The Siding Agreement

He had my blouse open to the third button and one hand flat on my chest in a dispatcher’s room over my own yard office, and I was fifty-eight years old and holding on to the desk.

Antonina Wysocki. I own the Erie Valley Railroad, twenty-two miles, start to finish, from the bayfront out past Wesleyville to a chemical terminal at the far end of the Kane Street lead. I have owned it since I was twenty-nine years old and eleven men carried my husband up off that lead in a tarp. I buried Walt Wysocki on the Saturday, called the roll myself on the Monday, and since that Monday I have not had one hour of my own life. That is the bill and it gets said once. I have made payroll in 2009 and in 2020. I can read a waybill upside down across a desk. And on a Monday night in mid-October I had a conductor’s hand inside a four hundred dollar blouse, and my mouth was open on nothing.

He had come up to drop a delay report he could have left in a shanty.

I started the whole thing. He was standin’ at the counter with his coat still on, writing in that terrible square printing men learn in a yard. I said his name. He looked up and he did not look away, and that is all it took. Eleven years of men finding a spot over my left shoulder, and this one held my eyes, and my voice came out flat and ordinary.

“Gerard.”

“Ma’am.”

“Do not do the ma’am.”

“What should I do instead?”

“Try my name.”

“Toni.”

“There is my name.”

Then I did not say anything, and he did not either. The window unit was tickin’. The yard lights were on out past the glass. The silence went about four seconds past what two people can call an accident, and both of us let the silence sit.

“I own twenty-two miles of this town,” I said, “and nobody has put a hand on me in eleven years. Tell me what you see. Use the words.”

He took the coat off.

He took his time with it. He did not cross the room while he was doing it. He hung the coat on the back of the chair and turned the lining in toward the wall, then squared the shoulders on the chair back like a man puttin’ a coat away in his own house.

“Is my chair not good enough for the coat?”

“It is cold in here.”

“It is eighty degrees in here.”

“Then I am particular,” he said, and came across the room.

The first thing he did was take my glasses out of my hair. I did not know the glasses were up there. They are always up there. He folded them and set them on the desk by the car count, and then he had both hands on the sides of my face.

“You come into that yard at six in the morning in a burgundy satin blouse,” he said. “Every man down there has an opinion. Not one of them has the nerve.”

“And you?”

“I have got the opinion.”

“Say the words.”

“You want the nice version.”

“I have had the nice version. The nice version is a man tellin’ me I am holdin’ up well.”

He laughed down in his chest. Then he put his mouth under my ear.

“August,” he said. “You pulled up on the Kane lead and put your arm out the truck window and told Earl to shove four and tie three. You had your sleeves rolled. I stood on the ground with my hand on your sill and thought about puttin’ my mouth on the inside of your arm.”

“That is the nice version wearing a hat.”

“I am not finished. Then I thought about what you would sound like. All week. One night I was out at the far end of the lead with a lantern, and I stood there with my hand down the front of my pants like a kid, thinkin’ about your mouth and that blouse and what you would say if I ever got your legs open.”

I made a noise against his shoulder I have not made out loud since the Clinton administration.

“Say the last part again.”

“Which part.”

“The part where you were out on my railroad with your hand down your pants.”

“I was out on your railroad with my hand down my pants,” he said. “On your gravel. Lookin’ up at your office light.”

“Mm.”

“You liked hearing that.”

“Liked is the wrong word. I am going to have it framed.”

He got the blouse open the rest of the way one-handed, which no man has ever managed, and took the weight of my tits in his hands the way a person picks a thing up to know what it weighs.

“Jesus.”

“That is not a word.”

“It is the only one I have got right this second.”

“Find another.”

“All right.” He put his mouth on me and talked into my skin, which does not work, and he did it anyway. “Heavy. You are heavy and warm. I have been lookin’ at the shape of these through a coat since my first week here, and twice I have had to turn around and walk down the track.”

“Twice.”

“Four times.”

“Gerard.”

“Every day,” he said. “Every single day since the fourth of August. Today you had the top two buttons open and I had to go sit in the shanty.”

He got the blouse down off my shoulders to my elbows so my arms were caught in my own sleeves. That was not an accident either. He stood back about six inches and looked at me with the yard lights comin’ through the blind in stripes, and he looked for a long time.

“Say something.”

“I am looking.”

“Look out loud.”

“You have got a body you keep,” he said. “Somebody who does not know you would call that lucky. Lucky is wrong. You get up before anybody in this county is awake and you go do somethin’ about it, and you do it for nobody. Standin’ here lookin’ at you with your arms stuck in your sleeves is the best thing that has happened to me in four years.”

“That is not filthy.”

“I have not got to filthy. Do you want filthy or do you want true.”

“Both. In that order.”

So he gave me filthy. He was good at it and he was specific and he did not use one word a woman has to translate. He told me what he wanted in my mouth. He told me what he wanted to do after my mouth, and how long he intended to take over it, and he said the word for what he wanted between my legs the way a man names a room in his own house. I stood there with my arms pinned in my sleeves and let him say all of it about a body I have kept on purpose for nobody since 2015.

I swim at the Y at five in the morning. I have not had a cigarette since Walt died. I spend two hundred and twenty dollars every three weeks on this hair and I have never once been asked to the kind of dinner where it would matter. Everything in me that had been standin’ in line for eleven years came up to the window at once.

Why was I not ashamed of myself? Standin’ in a work building with my blouse off and a man on my payroll telling me what my mouth was for, and the only thing moving in me was gratitude. A woman is supposed to feel something else there. I waited for the something else and it did not come.

“Ask me somethin’,” I said.

“Like what.”

“Anything. I want to hear you talk while your hands are on me.”

“When was the last time.”

“Ask me something else.”

“You said anything.”

“June of 2015,” I said. “A lawyer out of Pittsburgh who came up for the arbitration and went home on a Sunday.”

“Was he good?”

“He was in a hurry.”

“And after him?”

“After him I ran a railroad.”

“That is a long time to be careful.”

“Careful is the wrong word too. There is nobody. Every man down in that yard works for me, which is a door that does not open. Every man at the Jefferson dinner is married or scared of me, and usually both at once. The truth of it is I am not hard to get. I am hard to reach.”

“I reached you.”

“You walked up an iron staircase with a piece of paper.”

“Toni.”

“What.”

“Your hands are shakin’.”

“Do not discuss my hands.”

“I am not discussin’ them. I am enjoyin’ them.”

“You are enjoyin’ yourself quite a bit for a man on eleven dollars over scale.”

“Twelve.”

“Eleven. I sign the payroll.”

He went down on his knees in front of that desk, and a railroad man’s knees do not do it quietly. His hit the floor like a dropped toolbox. He got my skirt up over my hips, put his mouth on the inside of my thigh, and stopped there and looked up.

“Do you want me to ask?”

“If you ask I will say somethin’ smart and ruin the whole thing.”

“Then I am askin’.”

“Ask.”

“Can I put my mouth on your pussy,” he said, plain as asking for the salt, and my hand was already on the back of his head and I said yes before he got to the end of the sentence.

And then the head does not stop. Nobody warns a woman about the head. His mouth was on me on the floor of a room where I have called sixty thousand train movements, and I was on a Tuesday in March in 1997, standin’ in a black dress on wet gravel, callin’ the roll in front of eleven men who were waiting for me to cry. I have never once got this building apart from that morning. Then he did something with his tongue, and for about nine seconds I was not in 1997 and I was not anywhere at all.

Nine seconds. Eleven years for nine seconds, and I would have signed the paper.

“Do not stop.”

“Say the words.”

“Do not stop, do not get clever, stay right there.”

He stayed right there. He got one arm up across my hips to hold me down against the desk edge, because I had started to get away from him. He said something into me that I felt more than heard. I came with one hand flat on the car count and the other in his hair, and my glasses went off the desk onto the floor.

He stayed down a second with his forehead on my leg.

“You all right?”

“Get up here.”

“In a minute.”

“Gerard.”

“Give me a minute,” he said. “I want to remember the room.”

Which is a line. I knew the line for a line while he was saying it, and I put both hands over my face anyway.

When he did come up I got his belt open and my hand around his cock, and he put his forehead down on mine and swore, and the swearing was not for my benefit.

“Tell me what you want.”

“I want you to keep doin’ that. Then I want to get on the floor with you.”

“That floor is filthy.”

“I know.”

“I have had this skirt three years.”

“Toni.”

“Take your shirt off,” I said. “If I am goin’ on that floor, give me a view.”

He laughed and took the shirt off. He is thirty-eight, goin’ soft through the middle, with a yard man’s arms on him. I put both hands flat on his chest and pushed him down onto his own coat, which was the only clean thing in the room.

I got over him. I took my time. He had his hands on my hips and he watched my face the whole way down, and he kept talking, and one man who talks is worth four quiet ones.

“There is the woman.”

“Hush.”

“No, ma’am.”

“I will fire you.”

“Fire me,” he said, and came up off the floor into me, and I stopped talking for a minute.

It was not quick. That part I did not expect, and that part got expensive later. He was not in a hurry and he was not performing. He asked questions the whole way through and I answered every one of them out loud.

“That all right?”

“Harder.”

“Like this.”

“Yes.”

“Say the word.”

“Just like that, do not change one thing.”

“You are gonna have to be quieter.”

“This is my building.”

“Earl comes in at one.”

“Then Earl can learn somethin’,” I said, and he laughed, and I came on him laughing, which I did not know was still available to a woman my age. He came about forty seconds behind me, with his hands tight enough on my hips to leave a mark I found two days later in a mirror and did not mind one bit.

Afterward he lay on his back on his coat, and I sat on the floor with my spine against the desk and my blouse pulled round me.

“God, you are fun,” he said.

Nobody has called me fun since 1996. I was glad, on a dirty floor, in a work building, at fifty-eight, and I am not going to pretend otherwise at this hour of my life.

There was a burn on the inside of his right wrist. Round, the size of a dime, old, white in the middle. I put my thumb on the burn.

“What is this from.”

“Stove.”

“Mm.”

“Toni.”

“What.”

“You are gonna want me to say somethin’ right now and I am no good at speeches.”

“I do not want you to say anything.”

“All right.”

“I want my glasses, and I want you gone before Earl brings the local in. Earl talks.”

He got up. He picked the glasses up off the floor and set them on the desk. Then he reached over and put his hand flat over the switch on the lamp, not the lamp, the switch, the way a man does with a lamp he has turned off before.

“You want this off?”

“Leave the lamp.”

He took the coat up off the floor, shook it out, put it on, and went down the iron stairs on the outside of the building. I heard every step. Then I heard the gate.

I sat there another minute, pleased with myself, which I will not pretend otherwise about at this hour.

Then I buttoned up, fixed my face in the glass of the train sheet frame, and went down and did the thing I do every night of my life, which is walk the yard before I go home.

It had rained and quit. The air off the water was comin’ in cold the way it does in mid-October, lake effect sittin’ on the east side, nothin’ at all out at the airport. The rail was shinin’ under the lights the whole way to the Kane Street lead. I took the big light out of the truck. I walked the ladder, the house track, the two behind the transload where we keep the ties.

Then I walked out the lead to the Kane Street siding, because I always do, and I counted.

Three cars. There are three cars on that siding. There have been three cars on that siding since the spring of 2022, because Bayfront holds three and they go out on a Wednesday.

I counted eleven.

Eleven black tank cars standin’ nose to tail in the dark, placarded, loaded, sittin’ dead on my iron four hundred feet from the back porches on Kane Street where people were watchin’ television. I walked the string with the light on the reporting marks. I know those numbers. I bill those numbers. Four of them had been standin’ on my property since the last week of September, and my signature is on the paper that says otherwise.

There was a man between the seventh and the eighth.

Not one of mine. I know every man with a reason to be on this property at that hour and I know what they wear. This was a quilted vest and clean boots, and he was standin’ in the dark between two loaded cars with no light on him, not working, not going anywhere.

He turned when my light got to him. He did not put a hand up against the light. He let it sit on his face.

“Evenin’, Mrs. Wysocki,” he said.

And he walked off down between the cars, unhurried, like a man leaving a room he had paid for. I stood on my own gravel with a flashlight in my hand and my blouse buttoned wrong and did not say one word.

I was scared. Not of him, particularly. Of the arithmetic: eleven cars on a siding that holds three, a stranger comfortable on my property in the dark, my own name on every piece of paper between the two. My stomach dropped about four inches and stayed down there.