The Shrimp We Sold by the Bay

Tate stripped off his shirt and worked in his undershirt, and the sweat ran off his chin, and he did not complain once. Not once. I was so proud of him I could hardly see.

The other boats were tied up along the dock by then.

The men on them had been unloading to Lamar, the hoist creaking and the scale clanking, but one by one they stopped and stood on their decks and watched us. Nobody said anything for a long time.

Then old Augie, who has shrimped out of that harbor for longer than I have been alive, climbed down off his own boat and walked over without a word.

He picked up a mallet off the dock and started breaking ice bags beside Tate. He was seventy-one years old with a bad hip, and he broke ice for half an hour.

When we finished, Augie handed the mallet back to Tate, wiped his hands on his jeans, and tipped his cap at me. That was all.

He walked back to his boat. I had to turn around and look at the water for a minute before I could go on.

Lamar was still standing in the doorway of the fish house. His coffee had to be cold by then. He had not moved.

We loaded the coolers into the truck bed, two high and tight together, and the last four across the open tailgate. Tate strapped them down with a ratchet strap so they would not slide.

Then I took a piece of plywood out of the boat’s lazarette and a can of black paint, and I lettered a sign on the dock.

Fresh white bay shrimp. Fresh off the boat. Headless. Five dollars and fifty cents a pound. That was all it said.

My letters were crooked, and the paint ran a little on the five, but it was plain enough to read from a moving car.

We drove out of the fish dock lot past Lamar. I lifted two fingers off the steering wheel to him, the way you do to anybody on a country road.

I was not trying to make a point. I was raised to wave. He did not wave back, but he watched us all the way to the highway.

I parked on the wide gravel shoulder right where the highway curves past the harbor, the bay flat and blue behind us, the boats lined up at the docks with their outriggers standing up against the sky.

I pulled the truck half off into the grass so the tailgate faced the road.

It was nine forty-five in the morning. I propped the plywood sign against the front tire.

I did not trust the little digital scale we keep for weighing bait, so I went and got the hanging brass scale out of the wheelhouse instead.

Tate hung the scale from a hook he rigged on the truck’s back rack with a length of rope.

It was the old spring scale Glenn’s daddy used, brass and heavy, with a pan you hang the bag in.

It had been checked and sealed at the start of the season like it was every year.

Then I stood there behind the tailgate in my white fishing shirt and my navy cap, with my braid stuck to the back of my neck with sweat, and I waited for someone to stop.

The first ten minutes, nobody did. Cars went by. A pickup slowed down, read the sign, and kept on going. A log truck went past and blew grit all over the coolers.