talking about getting ahead of this damned thing.”
7.
Several times over the next few weeks, Val left me to work in the shop on my lonesome for hours at a time, sometimes for whole damned days without telling me that he’d be gone or where he was going. And then he’d return home a sweating wreck, smelling like beer and grease, and unwilling to talk. I didn’t find out until much later that he was hunting desire.
This thing with him and feeling—Val was pragmatic, rarely giving in to any passions other than sexual. So when he was visited by strong emotion, he always took it seriously. And under the current circumstances he was keenly aware that his lack of strong feeling posed a problem. He decided to drive, wandering loops around the wards, then out towards the suburbs. He didn’t know what he was looking for, he was just going, hoping that some sort of instinct or fancy would take him.
That’s one way to live.
He’d been disgusted by what he’d seen online, even from fellow entrepreneurs he considered friends and half-assed mentors. There were guys putting a new twist on the already twisted industry of viatical trading. Cooperatives were selling wish futures. Internet dead pools had been elevated to consultancy status. Val was ready to make his move to grab a bit of the future, but none of these ideas seemed right. Eventually he found himself touring the swampy parishes of St. Bernard, Lafourche, and Terrebonne—not far from the city proper, but a whole other world.
Val cruised broken roads—dusty, glittering with glass shards, and half swallowed by hostile vegetation—that skimmed along the waterways and led to commercial marinas choked with rickety shrimp boats. Shrimpers are, next to Iron Curtain era barges, just about the ugliest watercraft you’ll ever behold, overtaken by brutal rigging that leaves just enough working room for a crewman with the instincts of a dancer under sniper fire. Shrimp and oyster boats are not built with any pleasure in mind.
So when he saw boat after boat with For Sale soaped across the cabin windows, and knowing that the combined assaults of Katrina, Rita, and the oil leak had decimated the local industry, Val was overcome with sadness. Those marinas were watery ghost towns.
And that sadness rang a bell.
In Lafourche he stopped at a bar. It was a shack—fried gray wood, corrugated plastic roof. The front of the building straddled a dock sagging over black water, while the rear nestled in a green and thorny world knotted around barrels, engine parts, and another, smaller shack. The word BAR featured in black paint over siding where other words had been bleached away by the ages. If the establishment had a name, it didn’t advertise it. It was eleven in the morning when Val stepped in. Nearly every seat was taken.
The sadness was even deeper than he thought. These men hardly even noted his entrance. Val had been expecting some guff, dressed as he was in chains, jeans, a hammer & sickle shirt, his black hair swinging down like a girl’s. But nothing. One old timer who quickly morphed into a mere forty year old gave him a yellow-eyed glance, but that was it. Everyone was too depressed to start any shit, and that was very depressed indeed.
BAR had not always been a bar, that much was obvious. Electric beer signs were rigged up on pegboards to remind patrons that life was temporary. Behind the counter, a short woman with dyed black hair and bare, biscuit colored arms leaned back, smoking a cigarette and watching a television mounted behind her patrons. Unless they twisted around on their four legged stools (swivels are for pussies), their only view was of the woman and rows of hooks, weights, leaders, and bright orange floats in dusty packages—merchandise for tourists should they ever hire a boat. And that never happened. A long, narrow package hung on one side. Val could just make it out through the plastic wrap gone milky gray: a closed bail Snoopy rod, for little kids.
He didn’t bother asking what was on tap. He took a seat and accepted a Budweiser. Along with the other men he stared at the barkeep. She stared at the TV set and smoked. She was watching a medical reality show that made no sense without the picture. Val thought, I’m going to crack up. I’m going to giggle. And if I do that I’m going to die.
The man seated to his left had silver hair, blue eyes, and cheeks like watermelon meat, complete with pits that looked like seeds. He was drinking beer after beer, but no hard liquor. And no money changed hands between him and the barkeep. Val decided the man was a captain.
He put his hand out. “Valmont Swaim.”
The man moved at half speed but managed to grasp Val’s hand. “Dan Cheramie.” He made only brief eye contact before returning his attention back to its natural resting spot.
And that was when Val realized that there was something other than the bartender and unsold tackle to stare at. The bar’s one un-shuttered window could be found at the end where no one could sit because that’s where the door hit when opened. Through that dingy square of glass the sun streamed through, bouncing bronze light off the bayou in such a way that you couldn’t detect a clear horizon. This was probably the only angle from which you could not see a boat or any rigging. A green heron angled over and settled into the branch of a live oak. A tacky scene if it had been a couch painting.
Val leaned closer to Dan Cheramie. He was about to ask the man if he owned one of those rusting boats out there, when the woman tending bar suddenly looked at Val. Hard.
“Watch it,” she said around her cigarette.
And then Val fell sideways off the stool that everyone knew had a tricky foot rung that popped out if you didn’t center yourself just right. On the filthy floor of the bar, Val felt pain like sunbursts in his hip and elbow. Around him there were shouts and boots, none of them coming at him it seemed, so he took a little break there on the floor, holding his head and curling his knees up to his chest. The air was cooler down there but heavy with the stench of old blood. Before he could get sick, he was lifted up on both sides by two sets of powerful arms, and as he was forcibly re-fitted to his stool, Dan Cheramie said “Jesus Christ,” almost tenderly.
By the time Val realized that there was a fresh beer set up for him, his fellow patrons had retaken their seats, their faces animated, here and there a quick grin. Nothing meaner than that. One fellow advised, “You should sue Barbra’s ass. Take her for all she’s got.”
Barbra nodded towards the beer she’d just served. “That is all I got.”
Dan Cheramie patted Val on the back, and Val drank down half the beer, partly to cover his embarrassment. “Wood glue,” he said to Barbra when he could find his voice. But she waved him off like that was crazy talk. She was back into her show.
The accident turned out to be the perfect icebreaker, and pretty soon Val was informally interviewing Dan Cheramie and his buddies, learning about how they spent their days, what they used to do, and what they wished for the future. Of the seven men present, four owned their own boats and were trying to sell them. Dan Cheramie was one of those four.
Val took on a third beer, and his heart grew reckless. He’d made some offhand comment about how beautiful it was out “there,” indicating the view of the water and the sun, and Dan Cheramie took exception.
“No sir,” he said. “That there is a barren field. A graveyard.”
At which point Val understood that these men weren’t merely drinking their lazy days away. This was an endless wake, and they were grieving, twenty-four seven.
The idea that overtook Val was unstoppable. And it wasn’t even an idea. It was a whiff of what was possible, vague and unformed, but it came with its own theme music. As soon as the thought occurred to him, Barbra had cranked up the AC and changed channels on the TV. The theme from Bonanza arrived on ribbons of cool, sweet air, and Val just couldn’t help himself.
“Dan, let me buy into your business.”
Dan turned, his neck a little stiffer with drink than it had been when Val first arrived. “Kid, there ain’t no business. You want my boat, I’ll sell you that.”
“I don’t want the boat. I can give you $350 a week to start.