He still shorts me on ice

Diesel was three twenty-four Tuesday. No, three twenty-two. I put three hundred eighty gallons in her. Ice is four cents a pound. I take twelve hundred pounds, so forty-eight dollars, and Roy writes the ticket out of a book he keeps in his back pocket.

The dock's paying a dollar ninety for twenty-one twenty-five count, heads on. In 2018 it was two forty. You can go stand in the H-E-B up in Bay City and look at farmed shrimp out of Ecuador for eight ninety-nine with a nice picture of a boat on the bag, and I quit going down that aisle a while back.

She's the Kim Anh. Fifty-eight foot of steel, built in 1979. There was a yard here then. My father had her thirty-one years and I've had her nine. There's eighty-six thousand left on the note and Thuy's brother Hai put his name on it next to mine, which doesn't come up except at Tet.

Roy runs the fuel dock and the ice house. He was selling my dad diesel before I was out of school, so call it twenty-some years. He's in his fifties. I've read his last name off invoices probably a thousand times and I couldn't tell you what it is.

He had a heart thing a few years back. They put a stent in him over in Victoria and he was back out on that dock in about nine days with a case of that Ensure stuff sitting on the counter, and Dat's uncle went around telling everybody Roy had died, which he hadn't. His wife does the books on the first. She's the one who calls you if you're behind.

The scale on his ice chute is a dial. Needle behind glass, and there's water fogged up inside the glass that was in there before I ever owned a boat. The needle stops early. Everybody who ices up on that dock knows that.

They shut the Gulf the fifteenth of May and don't open it back till the middle of July. Sixty-one days.

A man with a bay license works through some of it. I don't have one. So in June I painted. I did the deckhouse twice because I ran out of what needed doing. The note's the same either way. Eleven forty on the fifteenth, same as March.

Thuy cuts hair at the house on Saturdays and in June that was the money coming in. Eighteen dollars a head, more if it's a perm for one of the older ladies from church. My mother lives with us and she keeps the good shrimp out in the deep freeze in the carport for Tet, and in June she started letting us eat it.

I was down at the dock a lot that month. Not for anything. The house has three kids in it in June and my mother's got the Vietnamese channel on loud enough you can hear it from the street.

Roy's office is a plywood room with a window unit in it that's louder than my main engine at idle. I've stood next to both.

One night in the middle of June I was in there with him with that unit going and that was the one time.

Ice went up a half cent in July and he told me about it twice, like he was breaking it to me gentle.

Gulf opened the fifteenth and I had her out that night. Nine days. Came back in with thirty-one hundred pounds. Thirty-one hundred is thirty-one hundred.

First time I iced up after the closure I stood there and watched that needle stop twenty pounds short of what I was paying for. I said something to him about it. I don't remember what I said. He told me to take it up with the scale.

Now it's a thing we do. I come in and he's already writing before I've got the stern line on. I tell him I'm going to get the state out here to look at that dial. He says let them come. Dat, who runs the Saint Jude, has started saying it for me before I can get it out. He thinks it's the funniest thing on that dock.

Thuy asked me in July what I'd been doing down there so much in June. I told her the packing on the shaft. She said her cousin's husband sits at the Shell station in Bay City all day with the other men and at least the dock is mine.

I run one deckhand, a kid named Marcus out of Blessing who's nineteen and eats like it. First week of August it was a hundred and one on the deck and he had his shirt off by nine in the morning and burned the whole back of himself. Couldn't lay down for two nights. I keep mine on. I've kept mine on since I was about eleven.

The winch took the ends of two fingers on my left hand in 2016, the long one down to about the first knuckle. I still count money out with that hand and it still bothers Thuy that I do.

We're at Our Lady of La Vang Sunday morning whether I slept or not. Middle of August I tied up at four thirty on a Sunday and went anyway and sat in the back by the fans, and my mother turned all the way around in her pew to look at me so I'd know she'd seen me come in late.

Labor Day we had that little thing blow up in the bay and I was tied up two days. Roy was down there getting his hoses up out of the weather. I carried the transfer pump up under the office for him because he shouldn't be carrying it. Him and me back there forty minutes and neither of us said one word that wasn't about the pump.

He asks about Vy's braces now, top ones go on in October, twenty-two hundred and they'll take four hundred down.

The ice is short every trip. He's never let that needle get up past eleven eighty, and he writes the ticket for the whole twelve hundred in pen every time. Eighty cents. That's what it works out to.

Went down Thursday before light to ice up for a nine-day trip. Nobody else on the dock. Dat was already gone out and the boy off the Miss Cindy doesn't ice till the afternoon.

Roy came out in the same Dickies he's had since I've known him and opened the house up and we didn't say anything. The chute ran about four minutes and I watched the dial.

He wrote the ticket. Twelve hundred pounds, forty-eight dollars. I got down in the hold with the shovel and Marcus still wasn't there. The handle's split about six inches up from the blade and there's been a roll of electrical tape sitting in the toolbox since March.