Chapter SIXTEEN
Dax — September 28
Chief finds him through a man at the ice house, which is the first thing that should have stopped us and did not.
“Gaspard Poche,” he says. “Marine diesel, twenty-two years, Pascagoula. Does hydraulics, does gears, does refrigeration. Comes with his own van.”
“Poche.”
“That’s what I said.”
“There’s forty Poches on this coast,” Fry says.
“There’s four hundred,” Chief says. “Half this parish is a Poche or married to one.”
Deuce is at the shed door with his coffee.
“He available?”
“He can be here in the morning.”
“Get him here in the morning.”
And that is the whole meeting. Ninety seconds, five men, and not one of us says the other name out loud, because Alcide Poche has been in the ground since the second of August and there has been an arrangement in this parish for eight weeks that his name is not a thing anybody says at that shed.
I have thought about that a great deal since. Five men in a room and every one of us heard the name and every one of us did the same thing with it, which is nothing.
He comes at seven forty the next morning in a white van with PASCAGOULA MARINE on the side and a magnetic sign that has been on and off that door so many times you can see the ghost of it.
He is about fifty-five. Grey in the beard, forearms like a man who has been doing it twenty-two years, and he gets out and stands and looks around that yard before he looks at anybody, which is what a good one does.
Then he stops.
I am forty feet away with a coffee in my hand and I watch him do it.
He is halfway through turning and he stops and he looks at the shed, and then past the shed at the crane, and then at the row of hulls up on the stands, and then he turns all the way around and looks at the shell road he came in on.
“You Chief?” he says.
“That’s me.”
“Gaspard Poche.”
“Appreciate you coming.”
“Mm.” He is still looking at the yard. “This the salvage side or the boat side?”
“This here’s the shed. Boats are down the dock.”
“Y’all got the salvage yard too?”
“That’s ours, yeah. Nine minutes up the road.”
“Mm,” he says again.
I put my coffee down on the bench.
We take him down to the Ida Ray and he is on her forty minutes.
He does it properly. He goes over the whole steering circuit from the helm back before he opens anything, he traces the line by hand, he checks the reservoir and he checks the return, and then he goes down into the space on the port side without being told where it is.
He is down there eleven minutes.
He comes up with rust in his hair and stands on the deck and wipes his hands on a rag out of his own back pocket, which is a thing my father says you should always notice, whether a man brings his own rag.
“Your union’s aft,” he says.
“That’s what we found.”
“It’s aft and it’s inboard, and there ain’t no room to come at it because that bulkhead’s stood off about eleven inches from the hull.”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
Bones says, “Tankage.”
Gaspard Poche looks at him.
“That ain’t tankage,” he says.
“It’s a wing tank.”
“Where’s the fill?”
Nobody says anything.
“There ain’t a fill,” he says. “There ain’t a fill, there ain’t a vent, there ain’t a sender, there ain’t a sight glass, and there ain’t no pickup coming out the bottom of it. I been down there with a light, me. That’s a box.”
“It’s a wing tank,” Bones says again.
“Alright.” He puts the rag away. “It’s a wing tank.”
He goes back down.
He does the job in about two and a half hours, and I do not know how, and I stand on that deck the entire time.
Twice he comes up for something out of the van, and once he asks Chief for a piece of quarter inch rod, and he bends it in the vice on the bench himself, and takes it down there and comes back up eleven minutes later with the union in his hand and puts it on the deck.
“Threads is fine,” he says. “Ferrule was cracked. Somebody’s had that off a lot of times.”
“Have they.”
“Corners is rounded off even. That’s not a man in a hurry, that’s a man doing it careful for years from a bad angle.” He picks it up again and turns it over. “How’d he get on it?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“You don’t know.”
“No.”
Gaspard Poche looks at me for a second.
“Y’all got a fella been doing this work,” he says. “Where’s he at?”
“He’s not available.”
“Mm.”
He finishes at eleven. He primes it and bleeds it and stands at the helm and turns it lock to lock four times and then does it again, and he does not hand it over until he has done it twice.
“That’s your steering,” he says. “You want to run her, run her.”
Chief pays him in the shed out of the box.
I am standing at the door and I hear the whole thing.
“Four hundred?”
“Four hundred and I’ll bill the rod at nothing.”
“That’s fair.”
“It’s more than fair, I done it in two and a half.” He folds it and puts it in his shirt pocket. “Y’all got that other one with the head?”
“Bonne Chance.”
“I could take a look at that when I’m out here next. That’s a Detroit?”
“Six seventy-one.”
“Then it’s a machine shop or it ain’t, and I’ll tell you in an hour which.” He is looking at the wall of the shed while he says it. “I’ll tell you honest, though. I nearly didn’t come out here.”
“How’s that?”
“I got a cousin worked the ice house in this parish twenty years.”
The shed is not a big room.
“Alcide,” he says.
Chief does not say anything.
“Y’all knew him.”
“Everybody knew Alcide,” Chief says.
“Everybody knew Alcide.” Gaspard Poche nods slowly.
“He come up on a dock the second of August out on the Fontenot slip, and they buried him on the ninth, and my aunt Odile went in the ground four year ago so it was his sister done the arrangements, and I drove over for it and I stood in that church, me.”
“That was a bad thing.”
“It was.” He turns around and looks at the shed door, which I am standing in. “Y’all got a wash bay up at that salvage yard? Old trawl bay, three walls, drain in the middle?”
I do not say anything.
“I done a job in one of them in Bayou Blue in ninety-nine,” he says. “Same building. They was all built the same, them, in the fifties. You can tell them by the slope.”
Then he picks up his bag.
“Anyhow,” he says. “Y’all know where I’m at.”
He goes out past me and he does not look at me on the way past, and he gets in the van, and he does not start it straight away.
Deuce is standing at the corner of the shed.
I did not know he was there. I do not know how long he has been there.
“Dax.”
“He fixed the boat.”
“I know he fixed the boat.”
We stand there and watch the van not start.
“He said wash bay,” Deuce says.
“He said he did a job in one in ninety-nine.”
“He said drain in the middle.” My father drinks his coffee. “And he said the slope.”
The van starts.
“Handle it,” Deuce says.
I go out onto the shell with my hand up and Gaspard Poche puts the window down.
“You want to follow me up the road,” I say. “Look at that Detroit while you’re out here.”
“I got Cocodrie at one.”
“It’s twenty minutes.”
He looks at me for a second and a half.
“Alright,” he says.
He follows me up the shell road nine minutes to the salvage yard, and I take him in through the gate and past the crane and past the four acres under the roof, and I park by the office and he parks behind me, and neither of us gets out for a second.
The wash bay is forty feet away with the doors open.
I get off the bike and I walk over to his window and I put both hands on the sill.
“There’s no Detroit up here,” I say.
“I know there ain’t.”
“You knew when you turned in.”
“I knew when you said follow me.” He is holding the wheel with both hands at the bottom. He is not looking at the bay. He is looking straight ahead through his own windscreen at a stack of hulls. “I got two girls and one of them’s fixing to have a baby in November.”
“Mr. Poche.”
“I said what I said in that shed and I ought not to have said it and I’ve been driving up this road for nine minutes telling myself I ought not to have said it.”
“Look at me.”
He looks at me.
And I stand there with my hands on the sill of a stranger’s van forty feet from a concrete floor with a drain in the middle of it, and I do the arithmetic.
It takes about two seconds and it comes out exactly the way it came out on a dock on the twenty-fourth of July and I know the answer before I have finished asking the question, and I stand there and look at a man who has two girls and one of them is having a baby in November.
And I think: I did this three months ago and it did not cost me anything, and then a woman walked into a yard that day, and it turns out everything costs.
“Have you told anybody,” I say.
“No.”
“Anybody at all. Your wife. A man at the ice house.”
“I ain’t told nobody nothing because I ain’t got nothing to tell.” He says it steady. “I done a steering ram this morning and I said a stupid thing about a building, and that’s the whole of what I know, and I’d be obliged to keep it that way.”
“Then that’s what it is.”
I take my hands off the sill and reach in my back pocket.
There is thirty-one hundred in it because I have not been to the bank since the run got pushed, and I count out fifteen and put it through the window onto the seat beside him.
“That’s for the boat,” I say.
“Chief paid me for the boat.”
“Then that’s for the drive.”
He looks at the money and does not touch it.
“You don’t come back here,” I say. “Not to the shed, not to the dock, not for the Detroit. If Chief calls you, your board’s full. If a man from this parish calls you for anything, your board’s full, and it’s full in April too.”
“Alright.”
“And you don’t say the word Alcide out loud again.”
He takes the money and puts it in his shirt pocket with the four hundred.
“That all?”
“That’s all.”
Gaspard Poche sits there for a second.
“You could have,” he says, and does not finish it.
“Drive out slow,” I say. “There’s shell and it’ll pick up in your wheel arches and I don’t want a stone through a windscreen on the Ardeen road.”
He drives out slow.
I stand in that yard until the dust settles and then I ride back down to the shed.
Deuce is on the bench with the coffee gone cold beside him.
“Well?”
“He’s not coming back.”
“That ain’t what I asked.”
“He’s got two girls and one of them’s having a baby in November,” I say. “And he doesn’t know one thing. He knows the shape of a room he did a job in twenty-six years ago.”
My father does not say anything.
“He fixed a boat we couldn’t fix,” I say.
“In two and a half hours, out of a nine inch space, with a piece of rod he bent himself. He’s the only man on this coast who can do what she did and he’s had his hands in a hull with a void in it and he knows exactly what a void is, and if you want that solved, then it’s solved,
because he’ll never take another job in this parish as long as he lives.”
Deuce picks up the cold coffee and looks at it and puts it back down.
“You paid him,” he says.
“Fifteen hundred.”
“Out your own pocket.”
“Yes.”
He nods, slowly, about four times, looking at the floor of the shed.
And that is all he does.
He does not raise his voice. He does not stand up.
He does not ask me one question about whether I understand what a man carries out of a yard when he drives out of it.
He does not say the thing I have been braced for the whole nine minutes back down that road, which is, you did that on the dock in July and you did it right, and I want you to tell me what is different now.
He just nods.
Then he gets up off the bench and picks up the cold coffee and walks past me and puts his hand on the back of my neck the way he has done my whole life, and he leaves it there about a second, and he says:
“Alright, son.”
And he goes into the shed.
I stand out there on the shell for a while.
I would rather he had knocked me down. I want to say that plainly because it is true and because it is the only useful thing I learned that day.
I would rather my father had put me on the ground in front of Bones and Chief and everybody, and shouted, and said what it was, because a man who shouts is a man who has decided something and told you what it is.
He nodded and he touched the back of my neck and he said alright, son, and he went inside, and I did not know one single thing about where I stood.
I know now. I did not know then.