He worked for my father for thirty years

Diesel was three-ten a gallon in May and the dock was paying a dollar five for 21-25 count, which is another way of saying I spent the summer working for Shell.

The boat's a fifty-four foot wood hull my father bought in 1983 off a man in Empire who'd let her sit two years. The name on the transom is the one he painted and it's gone chalky on the one letter. The note's in my mother's name because the credit union wouldn't write paper for my father back then and they would for her. It's down to almost nothing now and it's still in her name, and she brings that up when the Vietnamese channel goes to commercial.

Terry came with the boat. My father hired him out of Delacroix in 1986 and after about a month never had to tell him where anything was again.

He's six three and better than three hundred pounds. There's a wooden box in the wheelhouse my father cut so he could see past the bow, and I'm still standing on it at fifty-five.

It used to be four of us out there. I let the Cortez brothers go in 2019 when the price went and I never hired anybody back, so this season it was him and me. Him and me were never more than about nine foot apart for eleven days at a stretch.

His wife's Verna. Her people have been in St. Bernard since before it was a parish and she wouldn't move after the storm, so he was driving an hour and ten each way to the dock for the better part of nine years.

June was nothing. We iced for six days and came in with eleven hundred pounds and half of it was small, and the ice house takes their cut whether you caught anything or not. I told him we ought to be running further out. He said the fuel to get out there costs more than what's out there, which is the same thing my father used to say.

The alternator quit in the second week of July. There was a case of Busch in the ice box that trip because that's what was on sale at the Rouses on Chef. We were anchored up behind the Chandeleurs waiting on light and I shut everything down but the anchor light to hold the batteries, which means no air, and in July no air means you're on deck or you're not sleeping. He brought two up and sat on the hatch cover. We didn't say much for a while, and then it was something else. That's all I'm going to say about that part.

In the morning I put the spare belt on backwards twice before I got it right. I've been doing that since I was fourteen. He made the coffee out of his own can. He'd been bringing his own Community dark roast since my father's time because he wouldn't drink what I buy. He didn't say anything about the belt and we had the try net down by six.

It happened again.

Verna called his phone the next trip while he was up on the rigging and it was going off on the bunk next to me, so I answered it. She wanted to know had he taken the blood pressure pills. I said I'd tell him and I told him.

He still wouldn't eat anything that came to the table with the head on it. He took the four to eight because he said I steer like a man being chased.

Thuy's been packing me a cooler of thit kho the night before every trip since we got married and that'll be thirty-one years in May, and he ate it for twenty years and never one time said it right. She asked me in August why I'd stopped calling the house at night from out there and I told her the phone eats the battery.

August we got boarded off Breton Island and the kid from the Coast Guard wanted to see the turtle excluder and Terry went in the water and cleared the flap for him because it had grass in it. He's sixty-two years old. He went over the side and came back up the ladder and put dry clothes on. I wrote the boarding number in the log and my handwriting's bad on that page.

He gave notice on the eleventh of October. I know the date because we'd just come off a bad trip and I had the fuel log open in front of me. He said his sister's boy has a boat out of Bayou La Batre and they'd pay him salary instead of a share.

I told him salary's a trap in a good year. He said there hasn't been a good year since 2016. He isn't wrong about that.

Verna's going with him.

I didn't ask him anything else.

He had a duffel bag and that same tackle box he's had since my father's time, and I carried the tackle box down the dock because the bag was on his bad shoulder. I gave him my channel locks out of the kit. His were sprung and he'd been working with them sprung two years because he wouldn't spend the eighteen dollars.

He stopped at the end of the dock and looked at the transom a second. Then he got in his truck. It's an '04 F-250 and it's had a lifter tick since 2021 and I've told him about it more than once.

I've got a boy out of Violet now, nineteen. He asks me where everything is about forty times a day. The new alternator came with a smaller pulley so the belt chirps at idle.

Our oldest came down from Baton Rouge for Thanksgiving and my mother asked at the table where he was and I told her Alabama, and she asked me again before the plates came off. She's eighty-one. She's been saying his name the same wrong way since 1986 and nobody ever corrected her because he didn't care and neither did I.

I've been buying the Community dark roast. There's four cans of it over the stove now.