When he got home his mother had already gone to bed. He stood for a while in front of the photographs on the living room wall. His grandparents, Earl and Delia, in front of the Delia P., an old wooden trawler with outriggers raised, his grandfather squinting and his grandmother laughing at something off-camera. The trawler had a dark stripe along her hull. In the faded print, it was a kind of gray-blue, or blue-gray, or nothing much at all.
He'd never once asked what color it had really been.
* * *
He was at the public ramp at a quarter to five the next morning, out of uniform, in jeans and an old Bayou Clement Pirates sweatshirt, with two cups of coffee from the gas station on the highway because nothing else was open. He leaned on the rail where Danny had stood and waited. The pelican was on the third post again. It regarded him with one cold eye and then tucked its head back into its shoulder as if it had seen enough.
At four fifty-two, the old Ford came down the shell road with its one dim headlight and the trailer rattling behind. Mr. Tran backed down the ramp in one smooth motion, set the brake, and got out. He saw Wade. He looked at him for a while. Then he walked to the trailer hitch as if Wade were another piling.
"I brought you a coffee," Wade said.
"I don't drink gas station coffee."
"I didn't figure you would. I brought it anyway." Wade set the cup on the rail post. Then he came down onto the ramp and stood where he had stood yesterday, under the lamp, in the same place, because it seemed important to stand in the same place. "I'd like to say something, and I'd like you to let me get all the way through it before you decide what it's worth."
Mr. Tran unhooked the winch strap. He didn't say yes. He didn't say no. Behind him, Danny's bicycle came rattling down the road with no light on it at all.
"Yesterday morning," Wade said, "I didn't look at your boat. I looked at you. I got a call that said an old Chinese man would be here with a stolen skiff, and I came down here, and I saw an old Asian man with a white skiff, and I stopped looking. I'd already decided. The stripe, the lamp—that was just me finding the facts to fit what I'd decided. If you hadn't stopped me, I'd have put your name on the radio, and I'd have felt good about it, and I'd have gone home and told my mother I'd caught the guy. And then yesterday afternoon I came to your house and tried to get you to tell me that was all right. It wasn't all right. I'm sorry. Not for the inconvenience. For what I thought of you before I knew one thing about you. That's what I'm sorry for."
The winch strap reeled slowly back. Danny had stopped at the top of the ramp, one foot on the ground, holding his bike.
Mr. Tran coiled the bow line over his shoulder. He walked the length of the trailer and checked the transom drain plug with his thumb, as he must have done ten thousand times. Then he came back and stood in front of Wade, shorter than him by most of a head, and looked up at him with that same unreadable expression, and Wade understood that he was being weighed—not his words, but him.
"Okay," Mr. Tran said. "Better." He tilted his head toward the skiff. "You know how to pull a trap?"