Nine days on my uncle's boat

My uncle's boat is sixty-two foot and we go out nine days at a time in the season, ten if the ice holds. There's four of us on it. My uncle runs it. Perry works the rigging and he's been doing it since before I was born. Dale works the deck. I do the rest.

The rest is the try net and the culling box and the ice and the coffee and the washdown. None of it's hard. They call me the kid. I'm nineteen. The man at the fuel dock asked was I out for the summer.

We take on about seven ton of ice before we leave and that's got to hold for nine days, and it isn't for you, it's for the product. You lay ice down in the bottom of the pen and then a layer of shrimp and then ice over that, and you don't let the layer get too thick or the bottom ones crush and come out soft and the fish house pays you less for soft. Ice settles. So somebody's down in the hold every day moving it around with a scoop shovel, and it's about thirty-four degrees in there, and your hands go stupid after a while. That's mine because I'm the smallest and I fit between the boards.

The night before we left I slept at my grandmother's like always and she had my clothes folded on the chair. Shoes come off outside on the steps, not inside the door, and if you forget she doesn't say anything about it, she just looks at the floor until you go back out and do it. Fridays she changes the water glass on the altar in front of my grandfather's picture. That glass is hers and you don't touch it.

We drag around the clock. My uncle picks where and we put the doors over and let the cable out, and then it's three or four hours of nothing much, and every half hour I pull the try net up by hand to see if we're on them. The try net's little. You dump it in a bucket and count what's in it and go tell him the number. When it's time we bring the big ones up on the winch and swing the bag over the deck and Dale pulls the cord and the whole thing comes out in a pile up to about your knee.

Then you sort. There's a table on the culling box and you shovel the pile up onto it and you pick. Shrimp go one way and everything else goes off the low side. There's a lot of everything else. Croakers and hardhead cats mostly, and crabs that get you if you aren't looking. Some nights squid come up and land on the deck on their own and I don't like those. The table hits me at the chest so I stand on a milk crate. I've been standing on a milk crate out there since I was fourteen.

Dale married my cousin Tam three years ago. She lives four blocks over from us and she brings food on Sundays. Before that he worked out of Bayou La Batre with his daddy until his daddy sold the boat. He's twenty-six. He's the one who taught me to splice, and he showed me four times without getting ugly about it.

Day two he moved me. The doors were coming up and I was standing inside the bight, which is the slack loop the cable makes, and if a cable parts in there it'll take your leg off at the knee and there's nothing you can do about that. Everybody knows not to stand in the bight. I knew. I was looking at the water. He put his hand on the back of my neck and moved me about two foot over and never said anything and went back to the winch.

He did that a lot after. He'd come up behind me and put his hand there and move me over and then he'd go back to the winch and that was it. On deck at night you can't hear over the hydraulics so nobody talks, they just put you where you're supposed to be. Perry does it too. Perry grabs your shoulder and shoves you. It isn't the same thing. I don't know how else to put it.

Night six we came up heavy twice in a row. My uncle stayed up top because he wanted to stay on that spot, and Perry went down to lay in his bunk for twenty minutes, so it was me and Dale on the table under the work light. It was around two.

He came around behind me to get the hose and he put his hand on the back of my neck and he didn't move me anywhere, he just left it there, and I kept picking and I didn't say anything and he didn't say anything either and I don't know how long it was. Then he got the hose and washed the trash off the deck and that was it. We worked another hour and a half after that.

Day seven I was in the hold trying to make room and he came down to help because we were running out of pen. It's tight down there. You're on your knees on ice with the boards at your back and you can see your own breath, which is a strange thing when it's ninety on deck. He took the shovel off me and showed me a different way to come at it, from underneath, so you're not lifting with your back. He was behind me the whole time he was showing me. When we came up out of the hatch Perry said something about how long it took two people to do a one-person job and Dale said something back and they both laughed and I laughed too.

We boxed up on the ninth morning and ran in, and coming around Horn Island the phones come back and everybody's started going off at once. Dale sat on the hatch cover and called Tam and I could hear him laughing at whatever she was saying. He came back up the deck after and hit me on the arm and said nine days, kid.

The fish house had the hoist ready when we got in and we ran the baskets up and they weighed us and my uncle went in the office. He settles up with me at the end of the season. That money's my year. I stock at a restaurant supply the rest of it for eleven an hour.

Tam came for him in the Altima with the baby asleep in the back seat. She rolled the window down and asked was I skinnier and told me to tell my grandmother she's coming Sunday.

I texted my grandmother from the dock because I'm supposed to be in by ten and it was past it. She's had that rule since I was in school and it hasn't moved. She was up anyway. She had rice and the fish with the tomato and she put it in front of me and sat down across the table and asked me about my uncle's back, and I told her it was the same. I took two showers and I could still smell the boat on me. In the bed the whole room was still going up and down the way it does for a couple days after.

Sunday she came with the pork and that rice she does with the egg in it, and Dale carried the cooler in and set it on the counter and said what's up, kid. I said what's up. My grandmother sent him back out to take his shoes off on the steps.