Boil Delivery

The first crawfish out of the sack caught Lamar Fontenot by the thumb, and he only shook it off into the ice chest and said, “Feisty batch,” and that, first of all, was what Etienne Boudreaux liked about him.

It was a quarter to midnight in the Kenner den, four weeks out from Mardi Gras. The krewe’s captain, a man Etienne had known since they were boys in St. Martin Parish, had ordered a boil for Saturday’s build day, forty men at seven in the morning, and paid for it up front, as he always did. Etienne had brought four sacks up I-10 the night before so they could purge and so he would not have to leave the ponds at four a.m. His plan was to rinse the mudbugs, sleep in the cab of the pickup, and light the burners at six.

The captain had said the night man would let him in. The night man turned out to be Lamar, a wiry float builder with paint in his hair who slept on the office couch for the last month before every Carnival, so somebody was with the propane and the glue while he finished the floats.

The den smelled of spray paint and wet cardboard. Under the buzzing tubes a riverboat with no paddle yet sat beside an alligator that so far was only a head. A radio on the workbench played zydeco low enough that the compressor drowned it every time it kicked on.

They filled two ice chests from the hose and rinsed the crawfish until the water ran clear instead of brown, Lamar taking the heavy end of every chest without being asked. Then he lit the den’s propane burner. “Captain says you’re the best boil in the parish,” he said. “Captain says a lot. Cook me five pounds and prove it, so I know what I’m telling forty men at seven.”

Etienne cooked a test pot, and spice and steam rolled up into the rafters. They ate standing at a plywood table under a giant half-painted shoe, off a sheet of newspaper. Etienne peeled without thinking, his thick fingers knowing tails better than forks, the spice burning its old path into his cuticles. He watched Lamar peel with paint-stained fingers, quick and neat, sucking the heads without embarrassment, laughing at his own story about a float that lost its head on Canal in ’98. When he laughed the little gap in his left eyebrow deepened. He said a utility knife did it, and he told that story two different ways before the pot was gone.

“That’s a good boil,” Lamar said, licking his thumb. “I’ll tell them hiring you was my idea.”

“It was the captain’s.”

“Yeah, you right. Captain’s asleep in Metairie, though. Who’s going to argue?” He balled up the newspaper. “You sleeping in that truck?”

“That was the plan.”

“It’s forty degrees and your cab smells like crawfish. Couch in the office is free, I won’t want it before three. Or you can help me glue feathers on the riverboat till then. Pay is beer and bad company. I won’t be hurt if you take the couch.”

Etienne should have said couch. He looked at the bare riverboat rail, then at Lamar’s paint-stained hands. He said, “Feathers.”

---

They worked. Lamar showed him how to press a strand into wet glue without leaving prints and how to overlap it so the rail looked continuous from the street. Etienne’s hands learned the trick in twenty minutes. They talked in scraps. Lamar had grown up in Mid-City and learned floats from an uncle who drank too much and carved like a saint. Etienne talked about the ponds after rain, and the year diesel nearly broke him and a neighbor floated him a tank without interest. Neither of them mentioned men, and the not-mentioning sat between them like a third worker.

By two the radio had gone to something slower. Etienne stood on the ladder handing down strings of purple and green while Lamar glued them along the rail with twenty-nine seasons of patience behind him, and still cursed when a strip stuck to his wrist.

“You build all year?” Etienne said.

“Most of it. Summer I do commercial signs. Winter is this. You farm.”

“Spring’s the flush. Rest of the year I’m waiting on rain and diesel.” His boot slipped on a rung. Lamar’s hand shot out and caught his calf, and it stayed there a second longer than balance needed. Etienne could feel the print of it through the denim long after.

“Careful,” Lamar said. “I need the boil man in one piece at six.”

He asked about the farm then, and this time he wanted the real answer, so Etienne gave it to him: the levees he walked every morning with coffee in one hand and a flashlight in the other, and how the quiet out there could be a comfort or could sit on a man’s chest at night like a dog that won’t get down. Lamar listened with the glue gun going cold in his hand.

“I got the same quiet,” Lamar said. “Different address. Shotgun double in Mid-City and a cat that doesn’t like me. I make the prettiest things in this parish and I watch them roll down St. Charles for four hours and come back to the barn.” He shrugged. “That’s February. I’m telling you so you know I’m no tourist in my own life.” He looked up the ladder. Paint freckled his cheekbones. “And you’ve been eyeing me like I’m on the menu since the test pot.”

Etienne’s ears went hot. He came down the ladder. On the ground they stood close enough that glue and crawfish spice were on both their clothes. “Out at the ponds nobody asks me anything,” he said. “In the bar in Lafayette, the men that ask take one look at the size of me and want me on top. I get tired of saying no, so I say nothing.”

“And what would you say yes to?”

Etienne rubbed his beard. “The other thing.”

“I figured.” Lamar’s mouth tilted. He set the glue gun down on a heap of foam offcuts banked against the riverboat’s unfinished side, white blocks and papier-mâché scraps under a drop cloth, soft as a couch and a lot bigger. “Etienne. I’m going to say this once, because I’m too old for dancing round it. I’ve been watching you peel crawfish since midnight and I’d like to put my hands on you, if you want that. If you don’t, we glue till three and you take the couch, and the boil’s still good either way.”

Etienne’s mouth was dry. “I want that.”

“Say the whole thing.”

“I want your hands on me. I want you to fuck me. Yes.”

“Then I will. I’m wiry and you’re a whole weather system, and I still want to. You say stop, I stop. Word is stop.”

“Mais, stop works.” Etienne said, rough-voiced. “And yes. On the sacks. Whatever you got.”

Lamar laughed, quiet. “Come here.”

---

They never made it to the office couch. Lamar backed Etienne into the foam pile and kissed him with glue-sticky fingers along his jaw, and Etienne answered it open-mouthed and pulled him closer. Foam squeaked under them. Lamar got the Saints hoodie up and off and set his mouth on Etienne’s chest, then on the soft belly and the trail of white hair that thickened below the navel. He bit lightly at a love handle and Etienne’s whole body jerked. His cock strained his jeans. Lamar palmed it through the denim and Etienne cursed in French under his breath, words his grandmère would have washed his mouth out for.

“Out of these,” Lamar said.

Etienne kicked off his boots and shoved jeans and shorts down together, and the den air hit his skin cold. He felt big and bare under the fluorescents and did not care, because Lamar was eyeing him like a float that had finally come out right. Lamar dragged his paint shirt off over a flat wiry chest with a pale scar along one rib and shoved his work pants to his thighs, already hard, slimmer than Etienne, flushed dark at the head and wet at the slit.

He knelt at the edge of the drop cloth and looked up at him over the slope of his belly. “Before anything else. Can I taste you?”

“Yes,” Etienne said, rough and fast. “Lord, yes.”

Lamar took him in slow, one hand flat on Etienne’s belly to feel it jump. He was not shy about it. He sucked the way he glued, careful and thorough, tonguing the head, then sinking down until his nose pressed into white hair and Etienne’s thighs shook against the foam. Etienne gripped his shoulder and watched his own cock vanish into that mouth and come back shining, and Lamar moaned with his mouth full, as if crawfish spice on a man was his favorite taste. The sound Etienne made bounced off the riverboat hull. “Lamar. Cher. You got a mouth on you. Don’t stop. Don’t… all right, stop, stop, or I’m finished.”

Lamar pulled off wet and grinning. “Can’t have that. I want you finished with me inside you.”

“How you want me?” Etienne said, winded.

“On your back on these. Legs round me. I want your face up where I can watch it and your arms holding on.” Lamar spat into his palm, crude and workable, and reached between Etienne’s thighs, rubbed over his hole and pressed. “This all right?”

“Yes. More. I can take more. I haul sacks for a living.”

Lamar worked him open with two fingers, then three, twisting and crooking and spitting again when the slide got tight, while Etienne lay back on foam that smelled of latex paint and watched the alligator head watch the ceiling. The stretch stung, then settled into a deep ache that made his cock twitch on his belly. “For a man who hauls sacks you open up sweet,” Lamar said, turning his wrist. “Easy. Yeah. Feel how you’re pulling my fingers in?”

“I feel it,” Etienne said. “Keep going.”

Lamar found the spot and pressed and held, not moving, only pressing, until Etienne’s heels shoved at the foam and he swore at him in two languages.

“Still yes?” Lamar said against his knee.

“Still yes. Put it in me. Please. I’m done waiting on feathers.”

Lamar spat in his hand once more and slicked himself, lined up and pushed, and Etienne’s head tipped back on a sack of offcuts as the head of Lamar’s cock breached him. It went slow and steady. The burn flared and Etienne breathed through it with his fists in the drop cloth, and as Lamar’s weight settled between his thighs he wrapped his legs round Lamar’s waist, hooked his heels low on Lamar’s back, and drew him in until Lamar was flush and Etienne was full and breathing like he had run the levees in August.

“Fuck,” Etienne said. “You feel bigger than you look. Stay. Just stay a second.”

Lamar stayed. He kissed him and pressed his forehead to Etienne’s collarbone and breathed with him until the tight ring round his cock eased. “Still good?”

“Good. Damn good. Give me a minute to remember how this goes, and then quit being polite.”

“I can wait a minute. I been waiting since the test pot.” He rocked once, barely, and Etienne’s breath broke. “Lord. Do that. Do that again.” Lamar did it again, then started to move with short strokes first and longer ones after, the foam shifting under them on every push. Skin slapped. Etienne’s cock was trapped between them and leaking a slick trail up Lamar’s stomach. “Talk to me. I like noise. This den’s heard worse than a farmer getting fucked on parade scraps.”

“Then fuck me properly,” Etienne growled. “I didn’t drive two hours to get handled like a wedding cake. Put your back in it, float man. I want to think of you every bump of the tractor seat Monday.”

Lamar grinned against his mouth and stopped being careful. The riverboat rail rattled, and a string of purple feathers came loose and drifted down onto Etienne’s shoulder. Etienne held on with arms and legs, his big hands spanning Lamar’s narrow back, feeling muscle work under paint-flecked skin. Every thrust knocked a noise loose from him. Foam dust rose and stuck to their sweat. “There. Lamar, right there. Goddamn, stay on that spot.”

Lamar hitched Etienne’s thigh a little higher on his hip and drove in deeper, and the fluorescent tubes overhead went to long white smears. “That’s me, all of me,” Lamar said, “right up in you.”

“Don’t ease up on me. I farm mudbugs, I can take a float man.”

Lamar slowed down instead, all the way down, long strokes that pulled almost out and sank all the way home, slow enough that Etienne felt the whole length go in and the whole length leave. He never took his eyes off Etienne’s face. “Every time I pull back you try to follow me,” he said. “Your whole body’s asking. Tell me what that does.”

“Makes me crazy. Makes me want to cuss you out.” Etienne’s heels dug into his back. “You’re teasing a fifty-seven-year-old man on a pile of trash.”

“On a pile of parade,” Lamar said. “Ask me nice.”

“Please. Please, Lamar. Fuck me hard. I want it loud. I want you to forget the riverboat.”

“Yes sir,” Lamar said, and snapped his hips, and the whole foam pile slid six inches across the concrete. Etienne started to laugh and lost it halfway, because Lamar did it again and kept on doing it until the laugh was a long open groan.

After that nothing was slow. Lamar fucked him in short hard strokes and Etienne took every one and asked for the next. He talked the whole way, half English and half his grandmère’s French, telling Lamar he was deep, he was right there, God, right there. Lamar laughed against his throat and kept going. “That noise is you, cher, wide open on my foam and begging a float man for more. Keep begging. I like it.”

“Tell me what you see,” Etienne got out. “Talk.”

“I see a big man who drove two hours with crawfish and let me open him up on my foam,” Lamar panted. “You’re red all the way down your chest and you keep pulling me back in like you can’t get enough. You take me so good. Hold on to me like the levee’s going.” He pressed his weight down so Etienne’s cock was pinned between their bellies, slick and hot, dragged on every thrust, until Etienne was bucking up into the pressure and back onto the cock in the same desperate loop. “You’re wet everywhere, cher. You’re squeezing me so hard I can barely pull back. Come while I’m in you. Paint us both, and then I’m coming in you.”

“Don’t stop,” Etienne begged. “Do it. Put it all in me. Lamar, I’m close.”

“Not stopping. Say yes one more time so I hear it over the compressor.”

“Yes. Yes. Lamar…”

Etienne came untouched, rubbing between their bellies, striping Lamar’s stomach and his own in thick pulses while his hole gripped in waves that dragged a broken groan out of Lamar. Lamar fucked through it, lost his rhythm, and drove deep a last time with his face in Etienne’s beard, coming inside him with a raw sound the compressor almost covered. Etienne held him through it with his heels still locked at his back, until the shaking slowed and the fluorescent buzz came back like a tide.

They lay tangled on the sacks with foam dust stuck to their sweat. Somewhere a drill battery beeped, forgotten. Lamar eased out and Etienne hissed at the empty, then laughed at the alligator head.

“He saw everything,” Etienne said.

“He’s discreet.” Lamar fished a clean rag out of a bucket and wiped them both down as carefully as he cleaned his brushes. “Couch is free. You’ve got three hours before your burners.”

“Coffee first,” Etienne said. “And your number. I can bring a sack up Thursday if the crew stays hungry.”

“Crew stays hungry,” Lamar said. “So do I.” He found a Sharpie, wrote his number on Etienne’s palm, and closed Etienne’s fingers over it.

Etienne slept two hours on the office couch with Lamar’s paint shirt over his chest. At six he lit the burners in the roll-up doorway with his hoodie on inside out and the number still on his palm. Lamar came out with two cups of den coffee with a burner-coil taste to it and didn’t say a word.

The crew came in from ten to seven, forty men in work boots and krewe jackets. The captain clapped Etienne on the shoulder, sniffed the pot and said he had outdone himself. Up on the ladder Lamar was gluing the last yard of riverboat rail. One strand of purple hung crooked halfway along, the one that had come down on Etienne’s shoulder.

“You going to fix that?” the captain called up.

“No,” Lamar said. “That one stays.”

Etienne turned back to the pot, dumped in another sack, and kept his face to the steam. He was already working out what time he would have to leave the ponds on Thursday.