My extended walk along the river with Phil made me wonder if traveling to new places opened up a person’s mind with new ways of thinking about things. My head had always been full of thoughts of baseball and copying words on my typewriter. New thoughts bombarded me now like stinging raindrops after getting caught with my convertible top down.
“I’ve t----alked so much my mouth is dry,” I said. “Could I get a drink of water at your house?”
“For someone who says he has trouble talking to people, you can sure get on with it,” Phil said. Her smile and wink turned what might have seemed like a criticism into a compliment.
I never seemed to be that comfortable visiting the houses where my friends lived, but I was happy to see the Moreau house again on its tall stilt legs. Phil opened a rusted refrigerator under the house and took out a NuGrape. She took a long swig, wiped off the top of the bottle with her palm, and handed it to me. We sat on top of one of the picnic tables. Phil brushed off the soles of her feet, which appeared to have the texture of an old catcher’s mitt left out in the rain.
“How can you walk on c----rushed shells and gravel without any shoes?” I liked to go barefoot on the beach, but that was about it.
“Been doing it going on nineteen years. Do anything long enough and you get to where it don’t bother you none.”
“N----ot stuttering,” I said.
I thought my bold response would throw her off and get us back to where we were before I asked her about going to college. She didn’t flinch.
“Why you worry so much ’bout how you talk? You in Sout’ Louisiana where all a body talk funny, sure.” She could turn her accent on and off for emphasis. “I don’t hear you stutter anyhow, so much as you just kind of sputter sometimes.”
All my life I had considered myself a person who stuttered and now I was informed that all I did was “sputter,” like an engine that was only in need of a little fine tuning. A sputter was better than a stutter in my book.
She jumped down from the table, her bare feet crunching the shells and gravel. She grabbed my left wrist and twisted it to look at my watch.
“Let’s take that little sporty car of yours over to the marina. The Rooster should be coming in soon.” Phil changed her mood and the subject of conversations like the wind changed directions.
I had forgotten about my typewriter on the passenger-side floorboard.
“Let me put that on a table under the house,” I said, but she had already slid into the car with her knees pulled up and her feet resting on the front of the bucket seat.
“It’s not far. What do you do with this thing anyway?”
“I type on it — I c----opy stuff — when I probably should be doing other things.”
The incomplete answer seemed to satisfy the girl, who surely had the toughest feet in South Louisiana.
* * *
The traffic on Highway 23 was mostly pickup trucks hauling boat trailers. Some of the trailers were twice as long as the trucks pulling them. My father had a summer cabin on Moon Lake in Mississippi that he kept mainly for the people in his office and their families. We didn’t use it often since I had so many baseball games in the summer, and my mother said the place was “a little on the crude side,” but I liked to go down and haul the ski boat in and out of the water with a truck that stayed at the cabin. Against my mother’s wishes, my father taught me to drive the truck and back the boat trailer long before I got my driver’s license. I remembered those times as some of the best I ever had with my father. It was nice to be alone with him and have him teach me how to do things in his calm way.
“What size is your father’s charter boat?” I asked. Phil had gone quiet on me, but I figured she would like talking about the Rooster Tale.
“Thirty-seven feet.” She answered without taking her eyes off the passenger-side rearview mirror.
I asked Phil where the boat got its name. No answer. She leaned forward against her knees, staring at the mirror. A red truck with oversized tires swerved to pass a car behind us and came close up on our tail, almost touching my bumper. She turned around in her seat and looked at the truck.
“I knew it. That couyon is following us,” Phil said, tightening her arms around her knees.
“Who?”
“Jimmy LaBue from over in Cutoff. The one on the marine radio. I can’t make that Cajun stop sniffing round me.”
“What’s that name you called him?”
“Couyon. Crazy in the head.”
Phil told me where to park in the marina’s paved lot. She jumped out of the car before it came to a full stop, slamming the door and running over to the truck when it pulled in near us.
“I told you not to be coming round me, Spy Boy,” Phil said to the driver in the cab.
The door of the shiny Chevrolet Apache opened. The pickup truck had amber lights on its roof like the tractor-trailer rigs on the highway. The rear-view mirrors stuck out like silver wings. The windows were heavily tinted.
“Just wantin’ to meet dat new friend of yours, cherie,” Jimmy LaBue said in an accent much heavier than Phil’s.
He wore black jeans with a sleeveless shirt tightly tucked in, and red cowboy boots with silver tips on the toes. On his belt was a fish-filleting knife in a long leather sheath. My mother had a similar knife in the set she bought for her new kitchen. The knife took on a more threatening look hanging on a belt.
LaBue walked past Phil without looking at her and up to me. He stuck out his hand. He had tattoos on the inside of both forearms, which didn’t have much meat on them, making his blue veins stand out like lines on a roadmap.
“James LaBue here. Welcome to Sout’ Louisiana.”
Phil moved in between us before I could shake his hand.
“Reckon you drove all the way down here from Tennessee in dat little t’ing just to see us?” He motioned with his head to my car without taking his eyes off me.
“This is Vic,” Phil said. “He’s down from Memphis to go out on the Rooster. My daddy’s gonna be coming in just any minute now. We got to go meet him.”
LaBue ignored Phil. He glanced down at my feet.
“Don’t college boys wear them kind of leather shoes now without no socks? You must be one of them college boys.”
“Starting soon.” I was glad for the two s-words in a row. I concentrated on maintaining good eye contact. LaBue was a couple of inches taller, but I was stockier. He moved closer.
“So, what you going out fishing for, college boy?”
I didn’t want to get into the fact that I wasn’t interested in fishing and didn’t know anything about it, but then recalled my conversation that morning at the service station in Happy Jack.
“Y----ellowfins. H----ear they’re b----iting well.”
The y sound was never a good starter sound for a sentence. I had to stretch it out or it would cause a hard block. I added the extra sentence to try to cover up the bad start but could get the extra words out only by taking some hard breaths and slurring my sounds. My stuttering usually went downhill fast during a challenge and there was no doubt that Jimmy LaBue had a challenge on his mind.
“What you gonna use on them y----ellowf----ins?” He mocked my stutter by drawing out the sound a lot more than I did.
“Shiny j----igs with skirt. T----op up.”
The s sound came out okay but I had to slur and draw out the j sound to get through the block and I wasn’t sure what the service station attendant had meant by “up top,” so those words got reversed. Trying to fool somebody when I didn’t know what I was talking about was another skill I lacked. I had gotten lucky on coming up with an answer on Jimmy LaBue’s fishing question, but my stuttering had put itself on parade. And maybe the worst thing I did was lose eye contact when my eyes dropped down to his red cowboy boots. I saw they were made out of alligator hide.
“We got to meet the Rooster now,” Phil said. She pulled me by the arm.
LaBue looked at her for the first time. “Why you fooling with this bégayer boy, cherie?”
“Je te préviens. Leave us be, Jimmy.” Phil pulled me toward the marina docks.
“Where you come off warning me, bitch?” LaBue said.
She didn’t look back as we walked toward the marina.
The truck’s tires screeched on the blacktop of the parking lot. Phil didn’t let go of my arm until we reached the boat slips.
“I never figured you for a sport fisherman.” Some of the tension had left her voice. “So, just what exactly do you know about yellowfin tuna?”
“N----ot much. I didn’t even know a y----ellowfin was a tuna.” I told her about my conversation at the filling station in Happy Jack.
She squeezed my arm and laughed, but I got serious.
“W----hat was that name he called me?”
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“It started with a b.”
“Forget it, I’m telling you. It’s nothing.”
I let it drop, but there was no way I was going to forget it. I could tell by its context exactly what it meant. I wasn’t good at saying words, but I was hard to beat when it came to understanding them.
* * *
The Rooster Tale was impressive with its sleek hull and tall extension on top of the cabin that had a duplicate set of controls. The boat eased into its large slip. Phil leaped aboard.
I watched her work from a bench on the wharf. She grabbed the heavy lines, tied quick knots, and heaved the lines to the dock. She hopped off the boat with a line in hand and made a figure eight with it around a dock cleat, wrapping it under itself on the last turn and then jerking it snug.
She shoved a gangplank from the dock onto the boat as Captain Henri Moreau backed down the flybridge ladder. Phil gave her father a hug. He had on khaki shorts like the ones I wore. His thick arms and legs were dark from the sun. The ball cap pulled down over his eyes was stained and ragged. Sunglasses hung from a cord around his neck. He didn’t look anything like I had imagined him. He was not much taller than I was, but if I were pitching to him, I certainly wouldn’t give him a good ball to hit. He looked like he could knock anything out of the park.
The Rooster’s three charter customers for the day, all on the chubby side with white sunblock slathered on their faces, stepped off the boat. Phil steadied them and their wobbly legs on the gangplank.
“How’d it go out there, fellas?” Phil asked.
“Pretty good,” said the one with the biggest belly. “See what the Captain thinks.”
Captain Moreau took inventory at the large ice chest that ran the length of the stern.
“Two nice yellowfins, a bunch of snapper, some nice grouper.”
“Not too bad for a bunch of old guys.” Phil’s wink cushioned her words. She could get by with saying anything to anybody with her wink and smile.
Captain Moreau began slinging the smaller fish one by one onto the dock. Phil put on a pair of cloth gloves and grabbed a fish in each hand by sticking her thumb in the mouths. She hooked them under their gills on metal spikes below a “Rooster Tale for Charter” sign.
“C----an I help?” I asked.
“I might need some help with those yellowfins you know so much about.” She winked at me.
“Too big to hang,” Captain Moreau said to his daughter. “See if the guys want their picture taken. I think one of them went to get a camera.”
Phil gathered the three men underneath the sign and instructed them on how to hold one of the big tunas in front of them.
“Now everybody smile and say ‘Rooster,’” Phil said.
“I’ll make sure everything is iced after I scrub down here,” Captain Moreau said to the three men. He jumped onto the dock to uncoil a water hose. Phil waved me over.
“This is Vic, the General’s friend from Memphis. He wants to talk with you about going out on the river.”
Captain Moreau stuck out his hand that felt like it might have even tougher skin than the bottom of Phil’s feet.
“Good to meet you, son. My wife radioed me after the General called this morning. I’ll be glad to try to help if I can.”
Phil uncoiled the rest of the hose for her father.
“You remember your party tonight, don’t you, Daddy?”
“I don’t know why we’re having it, much less on a Tuesday night,” the Captain said.
“Momma wanted to have it before school started, and, after all, today is your birthday.”
“I’ll be on home after I get the Rooster scrubbed and the catch iced down.” Captain Moreau turned to me. “We can talk tonight about exactly what you’re looking for.”
“If you don’t need me, Daddy, I’m going to show Vic around Venice some.”
“Afraid there’s not much to see here,” Captain Moreau said.
“I like it here, sir. All this is n----ew to me.”
“See you at the house, then.” The captain turned on the water and began washing down the Rooster Tale.
Phil scanned the marina parking lot in all directions as we walked back to my car. The concern on her face had turned into an excited twinkle in her eyes by the time she opened the car door.
“I have a secret spot for us to go if you’re up for it,” she said. “I bet you’re gonna like it.”
If the spot included Phil, I would like it. Earlier in the day I had hoped there would be enough time in the afternoon for Captain Moreau to take me out on the river and to my destination. I could finish my business and be back on the road home before the end of the day. After spending most of the afternoon with Philomene Moreau, I wasn’t in such a hurry anymore.