The Night Sort

Q was holding a cargo can like it was a baby with a fever.

“Mika. You going to come look at this, or you going to keep acting like you don’t see me?”

“I see you, Quentin. Bring it here.”

“No. You come here. I’m not putting my hands on this thing again.”

“You’re holding it right now.”

“I’m holding the can. I’m not touching that.”

That’s Quentin Sledge. Q. Skinny, tall, a lineup so sharp it looks drawn on with a ruler, and the lead on my night sort. I have known that man since tenth grade at Weequahic, when he taught me to drive in his mother’s Camry and I put it in a fence on Chancellor Avenue and he told her it was him. He has two boys and coaches the little one’s football on Saturdays and comes in Sunday night still hoarse. He cried harder than her own sister at my aunt’s funeral, and then he had the whole repast laughing about the pastor’s shoes, because that is what he does with a thing he can’t carry. He has never been scared of a box in his life. So when Q won’t touch something, I look.

A Tuesday night in March, late, and Newark was doing that thing it does in March where it isn’t raining but everything is wet anyway. Our building sits in the north cargo area at the airport with the taxiway right outside the open dock door, so all night the freighters roll past and the floor goes loud, then quiet, then loud. Somebody had the radio going low by the belt, Mary J. singing about no hateration, and every man in a yellow vest was pretending he wasn’t watching me walk down that belt in my steel toes.

My name is Tamika Prentiss. Everybody calls me Mika. I was twenty-nine that night, and I had owned Prentiss Air Freight Services since January, since my aunt Verline died in her bed on Shephard Avenue with the TV on.

Here is how a girl from Hawthorne Avenue ends up owning a building at the airport. My mother used to leave me places. Not for good. A Saturday. A week. One whole summer. Church, a lady on Hawthorne who kept kids for cash, and mostly her big sister’s office at the cargo building, because Verline was at work and Verline was always at work. So I grew up on this floor. I did my homework on a little wood stool in her office with a grape soda while grown men pushed cans past the door. I was sweeping that floor before I needed a bra. I was on the payroll the summer I finished high school. I was running the dock before I was old enough to rent a car, and every man on it had an opinion about that, and every man on it did what I said, because I knew where everything was and they didn’t. Verline never had children. She had me. When the will was read, in an office in East Orange with cheap chairs, the lawyer said Tamika R. Prentiss. My mother sat down the row from me in a cream coat and got a garbage bag of coats and a picture of their mother, and she didn’t say one word.

What Verline left me. A lease on a building. Every soul on that floor and their kids. A contract with the French airline that comes up for rebid in May. And a piece of paper from the government that says when we put a box on a passenger airplane, the box is clean. That paper is the business. Not the forklifts. The paper. Every box that goes through our screening machine and comes out closed and sealed goes in the belly of a plane full of people. Nobody opens it again, because our paper says they don’t have to.

Q turned the can so I could see the latch.

A red cable seal was hanging off the latch. Crimped, tagged, a number printed on the tag like every seal in the world.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay?”

“It’s a seal, Q.”

“Mika.” He said my name slow, like I was the one being slow. “This can came off the scale open. I watched it come off the scale open. Second shift built it, it went through screening before I got here, it came out the machine, it came off the scale, and it was open, because it comes to you open. That’s the whole point of you.”

“So who closed it?”

“That’s what I’m asking. You’re the owner.”

He had been saying owner like that since January. Like a joke we were both in on and only one of us thought was funny.

I put my hand on the seal and turned the number up to the light.

772306.

I don’t write anything down. My aunt used to stand me up off that stool and make me say back the last waybills I’d touched, and if I missed one she made a face like I’d spit on her floor. I stopped missing them fast. That head is the only reason anybody has ever needed me. It also cost me my mother, if you ask my mother. Every number that ever went through that building is in my head somewhere, and I know our seals. Ours all start seven seven one or seven seven two, and I know where they stop. Dewayne Bray issues them out of his cage one at a time, and he logs every one like it’s his daughter’s tuition.

Seven seven two three zero six was past where they stop. Not by a little.

It was a real seal. Right color, right crimp, right company. And it did not come out of my building.

Here is the problem, and it is not a paperwork problem. A can comes out of screening open. It gets built and closed in front of my people, it gets a seal out of Dewayne’s cage, and then nobody on this earth touches it again until it’s on an airplane. That seal is the promise. If a can comes off the scale open and shows up at my belt already sealed, with a number nobody in this building owns, then somebody closed that can where I couldn’t see them, hung a seal on it that says it’s clean, and my name is on the paper that says so. Not Verline’s. Mine. Since January.

“Cut it off,” I said.

“Cut a seal off a can.”

“Did I stutter?”

Q got the cutters off the post. He didn’t say anything smart, and Q always has something smart. “You didn’t ask me who built it twice,” he said. “You always ask twice.”

“I heard you the first time.”

“That’s what’s worrying me.”

He cut it and handed me both halves. I stood in the middle of my own building with a piece of red cable in each hand like a woman who just found a receipt in her man’s coat pocket. I didn’t know whose it was yet. I knew it wasn’t mine.

Yo-Yo came around the back of the can with her clipboard against her chest. Yolanda Batts. My dock clerk, and my girl. Younger than me, small, glasses she pushes up with one knuckle, a bonnet under her hard hat, and a voice she never raises, because she sings alto at my aunt’s church and she saves it. That is how she got hired. Verline heard her at a funeral and said that girl can hold a note, she can hold a ledger. She was right. Yo-Yo reads paper the way other people read faces. She is the only person on my floor who has ever caught me in a mistake and then let me find it myself. She is getting married in October to a man who drives for the water company, and she is not going to be in this building forever, and every night I pretend I don’t know that.

That’s the other thing about my floor. Everybody knows everybody. My aunt hired out of her church, out of Weequahic, out of somebody’s cousin who needed a job, so the night sort is half a family reunion and half a group chat, and nothing happens in that building that the whole building doesn’t know by the end of the shift.

“That’s not one of ours,” Yo-Yo said. Not a question. She had read the tag from four feet away.

“Log the number. Seven seven two three zero six. Put it under exceptions.”

“Exceptions needs a reason.”

“Then put unknown.”

“Unknown.” She wrote it small and neat and underlined it once. “Dewayne is going to want to see this sheet before the end of the night.”

“Then he can see it.”

“And when he says it didn’t come out of his cage?”

“Then somebody in my building has a second box of seals.”

Yo-Yo stopped writing.

“Mika.”

“What.”

“Who has a second box of seals?”

I didn’t answer Yolanda. I didn’t have an answer. And right then I felt somebody behind me, the way you feel a door open in your mother’s house before you hear the hinge.

* * *

The temp had been on my floor since right after New Year’s. The agency sent a handful of people after my aunt passed. Most of them were gone inside a month, the way temps go. This one stayed.

Dov Kestenbaum. Forty-six, which on a night sort might as well be a hundred, because everybody else out there is a baby arguing about the Knicks. White. Jewish, from Elizabeth, which he told Yo-Yo his first week because Yo-Yo will ask anybody anything, including whether he had a girlfriend and what his problem was. Olive skin, like a man who’s been outside on purpose. Black curls going grey, longer than any man on that floor keeps his hair. He writes on his clipboard in block capitals like he’s taking a test. He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t touch the radio. He doesn’t say anything he doesn’t have to say, and since January I had been looking at the back of that man’s neck and telling myself I was looking at the belt.

Yo-Yo had a name for him. She called him the Librarian.

A whole winter of not doing anything looks like this.

His first week the belt jammed at the turn the way it does, and every man on my floor stood there looking at it like it was going to fix itself. He walked over, got down on one knee in his good work pants, and had it running before Q finished his sentence. Didn’t say a word. Wiped his hands on a rag and went back to his spot. Q said, “Oh, so he’s a mechanic now,” and Yo-Yo said, “He can be whatever he wants,” and I said get back to work, and I didn’t stop thinking about those hands until Sunday.

Then one night a coffee showed up on the rail at my spot, deep in the shift. Dunkin’, the one on Frelinghuysen, black with two sugars, which is how I take it and which I have never told anybody on that floor. I looked down the belt. He was writing on his clipboard. I drank the coffee. It has been on that rail every night since, and we have never said one word about that coffee. Q said, “Boss, somebody’s courting you with a medium.” I told Quentin to go count something.

Then Thursday. The light over the far bay went out and I was up the ladder with a bulb in my teeth, and men on a dock will look up a ladder, that is just what men do, I have been up ladders in front of men since I was a teenager. He came and held the bottom of the ladder. Both hands. And when I looked down he was looking at my face. Not my behind. My face. Like he was waiting to see if I’d fall so he could say something smart. I came down that ladder slow and I didn’t know why, and when my boots hit the floor he said, “You always do that with the bulb in your mouth?” and I said, “You always hold ladders nobody asked you to hold?” and he said, “Yeah,” and walked off. That was the whole conversation. I went home and lay in my bed with the sun up and said the word yeah to my own ceiling until I fell asleep.

Yo-Yo saw the whole thing from the aisle. She waited until we were in the office with the door shut, and she said it the way she says a weight is off by a kilo.

“He likes you.”

“He held a ladder.”

“He looked at your face the whole time you were up there, Mika. I was watching him watch you. He never looked down once.”

I know what I’m like. Men have been trying to talk to me on that floor since I was a teenager, and I know how to make a man feel foolish for trying. This one wasn’t trying. He was just there, every night, at the end of my belt, quiet, and the not trying was doing something to me that trying never did. I caught myself walking the long way down the floor to pass him. A grown woman. The owner of the building. Walking the long way.

And then the seal. And there he was behind me like he had been standing there his whole life.

He came up beside me and didn’t say anything. That’s his whole move. He gets close and he waits. The waiting works on you, and by the time you talk you’ve already given something up.

“You saw this seal,” I said.

“Saw it when it came down the line.”

“When?”

“Start of shift. Already sealed. I set it aside.”

“You set it aside all this time.”

“Set it aside for you.”

“For me.”

“Wasn’t going to hand your problem to the second shift lead.” He moved his clipboard to his other hand. “Figured it goes to the woman whose name is on the door.”

Now. I am a grown woman. I have run a dock a long time. I have been talked at by every kind of man there is, including the kind who thinks he’s helping. There was no good reason for my stomach to do what my stomach did when that man said the woman whose name is on the door.

“Come with me,” I said.

“Where?”

“Does it matter to you?”

He looked at me a second. Then he set that clipboard down on the belt rail, on top of the paperwork, in front of everybody.

“No,” he said.

Q made a noise like a tire going flat.

* * *

The pin room is a cage off the northeast corner where we keep tie-downs and empty locks and a lifetime of things my aunt never threw out. It has a door that closes. It has no window. It has no lock either, which I had never thought about once before that night, and which I would think about a great deal after.

Everybody on that floor knew where I went. Everybody knew who walked in behind me. And I am not going to lie to you, that was part of why I went. That was most of why.

Here’s my thing. A man can put his hands anywhere he wants. Hands are easy. Hands cost a man nothing. It’s the saying. Out loud. Where somebody could hear him. I didn’t know why that was my thing yet, not all the way, but I knew it was, the way you know you don’t like cilantro.

He shut the door. And then neither one of us did anything.

That’s the part nobody tells you. I marched that man in there in front of my whole floor like I knew exactly what I was doing, and then it was two grown people standing in a supply cage under one bulb with a box of tie-downs between us and Mary J. coming through the wall.

“So,” he said.

“So.”

“You bring all the temps in here?”

“Don’t play with me, Dov.”

He laughed. Low. First time I had ever heard him laugh. It came up out of his chest like it hadn’t been used since Christmas.

“Mika.”

“What.”

“Come here.”

“You come here. You’re the one who’s been holding ladders.”

He came. He took his time, the way he does everything. He stopped about an inch from me and just looked, and I couldn’t stand the quiet.

“Say something, Librarian.”

“I’ve been trying to figure out what to say to you since the day I walked in here.”

“And?”

“And I don’t have it yet.” He put his hand on my face. Not grabbing. Just his hand, warm, with a callus on the thumb from that clipboard. “So I’m going to kiss you, and then I’m going to keep trying.”

Nobody kisses me first. I’m the one. I decide, I start, I finish, I leave. That man kissed me slow in a supply cage like we had all night and nowhere to be. My hands came up off my sides and went into his hair before I told them to, and it was soft, that grey, and I didn’t know what to do with a soft thing, so I pulled it.

“Ow.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Do it again.”

I did it again. We were both laughing into each other’s mouths, which I have never done with anybody, and then we weren’t laughing.

“Take the vest off,” he said, against my neck.

“You take it off.”

“I want to watch you do it.”

I took it off. Yellow hi-vis, the ugliest thing a woman can put on her body, open over black satin, the way I wear it every night of my life. That’s for me. That’s what I say out loud. The second that vest hit the concrete I found out who had been lying, and it was me, and the lie was black satin.

“That’s what I thought,” he said.

“You didn’t think anything.”

“I thought about it tonight when you came down that belt. I thought about it Thursday on that ladder.” He put his mouth by my ear. “You want to know what else I thought?”

“Yeah.”

“That you’re the only person in this building nobody ever tells she’s doing a good job. So I’m going to tell you. Every night. Whether you want to hear it or not.”

And that was the whole thing. That was it before he ever put a hand on my body. The other woman who lives in my chest, the one I don’t let out at work, woke all the way up and stretched. I turned around and put my hands on that wire myself.

He came up behind me and got both hands under the satin and held my breasts like he had been waiting on them since January. Then he stopped moving.

“What?” I said.

“Just saying hello.”

“To my chest.”

“They’re the reason I can’t hear a word you say on that floor. Figured I’d introduce myself.”

“You are so stupid,” I said, and I was laughing, and I was wet, and I did not know a person could be both at the same time.

He rolled my nipples between his fingers, slow, until I said something to God. Then he got his hand down the front of my cargos and found my pussy already soaked, and he said so, out loud, in plain words, in a supply cage with a door thin enough that Quentin Sledge could hear every syllable. And then he said, “You’re beautiful, Mika,” which isn’t dirty at all, and it hit me harder than the dirty ever has.

And in my back pocket, the whole time, two halves of a red cable seal with a number on it that did not come out of my building.

I was thinking about both. That’s me. A man had two fingers in me and the heel of his hand right where I needed the weight, and some part of my brain was going seven seven two three zero six, past the range, somebody has a box. The two things weren’t fighting. They were the same feeling. I didn’t know that about myself until that cage.

“Where are you?” he said.

“Right here.”

“No. You’re somewhere.”

“I’m here, Dov.”

“Then say my name like you’re in the room.”

I bit down on my own arm. He pulled my arm away from my mouth, gently, and kissed the inside of it where I’d bitten.

“No,” he said. “I want to hear you.”

“You want the floor to hear me?”

“I want you to hear you.”

I came against a cage wall with my cargos half down and my vest on the concrete like a dead bird, and I said his name, both syllables, louder than Mary J. And he held me up through the whole thing with his arm across my chest and his mouth on my shoulder, and for once he didn’t say anything at all, and that was the right thing to say.

Then I turned around and put my hand on his belt.

He caught my wrist. Not hard. He put my hand flat on his chest instead, over his heart, which was going like he had run up the back stairs.

“Not tonight.”

I laughed in his face. “You’re serious?”

“Mika, I’m forty-six. I have a hip. And I did not wait all winter to do this standing up next to a box of tie-downs.” He pushed my hair back off my face. “I want a bed and a whole afternoon and nobody outside the door.”

“Oh, so you have standards.”

“I have a plan.”

“A plan.” I fixed my bra. I picked my vest up off the floor. My hands were shaking and I made them stop, because they work for me. “What kind of grown man turns down having his dick sucked in a pin room?”

“The kind that wants a Sunday.”

Now see. That word right there.

I have had men say every dirty thing there is to say to me. Some of it I said back. Not one of them ever said Sunday. It scared me worse than anything he could have done with his hands, so I did what I do when I’m scared, which is get smart.

“You don’t know if you’ll even be here Sunday. You’re a temp.”

“I know what I am.”

“The agency could pull you Friday.”

“They could.”

“Then don’t promise me a Sunday, Dov.”

He put my vest back on me himself. Both arms. Zipped it all the way up like a school crossing guard. Then he unzipped it back down, because he saw my face.

“Sunday,” he said again, quiet. “Two o’clock. I’ll cook.”

“You cook?”

“Yo-Yo didn’t tell you that?”

“Yo-Yo doesn’t know that.”

“Then I guess I still have one thing,” he said, and opened the door.

* * *

When we came out he picked his clipboard up off the rail like he was picking up his lunch. And he said the word. In front of Q, and Yo-Yo, and two loaders, and a driver from a forwarder in Kearny who had no business still standing in my building.

“Sunday, Mika.”

Then he walked back to the end of the belt like nothing had happened.

I went to my office. Yo-Yo was two steps behind me with her clipboard against her chest. She shut the door with her foot. Then she stood there and looked at me over her glasses for a long moment, and Yolanda Batts, who does not cuss, who sings alto on Sundays, said one word, low.

“Bitch.”

“Don’t.”

“I said it once. I’m done.” She sat on the corner of my desk. “The pin room, Mika.”

“I know where I was.”

“With the man who doesn’t talk.”

“He talks.”

“He said Sunday. Out loud. In front of the Kearny driver.” She pushed her glasses up with one knuckle. “I have worked here three years and I have never heard that man say a day of the week.”

“Yolanda.”

“I’m not judging you. I’m telling you the whole floor heard it, so decide tonight what your face is going to do about it, because they are going to be looking at your face.” She stood up and opened the door. “And Mika. He fixed the belt his first week and he brings you coffee. Men who don’t want anything don’t bring coffee. Find out what he wants.”

That is Yo-Yo. She will say one word in the dark and then hand you the whole ledger.

Q didn’t say anything at all, which out of Q is the loudest thing in the world. When I came back out he was at the head of the belt with his arms folded, watching the taxiway like he was waiting on the 25 bus. When I walked past him he spoke without turning his head.

“Your auntie used to go in that room too.”

I stopped.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing.” He straightened up. “Load out at four, boss.”

“Quentin. What did you say to me?”

“I said load out at four.”

And he went and found something to lift, which Quentin Sledge has never in his life done unless he was avoiding a woman.

* * *

Here is the rest of that shift.

I walked my floor. I signed what needed signing. I stood over Antoine, who is a baby and has been on my floor less than a year, while he rebuilt a Frankfurt can that would have gone out light, and he said, “Miss Prentiss, it’s not going to move,” and I said, “I didn’t ask you if it was going to move,” and he rebuilt the can. Deep in the shift I stood in the open dock door and watched the Lux Atlantique freighter come off the gate with our freight in the belly. Lux Atlantique is the French carrier. They are the whole business. We put boxes on airplanes and we get paid. Somebody had switched the radio to Keith Sweat. I stood in the wet with my arms crossed, feeling like a woman who had gotten away with something.

Then Dewayne Bray came out of his cage with his log in his hand, sweating through his shirt in a building that isn’t even warm, gold cap catching the light, and he did not look at me. Dewayne Bray always looks at me. He walked past Yo-Yo. He looked at the exceptions sheet on her clipboard. He looked at it a long time.

Then he went back in his cage and pulled that door shut.

I put my hand in my back pocket and felt those two pieces of cable.

I knew what that seal was. I didn’t know who. And I’m telling you the truth, I still wanted it to be sloppy. I wanted somebody in the cage to have dropped a box and grabbed the wrong one. I wanted my aunt to have left me a building with a couple of loose habits in it that I could tighten up, and keep the carrier contract, and be the woman whose name is on the door.

But I know my building. I know where every last thing in it sits, and that is the only reason anybody has ever needed me. All night, while I signed things, my head kept saying one thing.

Nothing about that seal was sloppy.

That seal was the neatest thing in my building. Somebody put a real, sequential, correctly crimped seal on a can that had already been screened and closed. On my floor. On my shift. Standing close enough to hear me breathe while I was busy being the one who knows where everything sits.

And then there was a man at the end of my belt who had said Sunday to me out loud in front of a driver from Kearny, and who had known about that seal all night and told nobody but me.

Seven seven two three zero six.

I didn’t have to look it up. I have never had to look up anything in my life.

That’s what you get for being the girl who memorizes everything so nobody can set her down and walk off.

You remember everything. Even the things you weren’t supposed to see.