The Manual 2.0 
A Shrimp Tale
Vernon Bates and Weecho Salinas have been dragging their nets in Matagorda Bay for decades. But these days they’re tangling with state regulators and watching profits plunge, which is why their way of life could soon be dead in the water.
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There are worse fates. One evening in the late seventies, an ordinary-looking man arrived in Palacios and met with the town’s Anglo shrimpers. He identified himself only as a Gulf Coast—area member of the Ku Klux Klan. “Y’all don’t have to do anything,” he assured them. “Just give us the word, step aside, and we’ll take care of things.” When someone asked the Klansman just how his mob intended to rid Palacios of its refugees, the man answered without hesitation. They would apprehend the Vietnamese Catholic priest, Joseph Phamductrinh, and drag the man known as Father Joe through town by means of a rope attached to a truck bumper—after, of course, tarring and feathering him.
Murmurs of approval were general throughout the room. Then Vernon Bates spoke. “It’s a bad idea,” he recalls having said. “I don’t want any part of it.”
The others had always looked up to the eldest Bates shrimper. They did so now. The meeting broke up, and the Klansman somberly took his business elsewhere. When I ask Vernon why he vetoed the tar and feathering, I expect him to profess his admiration for the Vietnamese work ethic and acknowledge that they worship the same God he does. But too much has happened to allow Vernon Bates to speak passionately on behalf of the Vietnamese. They now far outnumber the Anglo and Hispanic shrimpers in Palacios. Captain Tom’s fish house nowadays does business with more trawlers than any other fish house in town. And when Vernon sees their boats out in the bay so early in the morning, he suspects that they have been illegally dragging their nets all night. If bay shrimping is ever outlawed, it will be because the arrival of the Vietnamese and the subsequent overfishing of the bay have coincided with a 600 percent increase in landings of juvenile shrimp—a trend that Texas Parks and Wildlife ominously terms “ecologically unsustainable.” In these ways, the Vietnamese have made his life, and the lives of his lifelong friends, more difficult, and under those circumstances warm words do not come easily.
So instead he says, “I’ll tell you why I wouldn’t support it. Because word would get out, and I’d end up in Fort Leavenworth, and I’d never be out on the water again. That’s why.”
“PULL UP, WEECHO!” AS VERNON winches up the cables, the deckhand stalks over to the side of the trawler, tosses out a hook tied to a rope and with it snags the try net, which he hoists up to the deck. Sand crabs scramble out of the net and dance around his white boots. A jellyfish rolls out as well, which Weecho impales on his spade with a single stroke. He holds the creature up for a second, eyeing it with dull interest before tossing it from his spade into the ocean with a subtle flick of the wrist. Then he tends to the shrimp, of which there are few on this first try.
His cracked face and hands, his deeply stained clothes, his stooped posture—everything about Weecho has been shaped by his trade, which he has practiced for as long as Vernon has. There are no guarantees of upward mobility in the shrimping business, and poorly educated types such as Weecho tend to stay where they are: on deck, sorting and icing the shrimp, dumping the bycatch, picking the crabs off the net, scrubbing things down. “What he’s doing right now,” Vernon says to me, gesturing at his deckhand, “is all he knows how to do.”
Vernon learned this a couple of years ago, when he had a stroke while sitting behind the wheel. He gasped for Weecho to steer the ship and radio for help. The deckhand didn’t know how to do either. Fortunately, another boat happened by and radioed for a medical helicopter. Ever since then, Vernon has taken blood-thinner medicine and worried that he might not be so lucky next time. Still, dependability counts for something, and in the fifteen years that Vernon has used Weecho, the deckhand has never failed to be at the docks by four in the morning. For his labor, Weecho gets paid 20 percent of what the day’s catch is worth at the fish house.
When I ask the deckhand why they call him Weecho, he answers, in his gravelly snarl, “’Cause they got tired of saying my first name, Mauricio, so they just said Weecho.”
Vernon looks amused. He didn’t know that, never bothered to ask. Though Weecho cuts a comical figure and is much teased back at the fish house, his life is not a pitiable one. In Palacios he owns a small house (made smaller by the fact that he keeps his lawn mower in the front room so it won’t get stolen), and when the shrimping season ends in December, he spends his winters in Durango, Mexico, where his wife lives in a house that he also owns. Vernon and the other shrimpers speculate that Weecho lives like royalty down there, throwing his dollars all over town.
For now, the prince of Durango tosses the shrimp into a bucket while several dozen flapping seagulls monitor his accuracy. Up this close, the birds rapidly lose whatever aesthetic aura they possess on the shore. As if reading my mind, Vernon laughs and says, “When I went up to Austin to fight against one of the laws one year, I ended up talking to this lady from the Sierra Club or one of those organizations. She was saying, ‘Oh, we’ve got to protect the seagulls, they’re such wonderful birds.’ I nearly told her, ‘Lady, have you ever had a seagull drop one on your head?’”
At eight o’clock, just half a mile from the mouth of the Colorado River, on the east end of the bay, the big net is winched in, and Weecho positions it over the deck and then loosens the rope. What falls splat to the deck looks like nothing so much as a mass grave: the pale bellies of hundreds of croakers, upturned crabs, silver eels, jellyfish, squid, and somewhere in there, a few hundred brown shrimp plus a couple dozen whites. Vernon’s nets have snared all manner of things in the past. Sharks and stingrays are common, and occasionally he’ll snag something he’s never seen before, like the forty-pound specimen someone at the docks told him was called a rabbit fish. (“You talk about good eating,” Vernon recalls.) Back in the forties, he and his dad caught a seven-foot-long, 515-pound jewfish. He has also dragged aboard an antique anchor, and once he found tangled in his net a three-foot-long rocket, which some federal officials snatched away from him and took to San Antonio. But all Vernon cares about is catching shrimp, and the first haul tells him that the bay is still fallow.
“Damn, there’s no shrimp!” Vernon grumbles as he stands over the tray where he sorts the browns from the whites. “What’d you do, Weecho, throw ’em all overboard?” He drags four more times over the next six hours—across the oyster beds near Mad Island, around the surveying platforms, and beside the red flags where the pipelines lie newly buried. He pulls out all the stops, but while some of the hauls are more successful than others, the total is nowhere near what he had in mind. Finally, at ten minutes before two, Vernon says, “Well, hell, we might as well just pick up. Ain’t got but ten minutes left, and there ain’t no getting around it, today’s just a bad day. Pick up, Weecho!”
The nets are winched up, and Vernon turns the captain’s seat over to me so that he can assist his deckhand. From the tug against the wheel, I can tell that the wind is still pulling hard to the west. But the day is otherwise beautiful: a crisp azure sky, the sunlight shimmering against the surface of the malty bay water. After a while I hear Vernon standing behind me, munching on an apple that he has peeled with his pocketknife. I imagine that he’s fuming quietly, figuring all the things he could have done differently, counting all the odds stacked against him and the other shrimpers—wondering, perhaps, just how crazy a man has to be to stay in such a business. When we return to the fish house, Vernon will learn that he has netted less than one fourth the legal limit. He will also learn that the big buyers have forced the price of shrimp down today from $1 to 85 cents a pound.
Vernon Bates finally speaks. “Well,” the shrimper says, “we didn’t catch much. But we sure had fun, didn’t we?”
He is positively beaming. “I mean, it beats the hell out of sitting around the fish house,” he adds. Which, in turn, beats the hell out of sitting around at home. And tomorrow morning I’ll arise to find a stiffer wind than today’s, but when I go to the basin where his trawler is docked, I’ll see only an empty space. Vernon and Weecho and the Faye B. will be out on the water, dragging the net, having fun while it lasts.
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