Lucien Robichaux read the line a second time with his lips moving, and then he held the paper out at the end of his arm, as if the number might get smaller from a distance. It did not. “M slash V Miss Danielle,” he read. “Fifty two foot push boat. Seller, Russell Naquin.” Under that, in bold black type, was the sum. Twenty four million, six hundred thousand dollars, for the whole of Naquin Marine.
“I sold the company in January, Lucien,” I said. “Three dredges, nine push boats, and the contract with the Corps. A marine construction firm out of Houston. Sixty two of my men kept their jobs, with a raise.” I looked down at my hands, which still smelled of turkey fat and propane. “I did not tell you, because I did not think you would care. I did not tell Danielle, because I wanted to give her a trip to France on our anniversary. And I did not tell Beau, because I wanted to put a check in his hand on his birthday. A check, and the truth.”
Danielle had come down off the porch. She walked through the crowd of people in beads, her shoes sinking into the soft ground, and she stood beside me and put her arm through mine. She did not say a word to her father. She looked at her son. Beau was still holding his gold mask by the elastic, and his face under it had gone the color of boiled shrimp. “Beau,” I said, as gently as I could, “the Miss Danielle is on the list the buyer paid for. So is the crew boat. So is the spud barge. You have taken three pieces of equipment that do not belong to you.”
A vessel schedule with one name typed in the line was laid on the amp of a Zydeco band and gave one dredge man the evening to bring his son back to the bayou.
Marc, the lawyer, came forward in his feather boa. I had been waiting for him. For thirty one years he had called me the mud man, and he came now with his hands raised like a man trying to settle a fight. “Russell, hold on, now. This is a family matter. No need to bring the law into it.” I looked at him a while. “Marc, I am glad you are here,” I said. “I need someone to explain to my son what the penalty is in Louisiana for selling a vessel you do not own. I would use my own lawyer, but he is in Houston, and I did not want to spoil your party.”
Beau climbed down from the flatbed. He pulled off the mask, and the sweat ran down his forehead, and he said it all at once, in a rush, the way a boy confesses to breaking a window. He had borrowed money in October, he said, from a man who ran a poker game in Lafayette. Eighty thousand dollars. The man had started calling at night. He had thought, if I could just sell the boat, nobody would be hurt. “I thought the company was sinking, Daddy. You told me. I did not want you to lose the house. I did not want Mama to know about the cards.” He looked at Danielle. “Mama, I am so sorry.”
I will tell you what I felt, because I have never been good at pretending. I felt angry enough to put my fist through the side of that flatbed. And right behind the anger, I felt something older. I remembered a night in 1986, in a bar in Morgan City, when I owed a man two hundred dollars, and my own father stood in the doorway in his rain slicker and counted it out of an envelope. He never mentioned it again. I looked at my son. “How much do you owe now?” I asked. “Eighty one thousand.” I nodded. “That is a good deal less than the price of that boat.”
“Here is the arrangement,” I said, and Danielle squeezed my arm. “The Miss Danielle goes back to the yard on the Intracoastal tonight, with every other piece of equipment you moved. I will pay the man in Lafayette, in full, and I will have a word with him about the way he talks to boys on the telephone. You will work for the company in Houston, running a push boat, on the lowest seniority, on the night shift, for the next three years. And every Friday, you will come to the house for dinner, and your mother will make you eat.” Beau nodded, and nodded again, and he could not stop.
Lucien Robichaux was still holding the paper. He was a stern old man in a white guayabera, who had built two restaurants from a food truck, and who had watched his daughter marry a dredge hand with a face like a closed door. Now he lowered the paper and said something I will keep for the rest of my life. “Russell, I laughed at digging mud for thirty one years. Every shrimp boat that ever supplied my kitchens got to my dock through a channel dug by men like you.” His voice cracked. He laid the paper on the amp and held out both hands, and I took them. They were shaking, and so were mine.
The party went on until the stars were out. Somebody turned the Zydeco back up, and Danielle pulled me onto the flatbed and made me dance, in my grease stained shirt, while the whole yard clapped. Marc brought me a Dixie. He did not say anything, and neither did I. But when he handed it over, he said, quietly, “Russell,” and that was all, and it was the first time in thirty one years he had said my name without a joke attached to it. I drank the beer standing next to my son, who was holding a plate of gumbo with both hands and eating as if he had not eaten in a week.
Beau runs the Miss Danielle now, on the night shift, out of Houma, pushing sand barges up Bayou Terrebonne. In April, on his birthday, I gave him the check I had meant to give him in the first place, folded in a card, with a note that said, Not for the boat. For the house. He read it standing at the dock, in the early light, with the diesel running behind him, and he did not say a word. He only took off his cap, the way you do for a funeral or a blessing, and held it against his chest. Then he went back aboard and backed her out into the channel.