He carried the note on my boat

The boat's a 1978 Desco, fifty-four foot, steel, with a 671 in her. My brother and me bought her in 1999 for sixty-two thousand off a man in Coden who was quitting. He carried eighteen of it himself for two years and a bank in Mobile took the rest. The winch took the top of my left ring finger in 2001. By March of 2005 we owed forty-one thousand on a balloon.

Shrimp was two-forty a pound that year, twenty-one twenty-five count, headless. In 1997 we got four and a quarter. That's pond shrimp coming in out of Thailand and Ecuador and there's no fixing it from here. Diesel opened at a dollar ninety-one and didn't stay there.

Regions had my papers nine days and told me no over the phone. The man at the credit union in Irvington said the boat was twenty-seven years old, and I said so is every boat down here. Nobody in Mobile County was writing on shrimp that spring. Half the fleet was behind and they knew which half.

My brother's seven years older than me. He still calls me Út. We came through Palawan in 1991, him nineteen and me twelve, and he'll talk about the camp and I don't remember much past the food line. He's the one on the wheel. I do the money and the ice, which is why it was me standing in the shell lot at the ice house that March and not him.

Curtis ran that ice house on the east side of the bayou. His daddy had it from 1968. Flake ice, three-fifty a hundred pounds, sold by the hundred and not the ton. We'd take on eight ton for a ten-day trip in June, because in summer you want three pounds of ice to a pound of shrimp and more than that if you're working out past Petit Bois.

You can't hold flake in a box past six days in September down here. It slumps and the bottom of the box goes warm and you've lost the trip. Block holds longer and nobody wants to be breaking block at two in the morning. He wrote his tickets in a book with carbon paper and he had every trip we'd landed since 1999 sitting in there, so he knew the boat better than Regions ever did.

I asked him in the lot and he told me come inside. He said forty-one thousand at six percent, six hundred off the top of every ticket. I said write it down. He said no, and then he went and weighed somebody's box. There was never any paper.

The storm came the twenty-ninth of August. We ran her up the Tensaw and tied her in the trees with six lines and she came through it. The house took four foot. My wife was at her mother's in Grand Bay with the girls and stayed till December. There were boats sitting on 188 and one in a parking lot.

The processors were shut and the ones that weren't had no power. There was nowhere to put anything even if you caught it. Whites were running all that fall and nobody went and got them.

I was on the boat anyway. I've been off her a full week one time since 2003 and that was when my mother died.

Curtis had a generator on the ice house by the second week and kept selling at three-fifty. FEMA was trucking ice down from Tennessee and it'd be half water by the time it came down Coden Belt Road.

He came down to the boat the first time in September with a case of Busch and five gallons of diesel for the Honda I was running the bilge pump off. He stood on my left side to talk. That's the ear that still works and I never told him it was. He stayed about two hours that time.

Fourth or fifth time he stayed all night. I was twenty-six and I hadn't done that before. After that it was most nights until about March. My wife came home in December with the girls and I slept in that house maybe nine nights that winter.

Mostly we sat. He brought a radio down and we'd get Mobile and the weather out of Pascagoula. He went up at four-thirty because the ice house opened at five whether he had a thing to sell or not. Some nights he brought plates from the line at the church and we ate them in the wheelhouse. He never came on a Sunday.

Tết was the twenty-ninth of January that year, so I know when it quit, because it was two or three weeks after. The next year it fell on the seventeenth of February. Blessing of the Fleet is the first Sunday in May. Father comes down the line in a skiff and does every boat. Ours got done in 2006 and my brother had the whole cabin painted for it.

Boats started going back out in March. He had ice to sell again and I was gone ten and twelve days at a stretch. He still stood on the left.

Six hundred came off every ticket from June of 2006. We made fifteen trips most years, sixteen if the fall held. Some months it came off three times. He never took more than the six. Not the fall of 2008 when we were about the only boat in there still paying him.

The last of it came off a ticket on the twelfth of September 2011. Eleven hundred and forty pounds of whites. Forty-eight thousand it came to, on forty-one. He wrote the number in the book and turned the book around so I could see the zero.

He sold the ice house that November to an outfit out of Gulfport and went over to Foley. His sister's there. It's thirty-nine miles from the dock. I looked it up.

In 2014 at the Blessing I saw a truck in the lot off Shell Belt I thought was his, and I walked over and it had a Baldwin plate on it and it wasn't him. My brother asked me what I was doing and I told him I thought I'd left a cooler in somebody's truck.

She died in October of 2019. Pancreas. Nine weeks from the day they found it. The parish did the Mass in both because her people are out of Biloxi and half of them don't have the Vietnamese.

We buy our ice in Irvington now. Four-ninety a hundred, thirteen miles each way, and you lose eight or ten pounds off every hundred before you get it in the box. My brother's asked me about it every season since 2012.

He asked again in August, coming in with nine hundred pounds. I told him what the bayou charges now. I got the wash-down hose going and started on the deck.