The Shrimp We Sold by the Bay

The padlock was new. That is the first thing I noticed when we tied up at the fish dock in Palacios that Tuesday morning, a fat brass lock still shiny from the package, hanging through the hasp on the ice house door.

The second thing I noticed was Lamar Kocurek standing beside it with his arms folded, watching my son throw the bow line, like he had been waiting there a while just to see our faces.

We had 900 pounds of white shrimp in the hold. Big ones, about twenty-six to thirty to the pound headless, the best tows we had pulled all season.

That was two days of catch, a long Sunday tow and Monday’s, because a crew of two does not pull 900 pounds in one day. We had headed them as we went and kept them iced in the hold.

And the ice we had packed them in the evening before was already going soft.

“Morning, Jodie,” Lamar said. He did not unfold his arms. “Before you start the hoist, I need to tell you something. I’m paying a dollar and a half today. That’s for you. That’s the price.”

I stood on the deck in my white rubber boots with a cull shovel still in my hand, and I could feel Tate go still behind me at the winch.

He is nineteen. He knows what shrimp bring, and he knows what a dollar and a half means.

“You paid Augie two and a quarter yesterday,” I said. “I heard him say it on the radio, Lamar, and he was not bragging. He was complaining that it was low.”

“That was yesterday.” He nodded at the padlock like it was a person standing next to him. “And the ice house is closed for repairs. Machine’s down. So you can sell at a dollar and a half, or you can sit there and watch them turn.”

I want to tell this right, so I will go back a little, but only a little. Glenn and I have run that 48-foot boat out of Palacios for twenty-two years.

It is an old white steel boat with a wheelhouse that smells like coffee and diesel, and it has paid for our house and raised our boy.

Glenn ran the wheel and I ran the deck for most of those years. I culled, I iced, I mended web, I kept the books at the kitchen table.

When our son was little he slept in a playpen in the wheelhouse while we pulled. He has been on that boat longer than he has been anywhere.

Then in the first week of October, Glenn bent over to lift a cooler of shrimp on the dock and something in his lower back gave out.

He went down on his knees right there on the boards. Two weeks later a surgeon in Victoria was fusing two of the bones in his spine together with screws.

The doctor said six weeks of no lifting, no twisting, no bending, and no riding in a truck any longer than he had to.

Glenn said six weeks was half the fall season. The doctor said Glenn could have half a season or a wheelchair, and he could pick.

Fall bay season on the Texas coast runs from the middle of August to the end of November. For a family boat like ours, those weeks are the year.

The winter is thin, the spring is thin, and the fall is what pays the note on the house and the insurance on the boat.