The Last Sailing

I had the surveyor’s dick in my hand in the pilothouse of my father’s boat, with the last sailing of the summer still talking on the radio behind me, and I was the one who’d asked.

“Say it again.”

“I said lock the door.”

“That isn’t what you said the first time.”

“I know what I said, Greer.”

He reached behind him without looking and threw the deadbolt, and the rain came across the forward glass in sheets, and down on the car deck somebody was walking the ramp chain back onto its pin. The slip lights were doing that yellow smear they do when the wind gets under the rain and holds it up. On the shelf the radio was going the way it goes at the end of the season, Fairhaven talking to the Anacortes boat and the Anacortes boat talking to nobody.

“Your hands are freezing.”

“That’s the boat. The boat’s always cold.”

“Put them in my coat.”

“I don’t want them in your coat.”

“Nailah.”

“I want them where they are.”

I watched his face the whole time, to see what it would do. What it did was go still. Other men get loud or get busy. Greer Antolak went quiet and stopped moving, like something had come up on the sounder and he was waiting to find out how deep.

“You’ve been on my boat damn near a week.”

“Five days.”

“Four, Greer.”

“I came aboard Thursday.”

“Thursday doesn’t count. You stood in my terminal office and drank my coffee and left.”

“I did a visual on the ramp assembly from the terminal office.”

“You drank my coffee.” He laughed. Then he stopped laughing, on account of what my hand was doing, and his head went back against the window frame. The glass behind him was running with water and his breath started putting a patch of fog on it the size of my palm. “You’ve been crawling around in my void spaces with a hammer since Thursday. You want to know what I’ve been doing the whole time?”

“Say it.”

“Standing on my own car deck looking up at the mezzanine at you.”

“Doing what.”

“Thinking about this exact thing. My hand right where it is. Days of it.”

“That’s a long time to say nothing.”

“I run a boat. I don’t say things. I put them on the schedule.”

“And tonight I’m on the schedule.”

“Tonight you’re the whole schedule.” I got up on my toes and put my mouth on his jaw, and his jaw was rough enough to take skin off me, and I didn’t care.

Everybody in that yard was going to want this to be something sad, and it wasn’t. I’m not lonely in a way a man in a pilothouse can fix. I’ve been lonely since my father went into Ferndale, and it’s the weather I live in, and I dress for it like weather. What I was, standing there, was greedy.

My father put me on this vessel before I could see over the rail. He used to stand me on an upturned bucket at the forward window so I could watch the slip come up, and every single time he said the same word. Hands. Meaning mine. Put them on something, girl, that’s how you know what she’s doing, you won’t get it off the window and you won’t get it off me. I knew the sound a good landing makes before I could spell my own last name. By the time I was grown there wasn’t one thing in my life that wasn’t this boat. My sister got out of that house and went and got herself a whole personality, and I got the schedule. A yard full of folks, a leased slip, a winter coming, and every one of them says the same thing to me. We need you, Nai. What they need is the sailing to go out on time.

Greer Antolak was the only man in this county who wanted nothing off me but a signature on his invoice.

“Hey.” He got a hand under my chin. “Where’d you go?”

“Nowhere.”

“You went somewhere.”

“I’m standing in front of you with your dick in my hand. Where you think I went.”

“Somewhere behind your own eyes. You do it in the engine room too. Somebody asks you a question and you answer it from about a mile off.”

“That’s called running a company.”

“That’s called something else.”

“Don’t.”

“All right.”

“I mean it. Don’t come up here and start telling me about myself. There’s a whole county does that for free.”

“All right.”

That was the first thing that man ever did that I didn’t expect, which was shut up when I asked him to. So I told him.

“I’m gonna say one thing. Then I’m not saying anything else all night.”

“Go ahead.”

“I’ve got one thing in my life that’s mine, and tonight it’s gonna be you, and I don’t care one bit what that costs me in the morning.”

He looked at me a long moment with the rain going sideways behind his head.

“Okay.”

“That’s it? Okay?”

“You said you weren’t saying anything else.”

“Oh, you think you’re funny.”

“I think you’re used to people arguing with you.” And he got my coat off me, and he didn’t do it like a man in a hurry to get anywhere.

He did it the way he goes through a vessel. He took the canvas off my shoulders and hung it on the hook by the door where my father’s hung my whole life, and he got my hood down off my neck with the tips of his fingers, and then he stood there with both hands on the outsides of my arms and looked at me, long enough that I started to hear my own pulse up under my jaw.

“What.”

“Nothing.”

“You’re looking at me like I’m a frame you’re about to sound.”

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

“The light’s a slip light. It’s orange and it’s ugly.”

“Mm.” He got his mouth on the side of my throat where the collar had been and said the rest of it into my skin. “It’s on your mouth. It’s on the top of your shoulder. It’s doing something to the wet on your face, and I’ve had days of you telling me to get off your ramp.”

“I never told you to get off my ramp.”

“You told Rueben to tell me.”

“That’s different. That’s management.”

He got my sweater up over my head and dropped it on the chart table, which on any other night I’d have had plenty to say about, and then he put his arms round my back and pulled me in and held me there. His coat was cold. The front of him under it wasn’t. I stood in a pilothouse I’ve run more hours in than I’ve slept, with my cheek on a man’s collarbone, and let somebody hold me up. Nobody had done that since before the slip nearly went.

Then he reached past my shoulder and put his hand straight on the chart drawer key.

It hangs on a nail behind the breaker panel. You can’t see it from anywhere but square in front of the panel with the door swung, and my father put that nail in with a tack hammer when I was still in grade school, and there’s maybe a handful of people alive who know it’s there. Greer Antolak reached past me without turning his head, had that key off the nail, had the top drawer open, and had his thumb on the chart light switch before it landed on me that nobody on this earth had told him where that key hung.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what.”

“Don’t turn that on.”

He took his thumb off the switch, shut the drawer with the heel of his hand, and put the key back on its nail, all of it so easy and so unremarkable that it went straight past me. Surveyor. Boats all year, same drawer, same breaker panel, a man who’s stood in more pilothouses than I have. Then his mouth came back down and I let it go.

“Why not.”

“Because with that light on, the yard can see straight up in here.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Then they’d know.”

“Greer.”

“I didn’t say turn it on. You asked me why not.”

“You are something else.”

“Come here.”

He got my jeans open and didn’t put a hand inside them. He laid his hand open on my stomach instead, over the denim, and left it there, and my whole body went looking for that hand like it had somewhere better to be.

“Move it.”

“In a minute.”

“Greer.”

“You said days.” His mouth was at my ear now, so close the words landed on skin. “Days of you on that car deck looking up at me. I’m not doing it quick.”

I’m a woman who lives by a timetable. Everything in my life is a departure, and there he stood in my own pilothouse with the clock off, and he went slow enough that I started to hate him. He got his hands up under my shirt and took his time with my breasts, the whole of them, palms and then fingers, and when he got to my nipples he wasn’t gentle, and the noise that came out of me wasn’t a voice I knew. The cold came off that forward glass into my shoulder blades. The front of me was so hot I could feel the line where they met, right along my ribs, and my scalp was tingling, and there was an ache in me low down that was going to turn into a problem. He had his mouth on me through my bra, and then he got the bra out of the way and put his mouth on me properly, with one hand in his hair and the other flat on the window glass, and that glass was so cold I could feel the shape of my own hand after I lifted it off.

“Tell me what you want.”

“You know what I want.”

“I want it said.”

So I said it, in the words I think in, and not quiet either. “I want your fingers in me standing up in my own pilothouse with that bolt thrown, and then I want your mouth, and then I want you on my father’s chart table. I’ve been putting it to myself in those exact words on my own car deck for days, Greer. Not nicer ones. Those.”

I watched his eyes change. He put his fingers in my pussy standing up, and he kept them there without moving, just in me, which did something to the inside of my chest, and then he started talking and he didn’t stop, in language my mother would’ve slapped me for repeating. “It’s on my wrist. All those days of you standing on your own deck being the operator at me, and now it’s running down onto my wrist, and the insides of your thighs are wet to the knee, and you haven’t moved your feet once. Stand right there. Don’t you move them.” The rain went across the glass behind my head and the slip light came in orange and sideways, and the Anacortes boat called Fairhaven and Fairhaven didn’t answer, and my hips went on his hand without asking me first, and I was so wet it was embarrassing.

“Say the part about my thighs again.”

“The insides of your thighs.” He said it better the second time. “Wet to the knee in a cold pilothouse with your boots on, standing up straight like you’re taking a report off the radio, and the only part of you that’s given anything away since Thursday is the inside of that thigh.” He gave me both anyway. I went up on my toes with one boot heel braced on the kick rail, and my arm went dead where it was wedged behind me, and I left it there.

“I want you on your knees.”

“Say please.”

“I want you on your knees with your mouth on me, and I’m not saying please in my own pilothouse.”

“That’s fair.”

He went down. He got my jeans and my boots off me in the dark and then got his mouth on me with his hands up under me holding most of my weight, and I got one leg over his shoulder and both hands on the window ledge behind me, and the inside of my head went quiet for the first time since the spring.

Not all the way quiet. With that man on his knees on a deck plate in front of me, what I was thinking about, in the gaps, was the weight sheet.

The north run had been coming back heavy all season. Not dangerous heavy. Nothing a mate would write up. Heavy the way a load is heavy when the count on the manifest is right and the number on the sheet is a little bit wrong, and you look at the number and you think, somebody put a van down as a sedan again, and you sign it and you go home, and then you do that for years. And I had the state coming. Ngo out of Olympia, the north route contract, a whole winter in one application, and me standing on a license and a safety record and my father’s name.

That’s where my head was, on a weight sheet, with a man’s tongue on me and my own hand holding his head still.

“Up.”

“Mm.”

“Greer. Up.”

He came up with his mouth wet and put his forehead against mine. “Tell me.”

“Put it in me. And stop being careful.”

“I’m not being careful.”

“You are. I’ve watched you walk a deck. You put your weight down one foot at a time.”

“You don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Then do it harder and we’ll both find out.”

He got me up onto the chart table with one arm under me, which he could do, and I let him, and he came into me there with my sweater under my back and my heels on the rail of the thing. The first part of it I was quiet, because it had been so long that my whole body had to go somewhere else for a second. After that I wasn’t quiet at all. The table took it. That table has had my father’s coffee on it, a thousand charts, and the yard’s entire payroll spread across it one bad winter, and the only thing that moved was the pencil cup going over onto the deck.

“Leave it.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“That was the good pencil.”

“Do you ever stop.”

“No.” I got both hands in the front of his shirt and pulled him down, and after that neither one of us said anything that was words.

I came first, with my hand spread on the chart table and my face in his neck, and it came up out of my feet. It started behind my knees and in the arches of my feet and it went in, not out, and my heels came off the rail, and somebody down on the car deck laughed at something and I heard it from very far away, like weather.

Then he was still, with his forehead down on my shoulder, breathing on my collarbone, and every breath went over the wet on me and put the gooseflesh back up my arm.

“You all right.”

“Get up here.”

“In a minute.”

“Greer.”

“Give me a minute.” He turned his face into my shoulder. “I want to remember the room.”

I put both hands over my face.

When he came up I got my legs around him. “Finish.” And he finished, and he said my name once in the middle of it, in a voice I hadn’t heard him use, and his hands were shaking after, which I noticed and didn’t mention.

Then it was us in a cold pilothouse with somebody’s pencils all over the deck.

“I have to take the schedule down.”

“Right now?”

“It comes off the board tonight. Summer’s over, the north run goes to once a week, and if I don’t do it tonight Linus does it in the morning. In pen.”

“God forbid.”

“He does it in pen, Greer.”

I found my jeans. I found one boot. I stood there with my hair soaked flat to my head and my sweater on inside out and looked at that man sitting on my chart table in the dark with his belt still open, and I did that on purpose. Nobody made me.

“Hey.” He picked my other boot up off the deck and held it out. “Nailah. There’s something I need to say to you.”

“Not tonight.”

“It’s about the survey.”

I took the boot off him. “Tomorrow you can tell me what my boat’s worth and I’ll go argue with the bank about it. Tonight I’m taking my schedule down.”

He sat there a second longer than he needed to. “All right.”

* * *

The car deck at the end of the summer schedule smells like creosote, diesel and wet dog. I don’t know where the dog comes from. There has never been a dog.

Sal Reaves stood at the foot of the ramp eating cold chow fun out of a carton with a plastic fork. That man has never once in my life sat down to a meal in front of me and he isn’t about to start.

“Evening.”

“Don’t.”

“I ain’t said nothing.”

“You said evening like it had a whole sentence in it.”

“Evening,” he said again, exactly the same way, and put more noodles in his mouth.

I got my gloves out of my coat pocket so my hands would have something to do. “Where’s the weight sheet.”

“Office.”

“I want it before I take the board down.”

“It’s in the office, Nai.”

“Sal.”

He kept chewing and looked out past the end of the slip, where there was nothing to see because it was black and raining. “You want to go walk a count this time of night in this.”

“I want the sheet.”

“Sheet says what the sheet says.”

“Then there’s no problem with me reading it.”

He put the fork in the carton and set the carton down, which for Sal Reaves is the same as another man standing up out of a chair. “Full deck on, full deck off, nobody left nothing behind, and I walked it myself twice.” He counted it off on the rail with one finger, flat, the way my father used to. “You got the state coming day after tomorrow and you been up since before light. Go home.”

“I’m not asking how it went. I’m asking for a piece of paper.”

“And I’m telling you where it is.”

“Which is right up those stairs.”

“Them stairs, this time of night, in the rain.” He left the carton where he’d put it. “Read it in the morning. You’ll read it better in the morning and you know you will.”

“I’ll read it the same either way.”

“No you won’t. You’ll read it tonight and then you’ll carry it around all night and come in to meet the state with a face on you.”

“Is there something on it worth carrying?”

He looked at the ramp chain and the man putting it back on its pin. “There’s a count and a signature and a displacement. Same as every sheet off this boat since before you were born.”

I didn’t move.

“Nailah.”

There it was. He calls me Nai in front of the crew every day of the year. When he wants something out of me he goes and gets my whole name and puts it down between us like a tool he had to walk out to the truck and fetch.

“Fine.”

“Thank you.”

“That’s not what that was. That was me being tired.”

“I hear you.” He picked the carton back up.

He didn’t look relieved. A man who’s just talked you out of something looks relieved. Sal looked the way he looks when the port engine is making a noise he hasn’t decided about yet.

“Your hair’s wet.”

“It’s raining.”

“You been inside, though.”

“I was in the pilothouse.”

“Mm,” said Sal Reaves, and ate his noodles, and didn’t say one more word to me about it that night.

* * *

The ticket office at Fairhaven is a glass box with a space heater that trips the breaker if you run it with the kettle. My sister has run both at once every day she’s worked there, out of what I can only call spite.

Taryn had her feet up on the counter and her braids pulled over one shoulder, the little heater going full blast against her ankles. She looked up when the door went. Then she sat all the way up.

“Oh.”

“Don’t start.”

“I’m not starting anything. I’m observing.”

“Observe quieter.”

“Nailah Danae.”

“Taryn.”

“Your sweater is on inside out.”

I looked down at my own front. It absolutely was. The tag sat up under my chin like a little flag somebody had run up.

“The pilothouse is dark.”

“Mm-hm.”

“It’s dark up there.”

“It sure is dark up there.” She put her hand over her mouth. “Dark as it’s been since Daddy went in, matter of fact.” Then she laughed so hard she had to put her feet down.

“You are a grown woman with a job.”

“I am a grown woman with a job, and my sister just came out of that house with her clothes on backwards while the whole yard’s still here. Rueben’s still here. Linus is still here. Linus walked past that ladder not even an hour ago.”

“Linus did not.”

“Linus did. He had the cash bag.”

I sat down on the stool by the terminal and put my face in my hands, and my sister gave me about a breath of that.

“So is it the boat man?”

“He’s a marine surveyor.”

“Is it the boat man.”

“Yes.”

“I knew it was the boat man.” She hit the counter with her palm. “I knew it Thursday. I said to Rueben Thursday, that man has looked at this whole vessel and he has not looked at one single thing twice except her.”

“Taryn.”

“He drank your coffee.”

“Why does everybody keep saying that like it means something.”

“Because he hates coffee. He asked me where the hot water was. He brings his own tea bags. The man brings his own tea bags, Nai, and then he stood in that office and drank a cup of your terrible coffee all the way to the bottom.”

I sat there. “Huh.”

“Yeah. Huh.” She put her feet back up. “Anyway. Congratulations. You needed that so bad it was starting to show in meetings.”

“I will fire you.”

“You can’t fire me. Mama would come down here.”

That was true, so I let it go. “Give me the clipboard.”

“Which clipboard.”

“The one on the hook behind your head.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“I know what time it is. I want the number.”

She got it off the hook without taking her feet off the counter and held it out to me sideways, which is how my sister hands over anything she thinks I shouldn’t be holding.

The weight sheet was on top and Sal had signed it, because Sal signs everything. A full deck on, a full deck off, same as he said. The displacement figure at the bottom was what it always is at the end of the summer, plus a little. Underneath it was the vehicle manifest, one page, carbonless, white for the office, pink for the master and yellow for the file.

My own signature was on the bottom.

I hadn’t been on the north run that trip.

“Taryn. Where was I Thursday.”

“Olympia.”

“Doing what.”

“Going and getting your own contract packet off a state desk in person, because you don’t trust a mailroom and you never have.”

“All day.”

“All day. You weren’t in this county.”

“And Sal had the boat.”

“Sal has the boat whenever you’re not on it, Nai. That’s the whole job.”

That’s what a chief mate is for, and my name goes on a manifest because the manifest goes out under the operator and I’m the operator. What wasn’t normal was that the signature was mine. Not a stamp. Not Sal signing for me, which he’s done more times than I could count, which is legal, and which I’ve told him to keep doing. My own hand. My own loop on the N, and the little flat line I put under it because my father put one under his.

I sat in my sister’s glass box with the space heater going and the kettle ticking and looked at my own name at the bottom of a piece of paper I’d never seen in my life, on a sailing that went out while I was half a state south.

It wasn’t fear yet.

“Taryn.”

“Hm.”

“Who brought the manifest up from the boat Thursday?”

“Sal, probably. Or Linus.” She didn’t look up from her phone. “Why?”

“No reason.”

I put the clipboard back on its hook, and went and took the summer schedule down off the board, and I did it in pencil.