The Short Landing

The crate came off the hook sideways and I watched a man lose his leg for about a second and a half.

Forty ton of banded steel swinging in a thirty-knot gust over a wet apron, and Dooney Suarez standing under it with his back turned and his hands in the tag line, and Pokey Guidry hollering a word that is not in any safety manual. The whole thing came down on the concrete eighteen inches from Dooney’s boot and skated. Sparks went up off the strapping. The crate stopped against a bollard. Everybody on that apron stood very still for a second, the way you do, taking inventory of what nearly happened to somebody else.

“That’s the wind,” Pokey said. “That ain’t nobody fault but the wind.”

“It is my fault. I put that lift on in a blow.”

“Miss Delphine.”

“Shut it down.”

“We got six more off that hatch and the man want the hatch.”

“The man can want it in the morning,” I said. “Shut it down, Pokey.”

He stood there a second with his jaw working. Sixty-three years old, been on this apron since Carter, calls me Miss Delphine, has since I was fourteen, and will be calling me Miss Delphine in his grave.

“You know what the demurrage run on that ship settin’ there till daylight?”

“Four thousand eight hundred a day, and I negotiated it, and I will pay it out of my own pocket before I call Letty Suarez and tell her something no mother should have to hear on a Monday. Shut it down.”

“Yes ma’am.” He turned and put two fingers in his mouth and whistled the apron down, and then he turned back. “Dooney, he don’t want no fuss made.”

“I am not making a fuss. Send him home with his shift.”

“He got four hours left.”

“Send him home with eight.”

Pokey laughed one time, down in the chest, and went off toward the hatch with his hands in his coat.

Delphine Renwick-Amankwah. My father’s name is on the lease and my husband’s name is on the letterhead and I run the oldest ship agency on this wharf, which has been in my family since my grandfather came off a banana boat and never got back on one. Fifty-four years old. Everything I know, I learned standing on concrete in the dark counting somebody else’s property, and the one thing I know better than anybody on this island is what a thing weighs.

That is what I had instead of a life, and it cost me the usual things. A marriage that is still standing, which is the expensive kind. A son who calls ahead before he comes to his own mother’s house. A body I keep up at five in the morning for nobody at all.

So when Beau Frechette came up the iron stair behind me an hour later with a wet clipboard and the rain coming off the brim of his cap in a line. Stood in the doorway of my chart room shaking his jacket out like a man who had been raised by somebody, I knew exactly what I was doing and I did it anyway.

He had been on the island two days. Marine surveyor, licensed, hired by a Houston adjuster on behalf of a London syndicate, here to cut bags in my warehouse and tell a man in an office four thousand miles away whether the sea had got into my cargo. Which made him, technically, the other side. He had the kind of close beard that is going grey at the chin before the rest of it has made up its mind, and he stood in a doorway the way certain men do, which is to say he filled it and apologized for nothing.

“Mrs. Amankwah.”

“Renwick,” I said. “On this floor it is Renwick. Upstairs is my husband’s.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“And do not do the ma’am.”

“All right.”

That was the whole thing, and I want it written down how small it was. He put the ma’am down the first time I asked him to and never picked it back up, and something in me turned over like an engine in a cold truck.

“You are soaked.”

“It is raining.”

“I am aware. That is my roof over your head.” I pushed the chair out with my foot. “Sit down before you drip on my chart.”

He did not sit down. He came three steps into the room and set the clipboard on the end of my table, square to the edge, and then he stood there looking at me with the rain still on his face.

“Can I say a thing that is not about cargo.”

“That depends on the thing.”

“I have been in that warehouse since Saturday,” he said. “You have come through it four times. Every time, every man in there finds something to do with his hands. The whole building changes.”

“That is because I sign the checks.”

“No, that is not why.”

“Mr. Frechette.”

“Beau.”

“Beau. Finish the sentence or go on back down the stairs, one.”

“You came through on Sunday in a green blouse with your sleeves pushed up and a pen behind your ear,” he said, “and you put your hand flat on a pallet of soy meal and told Pokey it had been wet twice. Not wet. Wet twice. And I stood on the other side of that pallet and could not have told you my own licence number.”

“How did I know it was twice?”

“The crust. Wet once and dried, you get a shell on top and meal underneath. Wet twice, the shell goes soft and there is a seam about four fingers down.”

“And you knew that before I opened my mouth.”

“I knew it before you opened your mouth. That is my whole job. What I did not know is that anybody who signs the front of a check still puts her hand in a pallet.”

“My daddy would have put his whole face in that pallet.”

“I would have liked to meet your daddy.”

“No you would not, Beau Frechette.”

Thirty years of men on this wharf finding a spot about six inches over my left shoulder to talk to, and this one looked at my face and kept looking.

The window unit was going behind me. The rain had come up hard enough to go sideways past the glass and the yard lights out over the apron had that drowned look they get, and the only thing in my head was a sentence I have never said out loud to anybody in my life, which was: say it again, say it slower, say it until I believe you.

What I said was, “Nobody has told me that since before my son was born.”

“That is a shame.”

“It is arithmetic. Every man down on that apron works for me, which is a door that does not open. Every man at the Mardi Gras ball is married or scared of my husband or both. I am not a hard woman to get. I am a hard woman to reach.”

“I walked up a staircase.”

“In the rain,” I said. “With a clipboard.”

“Tell me to go on back down those stairs.”

“No.”

“Then tell me what you want.”

“I want you to keep talking,” I said. “That is the honest answer. I want the words while your hands are on me. I have had the other kind. The other kind gets quiet and goes about his business like a man changing a tire.”

“Then I will talk.”

He came across the room.

The first thing he did was take the pen out of my hair, which I had forgotten was in there, the way it is always in there, and set it down on the chart beside the Galveston soundings. Then he put both hands on the sides of my face like he was checking the condition of something he intended to buy, and the whole of me went quiet.

“Say the rest.”

“You want it nice or you want it true?”

“I have had nice. Nice is a man at a dinner telling me I am holding up well.”

“Then here is true.”

And he got the first three buttons of my blouse undone one-handed, which no man has ever managed in the history of my life, and he put his mouth under my ear and told me what he had been thinking about since Saturday, and he did not use one word I had to translate, he said what he wanted to do and what order he wanted to do it in and what he had thought about on the drive back over the causeway with the radio off, and he used the plain word for what he wanted between my legs the same way he had said soy meal, like a man naming a thing he works with, so that I had to put a hand down on the table, and he felt me do it and said “that is the one, that right there”, and said it again lower.

“You are blushing.”

“It is eighty-one degrees in this room.”

“It is seventy-two degrees and you know good and well.”

“Keep going.”

He got the blouse the rest of the way open and took the weight of my breasts in his hands the way a person picks a thing up to know what it weighs, and he said “Lord have mercy” into my collarbone, which is not filthy, and which went through me like a hand.

“That is not what I asked you for, Beau.”

“I am getting to filthy.”

“You are dawdling.”

“I am looking,” he said. “There is a difference between the two.”

He got the blouse down off my shoulders to my elbows so my arms were caught in my own sleeves, which was not an accident, and then he stood back about half a step and looked at me with the yard lights coming through the blind in bars, and he took his time. The room got very warm and the rain kept coming.

“Say something.”

“You have got a body you have kept on purpose.”

“I swim at the Y at five in the morning.”

“For who.”

“For nobody,” I said. “That is the whole point. I keep it for nobody.”

“That is the saddest thing I have heard this year.”

“Do not go soft on me.”

“Do what.”

“Do not feel sorry for me with your hands on my tits,” I said. “Get filthy or get out.”

“All right. I have been thinking about your mouth since Saturday, and about what you would say if I got your legs open, and about the noise you would make.”

“That is better.”

So he got filthy. He was specific and he was unhurried and he told me, with his mouth going down my chest, exactly what he had been thinking about while a crane worked over his head, and the sentences got longer and the room got smaller, and every time I made a noise he said the next thing a little lower, and the rain came down on the warehouse roof the way it does here, all at once, like somebody dropped it, and the window unit ticked, and the smell of him was rain and diesel and a clean shirt. The whole of my body, every inch of it that had been standing in line politely for nine years, came up to the window at once.

He went down on his knees. A grown man’s knees on a wood floor do not do it quietly and his hit like a dropped toolbox. He got my skirt up over my hips and stopped there with his mouth on the inside of my thigh and looked up at me.

“Do I ask?”

“If you ask I will say something smart and ruin the whole evening.”

“Then I am asking.”

“Ask.”

“Can I put my mouth on your pussy,” he said, as plain as asking me to pass the salt, and my hand was already on the back of his head and I said yes before he finished the sentence.

And then there is no room and there is no wharf.

He was not quick about it, which I had not been prepared for, and he had one arm up across my hips before I was aware that I had started to come up off that table and away from him, and the weight of that forearm holding me down was better than the rest of it put together, and somewhere under everything the window unit was going, and he said “that is the one, give me that”, and I got out “do not stop” with no air behind it at all, and he said “say the words” with his mouth still on me so that I felt the shape of them more than I heard them, and I said “do not stop, do not get clever, stay right there”, and he stayed right there, and my mouth was open on nothing, and my heels came up off the floor. The pen went off the chart and I heard it hit from very far away.

It came up out of my feet.

That is the only way I know to say the thing. It started in my feet and in my hands and it went in instead of out, and I had one palm flat on a chart of the ship channel I have known since I was six years old, and the other one in his hair, hard enough to hurt him, and I did not care, and he did not stop.

Then he was still, with his forehead down on my leg, breathing on me, and every breath put the gooseflesh back up my thigh.

“You all right.”

“Come up here.”

“In a minute.”

“Beau.”

“Give me a minute,” he said. “I want to remember the room.”

I put both hands over my face. My palms were wet and I could not have told you from what.

When he came up I got his belt open and my hand around his dick, hot and moving in my fist, and he put his forehead down on mine and swore, and the swearing was not for my benefit, and he said “tell me what you want”, and I said, “I want you to keep doing what you were doing, and then I want to get on that floor.”

“That floor is filthy.”

“I know what is on my floor.”

“I will put my jacket down.”

“Well, aren’t you something,” I said, and he laughed, and we got down on a wet jacket on the floor of a chart room over Pier 21 like two people half our age, and he did not hurry, and he did not stop talking. One man who talks is worth four quiet ones.

He asked me questions the whole way through and I answered every one of them out loud, which I had forgotten a woman is allowed.

“That all right.”

“Do not change anything.”

“Like this here.”

“Just like you are doing.”

“You are going to have to be quieter.”

“This is my building.”

“Earl comes in at one.”

“Then Earl will learn something,” I said, and he laughed, and I came on him laughing. I did not know laughing was still on the menu for a woman my age.

Afterward he lay on his back on his own jacket with his arm over his eyes and I sat on the floor with my spine against the table leg and my blouse pulled around me. The rain eased off the way it does, all at once, like a tap.

“You are fun,” he said.

Nobody has called me fun since Clinton was in office.

“Where are you from, Beau Frechette.”

“Here.”

“Nobody is from here.”

“Avenue M,” he said. “Between Twenty-Eighth and Twenty-Ninth. My mother is buried out at Lakeview with her people and her people been here since before the storm.”

“Which storm.”

“Now you are being ugly.”

“I am being thorough.” I turned my head and looked at him. “Born on the island.”

“Born on the island?”

“And you let me stand here and tell you my grandfather came off a boat.”

“I enjoyed myself.”

“You let a woman run her mouth about a wharf she learned to walk.”

“I enjoyed that part the most.”

“What line of work did your daddy do?”

He was quiet for about as long as it takes a person to decide something.

“He worked,” he said.

“On the dock.”

“Hold man, mostly.”

“For who?”

“Whoever was hiring,” he said, and sat up and reached for his boots, and that was the end of that part of the evening. I let it be the end of it, because a woman does not conduct an interview on a floor.

There was a scar on the back of his right hand, a white one, the shape of a fish hook. I put my thumb on the scar.

“What is this here.”

“A hook.”

“Whose.”

“Mine. I was fifteen and I was in a hurry.”

“Fifteen and working.”

“Everybody was, out there.”

He did not say anything else about the hook and I did not go after the rest.

“Delphine.”

“What.”

“You are going to want me to say something right now, and I am no good at speeches.”

“I do not want you to say anything. I want my pen, and I want you out of this building before the one o’clock gang comes through the gate, because Pokey Guidry has been telling this island my business since I was fourteen years old.”

“Then I will go out the Harborside side.”

“You will go out the Harborside side and you will walk. You will not start that truck under my window.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Beau.”

“Habit,” he said.

He got up. He found the pen on the floor and set it on the chart, square to the edge, the way he had set the clipboard down. Then he put his hand flat over the switch on the lamp, not the lamp. The switch. The way a man does with a lamp he has turned off before.

“You want this off.”

“Leave the lamp.”

He took his jacket up off the floor, shook it out, put it on wet, and went down the iron stair on the outside of the building. I heard every step. Then I heard the gate.

I sat there another minute, pleased with myself, and I am not going to pretend otherwise at this hour of my life.

Then I buttoned up, fixed my face in the glass of the tide board, and went down and did the thing I do every night, which is walk the wharf before I go home.

The rain had quit and left the apron shining. The wind had come around out of the north and dropped and the air had that scrubbed smell it gets after: mud, rust, salt, somebody’s crab boil three streets up Harborside. The “Mirya Dawn” lay at Pier 21 with her booms down and her deck lights on, Panamanian flag hanging wet off the stern, nine thousand ton of soy meal in bulk and four hundred and some odd ton of bagged rice in the tween deck, discharging since Friday.

Earl Mouton was in the gate shack with the radio on low.

“Evenin’, Miss Renwick.”

“Earl. Anything off this pier after seven?”

“Two bobtails, and the Suarez boy cousin come get him. That is the whole list.”

“Nothing loaded.”

“Nothin’ loaded. That crate liked to kill a man tonight.”

“It surely did, ma’am.”

“Mr. Guidry already wrote it up.”

“Good. Go on and make your rounds.”

I walked the string of boxes on the apron with the big light. I walked the warehouse. Then I went into the office at the head of the pier and sat down and read the outturn.

That is the count. The terminal tallies what actually comes off a ship and the agent signs it, and the agent on this wharf is me. I have signed one of those on every vessel that has worked this berth since my father had his stroke. Nine thousand and change in bulk. The bagged rice came in at three hundred and eleven ton short. Metric ton. Every number on a cargo document is metric and not one word said out loud on that apron is, and you learn young to hear both at the same time.

Short landed. That is the language. It means the manifest says the cargo was loaded and the dock says it did not come off, and in between those two sentences there is a hole. The hole has been there as long as there have been ships.

I sat there with a cup of coffee going cold at my elbow and read it four times.

Three hundred and eleven ton is not a tally error. A tally error is a pallet. A tally error is a man with a clicker who sneezed. Three hundred and eleven ton of bagged rice is about twelve thousand four hundred bags, and twelve thousand bags do not get miscounted by a crew that has been counting bags on this wharf since before I was born.

And there was a note at the bottom of the sheet in the terminal superintendent’s square printing, the way they all print, and it said: “WEATHER DAMAGE / SEAWATER / HATCH 2 , SHORT LANDED PER MASTER.”

There had not been any weather. Not on this cargo, not on that passage. I had the routing on the wall behind me and I had been watching that ship come across the Gulf for nine days with nothing in front of her but a pretty week.

Underneath the note was a signature.

It was mine.