I parked my old Buick at the end of the lot at the Biloxi harbor and looked across the gravel at the black pickup with the Texas plates. A man in sunglasses sat behind the wheel with the window rolled down, drumming his fingers on the door, patient as a cat at a mousehole. I am Delphine Arceneaux, eighty one years old, and I took a photograph of that truck with my telephone, and then I walked into the harbor master office with my handbag held in front of me like a shield. Andre Thibault was waiting inside, and beside him sat a man in plain clothes whom he introduced as Sergeant Boudreaux of the Harrison County Sheriff.
I handed Sergeant Boudreaux my telephone, and he scrolled through the photographs I had taken at dawn in August, the open bait cooler, the little bags of white crystals, and the notebook full of names. He wrote down the plates. Jules would have known what to do. In 1969, he filed a spoon handle into a hook remover, and every fisherman on the Gulf came to know his name. I told no one but Andre, my godson, because I wanted to stand in his office with the truth in my hand, and watch it protect the people I love.
Andre told me the rest in a low voice. Dylan had come in that morning with a paper he claimed I had signed, giving him the boat slip, and a man in sunglasses had waited in the truck, tapping the dashboard. Andre had stalled. The sergeant had parked a deputy two streets away. Through the window, I saw the door of the fuel dock office open and my grandson step out into the sunshine, wiping his hands on a rag. He glanced at the black pickup, and then at the harbor office, and then at my Buick, and I watched his face go the color of old paper.
A bait cooler photograph on an old telephone gave one shrimper widow the length of a morning to bring her grandson back to the dock in Biloxi.
I gave my terms when Dylan came in, in a voice that did not shake. “Dylan, sit down. You are my grandson, and I am not going to let them take you from me. Sergeant Boudreaux has a plan, and you will follow it. You will tell him everything about the man in that truck and the other men in the nice trucks. You will go into the program at the center in Gulfport tomorrow, and I will pay. And you will move back to my house, where I can see you at breakfast. That is my price for your boat slip. It is a fair one.”
Dylan sank to his knees on the worn linoleum, and the rag fell from his fingers. “Mamere, I started with a little white pill my buddy gave me for my back,” he said, in a voice that cracked on every word. “Then I was in debt to a man who said I could work it off in the bait cooler.” He pressed his forehead to my knee. “I wanted the slip because he told me it would clear my debt. I know it is wrong. I know. I think I wanted somebody to catch me. I just did not know it would be you.”
But the habit of running is old. Dylan scrambled to his feet, snatched the paper off the desk of Andre, and bolted for the back door of the office that led to the dock, plainly meaning to throw it into the bay. He got his hand on the knob. Two old shrimpers who had been mending a net on the bench outside rose up together and stood in the doorway, shoulder to shoulder. Andre came around the desk. And Sergeant Boudreaux, in his plain shirt, said gently from behind him, “Son, the dock is closed. Turn around.”
Dylan stood in the doorway with the paper crushed in his fist, and the morning light fell across the planks of the dock. A pelican on the piling opened its beak and flapped away. He looked at the shrimpers, men he had known since he was a boy, and they looked back at him without a word. Then he came back across the office, laid the paper on the desk, and sat down on the bench beside me. I took his hand. It was shaking. Out in the lot, the black pickup started its engine, and two deputies rolled out from the corner.
The consequences were sad and good. The man in the truck was arrested before he reached the highway, and the notebook that I had photographed gave the sheriff eleven more names. Dylan told the court everything, and the judge in Gulfport sent him to a ninety day program followed by drug court, rather than to a cell. The marina owner fired the manager of the fuel dock, who had known and said nothing. I kept my slip. The next morning, at the dock, I fed the pelicans with a bucket of shrimp heads.
In the name of my husband Jules, who passed in 2022, I started the Jules Arceneaux Fund. It pays for recovery programs and job training for young people on the coast and for emergency help for fishing families who have lost a boat or a season, in Harrison, Hancock and Jackson counties. In the first year we paid for forty four recovery stays and helped nineteen families through a hard winter. One was a deckhand of nineteen from Pass Christian who had hit bottom, and who baited his first hook after ninety days with tears running down his face.
On the morning of the blessing of the fleet, I stood on the bow of my little boat with a bunch of white flowers, and the priest raised his hand over the water. Dylan was at the helm in a clean shirt, two hundred days sober, his face brown from the sun. The shrimp boats lined up on the bay, one by one, decked in banners, their horns sounding. “Mamere,” he said, over the noise of the engine, “this is the first time I have driven it since Papere.” I put my hand on the wheel beside his. “Steer her home, cher,” I said.