Chapter TWENTY-TWO
Dax — October 21
I wake up at ten past seven and she is gone and the bed is cold on that side and there is a cup upside down on the rack that was not there when we went to bed.
I stand in my own kitchen in my shorts looking at that cup for about a minute.
Because she washed it. She got up before light and dressed in the dark and did not wake me, and on the way out she stopped at my sink and washed a coffee cup and put it upside down on the rack the way she puts everything upside down on the rack,
and a woman who is finished with a man does not do his dishes.
That is the arithmetic. That is what I do at ten past seven in the morning on the twentieth of October standing in front of a drying rack, and I want it written down exactly like that, because for four days I lived inside that sum like a house.
She came to me.
That is the other side of it. I did not go to her. I did not stand on a step in the rain and get put out, I did not sit outside a gate with an engine running. She drove to my place that night with nobody knowing and she knocked on my door.
And she said one night, and I heard it, and I took it the way a man takes a thing he wants to hear.
One night is a door with a hinge on it. One night is a woman who has to say a hard sentence at the front of an evening so she can allow herself the rest of it, and I have known that woman four years and I know what she does when she is frightened of wanting something,
which is put a rule on it and then keep the rule badly.
So by half past seven I have got it all worked out.
She is going to want it slow. She will not have it in the yard and she will not have it in front of Nita and she will not be a thing anybody discusses at that hall, and that is fine, that is right, I would not want it either.
It goes at her speed. She comes to my door when she comes to my door and I do not go to hers and I do not push it, and in six months or a year there is a version of this parish where none of the last two months is the first thing anybody says about either of us.
I go to work at eight.
Deuce is at the shed with Chief and the tow yard book, and he looks up when I come in and he looks at me twice.
“You slept,” he says.
“I slept fine.”
“You ain’t slept fine since September.”
“Well, I slept fine.”
He goes back to the book. Chief says something about the Simoneaux boy’s hours and I stand in that shed doorway with a coffee and the sun coming in flat across the shell and everything in me is quiet.
At about eleven he says, “Walk with me.”
We walk the length of the Ardeen dock, which is two hundred and forty feet, and he does not say anything for the first hundred and forty.
Then he says, “The dock.”
“Which dock.”
“Don’t be smart. Fontenot.”
“What about it.”
“Chief’s putting the papers in the hall in a few days. It’s a covered facility from the first of the month and the fee runs from the first.”
He puts his hands in his pockets. “So it’s done. And I want to know from you if it’s going to be a problem, because I ain’t going to be surprised by it in November with four hundred bikes in that yard.”
And I say it.
“It’s handled,” I say.
I want to put down exactly what I meant, because I have had four years to be honest about it and I am not going to be generous with myself now.
I did not mean I had told her. I knew I had not told her. There is no version of that sentence where I was confused about what I had done on the eighteenth of October sitting outside a gate.
What I meant was: it is going to be alright.
I meant that a woman who washes a cup on her way out at half past five in the morning is a woman who is coming back, and that when she comes back there will be an afternoon somewhere in November or December, sitting down, at a table, with time,
and I will tell her the whole thing properly and in the right order, and by then the fee will have been in her account twice and the boats will be coming out of the water and there will be men on that apron doing the scraping,
and she will be able to see what it actually is instead of hearing it as a sentence on a step at night.
That is what handled meant.
It is the worst word I have ever said out loud and I said it to my father on a dock in the sun with my hands in my pockets.
“Alright,” Deuce says.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.” He stops walking about sixty feet from the end and turns around, and he does not go the last sixty feet, and he has not gone the last sixty feet of that dock since the twenty-fourth of July, which I noticed for the first time that morning. “There’s the other thing.”
“Go on.”
“Micah’s coming off VP.”
I stop.
“Say that again.”
“He’s coming off.” Deuce is looking out at the channel. “He come to me a few nights ago at my house and said it himself, and he said it decent, and I want you to hear the whole of it before you get anything on your face.”
“What’d he say?”
“He said the water’s finished.” My father says it flat.
“He said with Fry gone and Ovide off and three hulls on the hard, this club’s got about a year of pretending left in it, and he’d rather be the man that put the tow yard and the hall on their feet than the man that sat at that table watching the water die.
He said the yard’s got four hundred a week in it that nobody’s chasing and the hall’s got the whole north gate and there ain’t a man in this chapter working either one of them properly.”
“He’s not wrong.”
“He ain’t wrong. He’s been not wrong for two years and I’ve been letting him say it in bars instead of at that table because I didn’t want to hear it.”
Deuce rubs his mouth. “Anyhow. He’s coming off VP and he wants the tow yard and the hall, all of it, his own book, and he’ll take a cut of it, and I said yes.”
“When?”
“November. In front of everybody.”
I stand there on that dock.
“So the flash comes off him,” I say.
“The flash comes off him.” He turns around. “And it goes on you at the party.”
I do not say anything.
“The twenty-fifth,” Deuce says. “There’s Baton Rouge coming down for the run planning and there’s the Slidell boys and there’s about a hundred and forty people going to be in that yard, and I’ll put it on you in front of all of them, because I want it seen and I don’t want it seen in a chapel.”
“Deuce.”
“And in November, at the anniversary, with four hundred bikes in that yard and every charter on this coast standing in it.” He looks at me the way he has looked at me maybe four times in my life. “I’m going to say what happens after me.”
I have wanted this since I was twenty-two years old.
That is not a thing I ever said out loud to anybody except a woman in a kitchen in the rain on the twenty-fifth of September, and I said it then because she made me say it, and it came out of me sounding like the ugliest thing a man ever wanted.
Standing on that dock on the twenty-first of October it does not sound ugly at all. It sounds like eleven years.
“Say something,” Deuce says.
“I don’t have anything.”
“That’s about right.” He puts his hand on the back of my neck and leaves it there. “Alright, son.”
And we walk back up the dock.
Here is what those four days were.
The next day I went to Houma myself and stood in the machine shop until a man looked at the Bonne Chance’s head on the bench and told me to my face it was not cracked, and I drove it back the same afternoon with it wrapped in a moving blanket in the bed of the truck like a christening.
The day after that I found T-Boy Landry at the tow yard and told him what he did at four in the morning on the twelfth of October was the best thing anybody in this club has done in ten years, and he went red to the ears and could not say anything, and then he said, “I’d have got there quicker,
” and I said, “No you wouldn’t, and don’t you ever say that again.”
The following day I called the hall and asked Chief to put the facility fee at fifteen hundred and not twelve, and he said Bones already had, and I said good.
And every one of those four days I woke up at six and lay there for about a minute with the ceiling going grey and thought about a cup upside down on a rack.
I did not go to her house.
I want that understood, because it is the whole architecture of it.
I did not go, and not going felt like discipline.
It felt like the most decent thing I had done in two months.
She said one night and I was going to honour it to the letter, I was not going to turn up on her step and make her have a conversation on a doorstep, I was going to let her come at whatever speed she came at,
and every day I did not go was another day I was being a better man than the one who sat on a bike outside that gate on the eighteenth.
That is how good a man can feel about doing nothing at all.
The next morning I go out to Boudreaux in Bayou Blue for the flash.
He is seventy-one and half deaf and there is a dog asleep under the machine, and he takes the VP rocker out of a drawer and puts it on the counter and turns it around so it is facing me.
“That’s a nice piece of work,” I say.
“It’s the same as the last one.”
“It’s a nice piece of work anyway.”
He does not remember me. That is the thing.
I stand in that shop on the twenty-fifth of October and Alcide Boudreaux does not remember one thing about a phone call at ten past seven in the morning on the seventh of September, or a colour, or a size, or a man paying eighty dollars extra to have a thing in a week instead of two.
He wraps it in a piece of paper and puts tape on it.
“Tell your daddy I said congratulations,” he says.
“I’ll tell him.”
I put it in my jacket and ride back with it flat against my chest, out along the bayou road with the sun on my left and the marsh going gold on both sides and about a hundred and forty miles an hour of nothing in my head at all.
That is the last hour of it.
I have thought about that ride more than almost anything.
It is the last hour of my life where everything was true.
Not everything I believed. Everything I felt.
The route was coming back. The head was not cracked.
The boy had done a good thing and been told so.
The dock had a fee on it and a crew coming.
My father had said the word after me on a dock in the sun with his hand on my neck.
And there was a woman in Port Ardeen who had come to my door one night and washed a cup on her way out.
Every single thing in that hour was true except that one, and that one was not a lie either, because she did come and she did wash it.
I just had the wrong idea about what a woman washes a cup for.