My Father Sold Me to His Oldest Enemy to Play House, and the Old Man Bought the Only Witness Against Him novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Salt

By the end of March he had paid for it in front of everyone.

He had pulled three captains off the Pallis boats for taking the Mavrakis cut.

He had sold the Saint Marina for scrap, and the money went to the diver's family.

He had stood on the packing-shed floor at six in the morning.

He had told sixty men what his nephew had done, and nobody had asked him why.

He never once asked me to come back to the loft.

I came back on a Thursday.

I did not tell him.

I walked in and put my suitcase under the cot.

I went to the chart table and wrote on a scrap of paper: the workboat, Saturday, after dark. Bring rope.

He read it twice.

Then he looked at me over the paper with his grey eyes gone dark.

"Yes," said Aris.

We took the workboat out on Saturday, down the Anclote.

We went up into a bayou on the south side, where the cypress knees stand in black water and nobody goes.

He ran it himself.

I stood in the wheelhouse door and watched his back, and the moon came up behind him.

He dropped the anchor at the mouth of a creek and shut down the engine.

The quiet came in.

Frogs, and water on the hull, and the tick of the cooling diesel.

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