The hall had gone so quiet that I could hear the fryer hissing in the kitchen. I stood at the end of the long table with my hand flat on the pile of receipts, and I did not raise my voice. “Ernie,” I said, “I have lived over a garage for twenty six years. You are right about that, and I am not ashamed of it. I like the sound of the water. But I want these men to hear a few other things.” I looked around. Twenty three slip holders sat at their tables, some with fish baskets halfway to their mouths. “First, I own all one hundred forty slips. Second, the marina is sold. And third, I have never once collected a slip fee in cash.”
Ernie tried to laugh. It came out as a cough. “Larry, you are confused. Everybody knows you are getting on.” “Rosa,” I said gently, “would you read the letter out loud?” My sister in law looked at the hotel company letterhead in her trembling hands. She read the name of the company. She read the number, eighteen million three hundred thousand dollars. A man at the next table whistled. Another dropped his fork. Rosa kept reading until she reached the last line, where the closing date and my signature stood in blue ink, and then she set the page down and stared at her husband with something so cold it frightened me.
“Twenty three of you gave my brother cash for five months,” I said. “Sixty three thousand dollars. And a few of you signed leases with Gutierrez Bay Holdings, thinking he was taking over. I want you all to know right now that none of you will lose a dime.” I took out my checkbook, an old green one with a cracked cover, and held it up. “Jim Hollis has a list. Tomorrow morning at the marina office, every one of you will be repaid, in full, from my own account. No questions, no forms.” A murmur rose through the room, then a rough cheer.
A quiet marina owner set a stack of receipts and a letterhead on a VFW table and gave his brother a chance to make it right.
Ernie stood up, red to the roots of his hair. “Larry, you are humiliating me in front of my friends.” “I am not,” I said. “You did that yourself.” I took one of the false leases from the table, a glossy bound copy with the logo of his company in gold. I tore it in half, then in quarters, and dropped it into the trash can beside the coffee urn. Jim Hollis applauded. Then everyone applauded, thirty men in ball caps and windbreakers, standing at their tables in a VFW hall that smelled of cornmeal and hot oil, clapping for the quiet man with the stained hands.
Rosa did not applaud. She picked up her purse, put her hand on the arm of Ernie, and said, “We are going home.” At the door he looked back at me. His face was soft and frightened, a face I knew from boyhood, the face of the little brother who broke my fishing rod and tried to hide the pieces. I have never been able to stay angry with that face. Without thinking, I raised my hand. He nodded. Then they were gone, and the screen door slapped shut, and somebody put a plate of catfish in front of me and said, “Eat, Larry.”
I did what I had promised. On Monday morning twenty three men lined up outside the marina office, and I wrote twenty three checks, and I shook twenty three hands. Then I called the president of the hotel company, a woman named Diane Okafor, and told her about the leases. I told her the whole story in about four minutes. There was a long pause. “Mr. Gutierrez,” she said, “our company has no wish to start a relationship with a marina by evicting its people. If you would like to put a clause in the closing papers, we would be glad to honor every slip holder at the current rate for ten years.”
That was the best news I had heard since the sale. The clause went into the contract, and the closing happened in December, as scheduled, in a glass conference room above Shoreline Boulevard. I signed the final page and looked at the harbor through the window. Boats rocked at their slips. Gulls wheeled over the fuel dock. I thought about the hurricane that had flattened the place in 1996, and the loan I had gotten from a bank that thought I was crazy, and the nights I had spent hammering boards under a work light. I had never been prouder of anything.
I did not give Ernie a dime of the sale money, and I did not turn him in to the sheriff. Instead, I drove to his house on a rainy Sunday and sat at his kitchen table with Rosa and the two of them, and I made him an offer. If he would repay what was left of the sixty three thousand dollars, which he had already spent, by working it off, he could take a job on the maintenance crew at the new hotel marina, at fourteen dollars an hour, and I would speak for him. He looked at the table for a long time. Rosa put her hand on his. He said yes.
He paints pilings now, and scrubs hulls, and hauls ice for the charter boats. He wears no gold. He gets there at six, an hour before his shift, and he is the last to leave. One evening in March he stopped me on the dock, with a paint roller in his hand and a smear of blue on his chin. “Larry,” he said, “I told everybody you were broke. The truth is I was jealous my whole life.” I told him that I knew. I told him I had been jealous of him too, because he could talk to anyone. We stood there a while, watching the tide.
I still live over the garage. The hotel company asked if I wanted something nicer, a condo on the bay, and I told them thank you, but the water sounds better where I am. On Friday nights I still go to the fish fry at the VFW. Ernie comes now, in his work boots, and he tells the guys, “My brother does all right.” They laugh, and he laughs too, and I let him, because for once the joke is true.
