewhere aft, port side.”
There is a pause on the line.
“Y’all want to book that,” Prejean says, “call the office when we open and I’ll put it on the board.”
“When you open.”
“When we open.”
“Prejean, that boat’s due out.”
“That boat’s been due out for eleven years and I have moved eleven years of other people’s work to the back of my board every single time.” His voice has got something in it I have never heard in it. “Board’s full for the next few days.”
“Can you send Sabine?”
Longer pause.
“I can send Sabine when it comes up on the board,” Prejean says.
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I know what you asked. That’s my answer and it’s the same answer I gave your treasurer yesterday and it’ll be the same one in a few days.”
Chief looks up at me.
“Alright,” he says. “Put it on the board.”
“Counter rate.”
“We’ve always paid counter rate.”
“You’ve always paid counter rate for a boat,” Prejean says. “You ain’t never paid for the rest of it, and neither have I, and I’m sixty-seven years old and I’d like to still have a mechanic in April.”
And he hangs up.
Church is on the twenty-third and there are fourteen phones in the box and nobody is talking in the yard beforehand, which does not happen.
Deuce hits the wood.
“Money.”
“I ain’t got any,” Fry says.
“Say it properly.”
“We pushed the twentieth and we pushed the twenty-third, and that’s two runs, and two runs is a hundred and eighty thousand off the top and Rochelle’s eleven percent off of nothing is nothing,
which means Auguste has now had two weeks of no money at all off a man he just signed a five year paper with.”
Fry has both hands flat. “And Sylvain called me. Not Deuce. Me.”
“What’d he say?”
“He asked was there a problem with the water.”
“And you said?”
“I said we had weather.”
“There ain’t been weather in three weeks,” Chief says.
“I know there ain’t been weather in three weeks, Roland, thank you.”
Deuce lets it run about ninety seconds.
Then Sundown puts his coffee down on the hatch cover, which he has never once done, because that table does not take cups.
“I’d like to say something,” he says.
“Say it.”
“Two boats down in eight days.”
“We know that, Micah.”
“Bonne Chance took a head gasket after nine years of never running hot one time in her life. Ida Ray’s got a hydraulic union in a nine inch void that not one man in this room can turn.”
He looks around the wood. “T-Boy’s got the Saint Amelie’s coupling out an eighth and he’s had it out an eighth for a month and he’s been told twice by Prejean’s office it’s on the board.
Marie Delphine’s bilge pump is running twenty-two seconds and Ovide Thibodeaux has been calling this shed every day for a week.”
“That’s four boats,” Ro says.
“That’s four boats out of six.”
Nobody says anything.
“So I’d like somebody at this table to explain to me,” Sundown says, “how a route that ran eleven years without one seizure has come apart in fifteen days.”
“Boats break,” Bones says.
“Boats break. Six boats don’t break in the same fortnight. That ain’t breaking, that’s arithmetic.”
“Micah.”
“No, Deuce, I want to say the whole thing. I’ve sat here two weeks and let it go and I’m not going to sit here a third.”
He puts both forearms on the wood. “Every one of those hulls has got a void in it. Every one of them was cut by the same man. That man’s been dead two and a half years and he never wrote down one line of what he done,
and there has been exactly one person on this coast who could put a hand in them since, and she has done it for eleven years at counter rate and never asked this club for one thing.”
“We know who she is,” Chief says quietly.
“Do we?” Sundown looks up. “Because on the fourteenth of this month she walked into our yard with thirty-one pounds of pump on her hip and there was another woman standing in it wearing a cut.”
The room does not move.
“And I want to say the next part careful,” Sundown says, “because I’m not saying nothing about any man’s private business.”
“Then don’t say it,” I tell him.
“I’ll say what’s a club matter.”
“It’s not a club matter. Deuce stood at this table on the fifth and said it wasn’t.”
“He said the doing of it wasn’t.” Sundown turns and looks straight at me. “He never said the consequence wasn’t. The consequence is sitting in that channel right now with white smoke coming out of it.”
“Micah,” Deuce says.
“I made a motion on the fifth of September,” Sundown says. “It was seconded. It was killed from that chair, and I took that, and I ain’t brought it up since, and I want the room to remember that I ain’t brought it up since.”
“Then don’t bring it up now.”
“I’m not bringing up the motion. I’m bringing up the count.”
He puts one finger on the wood. “Because there was a price on that table and every man here understood the price to be Rochelle. Eleven flat, five years, paper. And what nobody costed, because we was all so busy being decent about it, was the other side of the ledger.”
“Which is what,” Fry says.
“Which is that the man who took the deal was already holding the only thing that made the route work, and he didn’t know he was holding it.”
I sit there.
“That’s a hell of a thing to say out loud,” Bones says.
“It’s a worse thing to not say.”
“Say it plain then,” Ro says. “Say what you’re actually asking for, Micah, because I’m tired.”
Sundown sits back.
“I’m not asking for anything,” he says. “There’s no motion. I want it in the room, that’s all. I want every man here to have heard, in this chapel, on the twenty-third of September, that we lost our water because of a thing that was done to Lucien Fontenot’s daughter in our own yard that afternoon,
and that not one of us stopped it.”
And that is how Micah Aucoin takes eight votes off me without ever calling for one.
Because he is right.
That is the thing about it that I sit there and swallow.
There is no lie anywhere in what he said.
He has not accused me of one thing I did not do, he has not asked the table for a single vote he would lose, and he has laid it out true and let fourteen men do the arithmetic themselves, which is exactly what my father does and Sundown has been watching him do it for six years.
“Anything else,” Deuce says.
Nobody has anything else.
He hits the wood once and gets up and goes out, and this time he takes the gavel with him, which I have never seen him do.
Theo is at the low end. He has not said a word for the entire hour. When the room empties he stays sitting, and I stay sitting, and for about eleven seconds it is the two of us at an eleven foot table.
“You want to say something,” I tell him.
“No.”
“Theo.”
“I got nothing to say to you,” he says, and gets up and goes and gets his phone out of the box.
I ride out to the Ida Ray that night on my own with a light and a nine sixteenths and I get back down in that space and I lie there on my side with my arm in past the elbow.
Four fingers on the union. That is all I can get.
Four fingers and I can feel the flats on it and I can feel where somebody has put a wrench on those flats a hundred times, because the corners are rounded, and they are rounded evenly, which means whoever turned it turned it carefully, from an angle I cannot find, over and over, for years.
I lie there in the dark inside a hull that a dead man built and I put my hand flat on the piece of steel that is not on any drawing.
Eleven inches on the other side of it.
She used to sit in here. Four years and she never once told me what this was like, and I never once asked her.