Chapter EIGHTEEN
Dax — October 11
Sylvain comes to the shed on the ninth, which he has never done.
He gets out of the car and stands on the shell in his pressed shirt and does not come under the roof.
“Mr. Landry.”
“He could have called.”
“He has called. He called your treasurer on the twenty-third and he called your father on the first.”
He has the small notebook in his hand and he does not open it.
“There are two boxes in the yard at Ardeen and one on the water and a fourth loading in Cartagena tomorrow, and there is no room at that end for a fifth.”
“I know what’s on the water.”
“Then you know what happens when a box sits.”
“Nobody’s opening a box.”
“Nobody has to open it,” Sylvain says. “It sits on a stack for nine days and a man with a clipboard walks past it nine times, and on the tenth day he wonders why nobody has come for it.”
He puts the notebook in his shirt pocket.
“Mr. Rochelle signed a five year paper on the seventh of September and has been paid on nothing since. He is not complaining. He wants me to say that particularly. He is not complaining and he has not asked for anything.”
“Then what’s this.”
“He asked me to tell you that Veracruz called him a few days ago.”
He gets in the car.
I stand in the shed doorway and watch him drive out and I understand that Auguste Rochelle has just squeezed me without saying one word he could ever be held to, and that he has done it to me and not to my father, and that he did it when he knew Deuce was in Houma.
Church is the same night.
“What’s on the water,” Deuce says.
“There’s a hull ready,” Chief says.
“Which.”
“Ida Ray.”
“She’s steering.”
“She’s steering. Poche done her on the twenty-eighth.”
“And the rest of her.”
Nobody says anything for a second.
“She’s got the pump in,” Ro says.
Deuce looks up.
“What pump.”
“Raw water. Jabsco.” Ro turns his beer around. “T-Boy put a new impeller in her the week after.”
“And the plate?”
“Plate’s still in her.”
“Which plate.”
“The old one.”
Deuce sits back.
“Say it out,” he says.
And Ro Sonnier, who is a good man and who has not slept properly since his own boat came in steaming, says it out.
“Sabine told me on the fourteenth. Standing right there at the bench with the pump on it. She said the housing’s cooked and there’s a groove in the wear plate you could put a nail in, and a new impeller on a plate like that will give you about nine hours before it chews itself.”
“Nine hours.”
“That’s what she said.”
“And the plate’s at Prejean’s.”
“It’s in a box in his loft, second shelf, fan belt on top of it,” Ro says. “I sent T-Boy for it and Prejean said he’d never heard of it and looked and it wasn’t there.”
“He looked?”
“He looked in front of the boy for about a minute.”
Fry says, “So order one.”
“I ordered one,” Chief says. “Nine to eleven days out of Houston. That was the fourth.”
“So it’s coming.”
“It’s coming. It ain’t here.”
Deuce puts his hand flat on the hatch cover.
“What’s the run,” he says.
“Southwest Pass, mother ship, and back,” Chief says. “Fourteen hours dock to dock in flat water. Sixteen if she’s got a sea running.”
Nobody says anything at all.
Then my father does the thing I have thought about every day since, and I want it written down exactly, because for a long time I told it to myself another way.
He looks at me.
He does not say a word. He looks at me the way he looked at me on a dock on the twenty-fourth of July with a hundred and ninety-one kilos on a plastic sheet and a boy standing by the conveyor with a hose in his hand, and then he looks back at the wood.
“It’s the Road Captain’s route,” he says. “It’s his call.”
And there is a difference between the twenty-fourth of July and the eleventh of October that took me four years to be able to say, and it is this. In July he looked at me and I did the thing, and afterwards he put his hand on my neck and told me I did it right.
In October he looked at me and then he said out loud, in front of thirteen men, that it was mine.
He was giving it to me. That is what I have decided. It was the only thing he had left to give me after the yard and after Poche, and he gave me a call in front of the table so the table would see me make it.
I sit there and do the arithmetic.
Fourteen hours in flat water. Nine hours of pump. It is not close. It is not a hard sum and there is not one version of it that works, and every man at that table can do it, and every man at that table is looking at the wood.
And on the other side of it there are four boxes and a five year paper and a man in a dining room who has been paid nothing for five weeks and has not complained, and Veracruz calling earlier that week, and a treasurer who told Sylvain we had weather when there had not been weather in three weeks.
And under all of it there is the thing I do not say and never have.
Which is that if I stand up at that hatch cover on the eleventh of October and say the Ida Ray does not sail, then I am the Road Captain who lost the route, and Micah Aucoin has been standing at the end of that table since the twenty-third of September with his hands folded, waiting.
“She sails,” I say.
“Say the whole of it,” Deuce says.
“Ida Ray sails tomorrow evening. She runs slow and she runs cool, and we watch that temperature the entire way, and if it moves we shut her down and sit and let her cool and go again.”
“That’s fourteen hours becomes what,” Chief says.
“Eighteen. Twenty.”
“In a following sea.”
“There’s no sea forecast.”
“There’s no sea forecast,” Chief agrees.
“I’ll take her out myself,” I say.
Fry Hebert puts both hands on the wood.
“Then I’m going,” he says.
“Fry.”
“I’ve been telling Sylvain we had weather for three weeks and I’m the one’s got to keep telling him, and I’d like to see the count come off that ship with my own eyes one time instead of hearing about it.”
He is fifty-one and he is a treasurer and he has been out on that water maybe four times in twenty years. “I’ll ride the load.”
“You don’t need to be on that boat.”
“I’ll ride the load,” Fry says.
We come off the dock at ten past six on the eleventh with Ro on the wheel and me and Fry and T-Boy Landry, and the water is flat all the way out past the Pointe.
She runs cool for six hours.
That is the thing that gets you. She runs cool and steady and the gauge does not move off the peg it has sat on for eleven years, and by midnight we are alongside and the load is coming across in the dark and Fry is standing there with a light counting it out loud with his lips moving like a man in
church.
“Two hundred,” he says. “Two hundred, and I counted it twice, and I’d like that on the record.”
“It’s on the record.”
“I’m serious, Dax. I’d like it said at that table that I stood here and counted it.”
“I’ll say it.”
We turn for home at ten to one and the wind comes around out of the southeast about an hour after that.
It is not weather. I want that clear. It is nothing that would go in a book anywhere.
It is a fifteen knot southeasterly that puts up a four foot sea, and every one of those seas comes up under her stern and lifts her and lets her go, and a boat running with a sea behind her yaws, and a boat that yaws is a boat working her engine.
The temperature starts to move at half past two.
“There,” Ro says.
“How much.”
“Two needles.”
“Shut her down.”
We sit for forty minutes with a sea running and the boat rolling and Fry sitting on the ice hatch with his hands between his knees.
Then we go again, slow, and she runs eleven minutes and the needle goes up like it is climbing a hill.
“That’s it,” Ro says. “That’s her.”
He shuts her down and this time she does not come back, and we are dead in the water at twenty past three in the morning twelve miles southeast of the Pointe with two hundred kilos in the hold and a sea on our quarter.
And I stand in that wheelhouse and there is a woman’s voice in my head saying a thing to an old man in an engine room in July, twelve miles out and no steering and me on the radio listening to it happen, and I never once thought about it again from that day to this.
Ro calls the Petit Frère.
She is two hours away, which is right, because we did it the right way and there is nobody to tow us but our own.
By the time she comes up on us at half past five the sea has got up another foot and we are lying beam on and rolling hard.
The tow line is the problem.
Ro will not go alongside in that and he is right not to. So they come across our stern and pass it, and T-Boy takes it on the bow and gets a turn on the cleat, and the Petit Frère takes up and we come around and start making three knots.
And forty minutes later, with the light just coming grey, the line goes slack and then comes tight with a crack you can hear over the sea and the Ida Ray slews.
“She’s in the wheel,” Ro shouts.
“Whose wheel?”
“Ours. It’s under us.”
The tow has gone slack in a trough and dropped and come up under our own stern and got itself around the shaft, and now we are a dead boat on a short line beam to a sea with two hundred kilos aboard and a hundred and forty feet of line between us and the Petit Frère’s transom.
“Cut it,” I say.
“Cut it and we got nothing,” Ro says.
“Then cut it at their end.”
“They got a knife on it now.”
And Fry Hebert goes over the side.
I did not see him go. That is the truth and I have said it four times to four different people and it does not sound better any of the times.
I was at the wheelhouse door with a light on the stern and my back was three quarters turned, and T-Boy shouted, and when I got there the boat hook was on the deck and there was a fifty-one year old man in the water on the port quarter with his hand on the tow line.
He is not wearing a vest. Nobody on that boat is wearing a vest, because nobody on that boat has ever worn a vest in twenty years.
“Fry.”
“I got it.”
“Get up on that line.”
“I got the knife, me.”
“Fry, get your hand on the rail.”
He goes under her quarter to get at the shaft, which is the only way you would get at it, and he is doing it right, and the sea lifts her about four feet and puts her down.
That is all it is. That is the whole thing.
She comes down and the line comes tight and something happens in the water that I cannot see, and when she rolls back up he is out from under her about eight feet away face down with his arms out.
T-Boy is over before I can stop him.
He gets to him. Nineteen years old, and he swims out into a four foot sea in the dark and he gets a fist in that man’s collar and holds him for the four minutes it takes Ro to get a light on them and me to get the ring out and a line on both of them,
and I want it said somewhere that T-Boy Landry did that.
We get him on the deck at twenty past six.
I do it for a long time. Ro takes over and I take it back and then Ro again, and we are still doing it when the Petit Frère gets a man across, and we do it all the way in on the tow, two hours, in a boat with no engine, on a deck rolling four feet,
and at some point it stopped being a thing anybody thought would work and became a thing nobody was going to be the one to stop.
We come alongside at Ardeen at eight minutes past nine in the morning.
There are eleven vehicles on the shell and every man in that club is on that dock, because it went out on the radio at four in the morning and this parish does not need a radio anyway.
Deuce is at the head of the dock.
I carry him up myself.
I am not going to say much about that. He is fifty-one and he is a big man across the shoulders and I have got him up out of the boat and across the deck and up onto the dock with Bones taking his legs, and then Bones lets go at the top because Bones understands something before I do,
and I carry Emile Hebert two hundred and forty feet up the Ardeen dock in the sun.
I have known him since I was nine years old.
He taught me to run a cast net off the end of that same dock in 1994.
He came to my mother’s funeral in a suit that did not fit him and stood at the back.
In February I put two thousand dollars out of my own end into a roof on his mother’s house in Golden Meadow and told nobody, and he found out anyway and came and stood in my kitchen and could not say anything and shook my hand for about nine seconds.
His wife is at the top of the dock.
She has come in Nita Aucoin’s car and Nita is holding on to her arm with both hands, and she is looking at what I am carrying and she is saying, no, but not loud, she is saying it the way you say it to a man behind a counter who has told you the price.
Deuce takes his hat off.
Every man on that dock takes his hat off.
I put him down where they tell me to put him down, and then somebody has my arm, and somebody puts a bottle of water in my hand, and Bones says something to me twice before I hear it, and what he says is, “Sit down, brother, you’re bleeding.”
I am not bleeding. It is off the tow line.
I sit down on a fish box at the head of the Ardeen dock at half past nine in the morning on the twelfth of October with two hundred kilos coming out of a dead boat behind me, and I look at my hands, and there is a rope burn across both palms in the same place.
And what I think about is not Fry.
I want to be honest about that because it is the worst thing I know about myself and there is no version of this where I come out of it decent.
What I think about, sitting on that box, is that the count was two hundred, and that Fry counted it twice and asked me to say so at the table.