The Shrimp We Sold by the Bay

I could not tell him no. I wanted him there too badly.

So I told him to call our neighbor’s boy to drive him, and to bring the folding cot out of the garage, and the license, and the old coffee can from the top of the refrigerator, the one we keep quarters in for the car wash.

Then I went to buy coolers.

There is a hardware store in Palacios and a feed store out on the highway, and between the two of them I bought every cooler they had.

Most of them were the plain 48-quart kind, white and blue, the kind you see in every truck bed in Texas from May to November.

A 48-quart cooler holds about thirty pounds of shrimp packed right with ice, a little more if you crowd it. I needed thirty coolers for 900 pounds.

The hardware store had nineteen. The feed store had eleven. I stood at the feed store counter and counted them twice, because I could not believe it came out even.

The coolers came to just over seven hundred dollars. I put it on the card we use for boat fuel and did not let myself think about the balance.

Then I drove to the first gas station and bought every bag of ice in the freezer out front, sixty-two bags, and to the second one and bought fifty-four more.

The girl at the second gas station looked at my rubber boots and the coolers stacked up to the roof of the cab and said, “Ma’am, are y’all having a party?”

“Something like that,” I told her. I was trying to smile, and I think I mostly managed it.

By the time I got back to the dock it was a little after nine. The sun was full up and hot. Tate had done just what I asked.

The hatch was closed, cold water was running over the ice, and he was sitting on the hatch cover with his elbows on his knees, waiting for me.

Lamar was still on the dock. He had gone into the fish house office, but he came back out when he heard my truck.

He stood in the doorway with a cup of coffee and watched me back the pickup down to the edge of the dock, as close to our boat as I could get it.

“Tate,” I said, “start the hoist. We’re unloading.”

Tate looked at me, then at Lamar, then back at me. “Mama, he said he’s not buying.”

“He’s not,” I said. “We’re not selling to him.”

So we did it right there, in front of everyone.

Tate ran the basket hoist up out of the hold, and I swung each basket over and tipped it onto the culling table on the back deck.

We picked out the last of the trash fish and the crabs and the little ones, and then I shoveled the whites into the coolers one layer at a time.

You ice shrimp in layers. A bed of crushed ice in the bottom, a layer of shrimp, a layer of ice, a layer of shrimp, and ice on top, so cold touches every one.

We had no crushed ice, so Tate broke the gas station bags against the dock boards with a mallet until they were fine enough to pack.

It takes a long time to ice 900 pounds by hand in thirty coolers. My shoulders were burning by the twelfth one.