by Tom Cooper
On the radio, voices crackled back and forth, captains bitching about their paltry hauls.
“Didn’t bring your metal detector today?” Dixon asked.
Lindquist always brought his metal detector when they went out trawling. There were inevitable dead hours in the bayou, when the tides slackened and the shrimp swam back in the marsh, when there wasn’t much to do except play cards or whip up a meal or catch some sleep. Lindquist would anchor the Jean Lafitte and pirogue to one of the barrier islands, metal detecting any patch of land accessible by foot. He never found much and the men ribbed him about it, but he liked to imagine the day he brought something back to the boat. A piece of Spanish gold. A jeweled necklace or diamond ring. He liked to imagine the look on their faces when they saw the treasure gleaming in his palm, proof after all these years that there had been some truth to his craziness. Shit, they were liable to buy metal detectors of their own after that. There wouldn’t be a patch of unturned land in all of southern Louisiana.
“Son-bitch is broken,” Lindquist told Dixon.
“Jesus, Lindquist. You make a deal with the devil or something?”
“I’ve been looking all around to make a deal with him, me, but he’s out of town.”
Dixon grinned.
“Yeah, I’m liking how this tide looks,” Lindquist said.
“Guess I better lower those booms,” Dixon said.
“Hey, Dixon.”
Dixon stopped and faced him.
“Let’s just see how it goes, huh?”
Dixon gave a small doubtful shrug.
“I got a good feeling, me,” Lindquist lied.
“That optimism?” Dixon asked.
“Go lower the booms, Dixon.”
It was ten in the morning, the air sodden with heat, when they tied onto Monsieur Montegut’s dock. Montegut’s sons, four shirtless boys in jean shorts and work boots, hoisted the shrimp-heaped baskets onto their shoulders and hop-stepped over ropes onto the dock, where they dumped the shrimp into the sorting box. In their haste the kids let dozens of shrimp dribble from the baskets and they blanched as soon as they hit the deck.
The way Montegut’s sons kept heedlessly working as if the loss meant nothing pissed Lindquist off. “Must be five bucks right there,” he told the boys. “You gonna give me five bucks out your pocket?”
Montegut’s squint-faced sons didn’t say a word, only eyed him darkly.
Lindquist and Dixon stepped into the shed to watch the weigh-in. Monsieur Montegut dug his metal scoop into the glistening mound of shrimp and weighed out two pounds. Then he placed the shrimp on the counting table and began to pick through them.
Lindquist watched with his mouth open. He thought of his wife. For all he knew she was making more money today than he’d net in the next week. Meanwhile the divorce papers sat waiting on his kitchen table and she’d be asking for alimony as soon as he signed them. He thought of his daughter, smoking and snorting money he didn’t have. Twenty-four years old. He was an old man when he was twenty-four. Nowadays kids that age were still sucking on the tit.
Dixon stood tensely beside him, worrying over his own troubles.
“Eighty-ninety,” Montegut said finally.
“Well, hell,” Lindquist said.
Montegut clenched his jaw but when he spoke his voice was measured and cordial. “We go through this every year, Lindquist. Every year you think I’m rippin’ you off when you know the truth as well as I do.”
Lindquist found himself staring at Montegut’s teeth, fake and over-large and country-club white. The V of his chambray shirt was open and a gold chain with an OUR LADY OF GRACE medallion was nestled in the russet excelsior of his chest hair.
“Count ’em again,” Lindquist said.
“I’ll count ’em a thousand times if you want me to.”
“Count ’em. Please.”
Montegut started counting again. Lindquist’s eyes shuttled back and forth, his mind working like a ticker.
The number the second time around was the same.
Lindquist and Dixon followed Montegut down the dock toward his office. Lindquist could hear the man’s sons chuckling and shit-talking behind his back.
In the steam-bath heat of his office Montegut keyed open a desk drawer and hauled out a metal strongbox. He sat the strongbox on the blotter and keyed it open and took out a sheaf of bills. He licked the ball of his thumb and counted out six twenties and held them out to Lindquist.
Lindquist took the money and slipped it into his shirt pocket. For all his doubts about Montegut, for all his jealousy toward him, he knew the man wasn’t a thief. Hell, with shrimp prices the way they were and all the stuff on the news, he was probably paying him more than he could afford.
“See you,” Lindquist told Montegut, all the civility he could muster.
Montegut nodded at Lindquist, then at Dixon.
At the harbor they roped the Jean Lafitte back into its slip and climbed stiffly as zombies onto the dock. When they were in the gravel parking lot standing next to Dixon’s truck, Lindquist fumbled in his pocket and took out the money. He counted out four twenties and gave them to Dixon. Then Dixon counted the money himself and looked at Lindquist. “Hell, Lindquist,” he said.
“What?”
“I counted out the money he gave you.”
“Yeah?”
“You gave me more than half.”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t.”
“One more day, Dixon. That’s all I ask. Everybody’s got bad days.”
Dixon stared down at his boots, as if his resolve might vanish if he looked at Lindquist directly. “I can’t, Lindquist,” he said.
Lindquist was looking over Dixon’s shoulder at the faraway treetops, green-gray and hazy in the heat. “Well, if you change your mind,” he said.
Dixon nodded and climbed into his truck and started the engine. He lifted his fingers off the wheel in a little wave and jerked the truck into gear.
Watching the truck lurch away, Lindquist reached into his hip pocket and fished out the Pez dispenser. He thumbed the duck head and popped out a pill. He palmed it into his mouth and chewed until bitter dust coated his tongue.
That morning before returning home Lindquist went to Trader John’s and tacked a handwritten help-wanted ad on the board next to the door. DECKHAND WANTED, ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS A DAY GARANTEED. NO DRUNKS. NO CRAZIES. Lindquist put his e-mail address and home number at the bottom, the times when he could be found at the harbor.
WES TRENCH
What did he want to do with his life? Wes’s father would ask him. It wasn’t really a question, Wes knew, but his father’s roundabout way of pointing out that it was almost certain what he’d end up doing, whether he liked it or not: shrimping. Like his father, like his father’s father, like six generations of Trenches before that. Wes’s dad wasn’t trying to be cruel, only realistic. And the reality was this: bayou boys almost always grew up to be bayou men.
Also a reality: Wes had missed so many school days helping his father this year, he’d have to repeat the eleventh grade. If he was lucky, he’d graduate by the time he was nineteen. He was almost eighteen already. Most of his friends, also the sons of trawlers, had already dropped out of school to work full-time on their fathers’ boats. “Too fool for school” was their motto.
Only one, Jason Talbot, had received an LSU scholarship for football.
Wes wasn’t an athlete and he wasn’t a good student. His highest grades were in English because Mr. Banksey, the biggest bleeding heart among the teachers in school, let his students write short stories for their final papers. Who couldn’t tell a story, Wes figured, so he did.
“You have a fine imagination and the heart of a poet,” Mr. Banksey had written at the end of the paper, awarding Wes an A, his first since middle school. Wes was proud. For a day or two. But then the old stubborn pragmaticism he inherited from his father jabbered in his ear like a devil on his shoulder. He figured that he couldn’t exactly wr
ite Mr. Banksey says I have a fine imagination and the heart of a poet on a job application.
In an ideal world, Wes thought, he’d have more time to figure out what he wanted to do with his life. But seventeen in the Barataria was different from seventeen in other places. Guys in Jeanette, many were engaged by the time they were seventeen, some already fathers. Two of the thirteen girls in Wes’s homeroom class were pregnant and showing, their bellies so big and swollen they had to sit in special chairs at a foldout card table to the side of the room. The biology teacher, Mr. Hargis, joked that he’d give the girls extra credit if they gave birth in his class. Instructional experience for everyone, he said.
But Wes actually wanted to be a shrimper, with his own boat and business. His father had built his own boat by the time he was eighteen and had a three-man crew before he was twenty. Wes’s plan, which he told his father about, was to start a new kind of shrimping business once he finished building his boat. He’d hire a few of his high school buddies as deckhands and they’d sell shrimp right off the dock, skip the middlemen and warehouses and wholesalers. They’d offer only the biggest, freshest shrimp, just hours—minutes—out of the water, shrimp so big his customers would have no trouble cleaning them, not like the puny shrimp they sold in the supermarkets. With Facebook and Twitter, he could start a kind of bacon-of-the-month club, the kind he saw advertised in the back of hunting magazines, except with shrimp. And instead of every month, it would be every day. The freshest shrimp in the world, harbor slip 89, six sharp, he’d message his subscribers. On weekends he might even let tourists, day-trippers from New Orleans, on the boat. For fifty dollars a head they’d get a tour of Barataria Bay and could catch shrimp themselves, or at least witness up close all the work that went into it. Wes would let them carry aboard their own coolers so they could fill them chock-full instead of paying by the pound.
Wes’s father seemed to like the idea, which surprised him. Except for the internet part. He hated computers and cell phones. “You sure all that’s legal?” he asked Wes.
“Pretty sure,” Wes said.
His father shook his head, gave him a rare compliment. “Got to admit, you got a head on you, kid.”
A few times a year Wes and his friends went to the French Quarter, where they met boys and girls from all over the country, boys and girls who, even when two or three years older, seemed much younger. Softhearted and unscathed by the world. They’d never lose an eye to a bait hook like Monty Blevins from shop class. Never know someone who cut off three of his own fingers for insurance money like Peter Arcinaux’s father. Never see their mothers drowned in the floodwaters of a hurricane.
In five or ten years, these kids would be doctors and lawyers and college professors and Wes would still be trawling in the Barataria. One far-flung day in the future they’d find themselves sitting in the elegant light of a Manhattan restaurant, no way of knowing they were dining on shrimp that Wes had caught himself. Shrimp hoisted out of the bayou and trucked up the Eastern seaboard all the way from Jeanette. By then, Wes would likely have a wife and children. And, a thought he found depressing but couldn’t help thinking: maybe he’d already be hunchbacked and bitter and brokenhearted like his father.
He hoped not. He hoped he was happy shrimping, and he hoped the bay was clean by then, because he loved life on the water.
In retrospect, maybe the story he’d written for Mr. Banksey was more a memoir. Except that wasn’t exactly right either, because wasn’t a memoir supposed to be pure truth? In the story, or whatever Wes had written for Mr. Banksey, truth and fact bled together, a muddle of confabulation.
Everything Wes wrote in the story about the hours before the storm was picture-perfect true. Wes’s father boarding up the downstairs windows. The vans and trucks loaded with suitcases and children lurching past their house. The way the tree shadows in the yard grew tensely still and the way the air outside tightened like a held breath.
And Wes’s mother, begging his father to leave.
The storm would peter out and turn away at the last minute, Wes’s father insisted. Just like the rest of them.
“You’ve gone braque,” Wes’s mother said.
Anger brought out my mother’s French, Wes had written in his story.
In the margin, Mr. Banksey wrote, Good stuff.
When the storm hit, it didn’t sound like a freight train, the way Wes often heard it described in other hurricane stories. It sounded like nothing he’d ever heard. A kraken’s roar, was what he wrote. A cannonade of debris hammered the house while a deluge slashed down from the sky, rain filling the street and yard, rising so deep it topped the rosebushes and hydrangeas. Soon the water lapped up the porch steps and seeped under the front door. At first it was only an inch or two, but within an hour a foot of muddy swirling water filled the the bottom story and Wes and his parents were sloshing through the house. Somewhere a levee had broken and Jeanette was swallowed in a rolling storm surge.
When the power blacked out Wes and his parents went upstairs with flashlights and gallon water jugs. They sat on pillows on the floor and played Scrabble by lantern light while Max, head on forepaws, cowered under the bed.
They played Scrabble: Wes would later marvel at this.
At one point during the game Wes’s mother used the word STUBBORN.
Wes’s father told her that she had quite a wit. He was trying to act calm, but Wes could tell from the hard set of his shoulders that he was scared.
A few minutes after, his mother spelled DUMB with her tiles.
“Okay,” his father said. “I get it.”
Sometime after midnight the wind wrenched a piece of plywood from one of the downstairs windows and the glass shattered, wave after wave of water surging into the house.
That was when they stopped playing Scrabble and started praying.
Dawn found them on the roof of the house. All Baratarians kept axes in their attics in fear of storms like this, and Wes’s father busted a hole through the ceiling so they could climb through. Max paced back and forth along the roof peak, whimpering and wagging his tail and staring down into the tumultuous water. The hurricane had turned the streets into swift canals full of spinning debris. Scraps of lumber and rags of plastic, trash can lids and window shutters. Cars and trucks were completely underwater, but the sky was oddly tranquil, gray like an old nickel.
Before the storm, Wes’s father had roped his pirogue to the frontyard oak tree. The only smart thing he did. The little boat jounced in the water, but it was intact and afloat. Wes’s father got a hundred feet of nylon anchoring rope out of the attic and tossed the line like a lasso, trying to snag the pirogue. He missed the first time and the second. On Wes’s father’s third toss Max scrambled down the roof, tail wagging, and launched into the water.
Instantly the wild current sucked him away and under.
Wes would never know if what happened next was an accident, or if his mother meant to go after the dog. She went skidding down the slope of the roof on her behind and caught herself on the gutter with her tennis shoes. The pipe gave, twisting away from the house with a great metallic shriek, and then she went tumbling into the water.
“Oh shit,” she said while airborne. Those were Wes’s mother’s last words. The ones he heard.
Wes and his father watched the raging water, bodies poised as if they were about to fling themselves into the flood. Then Wes’s eyes met his father’s. Pure animal panic. An awful look Wes knew right away he’d never forget.
For a second, ten or twelve yards away, Wes’s mother’s head popped up like a bobber. That was what Wes would always remember the clearest. Her crazed and twisted face, the terrified look in her eyes. Her open mouth making no sound. Then the water sucking her back under.
His father screamed Wes’s mother’s name. “Sandy,” he shouted again and again, as if this would bring her back.
From this point onward in his story for Mr. Banksey’s class, everything Wes wrote was pure fiction.
F
or instance: weeks later, when he and his father were living in Baton Rouge, they were eating dinner in a fried chicken restaurant and Wes’s father, drunk on whiskey, asked, “Do you blame me?”
In the story, Wes said, Of course not.
In the story, Wes and his father said they were lucky to have each other.
In real life, Wes had said, “Yes.”
That was five years ago and, even half a decade on, nothing felt healed. No, the wound of his mother’s death still felt as big as the hurricane itself.
The next evening when Wes showed up on time at the marina, his father was nowhere to be found. It was twilight, quiet save for the gibbering of frogs and insects. At the end of the dock the Bayou Sweetheart was unlit in her slip. Wes got out of his truck and paced in the bleached-shell parking lot. Another trawler got out of his truck and waved at Wes before trudging down the dock to his boat.
As he paced, Wes had a nagging sense that he was forgetting something. He chalked it up to the perpetual unease that he felt around his father these days. Lately they argued about everything. About how much money should be spent on a lightbulb, about how to set the house thermostat, about what kind of gas Wes put in his truck.
His father gave him the most hell about two things: Wes’s boat and the BP settlement money.
Wes started building the boat in the backyard when he turned fifteen, just as Wes’s father and grandfather had done when they were the same age. Now the keel of the boat, reared on cinder blocks under a gunny-roped tarp in the backyard, sat untouched for months. Wes’s father used to poke fun at his shoddy craftsmanship and welding, eyeing the ragged seaming, running the flat of his hand along the hull like a cattle baron. “See this?” he’d say. “This wood, you’ll have to throw it out, this whole section. And this metal, look. See how it’s bent? No way a boat’s going to float if it’s built like this. It’ll fall apart like a Polish submarine. One mistake leads to another. Listen to me.”