Dray (3 page)

Chapter 4

Dray

Fog was rare in August, but along the coast, the weather could change abruptly and while it had been triple digits the day before, the morning was starting out pretty damn cold. Of course, daylight was still a few hours off.

I pulled my beanie down over my head and zipped up my jacket. An opaque shroud of mist circled the houseboat. It would be even thicker down at the docks.

I dipped my chin down to avoid the salty, cold air and headed to the car. My steel toed boots kicked up puffs of fog from the brittle wood planks of the dock as I trudged toward the parking lot. My legs and head felt like lead. I’d been up half the night nursing a bottle of whiskey and trying to forget the fact that I’d fucked up the only good thing in my life. When the alarm had gone off it felt as if my head had exploded. Now I’d suffer for it the rest of the day.

Charlie, the old guy who lived three boats down, appeared through the mist with his tiny but extremely vicious Chihuahua, Pete. Nix and I had nicknamed the dog Piranha Pete because it would come after your heels with a snapping jaw of sharp teeth. Charlie was usually out on the docks before dawn because he claimed to have insomnia. I was inclined to believe that it had more to do with the three hour deck chair nap he took every afternoon.

“On your way to the docks, eh?” The dog lifted on its back feet and strained against the collar around its neck. It was hard to believe an eight pound dog could snarl like a rabid hyena. Charlie pulled once on the leash, and Pete fell back onto all fours still growling and gnashing his teeth at me.

“Yep, vacation is over, and it’s back to work. I hope. Well, have a good day.”

“Don’t drop any big boxes on your toes and remember to lift with your knees.” It was something he said to me every morning. He’d somehow come to conclusion that a bunch of us lifted the giant shipping containers onto ships with just our shoulders and our guts.

***

My head still hurt from the whiskey as I pulled my beanie low and headed out to the dock. During the drive to the dispatch hall, I’d tried over and over again to lift the weight of heartbreak from my chest. I’d never completely recovered from the first time Cassie had left, and now she was leaving for good. I had to push the darkness from my head. There were a lot of jobs on the board this morning, and I’d gotten a spot as a lasher on the ship. I’d be thirty feet up in the air with just a lashing bar and my wits, and I needed both to make it through the shift in one piece.

The crane engine had heated the moist air hovering over the port, and the fog had all but vanished. The ship’s massive bow jutted over the dock dwarfing everything in sight. It was stocked high with cargo, which assured me at least three days work. I would be stuck working up on the containers with Bill, a guy with the nickname Blackbeard. Bill had earned a place at the top of my shit list the moment I’d met him. A few days into working with the guy and I’d concluded that he’d come up with his formidable nickname on his own. His scraggly beard was black and that was about the only thing he had in common with the pirate. The guy was more fluff than muscle, but he insisted on constantly challenging me to fight, which I’d never taken him up on because he was a card carrying casual and I was a worthless grunt. Even though he outweighed me by a good fifty pounds, I had no doubt I would nail his sorry ass to the ground in a match. Of course, he took my refusal to fight as a sign of cowardice on my part.

Bill’s irritating whistle shot up the gangplank but I didn’t turn back. “Hey, Mini mouse!”

His nickname for me had really helped propel him up to the top of my list.

His heavy boots pounded the plank. His stale breath reached me first. I scowled over at him. “Jeez, what do you use for mouthwash— sewage?”

“Fuck you, Mini. So when are we going to step into the cage together?”

“I told you— come out to Tank’s Gym on fight night, and you and I can go toe to toe. They even have a special weight class for guys like you. It’s called the marshmallow division.”

He smacked my shoulder, and I nearly dropped my lashing bar. “We’ll see who the marshmallow is out here.”

He walked out ahead of me, and we climbed up the thirty plus feet to the catwalk that spanned the space between containers. The early morning fog had condensed to a slippery layer of saltwater that made every step dangerous.

When the cargo was stacked high enough, you could see so far it felt as if you could just reach out and touch the horizon. I felt like a meaningless speck of dust standing on the giant puzzle of containers. An ocean breeze carried the harsh smell of oil and sulfur over the busy port. I’d actually grown to like the smell.

Bill and I worked at opposite ends using our bars to loosen the turnbuckles that locked the lashing bars into place. We would spend the day doing the exact same work, but he would earn three times the wages. The only way to move up on the pay scale was to gather hours and earn an identification card. But gathering hours had not been easy. I was glad to have three days of steady work ahead of me.

When the weather was decent like today, it wasn’t altogether awful working as a lasher. But when a storm of rain and wind blew through the port, it seemed that every step could be your last. The first few times I’d climbed up to the catwalk, I’d realized that I had more than a casual fear of heights. It had taken me months to get over it, but I still avoided looking straight down. From up top, the narrow gaps of deck that could be seen between the stacks looked miles away. It wasn’t a job that you could daydream or get lost in your thoughts on, and today, I was grateful to have my mind occupied.

My gloves were never enough protection from the rough, rusty lashing bar, and within an hour I could feel painful blisters forming on my palms. A week hanging out at the beach had turned me soft, and I was going to feel the work tonight. Still, I couldn’t skip another workout at Tank’s or pretty soon, my pillowy pirate friend
would
be able to take me down.

Bill had an irritating habit of singing old rock and roll songs, loud and off key, while he worked. I pulled the beanie down over my ears, but it did nothing to drown out the noise.

A few bars into ‘Crazy Train’ he stopped his squawking and yelled to me across the top of the container. “Did I tell you that I’m proposing to my little lady this weekend?”

I’d seen pictures of his little lady and she was neither little nor a lady, but it seemed that everyone, even some dick who called himself Blackbeard and referred to his girlfriend as a little lady, had someone. My state of loneliness had really gotten to me since Nix and Clutch had found serious girlfriends. I could ease some of the feelings of destitution by hanging out with Barrett. Chicks flocked to him and we’d had some ridiculously good times together, but now that Cassie was moving to New York, I felt the loneliness deep down in my bones.

“That’s great,” I said unenthusiastically.

“Yep, bought a nice big rock. Going to propose to her down at our favorite biker bar.”

“Sounds sweet— like her.” The guy never caught on to my sarcasm, which almost took the fun out of it.

Bill lifted his round, ruddy face to the sky and bellowed out another line of a song, but I wasn’t completely sure what the hell it was. As he crowed out some lyrics, he swung his lashing bar back around. It threw him slightly off balance, and his foot moved to the edge of the container and slid out from under him. I raced across to his side. My lashing bar flew out of my hand as I grabbed hold of his arm. I yanked him back with all my strength. His bar slammed down on my hand, and I sucked in a breath of pain. We landed hard on the top of the container but not nearly as hard as he would have landed thirty feet below.

My lashing bar clanged against the containers on its plummet down to the deck. Bill’s face was sheet white as he lay like a landed fish gasping for air. I held my throbbing hand against me as I pushed to my feet. The knuckles were already swelling as I pulled off my glove.

The dock boss yelled up to us with his megaphone. “Who the fuck dropped their lashing bar? You nearly hit a worker down here.”

I stared down at Bill. Color had returned to his face. He sat up and rubbed the back of his head. He looked over at the edge that he had nearly just fallen from and then he scowled up at me. “You don’t say a word about this you little weasel, understand?”

“That’s my lashing bar down there. I’m not taking the heat for this.”

His face darkened as he stood. “Yes you are, you clumsy, little grunt. I can’t get written up again. I’m the card holder. You’re worthless out here on the docks.”

“Except that I just saved your sorry ass from a painful death.”

His face reddened more. “Nope. You slipped and your bar went over the edge. That’s what happened, you got it?”

“Both of you get down here now.” Harcourt sounded angry enough to be shooting flames through the megaphone.

“I need your word, Grunt, or you will never earn your card out on these docks. I’ve got connections, and you’ll be finished out here.”

“Yeah, whatever.” I stared hard at him. “But next time, I’ll just let you fall.”

His thin lips twisted so tightly, they turned white.

Without another word we climbed onto the catwalk and down to the deck. I probably didn’t need to worry about Bill using his connections to end my career. I figured this incident would probably seal my fate anyhow.

Harcourt held up the lashing bar, and I stepped forward and took it with my uninjured hand. I kept the left hand hidden. Every injury out here was a mark against you, no matter how it happened. And I had no plans to spend the entire day waiting in the workman’s comp clinic.

The white megaphone swung at Harcourt’s side as we followed him in silence back to his office. His shoulders were stiff with anger as he reached for his door and swung it open. “Take off your caps and leave the bars outside.” The inside of his office always smelled like a mixture of briny mold and cheap cigars. His desk was a flurry of unorganized paperwork, and I wondered how he’d managed to land himself the cushy office job. He showed no signs of being worthy of it. His office chair squeaked in protest as he lowered his fat ass onto it.

Harcourt glared up at us with flared nostrils. His face was an unfortunate combination of small eyes and a big nose. The nose looked extra bulbous when he was pissed, which he was now.

Bill stood straight as a rod next to me, but it was obvious he was still shaken from his near death experience.

Harcourt looked at him. “You first. What happened up there?”

Bill’s scraggly black beard twitched on his chin as he seemed to be considering what lie to tell. “Don’t really know, Boss. I was just doing my job, and next thing I knew, Warner here, dropped his lashing bar over the side.”

Harcourt’s tiny, deep set eyes shrank even smaller as he stared at Bill. “His bar came over the bow side of the container. When I looked up there earlier, Warner was working on the stern end. Are you telling me his lashing bar flew across the entire length of the container before falling over the side?”

Bill scrunched his cap up tightly in his fingers. “He— he had walked over to talk to me about something.”

For a second, I had hope that Harcourt would see through the lie and my ass would be saved. He turned his attention to me. Bill looked over at me too with a look that assured me we were sticking to the plan.

“Well, Warner, is that what happened up there?”

I scowled at the idiot next to me and then looked back at Harcourt. “Something like that.”

Harcourt paused a second before motioning Bill out of his office with a wave of his hand. “And stop that caterwauling up there. You sound like a cat in heat,” Harcourt called to Bill as he walked out of the office.

Harcourt leaned back in his chair and stared at me. “You want to tell me what happened up there?”

“It was just like he said.”

His beady eyes shifted down to the hand I’d kept tucked in my sweatshirt pocket. “What’s wrong with your hand?”

“Nothing. Just smacked it on a cabinet this morning when I was reaching for cereal. It’s fine.”

He leaned forward and lifted his chin telling me to take it out.

Reluctantly, I pulled it out. The knuckles had swollen to twice their normal size. My phone rang in my pocket, and Harcourt’s nostrils flared again.

“You know you can’t take personal calls when you’re out on the dock.”

“It will go to voicemail. It’s just my dad. I’m all he has out here now.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard a lot of stories about your dad. He was a good longshoreman, but his temper kept him from advancing. I think you’d make a good longshoreman too, Warner. That’s why I’m so hard on you.” It was something I had never expected to hear coming from Harcourt.

“Well, Sir, if you’re going for the tough love approach, I can promise you that I’ve already had plenty of that in my life.”

“I can tell.” He looked pointedly at my swollen hand. “What concerns me is that you might have some of the same temper problem as your dad. Hotheads don’t do too well out here. Accidents happen when people lose their temper.”

“I didn’t lose my temper up there.”

“Those swollen knuckles tell me otherwise.”

I tucked the hand back into my pocket. The warmth felt good on my sore knuckles. “Told you that was an accident at home.”

“You’ll need to sign a paper that says the injury happened at home. Otherwise you’ll have to go to the clinic.”

“I’ll sign.”

His chair wheels scraped the floor as he scooted over to his file cabinet and fished out a release form. He scooted back to his desk and dropped the paper in front of me. “I’ll have to write you up for dropping your lashing bar. It won’t be good for your chances out here.”

My stomach seized up. More shit was flowing and it only seemed to get deeper and thicker. I picked up the pen and scribbled my name under a completely false statement.

“Unless you want to tell me what really happened up there?”

My face shot up. He looked at me expectantly. The truth was right there on my tongue but I held it. I shook my head.

He grunted as he reached across his desk and picked up the signed form. “You should see a doctor about that hand.” He was being unusually nice to me, and it made me nervous. He dropped the paper into one of several piles littering his desk and leaned back again. “I saw what happened up there. Bill is a clown, and it isn’t the first time I’ve seen him get careless. I’ve been out on these docks since I was your age, Warner. I know how the hierarchy works out here, and I know why you lied about the incident. Good work up there.”

I nodded and placed the beanie back on my head. I turned to leave but he stopped me.

“I won’t write you up, but I’m going to have to take you off the shift. The guys out there are going expect a punishment, and losing the hours is getting off easy.”

“But I need the hours.” I yanked the cap from my head.

“I’m sure you do. Take care of that hand while you’re off.”