Nine times in eleven years

The boat's sixty-two foot and steel, built in Bayou La Batre in 1981. My brother Sang owns half and I own half. There's a note on her that was supposed to be finished in 2019 and it isn't finished, and Sang's name is on it with mine.

Diesel was four eleven a gallon in July and we burn about a hundred and ten a day when we're dragging. We got three dollars and ten cents a pound for twenty-one twenty-five count browns at the dock in August. The same shrimp comes in frozen out of India for a dollar under that. Some of the buyers pay the Vietnamese boats a nickel under and tell you it's the ice, and I quit arguing about the nickel years ago. The note payment is twenty-two hundred and it goes out on the first no matter what we did that month.

We came over in 1979 and I was ten. I haven't been back and I'm not going. When I'm counting boxes I count in Vietnamese, out loud, and I don't hear myself doing it. My boy counts that way too and it's about the only piece of it he's got.

Wade started on deck in the spring of 2013. He was from Bayou La Batre, forty-one then, and he'd done a season on a scalloper out of New Bedford and still wore the orange gloves off it until they came apart. His ex-wife was in Mobile and he sent her something on the first. I never asked how much and he never said.

You want to know what a deckhand does. He pulls the try net every twenty minutes so you know what's under you. He culls what comes up. The icing is the part that matters, in layers, and if he packs it wrong you find out at the dock when the buyer opens the hold. Every net's got a turtle excluder sewn in it, a grid of bars set at an angle with a flap cut behind, and if the flap's not right the inspector ties you up and you've lost the trip.

Wade sewed them better than I do. His hands were thick and his right thumb got broke twice and never set straight. He was quicker with a needle than me anyway.

We'd stay out ten or twelve days depending on how it ran. The last night the hold's full and you're steaming in and there's about eight hours of nothing to do. I put her on autopilot off Chandeleur and do the trip out on a legal pad so the hands' checks are ready when we tie up. Wade drank Busch Light and put the cans in a bucket by the door because I don't like them rolling.

The first time was August of 2013. It was in the bunk room, which is forward of the engine room, and the engine's a 3406 Cat so you can't hear your own voice in there anyhow. It didn't take long. Neither one of us said anything after, and I went up and did the pad over again, nine thousand two hundred pounds, and I'd had it at eleven thousand three days before, so I'd counted something wrong somewhere.

It happened nine times. The last one was October before last, coming in past Ship Island with about nine thousand pounds on her. It's nine because I can tell you which trip every one of them was.

It never came up at the dock. One time at the ice house he started to say something to me and a truck backed up beeping and he didn't finish it. He got the hose down off the rack and we washed her out.

My son Dat works the deck and everybody calls him Danny. He came on in 2016 when he was seventeen. He sleeps in the bunk across from the one Wade slept in.

My wife's name is Lan. We've been married thirty years and she does the books, so she can tell you what we paid for fuel in any month you want to name. Her brother runs a boat two slips down. The harbor's maybe two hundred people and most of them are somebody's cousin.

Wade's brother Kenny does HVAC in Theodore. Wade wanted a 2006 Dodge with the Cummins in it and he looked at them for about four years and sent me pictures of ones for sale in Lucedale. He never bought one.

After that October it didn't happen again. I couldn't tell you which one of us quit it and I don't think either one of us did, exactly. We went out the same as always, ten days, twelve if it was running, and he took the same bunk and drank the same beer. In 2025 we made twenty-two trips and the shrimp were small most of the summer, thirty-forty count, and we burned the same fuel to catch less of them.

He'd come up about four in the morning on a steam-in with coffee and stand in the house and not say much. He put a water pump in his own truck in the spring and a rear main seal in it in the fall. I figured there was somebody in Bayou La Batre and I never asked him.

In March, Wade was on the dock at Point Cadet putting the stern line on the cleat and he went down. He had the line in his hand. He was fifty-four.

Danny did compressions on the concrete for about eleven minutes. There's a gate at the top of the ramp the ambulance has to wait on and somebody had to go up and open it. I hadn't shut the main down. It's a 3406 and you can hear it from the road, and it ran the whole time, and after they took him I went aboard and shut it down.

The funeral was that Tuesday, at a church in Bayou La Batre with a gravel lot. Lan came with me and wore the dark blue she wears. I stood in the back by the folding chairs they hadn't put out.

Kenny shook my hand at the door after and said Wade told him our boat was the only one he ever worked where nobody got hollered at. I said Wade was a good hand. That's all I said.

They had food in the hall next door. I've got a hearing aid I don't wear because the salt eats them up and they're twenty-six hundred dollars apiece. In a room with linoleum and forty people talking I can't pull one word out of it, so I stood by the sweet tea and nodded when somebody looked at me. A woman I think was his ex-wife talked to me for a while and I don't know what she said.

Lan asked me in the truck going home if I was all right. I said it was a long drive for a Tuesday. She put the air on and we got back before dark.

We hired a kid named Trevor out of Pascagoula in April. He's got a cousin on the Miss Ruby so he came recommended. He's on the same share Wade was on.

I put a new stern line on in May. Three-quarter inch double braid, hundred foot, eighty-six dollars, and you have to whip the end or it'll unlay on you inside a season. I whipped both ends with what twine I had, which was black, and the line's white, so it looks like hell and I haven't gone back and done it over.

The zincs on the rudder shoe are about half gone. Four of them will go a season if she's working, and they go faster if she sits, and I never understood why that is. I've got two in the toolbox in the truck. The other two I have to order because nobody down here stocks the size we run.