The Shrimp We Sold by the Bay

So Tate and I took her out ourselves. I had run the wheel plenty of times when Glenn was sick or tired, and Tate can handle a net better than most grown men on that harbor.

It was just the two of us, and we were slow, and we were tired, but we were catching shrimp.

Lamar is Glenn’s first cousin. Their daddies were brothers, and they grew up two houses apart on the same dirt street, and they used to go floundering together with a gig and a lantern.

He owns the only fish dock on our stretch of the bay. If you shrimp out of Palacios and you do not want to run forty miles to sell, you sell to Lamar.

For twenty-two years we had sold to him. He weighed fair, paid by the end of the week, and let us take ice off his chute on credit when times were short.

At Christmas his wife brought us a pan of kolaches every year. I never once thought of him as anything but family.

But the last two seasons had been bad for everybody. A cold winter killed the brown shrimp, then a summer with too much rain pushed the whites out early.

Lamar had borrowed to put a new roof on the fish house and a new compressor in the ice machine, and the bank wanted its money whether the shrimp came or not.

I knew all of that. Everyone on the harbor knew it. I would have helped him if he had asked, and I think he knew that too. But he did not ask.

He waited until the week Glenn was flat on his back, and then he padlocked the ice and named a price he would never have named to Glenn’s face.

Here is the part people always ask about, so I will answer it now.

Shrimp spoil in a day without ice, and a fight with the only dock on the bay was something Glenn could not afford for the next twenty years, so ice and a tailgate were faster than any argument I could have won.

The night before, when we iced the hold, Lamar had let us take only half a load off the chute. “Machine’s slow,” he had said. I believed him.

Now I looked at that shiny padlock and understood that the machine was not slow at all. He had planned the whole thing a day ahead.

Half a load of ice in an October hold does not last.

It was already eighty degrees at eight in the morning, the sun coming up hot over the water, and the bottom of our hold was sloshing with melt.

I had maybe until noon before the shrimp started to go soft and turn black along the shell.

“Lamar,” I said, as calm as I could make it, “Glenn’s laid up flat on the couch. You know that. You came to the hospital. This boat is what we’ve got.”

He looked off at the water. For one second I thought I saw something move in his face, something that was sorry.

Then it was gone. “Everybody’s got something, Jodie. My note comes due the first. A dollar and a half. You want to start the hoist or not?”

I looked at Tate. Tate looked at me. He did not say a word, but his jaw was tight, and I could see him thinking what a nineteen-year-old boy thinks when he watches someone squeeze his mother.

I shook my head at him once, small, and he let it go.