The bank president held the yard inventory in one hand and looked at me over the top of it for a long moment before I answered. His name was Carl Dupree, and the bank was the largest in Escambia County. I am Royce Thibodeaux, seventy eight years old, and I stood in the kitchen of my son on Pensacola Bay with a cup of gumbo going cold in my hand. “Yes, Mr. Dupree,” I said. “Last Tuesday I put six million, four hundred thousand dollars in your trust department. And on Wednesday your loan officer showed me a file I did not expect to see.”
The file was a loan for one hundred and eighteen thousand dollars, with a cover sheet stamped in red and a note from the underwriter that said, verified in person, approved in August, secured by a twenty six foot center console, hull number TMB 0419. The signature at the bottom was mine. It was a good copy, with the loop on the T that I have used since I was in the Navy. But I had not signed it, and I had been sitting in a hospital waiting room in Mobile with my sister on the very afternoon the paper said I appeared in person. The bank had paid the money to a dealer in Gulf Breeze, and the dealer had handed my son the boat.
Mr. Dupree read the loan file, which I had carried in the pocket of my coat, with a face that grew steadily grayer. He looked at Holly, the wife of Clint, who worked as a teller in his main branch and stood now with her hand at her throat. “Holly,” he said, quietly, “did you know?” “No, sir,” she whispered. “I only knew he said his father was giving it to him.” Clint, at the end of the kitchen island, had stopped chewing. He looked like a man waiting for the floor to open.
A hull number copied onto an inventory sheet gave one old boat builder the Christmas party to bring his son home to Pensacola Bay.
I gave my terms to the kitchen at large. “Clint, the boat goes back to the yard tonight. The hundred and eighteen thousand dollars is mine to repay, and you will repay me, as you can, at five hundred dollars a month, for as long as it takes. Mr. Dupree, I would be grateful if the bank would treat this as an error in its own paperwork and not as a crime. And my son will go with me on Monday to the counselor in Pensacola who sees men from the casino in Atmore. If he does, no one will speak of this again.”
Mr. Dupree considered it for a long moment, and then he nodded once. Clint came apart. He sat down on a kitchen stool and wept, and the tears dripped off his chin into his lap. “Dad, I lost it all,” he said. “The dog track, then the casino, then the apps on my phone at three in the morning. Every time I lost, I told myself the boat would make it right. I could sell it and pay them. I did not know how to ask you.” Holly stood beside his stool with her arm across his shoulders, and her mascara ran.
Then he bolted. Clint snatched the loan file and the inventory off the counter, shoved through the sliding door, and ran across the lawn toward the dock, plainly meaning to cast off the center console and take the evidence out onto the black water. He was thirty yards from the dock when out of the dark stepped the three brothers of Holly, in Christmas sweaters, home for the holidays, and behind them an old shrimp boat captain named Lanier, a friend of the yard for fifty years, with a coffee thermos in his hand.
Clint stopped. A mullet jumped somewhere in the dark water, and the Christmas lights along the dock swung in the wind. The brothers made a wall, big men with their hands in their pockets, looking more embarrassed than angry. The old captain stepped forward in the light of the dock lamp. “Clint Thibodeaux,” he said, in his soft Gulf drawl, “your daddy fixed the engine on my boat the winter my wife was sick, and he never charged me a dime. You are not going to do this to him.” Clint looked at the water, then at the old man, and handed over the papers.
The consequences were settled in the kitchen over coffee. The bank corrected its records within a week, and the dealer in Gulf Breeze refunded eight thousand dollars of its commission. The center console went back to the yard and was sold for ninety four thousand dollars. I paid the difference. The six million, four hundred thousand dollars from the yard I placed in a trust with Mr. Dupree and a second trustee, so that no signature of mine can be copied again by a man who loves me.
In the name of my wife Odile, who passed in 2020, I started the Odile Thibodeaux Fund. It pays for boat building apprenticeships and for gambling counseling for families on the Gulf Coast, in Escambia, Santa Rosa and Okaloosa counties. In the first year we placed twenty one apprentices at yards along the bay and put forty three people in counseling. One was a shrimp boat deckhand from Pensacola Beach who had been betting his catch money on his phone and now builds skiffs in his own garage.
The next December, Clint, ten months well, stood in the old tin shed on the bay where I began, with a socket wrench in his hand and grease on his forearm. A rebuilt Evinrude sat on the bench between us. I showed him how to set the timing, as my father had shown me. He listened without a word, and then he pulled the cord, and the engine coughed and caught. We stood there in the noise and the smell of two stroke oil, with the bay glittering through the open door of the shed and a pelican watching us from the piling like a deacon. “Dad,” he said, grinning, “you smell like the best man I know.”
