The Catch Certificate

The alarm that got me out of bed at ten past four was the one I built the whole company around never hearing. When I came through the gate in my grandmother’s coat and a pair of boots with no socks in them, the door of reefer six was standing open with a man inside it.

Minus eighteen is where frozen groundfish lives. It is not a preference. It is a condition of sale, and a box that lands any warmer than that is garbage with a bill of lading stapled to it. That container was the first one going out to Europe under my own name. If it went warm on my pad I lost the lane. The lane was the only thing left in that building my father had not already put his hands on.

The gate was open. I chained it myself at six with Royal standing there watching me do it.

“Get out of there.” I said it from the top of the ramp with my keys still in my fist.

Thierry Lajoie took the flashlight out of his teeth and the beam swung down and lit the frost coming off the floor of the box in a low flat sheet. “You want to say good mornin’ first,” he said, “or you want to come look at this.”

“Out, Thierry.”

“Dell.”

“I will put you in the water.” I came down the ramp in boots I could not feel my feet in. “Hands where I can see them.”

“You gonna want to see this with your own eyes,” he said. He came down off the step with a carton under his arm and set it on the pad at my feet like a man laying down a card. Then he stepped back and put the light on it and let me do the rest.

HADDOCK FILLET, SKINLESS, BONELESS. My print. My printer. My lot code in a rectangle under it, and the catch certificate serial on a sticker over the corner. I have seen more of my own boxes than I have seen of my own sister. I squatted on the wet pad and got a thumbnail under the tape.

It was not haddock.

“Lord,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“This is whole round fish.”

“Headed and gutted,” he agreed. “Froze in a block. You see that line down the side?”

“I see it.” I put my bare hand flat on it, which is a thing I tell new hires never to do, and I held it there past the point where it burned. “It’s hard all the way through.”

“Meanin’ what.”

“Meaning nobody thawed it and froze it back.” I stood up and shook the hand out. “It came in cold. It stayed cold. It went in my box cold, with my paper on it.”

“So it ain’t your fish and it ain’t spoiled.”

“It’s somebody’s fish, and in about six hours it’s mine.”

The unit over my head kicked on then, the big fan, loud as a bus. The display on the door said minus eleven and climbing. Thierry pushed the door to without being asked so the thing would quit fighting the whole harbor. That is the kind of man he is. It is not nothing, and it has never once been enough.

I went around to the control end and pulled the panel off.

The download port was sitting open with its little rubber cap off. The cap was on the pad, under the box, where it got dropped. I picked it up and stood there holding it and did not say anything for a while.

Here is what a logger is. It is a plastic thing the size of a pack of cards, screwed inside the door frame. Every few minutes for the whole voyage it writes down what the air in that box is doing.

At the other end a man in Rotterdam plugs a laptop into it and reads the entire history of my promise. It is the only reason anybody in this business trusts anybody else. You cannot argue with the trace.

Somebody had been at mine, on my pad, in the dark, with a laptop.

“Royal,” I said out loud, to nobody.

“Royal what.”

“Nothing.” Royal Pelletier has been on this wharf since before I could see over the counter. I do not get to decide a thing like that standing in fog on no sleep. “Forget I said it.”

“Already forgot, me.” He put his collar up. “You cold?”

“I’m always cold.”

“Come on the boat. I got heat and I got coffee and you can stand on my deck and call whoever it is you ain’t gonna call till daylight.”

“I’m not calling anybody at four in the morning.”

“Then come have the coffee,” he said, “and quit standin’ on a wet pad starin’ at a fish.”

The Reine Blanche was two slips down with her stack ticking and her wheelhouse lit low. I knew what going aboard meant. He knew it too. Here is the thing nobody tells you about thirty-seven and tired. On the worst morning of your working life, the part of you with the good judgment clocks out first. It leaves the rest of you holding the keys.

I went up his ladder. He put a hand flat on my back to steady me and left it there a second past steadying.

The wheelhouse was warm enough to hurt. You come in off a November pier and the heat lands on your face like a palm. Your eyes go wet. Your fingers start to burn as the blood comes back into them.

He had the bulkhead heater going. The radio was down low on the weather channel, that flat computer voice reading out the Gulf of Maine the way it does. Seas three to five. He poured me a mug without asking how I take it. He has known how I take it since I was twenty-four.

I put both hands around it and did not drink it.

“Say it,” he said.

“Say what.”

“Whatever it is you chewin’ on.”

“Somebody opened my box.” I turned the mug a quarter turn on the chart table. “Pulled my trace. Put a different fish in a carton with my name printed on the side of it. Behind a gate I chained myself.”

“And?”

“And in six hours I have to decide who I’m telling.”

“That ain’t the whole thing.” He said it gently, which is worse. “You ain’t askin’ me who did it, cher. You askin’ yourself who you gon’ have to cover for.”

I looked at him over the top of that mug a second too long. It is a crying shame that man cannot be relied on for anything, because nobody on God’s earth has ever read me faster.

“Don’t do that,” I said.

“Do what?”

“The thing where you’re right.”

He laughed. He has a laugh that comes up out of his chest and fills a small room. He took the mug out of my hands and set it down and took my hands instead. He turned them over. He ran his thumb across the inside of my right wrist where the scar is. The little comma the condenser line left me when I was nineteen. He took his time about it. “You put a bare hand on a frozen block again,” he said, “I’m drivin’ you to Maine Med myself.”

“Then don’t watch.”

“I always watch.”

I should have gone home. I knew what I was doing with his thumb on that scar and I knew what it was worth, which is nothing. I did it anyway. Nobody had put a hand on me since before the leaves turned. I wanted somebody to touch me before I had to go be everybody’s boss.

“Thierry.”

“Mm.”

“One rule.”

“Name it.”

“Don’t tell me anything tonight you’re not gonna say again in the morning.”

He went still. He almost never does. “That’s a hard rule,” he said.

“That’s the rule.”

“Aight.” And he put his mouth on mine.

He kisses like he does everything, all at once, with no plan for afterward. His hands came up under the back of my grandmother’s coat and took it off my shoulders. It went down on the floor of a boat. She would have had a word about that. Then the good shirt, button by button. The one thing that man has ever been patient for is this.

“Look at you,” he said into my neck.

“Say something better than that.”

“Non.” He turned me by the hips to face the glass. “You look at you.”

The fog was right up against the window and the harbor lights had gone soft in it. He got my bra off and brought both hands up over my titties from behind and just held them, thumbs going, his mouth at the back of my neck under all that wet hair. In that black glass I could see his hands and my own face and the whole wharf behind us with my name on a building in it.

“Tell me what you want,” he said.

“I want you to stop talkin’.”

“Non, cher. Say it.”

So I said it. In my own voice, in the words I think in and never use in an office. I told him to get his hand in my pussy and not be gentle about it, and that I wanted his dick in me on that chart table before the tide turned. I felt him go hard against the small of my back while I was saying it and I heard his breath change. That is the part that gets me every time. A woman can take a man apart with one sentence and nobody ever puts that in the brochure.

He got my jeans down and put his hand between my legs from behind. I was already wet and I would have lied about it if he had asked, and he did not ask. “Mm,” he said, like a man finding the thing he came for, and he put his fingers in my pussy and my forehead went forward onto the cold glass.

He kept me there a long time with his fingers in my pussy and his thumb working, and he told me what it felt like while he did it, in the words he thinks in, which are worse than mine. Long enough that my legs went. The heater ticked. The radio went on reading out the bay and the ledges and the open water in that dead voice. My own breath came back off the window onto my mouth, hot. I was saying his name into a pane of glass with a harbor on the other side of it.

“Don’t stop.”

“I ain’t stoppin’.”

“Say what you’re doin’.”

“I got two fingers in your pussy, cher, and you about to come all over my hand.”

“Don’t get clever.”

“Who clever,” he said, and I could hear the smile in it. He got an arm across the front of my hips because I was coming up off my heels and away from him, and that forearm holding me down was the best thing that had happened to me since the spring. “Say the words.”

“Right there.”

“Say it.”

“Right there. Don’t move. Don’t you move.”

He did not move. Then he took his hand away on purpose, and I said his whole name into the glass like a curse. He turned me around and sat me up on the chart table on top of the entire Gulf of Maine.

I got his belt open and got my hand in and his dick was already hard and leaking in my fist, and I told him so, and he swore at the ceiling. I got my hand around it properly before he had it all the way out, hot and heavy and going in my fist. He swore in French with his forehead down on my shoulder.

“That one wasn’t for me,” I said.

“Non. That one was for me.”

I laughed, and he came into me while I was still laughing, and that is Thierry Lajoie in one line. He put one hand flat in the middle of my back and held me against him. The other went up in my hair at the root, into the wet of it, and took hold. The table went over on one leg the way it has gone over before. A chart rolled off onto the floor and neither of us looked at it.

And in the middle of it, with my mouth open against his neck, my head was where my head always is. On a carton on a wet pad with my own print on the side of it. On a rubber cap lying under a box where somebody dropped it. On my father at the kitchen table years back with a pen in his hand, signing something, not reading it, telling me a story about a man he used to know while he signed.

That is where I live. Even here. Especially here.

“Say it again,” he said into my mouth.

I said it again. Then I could not say anything at all, and my heels came up off the backs of his legs. I went over hard with my mouth open on his shoulder and nothing coming out of it.

He fucked me on that table until the leg went over and I did not care.

It came up out of my feet.

That is the only way I know to put it. It started where my feet had been burning on that pad and it went in instead of out. I had one hand in his hair and the other flat on the glass. I did not care who was on the wharf to see it.

After, I sat on his chart table with my shirt open and his coat around my shoulders. I looked at the clock on his bulkhead and did not say the number out loud.

“Don’t,” he said.

“I have to.”

“Stay till light.”

“I got a box of somebody else’s fish out there with my name on the side of it.” I got down off the table and got my jeans up, and he watched me do it the way he always does. He did not ask me for anything. That is the one generous thing about him and it is also the whole story of him.

I picked my grandmother’s coat up off the floor of a boat and put it back on.

“Dell.”

“What.”

“In the mornin’,” he said, “I’m gonna say the same thing I said tonight.”

“You didn’t say anything tonight.”

“I know it.” He grinned at me. “That’s how I keep the rule.”

I went down his ladder with my hair full of his hands and my boots still with no socks in them. The fog had come in thicker off the water. Reefer six was running loud enough to hear the whole length of the wharf. The door was to and not shut. That unit was pulling against the entire harbor, trying to get my promise back down to where I made it.

There was a man standing in my yard.

Grey wool coat, buttoned, squared up to the container with his back to me. He was not a cop and he was not one of mine. He was writing in a little pad with a pencil, and he had been there long enough that the fog had beaded across his shoulders.

I came up behind him. He did not turn around.

“Your door is open,” he said.

“Who are you?”

“Beckett Tannahill. Thoreau Marine and Casualty.” He closed the pad on his thumb and turned and looked at me, then at my coat, then at my face again, and nothing in his own face moved. “I am the adjuster on your spoilage claim.”

The fog went by between us.

“I haven’t filed a claim,” I said.

“No.” He put the pencil behind his ear. “You haven’t.”