by Tom Cooper
A familiar round-bottomed shrimper, sixty feet long and hung with a Confederate flag, glided alongside them. The captain shouted something from the wheelhouse and Wes looked up. It was Randy Preston, a man who years ago worked on his father’s boat. He grinned down with his too-big dentures and Wes gestured up at his father, who got on his megaphone and leaned out the starboard window. “What you got so far, Randy?”
“Nothing worth a shit.”
“That bad?”
“Wife’s gonna divorce me.”
“Could be a good thing,” said Wes’s father.
“No shit.” His boat was moving out of earshot so Randy had to shout quickly. “Heard on the radio they were catching a lot five miles west. I’m gonna see what’s going on over there. Get out of this mess.”
“Let me know if it’s any good,” Wes’s father said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Randy said. He held his arm out his window and made a jerk-off motion with his hand. “Keep a firm grip on yourself, Wes.”
Wes grinned and shot a bird at Randy. Randy leaned out of his window and shot one back. After a while his boat drifted away and was lost among the rest.
Wes hitched the starboard trawl to the winch. The motor smoked and strained and soon the swollen net emerged from the water like an amniotic sack, inside a squirming mass of fins and pincers and glinting black eyes. Then Wes went port and began winching up the other net.
His father put the boat in neutral and climbed down the wheelhouse ladder. With drip nets they dumped the haul into the sorting box and then they put on gloves and poked through the teeming pile. Hard-shell crabs snapping their pincers like castanets. Catfish and flounders and fingerling baitfish. Soft-shell crabs by the hundreds, so tiny and luminescently pale they looked like ghosts of themselves. A baby stingray whipping its barbed tail, a snapping turtle shooting its head back into its shell.
And then there were pinkie-sized shrimp, their brains and hearts beating like small black seeds beneath their rice paper skin.
“Worst I’ve ever seen,” said Wes’s father. His thousand-times-washed chest-stripe polo shirt, the same kind he always wore, was already stuck to his back with sweat.
Wes said nothing. He knew what was coming. His father was pissed and he was going to take it out on him. Wes was screwed if he said anything, screwed if he didn’t.
“Gonna be out here for a fuckin’ month.”
Wes kept quiet, sorting through the fish and crabs and shrimp.
“This is it. This swamp is gonna fuck us. It’s gonna fuck us like a thousand-dollar whore.”
Wes flipped a baby catfish off the boat.
“Watch that sting-a-ree,” his father said.
“I’m watchin’ it.”
“No you ain’t. How many times I gotta tell you about those sting-a-rees? All I need, a trip to the hospital.”
Wes lobbed a croaker back into the water.
“Jesus Christ,” his father said. “End of the world out here.”
It took them several minutes to toss the pile off the boat. Most of the fish and crabs swam back into the bayou’s keep, but a few lay stunned on top of the water, finning in dazed circles.
His father climbed back up into the wheelhouse and again Wes lowered the nets. While the Bayou Sweetheart moved along the pandemonium of boats, he checked his watch. The hands told him that it was half past two. His eyes felt hot and grainy and he wanted nothing more than to have this whole ordeal behind him. He longed for a shower and the cool clean sheets of his bed. But he knew they’d be out here for several hours more at least. Maybe days.
If he and his father didn’t kill one another first.
When Wes and his father docked at Monsieur Montegut’s two days later, it was an orange and foggy dawn. Three young deckhands in creaking rubber waders scrambled aboard the Bayou Sweetheart and scooped the shrimp into huge woven baskets. Whenever a shrimp fell onto the deck, seagulls swooped down and lit on the gunwales. One would snatch up the small pink morsel and wing away, a cawing mob chasing after.
The deckhands carried the baskets onto the dock and poured the shrimp into sorting vats. Then the shrimp were separated from the ice and dumped onto a rusty conveyor belt that rattled and groaned into the bargeboard tin-roofed shed, where the shrimp were loaded onto a scale.
The first weigh-ins of May and August were always the tensest, the bellwethers of the spring and fall seasons. Some years the bayou was such a miser that Mother Nature seemed to be telling the trawlers to give up. Other years, few and far between, seemed blessed, the Barataria giving up more shrimp than they dared hope for. Old-timers talked about the fabled hauls of the twenties and thirties, the apocryphal salad days. How the swamp hadn’t been the same since the oil companies brought in their diggers and started chewing up the land. Nowadays, trawlers considered themselves lucky if they made enough to pay their bills and feed their families. And if they ended up with a little more on the side to squirrel away—lagniappe—that was nothing short of a miracle.
When the deckhands finished unloading their haul, Wes and his father stepped off the boat and walked down the splintery dock into the open-sided weighing shed. Monsieur Montegut stood rheumy-eyed and haggard behind the scale, a cigarette dangling from the crimp of his mouth. He shook their hands. Told them that if the price of shrimp went down any further he was going to sail out to one of the British Petroleum oil rigs and blow the fucking thing up himself.
“Well, let’s see what you have here,” Montegut said. “Sure you two got better things to do than socialize with my old ass.”
First Monsieur Montegut weighed their total haul. Seven hundred and twenty-six pounds. Not nearly as much as Wes and his father had hoped for.
“These look a whole lot bigger than some I’ve been seeing,” Montegut said. “You shoulda seen the last guy. Lucky Sevens? Not a one bigger than my pinkie. And I got the hands of a geisha girl.”
Wes’s father huffed a polite laugh through his nose.
There was still some hope, Wes knew. The total weight of their haul didn’t matter as much as the size of the shrimp, how many it took to make a pound. If it took only thirty or thirty-five shrimp to make a pound, they were in business. If it took sixty or seventy, then the trawling expedition was a bust.
Wes’s father lit a cigarette and watched as Montegut took a metal ice scoop and dug into the pile of shrimp. These he dumped on a smaller butcher scale. Montegut added four or five shrimp to the scale until the red needle quivered up to two pounds. Then he transferred the shrimp to a waist-high wooden table and began counting. His puffy lips moved and his stubby fingers flicked as he tallied.
Wes stood quietly beside his father. From the corner of his eye he could see his sagging shoulders, his lined face. Maybe it was his imagination, but his father’s age in the last few years seemed to have come suddenly upon him. He climbed down the ladder slower and slower these days. His body was still wiry but the flesh under his arms was loose and flabby in a way that reminded Wes of a chicken’s wattle. And he lumbered stiffly around the boat, clutching his coccyx and wincing.
There was a reason why you saw so many billboards for chiropractors and acupuncturists when you drove into the Barataria. Many guys, their backs were shot before they were even thirty. By forty, they were drinking whiskey every night to keep the pain at bay, scoring Oxycontins from their doctors and friends just to make it through another day of trawling. And by fifty, most of them were over the hill and ruined.
Wes’s father was forty-eight.
After a few minutes, Montegut had counted out a hundred and five shrimp.
Wes’s father flicked his cigarette onto the ground and heeled it out with his boot. “You mind counting again, Willy?”
Patiently, Montegut took another scoop of shrimp. Weighed. Counted. This time the number was one hundred and ten.
“Fuck,” said Wes’s father, palming the top of his head like he was polishing a bowling ball.
“How bout we stick with the other number?�
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“Appreciate it, Willy.”
“Hey, shit.”
In the tawny morning light they walked out of the weighing shed and headed down a plank-board path toward Montegut’s office. Wes’s father’s eyes were on the ground and his mouth was cinched. Wes knew that numbers were running wildly through his head. How many days were left in the season, how many hours they would have to spend on the boat for the next several weeks, how much a gallon of diesel cost, how many bills needed paying.
He was sure he’d hear plenty about it later.
They passed a ragtag collection of sheds and warehouses rotting from the salt and sun. A shrimp boat named the Jean Lafitte was moored in one of the slips. A one-armed man in camouflage cargo pants shouted at Montegut’s sons as they unloaded the shrimp from his boat. “Look at that,” he was saying. “Spillin’ them shrimp all over the place. That’s two pounds of shrimp right there.”
Once they passed out of earshot, Montegut looked over his shoulder. “Son-bitch gets crazier by the year.”
Montegut’s office was the size of a storage closet, its metal desk littered with papers. Receipts, invoices, bills, time cards. On the wall hung a smoke-yellowed map of the Barataria waterway system. A tide chart, more recent, was tacked up next to it.
Montegut poured coffee from a pot into a Styrofoam cup and then he reached for the bottle of Jameson sitting on top of the filing cabinet. He poured a dollop of booze into the cup and took a swig. Then he slipped off his necklace and took one of the keys that hung from it and opened his desk drawer. From the drawer he took out a large metal box and opened it with another key. He reached inside and withdrew a thick sheaf of one-hundred-dollar bills and licked the ball of his thumb and counted them out. He handed the money to Wes’s father, who looked at the bills woefully.
Montegut sat in his office chair and leaned back and tapped his finger, his wedding band thumping against the blotter. “Ask me, it’s more the media’s fault than anything,” he said. “Acting like it’s the end of the world. You know how they like to exaggerate. Wanna draw it out so they have a story to scream about every night.”
Wes’s father pocketed the bills and thanked Montegut. Back at the harbor, he let loose a stream of curses. Wes let out some of his own as he hosed down the deck. His stomach was sour from eating only protein bars and canned ravioli, his tongue charred from his father’s burnt chicory coffee. Aside from thirty-minute catnaps in the cabin, he and his father had kept awake the full forty-eight hours straight. This wasn’t unusual, not in the beginning of the shrimping season. You heard about crews staying out there for a week at a time. Some of the Vietnamese trawled for two weeks in a row. The spring after Katrina, Wes and his father had stayed out in the Barataria for four days running. But that was when there were two other men on the crew. When Wes’s father was younger, stronger.
At the harbor, Wes’s father dug into his pocket and took out some bills. He counted off a few and handed them to Wes. Four twenties. Eighty dollars for more than forty hours’ work.
They stood facing one another. His father’s eyes were crinkled against the morning sun, the whites webbed with scarlet. “What?” he asked.
“Eighty dollars,” Wes said.
“That’s right.”
“Where’s the rest?”
“There ain’t no rest.”
“Two days for eighty dollars.”
“You think I feel good about it?”
“Crazy,” Wes said.
“Hey, watch it.”
Wes bit his bottom lip, picked at his eyebrow.
“There’s a lot of things you’re not figuring. The gas.”
“Eighty dollars.”
“Wes, how am I supposed to give you more when there’s no more to give?”
Wes walked away from his father toward his truck.
“Where you going?”
Wes didn’t answer.
“Listen,” his father called to his back, “I want you back here by nightfall. And don’t forget the ice.”
Wes kept walking.
“Wes, you hear me? Don’t forget the ice.”
COSGROVE AND HANSON
A nurse called from a New Orleans hospice and told Cosgrove that his father was dead. Congestive heart failure, a peaceful passing in his sleep. Cosgrove hadn’t spoken to the old man in half a decade, was surprised he lasted this long. He’d never taken care of someone’s funeral and there was no living family he could call, so he was clueless about what to do next. Too embarrassed to ask the nurse, Cosgrove took the city bus to the public library where he sat at one of the carrels and searched what to do when someone dies on the computer.
Next morning Cosgrove set out from Austin to New Orleans in his seventeen-year-old Corolla, a rattletrap jalopy with a cracked windshield and a sugar-ant infestation in the glove compartment. The back bumper was held together with duct tape, and ten miles east of Houston on I-10 Cosgrove heard grinding like rocks in a blender as the car lurched and shimmied. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw the bumper rolling wildly in the road like a suicide by self-defenestration.
He drove on.
The day of his father’s burial was gloomy and windswept, scrummed with clouds like an armada of dreadnoughts. Styrofoam cups rollicked over the cemetery lawn, and tattered stick-flags snapped over the veterans’ graves. The wind kept blowing the purple drugstore chrysanthemums off the coffin, and Cosgrove gave chase among the mausoleums like a cat after a windup toy. Finally he picked up an egg-sized stone off the ground and weighed the flowers down.
When the minister asked for a eulogy, Cosgrove at first was speechless. During the sermon he’d kept waiting for a stranger to belatedly arrive. A lost cousin or forgotten acquaintance. But the folding chairs around the gravesite stayed empty.
Cosgrove got up from his chair and clenched his lips, looked down at his rented shoes. “He trusted in the Lord and kept his path straight,” he said. Something he’d heard a televangelist say the night before on the motel television. As soon as the words left him, he realized how falsely they rang. About his father, about himself. In reality his father’s path couldn’t have been more crooked, his rambling around the country like one of those wandering dotted lines they showed on movie maps. A paper trail of bad checks and attorney bills and court summonses.
That night Cosgrove walked from his motel to a bar in the French Quarter and matched three Siberian businessmen shot after shot of Basil Hayden’s Bourbon Whiskey. The last thing he remembered before his blackout was getting into an argument with one of the men about the World Cup, about which he knew nothing and didn’t give a fuck. He had someone in a headlock, and someone else had him in a headlock, and they lurched around the bar like some tangled monstrosity, knocking over tables and chairs.
End of memory.
Next morning Cosgrove woke with a blinding hangover. In a jail cell. Curled fetally on the floor.
Six or seven other miscreants shared the cell, hard-eyed men who looked like they’d been courting trouble since the day they were born. A few paced like caged animals, clutching the bars and howling declarations of innocence. Others sat with their backs against the cinder block wall, eyes shut, heads bowed like penitents.
One bulge-eyed man kept raving about “the famous lawyer Jim Diamond Brousard.” “You just call Jim Diamond Brousard,” he said. “Tell him that Ricky Hallowell is in trouble.”
Another man with a port-wine stain on his cheek had his pants pulled down around his ankles and was shitting without compunction in the corner toilet. He shot Cosgrove a beleaguered look and went about his business.
The police report read like a furloughed sailor’s escapades, a story he and his roofing buddies back home would have laughed about. Public intoxication, disorderly conduct, pissing on a jukebox, resisting arrest. He doubted only one part, that he was crying about his father when they shoved him into the back of the police car.
No, that didn’t sound like him at all.
The judge must ha
ve hated him on sight because he sentenced Cosgrove to two hundred hours of community service, a punishment insanely disproportionate to the crime. Cosgrove stayed in New Orleans because there wasn’t much waiting for him back in Austin save for a crappy roofing job, hell on earth during the summer. Some underwear and socks in an Econo Lodge drawer. His other sole possessions, a cache of childhood mementos and his birth certificate, were still in a safety deposit box in Miami, where he’d left them after a short, ill-fated stint—he’d gotten sun poisoning—as a barback in a South Beach hotel pool-bar.
He feared he was turning into a gypsy, like his father. Maybe in a new place he’d find a career, a woman, a life. He certainly hadn’t in Austin.
And his fortieth birthday, four months away in January, loomed before him like a storm front. Maybe the best way to weather the sea change was in New Orleans.
Cosgrove rented one side of a sherbet-colored double shotgun in Mid-City and got a job at a neighborhood sports bar shucking oysters. And three days a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays, he showed up at eight in the morning for community service. With a dozen other offenders, deadbeat fathers and druggies and drunks, he waited outside the station in his Day-Glo vest and ragged jeans until a deputy carted them in a windowless white van to their duty for the day. Sometimes they worked in groups of three or four, cleaning graffiti with wire brushes and sandblasters in Jackson Square. Other days they worked en masse, picking up condoms and carnival beads with pointed sticks from the squalid banks of the Mississippi.
A month into his sentence, Cosgrove was dropped off in front of a derelict two-story Victorian with faded purple shutters and lopsided porch columns. It was late August and hot, sparrows keening in the gray-green oaks, bougainvilleas in moribund bloom. A bantam-bodied man with a small pinched face and a black ponytail hanging out the back of his camouflage baseball cap got out of the van with him. They stood on the sidewalk regarding the house.
“Good God Almighty,” the ponytailed man said. He had on a TOM PETTY AND THE HEARTBREAKERS T-shirt and frayed denim shorts two or three sizes too large, held up by a canvas belt with a gigantic gold and silver rodeo buckle engraved with the initials JHH.