The Seal Number

My competition had one hand flat on the back of my neck and the other one going down the front of my slacks, and the only reason that man was still standing in my yard at that hour was that a bobtail had come through my gate two hours before with no brakes under it at all.

Dontae Pickney, coming in off the last Tuesday run with his foot on the floor and nothing answering, and he put a hundred and some odd of tractor through the chain link at the east fence and took out a bare chassis and a light pole and walked away from the whole thing with a cut up the inside of his forearm. I heard it from the office and you do not mistake that sound for anything else in this world, because a pole going over is a sound like a church bell being dropped, and I was out the door with my boots untied and my license still hanging on the wall behind me. By the time I got across the apron he was standing on his own step in the sodium light with the blood running down into his hand.

“I had that pedal,” he said. “I had it to the board, Miss Ledet, and I am tellin’ you there was nothin’ behind it, not soft, not spongy, nothin’ at all, like steppin’ off a curb you did not know was there.”

“Sit down in the door of your truck and let me see that arm before you tell me one more word about the pole, because the arm is bleeding and the pole is already down.”

He sat. The cut ran about the length of my hand and it was not deep and it was not going to quit on its own, and he held it out to me the way a child holds a thing out, palm up, watching my face instead of the cut.

“It look bad.”

“It looks bad because you are the one looking at it, which is how a cut works,” I said, and got my thumb above it and lifted his wrist up over his heart. “Hold it right there. Get it up higher. Now, that truck came out of the shop in January, so I want the whole morning off you from the walk-around forward, and I want it one time and straight, because this is going onto a sheet of paper that a federal officer will be reading by Friday.”

“I pre-tripped her in the dark same as always and I did the walk-around and I checked my lights and I put my chocks back in the box the way you supposed to and not throwed in the sleeper like Roderick do, and I come down off the Isabel Holmes with an empty chassis behind me and I touched that brake and there was nothin’ there.” He was talking fast and his leg was going. “And people always say they believe you, Miss Ledet, and then two weeks later here come a letter.”

“I am not people, Dontae. I am the woman who signs the check and I am the one who will be standing in front of the port with this in my hand on Friday, which is exactly why I need the truth out of you a single time instead of the comfortable version four times. Did you touch that pedal and get nothing.”

“On everything I love, and on my girls.”

“All right, then that is what happened, and that is what the sheet is going to say when I write it up on Friday.”

Kee came out of the building at a dead run in house shoes, which is a thing I have now seen twice in nine years, with the first aid kit under her arm and her phone already up to her ear and a whole speech loaded and ready to go.

“Nope. Nope nope nope. Dontae Pickney, I have been askin’ this company for a camera on that east fence since Florence, and now I have got to call a fence man and a pole man and whoever it is a person calls about a pole, and the first thing out your mouth had better not be a joke.” She got down in front of him on her knees in the gravel in those house shoes and took that boy’s face in both hands. “Hey. Look at me. You are all right, you hear me, and I want you to say that out loud so your own self can hear the words.”

“I’m all right.”

“Mm hm. Now give me that arm and keep your mouth shut for once in your natural life, because I am carrying you to the urgent care on Oleander and I do not want to hear one word about how you can drive yourself.”

Otis Rameau was the one who climbed up and pulled the air line and chocked the wheels while I was looking at that arm, because Otis Rameau had happened to be standing in my yard at six thirty on a Tuesday evening holding a chassis invoice he could have sent from his phone, and because he is the kind of man who does the work in front of him before he asks whose work he is doing. He had the glad hand off and the tractor dead before my dispatcher got out of the building, and he did not say one word to me about having done it, which is the other thing about him.

So that is how he came to still be there most of an hour later.

Kee carried Dontae off to four stitches and a tetanus he did not need. The wrecker came and dragged the chassis and left two black arcs across my concrete. The fence man would come Thursday and the pole man would come whenever the pole man comes. The gate went down at eight and the yard lights dropped to half and the last hostler put his buggy up and went on home, and on thirty-one trucks’ worth of gravel there were two vehicles left in the world, his truck and mine.

And he came into my office with that invoice still in his hand and said, “Air dryer. That dryer has been purging wet on that unit for a while now and there is water sitting in those tanks, and it froze somewhere in the line, and when the boy hit the pedal there was nothing behind it to push. Pull the maintenance sheet and find the last time anybody put a wrench on those drains, and then go and look at that boy’s face one more time, because what happened out there tonight is not a driver thing.”

“And you know all of that from standing next to it for one minute in the dark.”

“I know it because I had a tractor do that exact same thing to me outside Beaumont in the rain in two thousand nine and I have never in my life gotten over that morning,” he said, and took his glasses off and put them away in his shirt pocket, which is what that man does when he has decided to stay. “If you want to go put a light on those tanks tonight, I will walk out there with you and hold the light.”

“I will go and get the maintenance sheet in the morning. You can go on home, Otis, and I will call you about your chassis.”

“Mm.”

“And what does mm mean, exactly, because I have known you four years and nobody has ever handed me the dictionary.”

“It means I am going to sit down in that chair over yonder,” he said, “and you are welcome to throw me out of it at any point in the evening that happens to suit you.”

He sat in the chair. Six foot two folded down into a thing I bought at an office liquidation in Castle Hayne, long legs out in front of him and his hands laced together on his stomach, grey coming in on the left side of his beard and nowhere else at all, like somebody had leaned on him once with a thumb. He did not say anything for a long time. The window unit cycled on behind me and the yard lights came through the blind in bars across his shirt, and I stood there in the middle of a dead man’s company and did not sit down.

“You are not going to ask me anything.”

“No, because you would answer it, and then you would be mad at your own self for the next hour about having answered it, and then I would have to sit here through that part too, and I would rather sit here through this part.”

That got a laugh out of me and it came out wrong, too loud and too fast, the way a laugh does when it has been standing behind a door a long while waiting on somebody to open the door. I was tired in a way that sleep does not reach, and I wanted somebody in that room to make one single decision that was not mine. When had anybody last come and got me? I could not come up with an answer and I quit looking for one.

Otis Rameau has eleven trucks across the river in Leland and every one of the eleven is paid for, which is a sentence he has let me hear exactly twice, both times by accident and both times in a room where somebody else was talking. I have thirty-one and I owe on nine of them. He lost a company in Houston in the spring of two thousand eighteen and sold it off one tractor at a time over eighteen months with his father sitting in the office watching him do it, and the first time I ever laid eyes on the man he was walking the north row at a fleet auction counting my trucks out loud on his fingers like somebody in a grocery store checking a list.

A long while of the same thing. A good stretch of a man across the river who bids on everything I bid on and loses most of it and turns up anyway, who has never once in a long run found a spot six inches above my left shoulder to talk to, who looks dead at my face and keeps on looking.

“Otis. Come here.”

He did not move for a second. He looked at me the way he looks at a figure that is almost right and that he is not going to sign until it comes out even.

“Say that plainer than you just said it, because I am forty years old and I have been wrong about a woman on a Tuesday before and I did not care for the experience.”

“Get up out of my chair and come over here where I am standing.”

“Well. That is plainer.”

He got up and came around the end of my desk and he did not hurry about it, and the not hurrying is the part that undid me. He put one hand on the back of my neck up under my hair with his thumb laid along my jaw and turned my face up to him, and the whole of me went quiet for the first time since the pole came down.

“You are shaking.”

“It is the air conditioner, and I will thank you not to make a study of me.”

“It is seventy-four degrees in this office and you set that thermostat your own self this morning, so let me say my piece and then you can do whatever you want with me.” His mouth was close enough that I felt the words before I heard them. “I have been in your yard at a reasonable hour maybe forty times in a good few years, and tonight I came at six thirty holding a piece of paper I could have emailed you from my kitchen, and you know it and I know it, and I would have gone right on knowing it and driven home across that bridge same as always. And then that pole came down and I thought, if that had been you standing on that step with your arm opening up, the last thing I ever said to you in this life would have been about a chassis rental.”

I got a fistful of his shirt and pulled.

“Then do not tell me about a chassis rental.”

He kissed me, and it was not a nice kiss, and I want that written down somewhere, because I have had a great many of the nice ones and I had not had one of these since before my father died, and the whole difference is in the hand. He kept that hand on the back of my neck the entire time and he used it, he tilted my head where he wanted it and held it there, and when I made a sound into his mouth he made one back at me and did not apologise for his and did not wait on me to apologise for mine. His other hand came flat down my spine and took a double handful of me through my slacks and pulled me up against him, and he was already hard, and there was something about feeling that through two layers of cloth in the office where I pay my fuel invoices that took the floor straight out from under me.

“Say something,” he said against my jaw.

“Drop the blind. I know there is not a soul on that gravel, and I am telling you to drop it anyway, and you can be smart about it on your own time.”

He went and dropped the blind and came back, and by then I had the top two buttons of my blouse undone and my hands shaking too bad for the third, and he said no and moved my hands out of the way and did it himself, slow, one button at a time, looking at what he was uncovering and not at my face. The looking is what got me. Nobody looks. Men put a hand out and arrive somewhere, and this one stood in a dark office with the sodium light coming through a cheap vinyl blind in bars across the both of us and took his time about the front of a blouse like it was the only item on his calendar for the week.

“You are going to make me ask, and I am not asking.”

“Then I will wait on you,” Otis said, and got the blouse off my shoulders and down to my elbows so that my arms were caught up in my own sleeves, which was not any kind of accident, and stood back half a step with his hands down at his sides and looked at me.

The air hit me. Gooseflesh came up the whole way from my elbows to my collarbone and my nipples went hard against the bra and he watched that happen and did not say one word about it, and I stood there in the middle of my own office with my arms pinned in my own clothes and let the man look.

“Say what it is you are looking at, and do not be a gentleman about it, because I have had gentlemen.”

“I am looking at a woman who has not let her back bend one day in some years,” he said, “and I am going to get filthy with you in about a minute, so you can go on and be patient with me.”

“You are dawdling.”

“I am looking, and looking is not dawdling, and you know good and well the difference.”

He came back in and got the bra open one-handed behind me and put his mouth down on the side of my throat with his beard dragging, and then the man said the rest of it, and he did not say one nice word the whole way through.

“I have been thinking about your titties since a fleet auction in two thousand twenty-two, which is a thing I am ashamed of and I am going to tell you anyway, and I have been thinking about your mouth since you took a chassis bill off me in the rain and read it standing up. And I am going to put my mouth on your pussy on that desk and I am going to stay down there until you are done telling me what to do, and then we will see about the rest.”

“Say the first part over.”

“Which first part, because I said several.”

“You know which one, and you know exactly what you are doing to me, so say it again and say it slower this time.”

He said it again and he said it slower, in the same flat voice he had used about the air dryer, like a man naming off a thing he works with every day of his life, and I felt it go through me the way a cold hand goes through a warm room.

My knees went. There is no other way to tell the thing. My knees went out from under me and I had to put a hand back on the desk, and he felt the whole of me drop two inches and said, “That is the one, right there.”

Then his hand came down the front of my slacks and inside and found me already soaked through, and the man quit talking in the middle of a word.

“Sanaa.”

“Do not you say one single word.”

“I am going to say a whole lot about it, but not tonight and not standing up,” he said, and kissed my shoulder, and took the clip out of my hair with his free hand as careful as a man handling something he has been told not to break, and set it down on my desk beside his own invoice. Then he put his mouth on my breast and his fingers in me at the same time and I lost the thread of everything I had been about to tell him.

What I had been about to tell him was that we are competitors, and that there is a hearing in front of the port in six weeks with both our names in the same file, and that this was the stupidest thing either one of us had ever done in a career. What came out instead was his name and then oh fuck, out loud, in my father’s office, which is a word my mother has never once heard come out of my mouth.

He laughed into my skin. He was working two fingers in me slow and knuckle deep with the heel of his hand exactly where it needed to be, and the office smelled like diesel off his shirt and coconut oil out of my hair and underneath the both of those the warm cardboard smell that every office on a wharf has had since the beginning of time, and the window unit was ticking, and somewhere out on the water a tug going up the Cape Fear put two short blasts on her horn. I had my eyes shut and my hands finally out of my sleeves and buried in the twists at the back of his head, and he kept talking the whole way through, which is the only thing I have ever wanted out of a man and the only thing I have never in my life known how to ask for out loud. He said my name like it was something he had been keeping in his mouth all day, and he told me what he could feel me doing around his hand, and then he asked me a question that was not a question at all.

“You been holdin’ this the whole a run of years?”

“Shut up, Otis.”

“That is not a no, and I notice you did not say no.”

“It is not a no,” I said, and my heels came up off the floor.

“Up here. On the desk. Right here.”

He got me up on it with one arm and his hand still where it was, and the papers went everywhere, and I did not look and I did not care, and he took my slacks and everything under them down off me and onto the floor in one motion. And then the man stopped.

“Why in God’s name are you stopping.”

“Because I want to remember the room,” Otis said.

The office. Half light. The blind down and the sodium coming through it in bars anyway, across my own thighs. The window unit. A wall of invoice folders kept by month in my father’s handwriting. My license in a black frame over the printer with my own name on it and the number that belongs to me and not to my family and not to any man alive. A styrofoam cup of coffee gone cold at nine in the morning. And a woman sitting on the edge of her dead father’s desk with her blouse off her shoulders and her legs open, watching a man take his reading glasses out of his shirt pocket and set them down because he did not want to lose them.

“Remember it faster.”

“No,” he said, and got down on his knees on my floor.

I want to be honest about what that did to me, because it was not the act and I have had the act. It was a man who owns eleven trucks free and clear and does not owe one dollar to one soul going down onto a cold concrete floor in a dark office on my yard without a single second of negotiation about it, and putting both hands up under my thighs and pulling me to the edge of that desk the way a man positions freight.

“Otis, wait, there is something I need to tell you before you go any further.”

He put his mouth on me and whatever I needed to tell him did not get told.

It was not fast and it was not clever, and that is the only thing I would ever say about it if anybody on this earth could make me talk. He got his tongue flat on my pussy and did the one thing, slow, and then he did the same thing over again, and when my hand came down on the back of his head and tightened he did not change one single detail of what he was doing, which is the entire skill, and almost no man walking around on the ground today has got that in him.

“Say it.”

“Otis.”

“Say what I am doing. I want to hear it in your voice and not in a nice one.”

“You are eating my pussy on my daddy’s desk,” I said, “and if you quit I am going to put you out of this yard.”

He laughed into me and I felt the whole of it go up through me.

I wanted to be a woman who could lie still for that and I am not one. My hips came up off that desk on their own and he put a hand flat on my belly and pushed me back down onto it without ever once coming off me, and then he got two fingers in me alongside it and curled them, and my whole body did something all on its own. The desk edge was cutting a line across the backs of my thighs and I could not have told you whether that hurt. The tug went up the river again somewhere out behind the building. I got out do not stop with no air behind it at all, and he came up off me just far enough to say say the words with his mouth still on me so that I felt the shape of them more than I heard them, and I said do not stop and do not get clever and stay right where you are, and he stayed right where he was, and got one forearm up across my hips because I was coming up off that desk and away from him, and the weight of that arm holding me down on my own furniture was the best thing that had happened to me since the Thursday my father called the yard to say he was proud of me. I had both hands in his hair and my mouth open with nothing at all coming out of it, and my heels left the floor again, and the whole room went narrow and gold.

It came up out of my feet.

That is the only way I know how to say the thing. It started in my feet and in my hands and it went inward instead of out, and I had one palm down flat on a stack of gate tickets and the other one gripping the back of his head hard enough to hurt a grown man, and he did not stop, and something went off the far side of the desk and hit the floor and I heard it land from about a mile away.

Then he was still, with his forehead down against the inside of my thigh, breathing on me, every breath going over the wet of me and putting the gooseflesh back up my leg.

“You all right?”

“Get up here.”

“In a minute. Give me a minute, because I am counting.”

“You are doing what, exactly.”

And the man held one hand up where I could see it and went through his fingers against the side of my thigh, slow, one and two and three, all the way up to the eleventh, tapping each one on me like somebody checking a load off a sheet, and then he looked up at me in the half dark with his beard shining and said, “Eleven. That is every truck I own, free and clear, and I am telling you what I have got because I am fixing to ask you for something, and I did not want to be asking you for it with my hand out.”

“Then ask me.”

“Not yet, and do not look at me like that, because not yet is not the same animal as no.”

“Otis Rameau, do not you dare leave that sitting out there.”

“I said not yet,” he said, and came up off the floor.

I got his belt open myself, because I had been thinking about that belt for a while and I did not want anybody else handling it, and I got my hand around his dick, hot and thick and moving in my fist with his own pulse going in it, and he put his forehead down against mine and swore, and the swearing was not for my benefit, and that is how I knew.

“Tell me what you want.”

“I want you to quit talking to me about trucks, and I want you up here on this desk.”

I put him in me myself. I got my hand around his dick and put the head of it right where I wanted it and then I pulled him forward by the back of the neck with my other hand, and he said, “Jesus Christ, Sanaa,” and I said, “Come on, then,” and he came the rest of the way.

And the desk is the thing I want to tell about it, because that desk is forty years old and came out of a Quonset hut on Burnett Boulevard and my father sat behind it until the last Tuesday of his life, and the back legs are shorter than the front ones by about the thickness of a shim, so that when a man puts his weight on the near edge of it the whole thing rocks. It rocked. It kept rocking the entire time, a small wooden knock against the concrete in a rhythm that neither one of us set, and I got my heels up on the edge and my arms around his neck and let it knock.

“Open your eyes and look at me. No. Look at me.”

I opened my eyes. Six inches of air between us. Sodium light in bars down the side of his face and the one grey patch in his beard lit up like a seam of something in a rock, sweat standing at his hairline, and a man looking at me with his whole attention, the same way he had looked at the front of my blouse.

“There she is, right there.”

“Do not get sweet on me now, we are too far in for sweet.”

“I am not being sweet, I am taking inventory,” he said, and went deeper and took his time about it, and I said something into the side of his neck that I have never said out loud to anybody in my life.

“Say that part again, and this time say my name.”

So I put my mouth up against his ear and said it again with his name in it, in the words I think in and not the words I file in, and he put one hand flat on the wall over my shoulder and that whole desk went forward an inch on the concrete.

I will not pretend I did anything graceful. My blouse was hanging off the one arm the entire time and my own sweat was running down between my tits and I did not care one bit. He got a hand up under me and told me to say the word for what he was doing and I said it out loud in my own office, fuck me, just like that, and the saying of it was worse than the doing and I loved every second. The second time I came I had my face in his shoulder and my teeth in him, and he said my whole name, both of them, the way my mother says it when she has had about enough, and I started laughing and could not stop, and he asked me what, and I told him you sound exactly like Clemence, and that man laughed so hard he had to brace himself up against the wall.

And afterward we did not have the conversation, which is worth putting down somewhere. He did not ask me what it meant and I did not offer him anything. We got dressed in a dark office with our backs mostly to each other like two people who were going to have to sit in the same hearing room in a fortnight, and he put his glasses back on and I buttoned my blouse wrong and had to start over from the bottom, and he told me my clip was on the desk and I told him I could see it, and neither one of us said the thing.

He left at a quarter past ten and I watched his tail lights go out my gate and swing right, toward the bridge.

Kee called me before I got the lights back up.

“Four stitches and a tetanus he did not need and about two hundred opinions on the drive across town. He is fine. Junie came and got him, and that woman wants to know are we paying for the urgent care, and I already told her we are, so do not make a liar out of me in front of somebody who feeds this entire yard.”

“We are paying the bill. How is he really?”

“He is scared out of his mind and he is covering it over with jokes, which is the Pickney family crest and has been since high school,” she said. “And I will tell you the one thing that matters, which is that he told that nurse the same story he told you, word for word, including the part about the chocks, and people who are lying change the story, and that boy told it the same way both times.”

“Otis says air dryer.”

There was a pause on that line about two seconds long, and I have known this woman since the tenth grade, and I knew exactly what the a beat were before they were done.

“Otis says.”

“Do not start with me tonight, Keisha.”

“I did not say one word. I said Otis says, which is a direct quote, and quoting a man is journalism.” She let it sit about as long as she could stand to let it sit. “I am going to need you to know that I pulled out of that yard at seven and that man’s truck was in it, and I am now sitting in the Harris Teeter parking lot where I can see the bridge from where I am, and a grey Ram with a Rameau Transport decal on the door just came over it from the Wilmington side.”

“Then he went home.”

“He went somewhere,” she said, sweet as pie. “Pull the maintenance sheet on that unit in the morning before the port asks you for it, and pull the Tuesday sheet while you are standing in that cabinet.”

“Why the Tuesday sheet.”

“Because Tisdale called this office at four in the afternoon and asked me who was running his box, and I told him Dontae, same as every Tuesday since the man started with us, and he said thank you Keisha and hung up, and then about most of an hour later that truck came through my fence. It is probably nothing at all. I just do not care for a man who calls up to ask a question he can already answer.”

I did not say one word.

“Sanaa.”

“I heard you. I will see you at five.”

And then I went to put the papers back on my desk.

They had gone everywhere. Invoices, a fuel report, the chassis paper he had come in holding. I was down on the floor on one knee picking up gate tickets with my hair in my face and my body still humming like a struck pipe, and I had a stack of them in my hand and I was squaring them up on the edge of the desk the way a person does without thinking.

Two tickets. Same Tuesday, same gate, two different trucks and two different drivers, a long while apart on the clock.

The same seal number.

I stood in my own office with my blouse buttoned crooked and read those two numbers four separate times.

A bolt seal carries one number and that number is stamped on it twice, once on the bolt and once on the barrel, and the entire point of the thing, the whole reason a man sitting in an office in Rotterdam will take our paper over somebody else’s, is that the number gets used once on this earth and then it is cut off with a bolt cutter and thrown in a bucket by a kid who does not know what he is holding. That number goes onto the shipping instruction and the delivery order and the interchange receipt and the gate ticket, and four separate parties hold those four pieces of paper, and not once in the history of this port has anybody laid all four of them down side by side on the same table.

I had two of the four in my hand and they did not agree with each other.

Underneath them on the desk, where it had been sitting under the both of us the whole evening, was the scale ticket off the second truck. Forty-four thousand one hundred and eighty pounds, gross.

I sat down in my father’s chair and held the brass press on the chain through my blouse, which is a thing I do, and looked at those two tickets for a long time with that man’s hands still all over me. What kind of person is any of this to, I thought. Who sits down and buys a number?

Nothing has ever been stolen out of a Ledet truck. A lifetime, thirty-one tractors, not one load short, not one box opened, not one claim paid. That is the whole of what I sell. That is the entire asset, and everything else out there on that gravel is a decal.

So what in God’s name is anybody doing with my numbers.