The Scale Ticket

Renard Beauvais had his hand up under my vest and I had both eyes past his shoulder on the scale indicator, and the indicator was moving with nothing on the deck.

“Lock the door.”

His mouth stopped about an inch off my jaw. “Say that again.”

“I said lock it.”

“Sol-VEIG.” He puts the weight on the back half of it, like a word he learned off a page, and he’s done it since my first week and I’ve never once corrected him. “You telling me what to do in my own building?”

“It’s my scale house. Your name’s on the gate. Mine’s on the wall.”

He laughed into my neck, reached behind him without looking, and threw the bolt.

That sound ends every working day I have. It had never once meant a bolt thrown for me.

The number stayed up there over his shoulder. A certified truck scale sitting empty on a hot evening will drift a few pounds and settle, and this one wasn’t drifting. It was walking. It went up and it stayed up the way it does when weight comes onto the deck, and out that window there wasn’t a thing on the slab but the last of the sun and the gallery conveyor’s shadow lying across it.

“Your hands are cold,” he told me.

“That’s the fan. Nothing in this county’s cold in June but me.”

“Mm.”

That was all. He went quiet. Other men get loud right about here. Other men start narrating what they’re doing like a man reading his own closing argument. Renard Beauvais goes completely still, the way a man goes still at the top of a bin when the pile moves under him, and the first time I saw him do it I thought he was mad at me. He wasn’t mad. He was just all the way there.

The room was the way it gets at the end of a hot day. A tin box up on legs, one window on the deck and one on the yard, the box fan in the corner pushing hot air at other hot air and calling it work. Dust on everything. That smell that’s sweet and dry and a little like a barn, which I’ve never gotten tired of and never told a soul. The gallery belt was still running and you could feel it come up through the floor into your boots, and the radio on the shelf was talking to itself the way it does at the end of a shift.

“Scale house, Teague. Gallery belt’s gonna run a while yet, pit’s still got a pile in it. My bad.”

Teague had apologized to me twice that week before anybody accused him of anything. I reached over without taking my eyes off Renard and turned the radio down.

“You gonna answer him?”

“He didn’t ask me anything.”

Renard had come up from the pit with the dust still on him, in the creases of his neck and across the backs of his hands, shirt stuck to him between the shoulder blades. He smelled like hot steel and corn and the inside of a truck cab. My face went into the side of his neck and I breathed him in, on purpose, like a thief.

“You been on my deck damn near a year, Weighmaster.”

“Give or take.”

“See, now, that’s a lie. You know it to the day.”

“I know it to the hour.”

“Say it.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I signed something, and you’ll laugh.”

He laughed anyway, into my hair, and it wasn’t a nice laugh and it wasn’t a mean one. It was the laugh of a man who’d just been handed the exact answer he already had money on, and I felt it go through his chest into mine, and I got wet off a man laughing at me, which was not a thing I’d planned on learning about myself in a scale house.

My hand went flat on his chest and pushed him back a step. I wanted to look at him. And I wanted to see past his head, to find out if the number would come down.

It didn’t come down.

“What.”

“Nothing.”

“You went somewhere.”

“I’m standing right here.”

“You’re standing right here lookin’ past my head.”

“It’s a nice head. There’s a lot of it.”

He put a hand on each of my arms, the way you steady a ladder, and he held on and didn’t move, and the fan went around, and the floor hummed, and I could hear my own pulse up under my jaw. The sun was low and orange off the silos through the yard window, all over the left side of his face and none of the right.

“Go on.”

“Go on what.”

“Whatever you been workin’ up to since last week. You walk past my office and you slow down. You think I don’t see that?”

“I slow down because the floor’s bad outside your office.”

“The floor’s fine.”

“The floor’s cattywampus and you know it. You won’t fix it, because fixin’ it means Teague’s in there with a grinder for two days and you’d have to listen to him apologize the whole time.”

“Solveig.”

“Okay.” I said it to his collar. “Here it is. I’m gonna say one thing and then I’m not sayin’ anything else about it.”

“Go ahead.”

“I’ve had my hands on the same clipboard every day since I got here, and I’d like one thing in my life that isn’t arithmetic, and I’ve decided tonight it’s gonna be you, and I don’t care what it costs me in the morning.”

He looked at me a long moment with the sun on half his face.

“Okay.”

“That’s it? Okay?”

“You said you wasn’t sayin’ anything else.”

“Ope.” I shut my eyes. “All right. Walked right into that.”

Then he got the vest off me, and he didn’t do it like a man in a hurry to be somewhere. He took the hi-vis off one shoulder and then the other and hung it on the hook by the door where the last weighmaster’s hung before mine.

“Where’d you learn to hang a vest up like that?”

“My mother. You don’t put a thing on the floor that somebody paid for.”

“It’s a vest.”

“It’s a vest somebody paid for.” He fixed the collar of my tank with a thumb and a finger like he was setting something on a machine, and then he stood there with his hands down at his sides and looked.

“What.”

“Nothing.”

“You’re lookin’ at me like you’re about to sound a bin.”

“I’m lookin’ at you because the light’s behind you.”

“The light’s a sodium lamp and the sun off a tin silo. It’s ugly light.”

“Mm.” He got his mouth down on the top of my shoulder where the vest had been and said the rest of it into my skin, warm, so I felt the shape of the words more than I heard them. “It’s on your mouth. It’s on the whole front of you. You been standin’ in that window all day with your hair comin’ down and I been on the pit floor losin’ the thread of what people are sayin’ to me.”

“That’s a liability, Renard.”

“Wi. It is.”

He got the tank up over my head and he took his time about it. My arms went up like a girl in a dressing room and I came out the other side with my hair down over one eye, and he pushed it back with the side of his thumb, slow, with his hand full of dust, and left a mark on my temple I wouldn’t know about till I saw it in the truck mirror.

Men have looked at me since before I was old enough to have an opinion about it. I came up heavy on top in a town where the co-op counter had an opinion, and what I built out of that was a voice, and a vest cut for a bigger man, and a way of standing with my shoulders back, daring somebody. It works. It has worked my whole life. The cost is that the day a man finally looks and doesn’t look away and doesn’t make a joke of it, you haven’t got one thing ready to say.

So I didn’t say anything. I stood in a hot tin room with my hands at my sides and let him.

“Hey.”

“Don’t say anything nice. You say something nice, I’m puttin’ my shirt back on.”

“Okay.”

And then he said the other thing, the one that wasn’t nice at all, with his mouth right up against my ear so it went in warm and didn’t have to be loud, and it was about my titties and my nipples and what he’d been thinking about doing to them since the week the beans came in, in the plain words, and my whole body went hot from the middle out and my feet did something I hadn’t told them to do.

“That’s better.”

“I know it is.”

“Say more of that.”

He said more. He got both hands on me and said it into my neck and down my collarbone and lower than that, and the fan went around, and the floor hummed, and the whole room smelled like hot corn and diesel and the back of his neck. I had one hand in his hair and the other gripping the edge of the steel desk where the ticket printer sits, and my head went where my head goes.

To a kitchen with a deputy standing in the door with his hat off. To my mother not sitting down. To a jacket folded on the seat of my father’s truck, folded, squared at the shoulders, the way that man never folded one thing in his life, not a towel, not a map, not a dollar bill. They said he jumped.

Then Renard’s mouth went down past my belly and for a while there wasn’t anything in my head at all.

What I’d come to this county carrying, and had never once named, wasn’t the act. It was the other thing. The quiet in the middle of it. I’d been without it so long that when it got me I made a sound I didn’t recognize and had to put my own hand over my mouth, in a building with the window standing open on a yard where men were still working.

He heard me do it. He took my wrist and moved my hand off my face and put it back in his hair, and he said “No,” just that, into me, so I felt it go up through me, and he had his mouth on my pussy and he stayed right there and didn’t get clever and didn’t go anywhere. The desk edge was cutting a line across the backs of my thighs and I couldn’t have told you whether it hurt. The sun had come down off the silo and the room had gone a dark orange, and somewhere out in the yard a loader backed up and the beeper went and I heard it from about a mile off, and the belt was still humming up through the floor into my legs, and it was in the rhythm of the thing, it was part of it, and I got out, “Don’t stop,” with no air behind it at all.

It came up out of my feet. It started in my feet and in my hands and went in instead of out, and I had one palm flat on the carbon ticket book and the other in his hair hard enough to hurt him, and I didn’t care, and my glasses went off the top of my head onto the floor and I heard them land from a long way away.

Then he was still, with his forehead down on the inside of my knee, breathing on me, and every one of those breaths went over the wet of me and put the gooseflesh right back up the whole length of my thigh.

“You all right.”

“Get up here.”

“In a minute.”

“Renard.”

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

I put both hands over my face. My palms were wet, and I couldn’t have told you whether that was him or me.

When he came up I got his belt open and got my hand around his dick, hot, with his pulse going in it, and he put his forehead down on mine and swore in Kreyòl, and the swearing wasn’t for my benefit.

“Tell me what you want.”

“I want you to keep doin’ what you were doin’, and then I want to get down on this floor with you, and I don’t care that it’s filthy.”

“It’s filthy.”

“I know exactly what’s on that floor. I’m the one who knows what’s on that floor. I want you to fuck me on it anyway.”

He laughed again. Then he got his hands under the backs of my thighs and lifted me off that desk, which he had no business doing with that knee, and I got a leg around him and the ticket printer went over sideways and spooled a yard of paper out across the floor, and neither one of us so much as looked at the printer.

“Your knee.”

“Hell nah. Don’t talk about my knee.”

“I’m a little concerned about your knee.”

“What’s a little.”

He put me down on that floor and he put his own shirt under my head first, which is the part I’d leave out if I were telling it to my sister, and then he got my jeans the rest of the way off one leg and left them hanging on the other boot, because neither of us had the patience left for the boot. The concrete was warm. Nobody tells you that about a scale house in summer, that the slab holds the day in it and gives it back after dark. I had my back flat on a warm floor in a filthy building with my own hair stuck to my neck and a man kneeling up between my legs looking down at me, and the sodium lamp outside the yard window had come on by then and was lying across the both of us in a long orange bar.

“Look at me.”

“I’m lookin’ at you.”

“Then say it again.”

“Fuck me.”

And he did, and he wasn’t quick about it. The first of it was slow enough that I got my hands up over my face again and he took them down again, and the floor hummed under my shoulder blades with the belt still running somewhere over our heads, and every time he came all the way back into me my spine moved a little on that concrete and I let it. I got my heels up on the backs of his thighs and told him in my own flat Iowa voice exactly how I wanted it, and heard myself doing it, and didn’t stop, and he put his forehead down next to my ear.

“Say that again.”

So I said it again, and he made a sound into the side of my head that I felt in my teeth.

My nipples were so hard they hurt, which happens to me and which I’ve never once had a reason to mention to anybody, and he got his mouth on them one at a time and wouldn’t be hurried off. His beard was wet. The dust off his chest was coming off on me in streaks, and the sweat was running down between us so our stomachs made a noise every time he came down, and it was not a dignified noise, and I laughed, out loud, in the middle of it.

“What.”

“Nothin’. Don’t stop.”

“No.”

He didn’t. I was loud and I quit apologizing for it somewhere in the middle, and when it took me the second time it was nothing like the first, slower, and it went on a lot longer and hurt a little across the hips, and I said his name twice and then couldn’t say anything, and he went when I went, and said something in Kreyòl with his mouth against my shoulder and his whole weight down on me. I put my arms around his back and held on to a man on a concrete floor in a scale house and didn’t want one thing in the world.

After, he lay on his back on the concrete with his arm across his eyes and said something else in Kreyòl, low, that I didn’t catch and didn’t ask him to say again. I got up. I found one boot. I got my tank back on inside out and left it that way.

And then I looked at the indicator.

Zero. It sat there like it had never done anything else in its life.

I went to the window. The deck was bare, scrubbed orange by the last of the light, no truck on the property, the gate shut and the chain run through the hasp. I could see the whole slab from where I stood, and there was nothing on that concrete, and there hadn’t been anything on that concrete all evening.

Behind me the printer was on its side with its paper all over the floor. I bent and picked up the tail of the roll, and there was a ticket printed on the end of it. Printed. Time stamped. A net weight filled in, a real one, the kind a loaded hopper car makes, on a car number I didn’t have on the schedule, under a commodity code I hadn’t keyed.

And at the bottom of it, in the box where it goes, was my name.

“Renard.”

From the floor, with his arm still over his eyes. “Mm.”

“Get up.”

Something in the way I said it got him up. He came and stood behind me, still doing his belt, and looked at that strip of paper in my hands a long time without a word, and I watched his face, and his face did the thing it does when something matters. It went still. All the way still, like a man at the top of a bin.

“That’s not ideal,” I told him.

“What’s not ideal. Sol. What is that.”

“It’s a ticket.”

“I can see it’s a ticket. Whose car is that?”

“I don’t have that car.”

“Then who keyed it?”

“Nobody keyed it. I was on the desk.” I turned it over, like the back of it might have something to say. “You were on the desk.”

He didn’t have anything for that, and I didn’t help him.

I didn’t void it. I should have. The procedure for a ticket you didn’t key is you void it and you log the void, and I tore it off the roll instead and folded it once and put it in the front of my jeans against my hip, and he watched me do that too.

That’s when I looked out the window again, past the deck, up at the conveyor gallery where the catwalk runs out toward the river.

There was a man standing up there in a ball cap with a camera in both hands, and while I was looking at him he took it down from his eye.

He didn’t run. He didn’t step back behind the housing. He stood up there in the last of that orange light with a grey beard and a camera on a strap, an old man on a gallery he had no business being on, and he lifted a hand to me. Not a wave, exactly. More the way one neighbor lifts a hand to another he’s been expecting for a while, who’s finally late enough to start worrying a person.