Chapter 7 — First Dock
They smelled the dock before they saw it: diesel, low tide, fried something, the sour of pilings that had been standing in the same water since before Elias had a license.
He was beside himself. A seized pump had given him an excuse to tie up and walk on land, which he treated like a holiday he had not earned and was going to take anyway.
He talked the *Merrily* into the slip the way he talked her everywhere, hands light, voice low, a running apology and love letter to the pilings.
“Easy, girl. Easy. That’s my beauty. Cole, toss that spring. Mara—look at the light on the sheds. That’s harbor gold. I want you to see a town that still has fish in it.”
Mara saw the sheds. She also saw the two men on the fuel dock with a crate of tools and the particular patience of people who got paid when something broke.
One was older, burned dark, a welder’s squint.
The other was younger and already looking at the yellow dress the way Ben had looked at it before he had permission.
Cole stepped onto the dock first. He spoke to them the way he spoke about weather.
“Pump’s aft of the engine. Captain’s going up to the chandler for gaskets. Wife’s aboard. She’s part of the hospitality if you want it. Don’t leave her where he can see it from the lot and don’t put marks on her face.”
The older one looked at Cole, then at Mara on the rail, then at the wheelhouse where Elias was humming while he tied his own bowline because he did not trust anyone else to love a knot enough.
“That the captain’s wife?”
“That’s her.”
“And he’s walking to town.”
“He’s walking to town,” Cole said. “He’ll be forty minutes if the chandler talks. An hour if they have coffee. You want the work and the courtesy, you get both. You want just the pump, you get just the pump. I’m not selling tickets.”
The younger one laughed once, disbelieving, and then stopped laughing when Mara didn’t correct any of it.
She stood in the yellow and felt the dock move under a boat that was no longer moving, a strange double stillness.
Lila, on the bow, whipped a line and did not look over.
Nia was already off down the boards toward a produce stall with a net bag, which was Nia’s way of not being a witness she would then have to store.
Elias dropped onto the dock, kissed the air beside Mara’s ear, and pointed at a painted advertisement for motor oil on the shed wall as if it were a chapel window.
“Parts and coffee. You stay. Mind the men. They’re good boys, these harbor rats. Shout if you need me. I’ll hear you from the corner.”
He would not hear her from the corner. He was already walking, hands in his pockets, in love with a town he had known for eleven minutes.
Cole jerked his chin aft. “Crates. Stay behind them until he’s past the ice house.”
Mara went.
The aft deck was a pocket of shade and coil and the stack of supply crates that had been waiting on this stop.
The pump squatted on its bolts, seized exactly as advertised.
The older repairman set his crate down, pulled on work gloves that were already black in the creases, and looked at her the way he had looked at the pump: a job with a sequence.
“You sure?” he said, not unkind. Last door.
“I’m sure.”
“Name’s Harlan, he said.”
“Mara.”
“Mara.” He glanced at the younger one. “Gloves stay on. I don’t need the captain smelling my skin on his wife. You want her mouth or you want to fuck.”
“Mouth,” the younger said, hoarse already.
“Then get it. I’ll take the rest. We switch if there’s time.”
They did not undress her so much as move the dress.
The younger one backed up to the crate stack, unzipped, and put a gloved hand in her hair.
The leather was hot and coarse and smelled like gasoline.
He pulled her down by that handful and she went to her knees on the deck plates with the harbor going on ten feet away: a radio, a gull, a man shouting about ice.
She opened and took him, sloppy the way Ruiz had taught her sloppy, spit immediately, the glove tightening when she went deep enough to make the wet choked sound the engine room had covered and this dock would not.
“Jesus Christ,” the younger one whispered. “She’s—look at her.”
“I see her.” The older one was behind her, gloves on her hips, rucking the yellow to her waist.
He dragged a leather thumb through her, grunted at what he found, and shoved in with the unceremonious seat of a man who had a pump to pull when he was done.
The gloves made it stranger: no skin, only heat and grain and the creak of the cuff against her ass.
He fucked her in short dockside strokes, eyes on the gangway over her back, and every time a voice rose on the boards he slowed without coming out.
Mara drooled around the younger one onto the deck between her knees.
A puddle started there, spit and the leak of her, catching sun when the stack’s shadow moved.
The glove in her hair used her face. The gloves on her hips used the rest.
She was a courtesy stop on a fuel dock, and the fact of it sat in her gut like a swallowed stone that had turned out to be warm.
They switched when the younger one said he was going to finish if he didn’t.
The older one pulled out of her, wet to the wrist of the glove, and walked around to her face while the younger scrambled behind and pushed in on a groan he bit off on his own wrist.
The older one slapped the slick head of his cock on her tongue.
“Open. Eyes up. Don’t you get shy on a dock.”
She looked up. Harbor light. A square of sky.
His squint. He fed her the taste of her own cunt on leather-slick skin and used her throat with more patience than the boy, which was worse, because patience lasted.
Spit sheeted off her chin into the puddle.
Behind her the younger one found a rhythm that made the crate stack tick against a cleat.
Cole passed the end of the crates, glanced in, counted bodies, and passed again. A first mate checking a line.
“Twenty minutes if he got coffee,” Cole said to the air. “Finish on her face if you’re going to finish. He notices clothes. He doesn’t notice skin.”
The older one pulled out of her mouth, fist working, and came across her lips and her cheek and the bridge of her nose in two thick ropes she had to blink through.
He held her jaw and put the last of it on her tongue and said, “Stay.”
The younger one hauled out of her, spun her by the hair with the glove still on, and painted her mouth over the first man’s come, shaking, cursing the dock and God and the captain who had walked to town.
It ran. It all ran. It found her chin and then the puddle and then her knees.
They zipped. They left the gloves on. The older one picked up a wrench like a man picking up a sentence he had dropped.
“Pump,” he said.
“Pump,” the younger agreed, wrecked.
They stepped around her. Mara stayed kneeling because her legs had not been consulted.
The puddle under her was obscene in the daylight, a little harbor of its own.
She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist and only made the shine wider.
The yellow dress hung off one shoulder. Her knees were printed with the pattern of the deck plate, raw already, the kind of raw a man might ask about if he were the kind of man who asked.
Elias whistled up the boards.
She knew the whistle. It was the one he used when a street had pleased him. Cole’s voice met him at the gangway, calm, something about the pump being further along than expected. Elias laughed. His boots hit the deck.
Mara was still behind the crates. She stood. The puddle stayed. She pulled the dress up and over the wet on her chest, which wicked through immediately in two pale maps. She stepped out into the open aft as if she had been watching the work.
Elias had a paper sack and a grease-thumbprint already on his cheek from some handshake in town. He lit up when he saw her.
“There she is. You have to go back to that chandler with me next time. They had a whole wall of old brass. I almost bought you a bell. Then I thought, she has a boat, what does she want with a bell.”
He crossed to her, kissed her temple, and put his clean mouth very close to the streak the rag of her wrist had not quite lifted off her hairline.
“Parts were cheaper than I thought. Can you believe it? I budgeted like a pessimist and the world was kind. That’s a sign. That’s a run telling you it’s a run.”
He did not look at her knees.
He did not look at the puddle in the shadow of the crates.
He did not look at the two repairmen, who had the pump housing off with the pious concentration of men who were now actually working.
“You all right? You’re flushed. Harbor air’s different. Thicker. I always forget.” He squeezed her waist. “I missed you. Forty minutes and I missed you. Don’t tell the men, they’ll think I’ve gone soft.”
“You’re soft,” Mara said.
He thought that was darling. He laughed, and called to the repairmen, “Treat her like she’s mine, boys. She’s the reason this boat looks like a holiday.”
The older one tipped his cap without looking up from the bolt. “Yes, Cap.”
The younger one tipped his a beat later, ears red, and said, “Ma’am,” to a point past Mara’s shoulder.
Elias beamed. He was a man whose wife had been respected by tradesmen. He took his paper sack toward the wheelhouse to put the gaskets where gaskets lived, humming the hymn of a cheap part.
Cole watched him go. Then he looked at Mara’s knees, at the shine, at the puddle.
“Rinse the deck before Nia sees the shape of it and makes it a sermon,” he said. “Or don’t. Your courtesy. They’ll be an hour on the pump. You want more, you stay aft. You want the rail, take the rail. He’ll be in the glass telling the harbor it did a good job.”
Mara got the hose.
She washed the puddle into the scupper and watched it become harbor.
The raw on her knees stung when the salt water found it.
She left the maps on the dress. She left the streak at her hairline.
When she coiled the hose the older repairman glanced over the pump and nodded once, a tradesman’s thanks, and went back to a seized thing that was, at last, the reason they were here.
Lila came aft with a billing chock, saw the knees, saw the dress, and stepped over the wet place as if it were any other wet place.
“Land agrees with you,” Lila said.
“Land didn’t touch me.”
“Land’s hands did.” Lila set the chock. “Next port will be worse. Word moves down a coast faster than weather. You still asking?”
Mara looked at the gangway, at the lot where her husband had walked, at the two capped heads bent over his pump.
“I’m asking.”
“Then you’re going to have a busy run.” Lila’s almost-smile. “Go stand where he can see you from the glass and look like luck. That’s the job he understands.”
Mara went to the rail.
Elias appeared in the wheelhouse window as if summoned, paper cup in hand, and pointed at her, then at the sheds, then at the sky, narrating a beauty she could not hear and did not need to.
He waved. She waved. The yellow dress stuck to her in the harbor wind and advertised every mouth and glove that had just been on her to anyone on the dock who knew how to read, and to one man aloft who did not.
The repairmen finished the pump. They packed the crate. On the way down the gangway they waited for Elias, who had come down to press money on them and thank them by name he had not asked for.
They tipped their caps to him.
“Good boat,” the older one said.
“Good wife,” said the younger, and then looked like he might die of it.
Elias, radiant, took both as the same compliment.
“Don’t I know it,” he said, and put his arm around Mara’s waist, over the bruise, over the dress that was still drying in the shape of other men, and squeezed. “Don’t I know it.”
The *Merrily* took on fuel and water and a pump that would work until the next thing didn’t. Elias started the engine as if starting a hymn. Behind them the dock receded, and with it two men who already knew her name, and ahead of them a coast that would know it soon enough.
Mara stood under her husband’s arm and watched the sheds go small, her knees raw, her mouth used, her luck intact as far as he was concerned.
She did not tell him the parts were not the only thing that had come cheap.