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Free preview · read by Jessica

Forty thousand pounds of steel came at my windshield sideways and stopped four feet short of my face.

I was in the center lane on Hampton Boulevard in the rain, singing, with my coffee in the cup holder and a slip on under my coat that nobody was ever going to see, and the container on the chassis in front of me let go.

It didn’t sound like a crash. It sounded like a note. Steel giving up on steel makes a sound like somebody dragging a chain across a church bell, and then the world goes quiet while everything that’s about to happen decides where it is going.

What it decided was me.

The chassis folded at the rear bogie and the whole back end went out from under the box like a man slipping on ice, and thirty tons of steel can came around broadside across two lanes, throwing water, making no more noise than a shoe on a floor, and I stood on that brake with both feet and watched a forty foot wall come at me in the rain.

It stopped. The corner post caught the concrete barrier and the whole overpass rang and my hood was under the shadow of it, and my coffee was all over the dash and my hands were locked on that wheel and I couldn’t hear one thing.

Then I could, and what I could hear was a man screaming.

I was out of the truck.

I don’t remember putting it in park. I remember rain on the back of my neck. The taste of diesel in the air. A girl in a red Honda screaming out of her window with her phone up. And I remember running in good boots across a road that still had cars moving on it, because the tractor was up there jackknifed against the rail with its driver side crushed into the concrete. A tractor with a man still in it is a thing a person runs toward whether she’s built for running or not. My daddy worked these ships and I buried him at fifty-four, and it cost me most of what I had in me, and I haven’t been able to stand still at a wreck since I was a girl.

I loved that boy and I won’t be shy about sayin’ it. Tyree Pettiford was twenty-four years old. He had a daughter who was two. He brought her to the yard on Saturdays and let her sit in the seat and mash the horn. Every single time, Hollis Dunnavant came out of the shop and acted like the noise had taken ten years off his life.

Tyree was out of the cab and on the ground in the water, holding his arm.

He had come down on the landing gear. That’s a crank, two steel legs, and a brace with an edge on it like a letter opener. He came across that brace on his way out of a truck that was trying to lie down on him. His forearm was open from the wrist to the elbow. It wasn’t bleeding the way a cut bleeds. It was pumping.

“Miss Ayoka.” He saw me and he started apologizing. Lying in the road, in the rain, with his arm open, he started apologizing. “Miss Ayoka, I did the pre-trip. I swear to God. I walked it. I walked the whole fuckin’ thing.”

“Tyree.”

“I walked it this mornin’. I got the sheet in the cab, it’s in the cab, I’m sayin’ though, I did it.”

I got my coat off and got it around his arm and put my knee in it, which is a thing I didn’t know I knew how to do until I did it. His blood came through the lining of a good wool coat before I had the sleeve set. I was scared and I was angry about being scared, which is the exact combination that makes me sound calm.

“Baby, listen to me. Nobody is asking you anything. Look at me.”

“I did it, though.”

“I know you did.”

“Chassis was clean.” His teeth had started going. “Chassis was clean, Miss Ayoka. I ain’t take no red tag. I ain’t never took a red tag in my damn life.”

“I believe you.”

“My daughter.”

“Your daughter is at her grandmama’s house in Park Place. She is fine. You are gonna be fine. Now stop talkin’ to me and start breathin’, because you are fixin’ to tell me your whole life story and I already know it.”

He laughed. Then he threw up on himself, which is what happens. Then he went very quiet and very heavy against my knee. I sat in six inches of road water on Hampton Boulevard holding a man’s arm closed with a wool coat, listening for a siren I couldn’t hear yet.

And that’s when my hand found the plate.

It was in the water against the outside of my boot. The rear sill of that chassis had torn clean off and gone down the crown of the road with the water, and the registration bracket had come with it, and a piece of tin the size of a dinner plate had washed up against my own foot while I knelt there with a boy’s blood going up my sleeve.

I didn’t even look at it at first. I moved it off my boot the way a person moves a wet leaf.

Then I looked at it.

Virginia apportioned plate. Rusted through at the bottom two corners. And above the numbers, stamped into the bracket in letters a quarter inch high, the registrant.

TRAMONTE.

AXZ 7843.

I’d never owned one single piece of equipment with that name on it.

Not one. Not leased, not subleased, not pooled, not borrowed in a surge, not ever. Tramonte Equipment and Marine sits on the Southern Branch at Money Point and they’ve been there since before my father was born. They’re the other side of a line I drew when I bought my first four hundred units. I drew it on purpose. I’ve never once crossed it.

That unit gated out of Norfolk International that morning. Clean. Signed for. My receipt. My authority. A twenty-four year old from Park Place hooked it at my counter and it came apart under him four miles later.

And it wasn’t mine.

I sat in the road in the rain with a wool coat around a man’s arm and a stranger’s steel in my other hand, and I heard myself say it out loud to nobody.

What is this.

I had three hundred and sixty chassis in that pool. I leased to sixty carriers. In six years not one unit of mine had put a driver on the ground.

I was terrified, and not of the blood. I’ve seen what a waterfront does to a body since I was nine years old. I was terrified the way a person is when the floor she built goes soft under one foot and she understands, standing on it, that she has been wrong about something for a long time.

What had I missed? That was the question sittin’ in my mouth with the diesel. What did I miss, and when did I miss it, and how many mornings have I put my name on a thing without reading it? Because a woman doesn’t get here by not reading. Reading is the only thing I have ever been good at.

And that’s what it took off me, right there in the road. It took the one thing I thought was mine. Fifteen years I’ve been the woman who reads the whole page, and on a Tuesday in April a boy from Park Place bled on my knee because something went out through my gate that I never once looked at.

And my mind went to the vote. Three weeks out, the Authority sitting down to decide whether my pool becomes the standard for this whole harbor, and a box in the road on Hampton Boulevard with my name on the gate receipt.

That’s who I am. A boy was bleeding on me and part of me was already writing the letter.

✦

The fire company came up from Little Creek. The ambulance came from Sentara. A trooper put flares out across two lanes. I stood on the shoulder with my arms wrapped around myself and no coat on, watching them cut the rest of the way through Tyree’s sleeve. His blood went pink in the water. It ran down the crown of the road toward the drain.

I was sick. Standing on that shoulder with my arms around myself I wanted to go home, and that isn’t a thing I have wanted in six years.

The rain was the kind we get in April here. Not a storm. Just a gray that sits down on the 757 for nine days and doesn’t get up. Everything is dark at four in the afternoon and everything smells like the river.

The wrecker crew got the box off the lane and the chassis stayed where it was. That’s when I went and looked at it, because I had to.

It was folded. The rear section had come apart at the slider and one wheel-end had walked clean off the spindle, and when a wheel-end walks off a spindle it’s because the bearing has been cookin’ for a week and somebody has been drivin’ past it. Grease that has gone past hot and come out the other side looks like coffee grounds. There was a black fan of it sprayed up the inside of the fender and halfway along the rail.

A week. Maybe two. I hated the look of it. I stood there in the lane and hated it the way a person hates a thing she’s gonna be responsible for.

I had that plate in my coat pocket by then and I’d read it about nine more times and it still said the same thing, and what I felt wasn’t fear. It was the thing that happens when a step isn’t where a foot thought it was. A drop in the stomach. A hand going out for a rail that’s not there.

A unit I don’t own had gone out through my gate under my receipt with my signature authority on it and had dropped a wheel on a boy from Park Place.

“Hey.”

I didn’t hear her come up. That’s a hard thing to do on a wet road and she did it.

She was maybe my height, white, sunburned in April, a knot of hair the color of weak tea coming apart at the back of her head, reading glasses on a cord against a Carhartt that had been washed about nine hundred times. Fifty feet behind her, up on the shoulder, was a wrecker. Old one. No company name on the door. Just a number.

She had a camera. Not a phone. An actual camera, with a strap, with rain beaded on the hood.

“That’s a Tramonte plate,” she said.

“Who are you?”

“You’re Greenlee.”

“I asked you who you were.” I didn’t trust her, and I had my reasons standing right there, because a woman who turns up at a wreck with a camera and no scanner is a woman who already knew.

“Rae Ann Bissonnette.” She said it like a license number. She didn’t put a hand out. “You want to put that down, by the way. You’re holdin’ it.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re holdin’ it with your hands on it and there’s a trooper standin’ forty feet away.” She lifted the camera and took a picture of the plate in my hand, which I hadn’t asked her to do. “Now there’s a picture of you holdin’ it. So that’s done.”

“Who called you?”

“Nobody called me.”

“Then what the hell are you doing on my wreck?”

“Wasn’t your wreck when I got here.” She looked past me at the folded rail. She looked at it the way Hollis looks at something, which I didn’t like and didn’t have room for. “Bearin’ went. Week ago, give or take. Somebody been runnin’ her hot.”

“I know what happened to it.”

“All right.”

“I have a man in an ambulance.”

“I seen him.” She pushed her glasses up into the wet hair with one knuckle. “He gonna keep the arm?”

And something about that question put a crack right through the middle of me, because it was the only question anybody had asked all afternoon that was about Tyree. The trooper had asked about the box. The fire captain had asked about the box. The man from the terminal had called me twice about the lane.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“He’ll keep it.” She was already turning. “They’re good over there.”

And I was relieved. I was embarrassed about being relieved by a stranger in a Carhartt when I had a man from the terminal calling me about a lane.

“Miss Bissonnette.”

She stopped.

“How did you know the name on this plate before you got close enough to read it?”

The rain came down. Up on the overpass somebody leaned on a horn and wouldn’t quit, the way people do when four lanes have gone to one and there’s nobody to be mad at.

“Because I got a picture of it,” she said.

Then she walked back to her wrecker and got in. She sat there in the cab with the wipers going and wrote something down on a clipboard before she pulled off.

That was the most unsettling part of the whole afternoon. Including the arm. It scared me and I couldn’t have told anybody why.

✦

I called Simone from the shoulder.

“Where are you,” she said. Not a question. She had the yard radio going behind her and she turned it down, which is a thing she only does when she’s about to be careful with me.

“Hampton Boulevard.”

“Mm.” A pause. “Hollis already got a boy over there with a flatbed for the chassis.”

“Tell him to put it inside. Not the rows. Inside, in the shop, and I want the door down.”

“Ayoka.”

“Inside, Simone.”

“Okay. Bitch, breathe.” Her voice came down into the register she uses with drivers’ wives. “How’s Tyree?”

“His arm is open to the bone and he apologized to me for about a minute and a half.”

“Oh, that baby. Oh, no.”

“He kept sayin’ he did the pre-trip.”

“He did the pre-trip. That boy does the pre-trip like it’s church.”

“I know he does.”

“So it ain’t him.”

“It ain’t him.”

Simone waited. Thirty-six years old, we met in a hallway at Norfolk State when we were nineteen, and in all that time she has never once filled a silence just because it was there.

“Simone, the plate on it says Tramonte.”

And she did the thing. She went quiet. Not the normal quiet. The other one, where the radio in the background is the only sound and I can hear her deciding what order to say things in.

“Say that again.”

“The registrant on the apportioned plate is Tramonte Equipment and Marine. I’m holdin’ it. I’m standin’ in the street holdin’ it.”

“That unit gated out of N I T this mornin’ on our receipt.”

“I know what it did.”

“I cut that receipt, Ayoka. Me. I looked at it.”

“I know you did.”

“Then how.”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay,” she said. And then, after a second: “I ain’t likin’ this one bit.”

“I’m not askin’ you to.”

Then she said it careful, the way a woman sets a cup down on a table in somebody’s nice house: “You want me to call Dorian?”

“No.”

“Ayoka.”

“I said no.”

“All right,” Simone said. “I’m not sayin’ it again.”

✦

She called him.

Of course she called him. I would have called him. He is thirty-eight percent of my company and he’s the man whose money bought the first four hundred units in my pool, and if a unit in that pool has just put a driver in Sentara then the man with thirty-eight percent gets a phone call, and anybody who says different has never run anythin’.

That’s what I told myself in the truck. That’s the reason I accepted, the official one, filed and stamped.

Here is the other one.

I had rain in my clothes. I had a dead man’s worth of blood dried brown in the lining of a coat on my back seat and the taste of somebody else’s diesel in my mouth. And I wanted to be put against somethin’ and held there until my hands stopped. That’s all of it. I’m thirty-four years old and I own a company and I sit on a committee with men who have grandchildren, and what I wanted that evening was for somebody to take me by the back of the neck.

I drove to Gate Four.

Our grounded lot is on the Southern Branch at Money Point, which is a part of Chesapeake that God made out of leftovers: four hundred units parked in rows on crushed concrete behind a fence, a scale, a shop, an office up a set of outside stairs, and a gate on the river side that we call Gate Four because there were three other gates in 1974 and there’s nobody left alive to tell me where they went. Past the fence the water sits about two feet below the lot and it comes up when it feels like it. Across the branch the cranes at the coal pier stand lit all night, orange and white, and when the sky goes that color over the Jordan Bridge the whole thing looks like somebody is about to be paid a great deal of money, which somebody is.

His car was already there.

He was standing at the gate in a suit, with his tie loose and no coat and his hair going flat in the rain, because Dorian Bass is a man who will stand in the rain rather than wait in a car, and I’ve never worked out whether that’s a real thing about him or a thing he knows about himself.

I got out.

“Don’t,” I said.

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You have a face.”

“I have a face,” he agreed. He came off the gate. “Is he alive?”

“He’s alive.”

“Is he going to be alive tomorrow?”

“They think so.”

“Then say that first next time.” He stopped about a foot short of me, which is a distance he picks on purpose. “Ayoka. Say it. You have been driving for twenty minutes saying it to yourself.”

“Say what.”

“The thing you are not going to say to Simone.”

I had the plate in my hand. I had carried it off that road like a woman carrying a plate of food to somebody’s house. Into the truck. Across the Berkley Bridge. Out to Money Point. I put it down flat on the hood of the shop truck parked inside the gate. The rain ran over it, into the stamped letters, and made them black.

“That is not my steel,” I said.

He looked at it a long time. Longer than a man looks at a thing he’s seeing for the first time, and I noticed it and I filed it, and then I did what I’ve been doin’ for two years, which is put the file in a drawer.

“All right,” he said.

“All right? That’s what you have?”

“What would you like me to have?”

“Outrage would be nice.”

“Would it.” He put two fingers on the edge of the plate and turned it a quarter turn so the numbers faced him. He didn’t pick it up. “You want me to be upset in front of you so you don’t have to be. I have met you.”

“Oh, we’re doing this.”

“We can do whatever you want.” He looked up. His shirt was through at the shoulders and stuck to him and the rain was coming off the end of his nose. “You are shaking.”

“It’s April.”

“It is sixty-one degrees.”

“Dorian.”

“Ask me the real question,” he said.

Two years that man has been sayin’ that to me. Ask me the real question. He says it in a boardroom in front of two accountants and he says it in my kitchen and he said it the first night, with his hand flat on my back at a reception at the Chrysler Museum, when the real question was are you going to and the answer was yes.

So I asked him the real one.

“Are you gonna lie to me about this?”

“No,” he said.

“Say the whole thing.”

“I am not going to lie to you about this.”

“Then come here.” I needed him. There’s no finer way to put it and I’m not lookin’ for one.

He came.

He didn’t grab me. He has never once grabbed me, and every man before him did. That’s the whole arithmetic of it right there. He came and put one hand on the side of my face, thumb along my jaw. He turned my head the way a man turns a thing he’s about to be careful with. Then his mouth went under my ear, and my whole body came up out of the cold like something lifted out of water.

“You smell like a road,” he said into my neck.

“Thank you.”

“Diesel and blood and that perfume.”

“You’re welcome to stop.”

“I am not stopping.” His other hand found the collar of the slicker I had pulled on in the truck because my coat had Tyree in it. “Take this off.”

“It’s raining.”

“I know what it is doing.”

“Somebody’s gonna come down that road.”

“Nobody is coming down that road.”

“Dorian, this gate faces the river and there is a man in a crane cab two hundred yards from my head.”

“Then he is having a better evening than he expected,” Dorian said.

I laughed. He got the slicker off my shoulders while I was laughin’, which is how that man gets everything. It went down my arms and hung at my elbows. The rain came straight through what was under it.

Which was a black slip. Lace at the top of it. I’d put it on before six that morning for a meeting at the Authority I never got to. Nobody was ever going to see it. That’s the true state of me on an ordinary Tuesday: a company jacket over the top and all that underneath it, for nobody.

It went transparent in about four seconds.

“Ayoka.”

“Don’t say my name like that.”

“Like what.”

“Like you’re fixin’ to ask for something.”

“I am fixing to ask for something.”

“Then ask.”

“No,” he said. He put his mouth on my collarbone. Then lower, through the wet lace. My head went back, the rain came down on my face, and my eyes closed. “I’d rather you did.”

“You are a nasty man.”

“Mm.”

“You are a nasty, married, thirty-eight percent nasty motherfucker and I am about to let you fuck me on this truck.”

“Keep going.”

“I hate you.”

“Say the other thing.”

My hands were in his shirt. It was so wet it came out of the waist in one pull and the buttons went wherever buttons go. He is forty-one years old and he swims in a pool at a hotel downtown four mornings a week like a man in a magazine. I put both hands flat on his chest and pushed him back against the hood of that truck, next to my dead man’s plate, in the rain, at Gate Four, with the cranes lit up orange across the branch.

“Put your hands on me,” I said.

“Where.”

“Dorian.”

“Say it.”

“You know where.”

“I want it out of your mouth,” he said. “You’ve had a day where everybody told you what they needed. Tell me what you need.”

And that’s the thing. That’s the whole thing about that man. Everybody in my life wants somethin’ out of me and tells me so by three in the afternoon. He is the only one who asks what’s missing out of my day, and a woman standing in the rain at her own gate ought to wonder how a man gets that good at it.

“I need you in my pussy,” I said. “Right here. On this truck. Before I think about it.”

“Say it one more time.”

“You heard me. In my pussy, Dorian. Now.”

“There she is.”

“Don’t gloat.”

“I am not gloating, I am relieved.” He got the hem of the slip up over my hips with one hand and put the other one between my legs, flat, not moving, just there, the heel of it pressed where it needed to be, and my knees tried to leave me. “Look at that. Soaked.”

“It is raining.”

“This is not rain and you know it. That is your pussy and you have been like that since I got out of the car.”

“Dorian.”

“Say what it is.”

“You know what it is.”

“I want to hear it in your mouth. You have been giving orders to grown men since six o’clock this morning.” Two fingers, slow, and he watched my face the whole time he did it. “Give me one.”

“Get on your knees.”

He went down in the water on the concrete in a four thousand dollar suit without one second of hesitation. That’s the part that always gets me. He hooked my leg up over his shoulder and put his mouth on me through the lace first, breathing hot through it, which he knows I can’t stand. I grabbed a handful of his hair and said something that would have gotten me put out of my mother’s house.

“Say it again,” he said against me.

“I said eat this pussy. Do not make me ask you a third time.”

“Mm.”

“Don’t you play with me tonight. Not tonight.”

He pulled the lace to the side and put his tongue flat on my clit and held it there. The whole afternoon went out of me at once. Tyree’s arm. The plate. The letter I’d already started writing in my head on the shoulder of Hampton Boulevard. All of it, gone, replaced by rain on my face and a man on his knees in the dark workin’ me like he had nowhere else in the world to be, and I put my hand back on that truck hood to hold myself up and my fingers came down on the edge of the plate.

I left them there. That’s the honest version. I came with my hand on that man’s name.

“Up,” I said, when I could say anything.

“Give me a minute.”

“Get up here.”

He got up. His knees were ruined and his mouth was shining and he kissed me with it on purpose, which he does because he knows I like tasting myself on him. I got his belt open while he was doing it.

“Turn around,” he said.

“No.”

“Ayoka.”

“I want to see your face. One time tonight I want to look at somebody who is telling me the truth.”

Something crossed him then. Fast. Gone before I could name it.

Then his hands were under me. I was up on that wet hood with my slip around my waist and the rain coming down on both of us. He put his dick in me slow enough that I said his whole name out loud. First and last. Like I was calling him into a meeting.

“That is not funny,” he said.

“It is a little funny.”

“Wrap your legs.”

“Make me.”

“Wrap them, Ayoka, or I will pull out and leave you on this hood.”

“You ain’t gonna do a damn thing.”

He made me. He got both hands under my thighs and pulled my pussy all the way down onto him, and after that I didn’t have any jokes left. He isn’t loud. He never has been. He talks the entire time in that low flat voice, and what comes out of that mouth in the dark bears no relationship whatsoever to the man who sits across from my accountant on a Thursday.

“Whose pussy is this.”

“Don’t start.”

“Whose.”

“Mine. It is mine, and you are rentin’ it. Say somethin’ that ain’t a question.”

“All right.” He got a handful of my hair at the back and brought my head up so I was looking at him. Then he said, perfectly level, perfectly calm, the filthiest sentence anybody has ever said to me. I came again with a container crane lit up orange behind his head and my whole company asleep in rows forty feet away.

The rain came down on the two of us on the hood of that shop truck for the better part of an hour.

We didn’t go inside.

Afterward he stood there with his ruined shirt hanging open and his hair in his eyes. Forty-one years old and looking about nineteen. He picked the plate up off the hood and turned it over in his hands.

“Tramonte,” he said.

“Mm.”

“Did you keep it?”

“It’s in your hand.”

“I mean did you keep it, or did you give it to the trooper.”

I was pulling the slicker back up my arms. The question went into me sideways, the way a splinter does. Felt before it’s understood.

“It is in my coat,” I said.

“Good,” said Dorian Bass. He put it back down on the hood, face up, where the rain could get at it.