The Sealed Bid

The iron had been out on the board in my kitchen since the Sunday before Thanksgiving, and on the second Monday in February I still had not put the thing away. That is the detail that comes first, before the rest. Not the number. Not the envelope. A woman of forty seven with a good salary and a bad marriage twenty years behind her, standing in a kitchen on Grelot Road at five in the morning in a slip, pressing a white blouse on a board she has been walking around since November.

I pressed the collar twice. I always press the collar twice.

Coffee in the red cup, because the red cup was my father’s. Two eggs I did not eat. The television talking to nobody in the front room about rain coming up from the Gulf by Thursday, and me listening the way you listen to a man who has never once been wrong about anything that mattered.

The iron was never about the iron. I spent eleven years working that much out.

I have never in my life started a sentence with the words I think.

Not once. Not in a meeting, not in a bed, not at my father’s funeral. I say the number is two hundred and eleven million. I say the soil report shows nine feet of soft clay. I say the low bid is Tidewater. I have signed my name to more money than my whole family has touched since we came up out of Escambia County, and I could not name you one thing I believe that somebody did not hand me first.

My daddy was a back and a pair of hands on a dock for thirty one years, and nobody ever asked him what he thought either. He just had the decency not to pretend otherwise.

It belongs at the front because of what came after. The thing that ruined me was not greed. I did not want money. I wanted somebody to ask me a question and then wait for the answer.

It cost me my brother. It cost me my mother’s house on Baker Street, the one with the crooked porch post my daddy would not straighten because he said a straight post on a crooked house looks worse. It cost a man his life, over a container box sixty feet off the stern of a boat I was lying on the night he opened it, with my shoe off under the chart table, laughing.

I did not know. That is worth exactly what it is worth and not one cent more.

I put the iron away. It is the one thing I finished all spring.

* * *

The Alabama State Port Authority keeps its engineering department on the third floor of a building the color of a wet oyster, and I had the corner of it with two windows and nine cranes. Deuce called my office the aquarium. Deuce is Rollie Thibault, fifty one, barrel chested, a grey beard kept short, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead from eight in the morning until bedtime. In twenty six years he has been passed over twice, and neither time by me, which is the entire reason we are still friends.

I drove in on the Causeway with the blouse on a hanger in the back window and was at my desk by a quarter past seven. Deuce was in my doorway at seven forty with the advertisement in his hand.

“It went out,” he said. “Berth fourteen. Last Monday, like you said.”

“I know when it went out, Deuce.”

“I am aware that you know.” He came in anyway and sat on the arm of the chair he never sits in properly. “Four are pulling documents. Tidewater, Coastwise, Jubilee Marine, and Deltana out of Pascagoula.”

“Deltana will not bid.”

“Deltana never bids. Deltana pulls documents so the bonding company sees them pulling documents.” He pushed the glasses higher. “You sleep?”

“Some.”

“That is a no.”

What was I supposed to say back? Rollie Thibault has watched me lie for twelve years and he has never once said the word out loud, which is its own kind of love.

I had the estimate open on the second screen. Two hundred and eleven million and change, and the change is the part that keeps you up nights. Berth fourteen wanted a thousand feet of new quay wall, a dredge to forty seven feet, two crane rails, and the kind of soil work you do when the ground under you is not really ground. It is the Mobile River thinking about becoming ground.

I had written that number the way I write every number. Which is to say I had written it down.

Did I believe the number? What would believing a number even feel like in a body? Nobody could have told you at seven forty in the morning, and I have not improved much in the years after.

“Board wants it under two twenty,” Deuce said.

“Board wants a lot of things.”

“Board wants you on the fourth floor too, if you would quit pretending otherwise.”

So there was the want, handed to me at seven forty in the morning by a man who had not been asked. That is the only reason the rest of it came out of my mouth at all.

At eleven I walked up one flight and asked Gil Ammons for the job.

Gil is sixty three, white, pink in the face, a man who has run this port for nine years on charm and a very good memory for first names. He keeps a model container ship on the credenza and a photograph of himself with two governors, one of whom went to prison. He let me say the whole thing. I had rehearsed the whole thing. Eleven years, two expansions, the Tenn Tom rebuild, the intermodal yard, no change order over four percent on anything I have ever signed.

“Letty,” he said, when I ran out. “You are the best engineer this port has had since Thel Sanceau, and I will say so in a room full of people.”

“But.”

“But a director has to stand up in front of a board of commissioners and tell them what she believes.” He smiled at me. He was not being cruel. That is the part I still cannot get past. “You tell them what is true. The two are not the same animal.”

I said thank you. I said I appreciated the candor. I walked back down one flight and sat in my chair and looked at nine cranes, and something in my chest went from warm to cold fast enough to hurt, the way a tooth hurts on ice.

He was right. Why did that land the way it landed, from a pink faced man with a model boat? Because he was right. That is what I could not put down. He was right, and he did not even know he was reading my chart.

I signed the draft transmittal on the estimate at eleven twenty six that morning, two hundred and eleven million and change, the version that was supposed to go final by the end of the week. Eleven seconds, start to finish. I timed it later off the door camera, because by then I had become the kind of woman who goes and finds the footage.

I signed it in eleven seconds, and I have had eleven years to think about how fast eleven seconds is.

* * *

Sonny called at eight that night. He does not text. He has never texted me in six years.

“You eat?”

“I ate.”

“You did not eat.”

I was standing in my kitchen with the light off, looking at the clean board where the iron used to live, and I heard myself laugh. “What are you, my mother?”

“Your mother would have fed you.” A pause with water in it, that hollow knock a hull makes against a fender. “I am at the slip. Come see about me.”

I will be plain. There is no point in any of this if I am going to be delicate.

I wanted him. I had wanted him since a Tuesday in September six years earlier, when he came up the gangway of a dredge with a wrench in his back pocket and told me, in front of four men, that my survey was wrong. My survey was wrong. I checked it that night, hating him, and it was off by four feet, and I have wanted him ever since the way you want water.

And I had never once let him stay until morning.

I drove down to Choctaw Point with my hair still tied and my boots in the passenger seat and my whole chest going like a bird in a bag. The entire twenty minutes I told myself I was going to say the thing. The errand was simple: say my name in front of somebody. Anybody. One time, out loud, where a third human being could hear the sound.

So why did I never say the words? Six years of driving down to that slip and not one time. I did not say the thing. I never say the thing. Anybody who asks me why gets I do not know, and then gets to watch me rub the scar on the back of my right hand with my thumb, which is the real answer.

The Marie Odette is forty two feet of steel crew boat, white gone grey, tied at the far end of the slip past the fuel dock where the yard lights do not quite reach. Ninth of February. My badge went through the reader at the head of the slip at eight forty. I know the date because of what I did the next morning, and I will get to the next morning.

He had the wheelhouse warm and the radar on for no reason on this earth, the sweep going around and around, painting the same three barges green.

“Why do you have the radar running.”

“Because I like the sweep.” The gold tooth. “Nobody looks at a boat that is already tied up, Letty.”

I have turned that sentence over so many times since that I have worn the letters off the words.

He kissed me standing up, one hand flat on the small of my back and the other still on the throttle housing, like a man who might need a handhold. I got my hands inside his coat. He smelled like diesel and cedar and the inside of a cold day.

“Say something,” I said, against his mouth.

“Say what.”

“Anything. Say you want me.”

“I want you.” He said it plain, with no performance in the words, which is the thing about Sonny Lachaise that has always undone me. “I have wanted you since you had that clipboard.”

“You are a liar.”

“I am a liar about plenty. Not about you.”

I pushed the coffee out of the way, the red Community tin, and it went over on its side and rolled against the window ledge and stopped. Neither of us reached for the tin. That tin comes back.

I got my shoe off. One shoe. It went under the chart table and I did not find the thing again for two days.

He put his mouth on my neck and said something filthy and unrepeatable, and I laughed so hard I had to put my forehead on his shoulder. That is the part nobody tells you about wanting a man for six years. You laugh. He says the worst sentence you have ever heard and you are laughing into your own hand with your dress up around your hips.

“You are going to break my radar,” he said.

“Then turn it off.”

“No.”

I got his belt. He got his hand on my pussy, and I was already so wet it embarrassed me, and I said as much. He said good. I told him not to say good in that voice. He said it again anyway, slower.

“Tell me what you want.”

“You know what I want.”

“I want you to say the words.” He had stopped. He had actually stopped, with his hand right there, the obstinate man, the sweep going around and around and lighting half his face green. “Say it, Letty.”

There is a woman who lives in me who cannot ask for a raise. She cannot ask a man to stay till morning. She cannot say the words I think out loud in a room with a table.

She is not the woman in that wheelhouse.

“I want your dick,” I said. “Right now, standing up, and I do not want you polite.”

He laughed. He put his forehead against mine and laughed and said Lord have mercy, and then he was not laughing anymore.

I ran that room. I have read enough of these to know how they get written, and it is always the man doing and the woman receiving. I turned him around. I put him against the bulkhead with the chart drawer handle digging into my hip, and I got his belt out of the loops. His jeans down and his dick in my hand before he had the sense to say one word about it.

“Letty.”

“Hush.”

His dick was hard and warm, and I had not had that particular weight in my palm since before Christmas. I took my time with it while a grown man held on to a throttle housing and breathed like a swimmer. He got my dress the rest of the way down and had my titties in both hands and could not decide what to do with either one of us.

Then I put my back against the chart table and pulled his dick into me, and he filled me up in one go. I heard a sound come out of my own mouth that I have never made anywhere else on this earth.

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

“Fuck,” I said.

“Again.”

“Fuck. Do not stop.”

He did not stop. He had one hand spread on my ass holding me up off the edge of that table and the other in my hair at the root. I had my heels locked behind him, and when he tried to slow it down I told him no. He said yes ma’am. I laughed again right in the middle of it, with his mouth on my tits and my dress up around my waist, which I had not known a person could manage.

Somewhere in there I caught my own face in the black glass of the wheelhouse window. Forty seven years old. Mouth open. My hair half out of its tie and pushed flat on one side from the bulkhead. A woman who ten hours earlier had been told she could not say what she believed, with her tongue in a man’s mouth on a boat at the end of a slip, giving orders and being obeyed.

I remember thinking, and I am not proud of the thought: this is the only room in the world where I am in charge.

After, I sat on the bench in my slip with my knees up and the heater ticking. He put his coat over my shoulders and stayed quiet a while, which is the other reason I kept coming back.

“Stay,” he said.

“I have a seven o’clock.”

“You always have a seven o’clock.”

“I always have a seven o’clock.” I found my other shoe with my foot and could not find the first one. “Sonny.”

“Letty.”

The lights out on the terminal were doing what terminal lights do, that sodium orange that turns everything one color. Past the fuel dock there was a row of boxes stacked three high on the apron, and I had looked at that apron ten thousand times in my life without once seeing that apron.

Sixty feet. Not even that far.

“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing. I have to go.”

He walked me down the gangway and kissed my hand at the bottom like a fool. I drove home with one shoe on the floorboard and the window down in February, and I was happy.

I was happy. That is the sentence I cannot get all the way out of my mouth in front of a jury.

At eleven minutes past nine that same night, by the gate log, while I had my back against that chart table, a man named Boot Pellerin badged through the apron gate, unlocked a box on that apron and saw what was inside. He never told a living soul what was in it, not in thirty two days. Then on the thirteenth of March somebody put four rounds through him in the Belt Line yard while my brother watched from a crane cab a hundred and ten feet up.

I did not know any of that on the tenth of February. On the tenth of February I came in at seven, and my daughter brought up a message slip from Thelma Sanceau, who taught me everything I know, who calls me the first Tuesday of every February, and who had never in eleven years called me twice.