Chapter 11 — Second Port, Open Gangway
The second dock was dirtier and did not pretend otherwise.
Fish scales on the boards. A crane with a limp. Sheds the color of old bruises. Elias loved it on sight. He took the *Merrily* in with his mouth slightly open, as if the town had arranged its ugliness for him personally.
“Look at that crane. That’s a working town. That’s a town that still bleeds. Mara, I want you to smell this place. That’s honest water.”
Mara smelled diesel and low tide and the ghost of the last hold that had been opened here.
She also saw the three men waiting at the foot of the crane: a welder with a burned forearm, shiny tight skin from wrist to elbow, and two stevedores built like the crates they moved, both already looking at the yellow dress the way men looked at a hatch they had been told was unlocked.
Cole met them on the boards before Elias had finished tying his own bowline.
Mara was close enough to hear it, the same weather-voice he had used on the first dock, except this time the men nodded before he was done. Word had come down the coast. Lila had said it would.
“Captain’s ashore. Office paperwork on the pump invoice from last port. Hour, maybe two if they find a pen. Wife’s the hospitality. Hold’s empty forward. You leave her walking. You don’t put anything on her he can see from the lot. You want it or you want to load ice.”
The welder looked up at Mara on the rail. His eyes were pale in a face that had been too near heat for too many years.
“That’s her.”
“That’s her.”
“Heard she asks.”
Cole’s mouth ticked. “She asked. She hasn’t stopped. Gangway’s open.”
Elias dropped onto the dock, squeezed Mara’s waist, and pointed at a window over a door that said OFFICE in peeling paint.
“Paperwork. I know. I hate it. I’ll be quick and I’ll bring you something. This town will have a thing. They always have a thing.” He kissed the air beside the braid. “Mind the loaders. Help Cole if he needs a count. You’re luck. Remind them.”
He went up the lot with his hands in his pockets, already making friends with a town that would not remember his name and would remember his wife’s.
Cole jerked his chin at the forward hatch.
The hold was a ribbed dark that smelled like old rope and older fish and the iron of the hull sweating. A coil of hawser sat in the shaft of light from the open hatch like a stage somebody had forgotten to dress. Cole left the hatch open. An open hatch was just a hatch. A closed one was a question.
“On the coil,” he said to Mara. “They’ve got forty minutes of ice to sling after. Don’t make a religion of the time. I’m on the deck.”
He went up the ladder. His boots crossed the hatch opening once, a shadow, and were gone.
The three of them looked at her in the yellow in the dirty light.
“Dress off,” the welder said, not unkind. “No sense ruining it if he’s going to come home and love it.”
She pulled it over her head and laid it on a dry crate. Nothing under it. The bruise on her hip had gone yellow at the edges, a week of hands. The rope bracelet on her wrists from the pipe was a ghost. The braid hung down her spine, Lila-tight.
The bigger stevedore whistled, soft. “Captain’s a trusting man.”
“Captain’s a busy man,” the other said, already opening his belt. “Come here.”
They put her on the coil.
The hawser was rough and huge, a scratchy throne.
One stevedore sat back into it and pulled her onto his cock facing out, a long wet slide that made her grab his knees.
The other stepped in front of her, spat on his hand, worked himself, and pushed into her ass with a patience that still burned.
She made a noise the hold swallowed. For a second she was too full to do anything but hang on the two of them and drip onto the rope.
The welder watched, burned forearm shining, then stepped to her face and thumbed her mouth open.
“When you’ve got a breath,” he said.
She didn’t have one. He fed her his cock anyway, shallow until her throat remembered the engine room and the pipe and the chore, then deeper.
They used her like that on the coil: two in her, one in her mouth, the hawser biting her knees and her shins, the hatch a bright rectangle of crane and gull and passing boots that did not come down.
They talked over her.
Tides. An invoice from a reefer that had shorted a pallet.
A union thing the younger stevedore was wrong about.
The welder corrected him with his cock on Mara’s tongue, patient, instructional.
When she gagged they waited without pulling out, the way you wait for a hoist to settle, and then they started again.
Spit ran off her chin onto the stevedore’s belly.
She drooled down the welder’s shaft and he used it.
The man under her held her hips and bounced her on both of them in a rhythm that made the coil creak and her tits throw a shadow on the rust-streaked bulkhead.
“She’s soaking me,” said the one in her ass, conversational. “You feel that?”
“I feel it. Cap know what he’s got?”
“Cap knows a heading.” The welder almost smiled. “That’s what I heard.”
Mara came on the coil with her mouth full and her eyes running, a helpless clench that pulled curses out of both men in her and made the welder hold her nose a second so she had to swallow around him. They did not stop. That was not what hospitality was for.
Boots at the hatch. Cole’s shadow. A glance. A nod. Gone.
The younger stevedore pulled out of her ass with a wet sound and they reshuffled without a meeting: welder onto his back on the coil, Mara lowered onto him, the bigger man back in her cunt so she was stacked on two again, the younger one at her face, diesel on his skin,
using her throat the way Tate used a hose, no romance in it.
She took it. She asked for it by opening when they moved her, by pushing back when they gave her an inch, by looking at the hatch whenever a new shadow crossed it in case it was a husband, in case it was more.
It was more once: Lila, checking a lashing, looking down into the hold the way she looked into any hold, counting heads, counting whether Mara was still a person who could walk. She went away without a word.
The welder finished first, buried in her ass, a long groan he bit off on her shoulder, and stayed in her through it while the bigger man kept fucking her through the twitch.
Then the welder slipped out and stood over her on unsteady boots and looked at the shine of her and the red of her knees and the braid.
“Hot in here,” he said.
He pissed on her tits.
It hit her chest in a hard hot sheet and ran off her nipples onto the man still in her and onto the hawser.
He laughed when she opened her mouth for it—surprised, then not, tipping the stream up so she could catch some, so it ran over her tongue and her chin and back down her throat onto the rest.
The bigger stevedore swore and laughed too and fucked her through it, sloppy now, a wet slapping mess, and came in her with his hands bruising the yellowed hip.
The younger one pulled out of her mouth, striped her face over the piss and the spit, and used his thumb to push what missed back onto her tongue.
“Hospitality,” he said, hoarse. “Christ.”
They got off her the way men get off a job: sudden, practical, looking for their belts.
Mara lay on the coil in the shaft of light with her knees raw again and her chest running and her face a glaze and two men’s come leaking out of her onto a rope that would go back on a cleat this afternoon and be a rope again.
The welder took a fold of bills from a pocket that had welding slag on the flap and dropped it on the coil beside her hip.
“For the boat,” he said. “Don’t make it a thing.”
They went up the ladder one at a time. At the hatch the younger one looked back, shook his head once, and was gone.
Cole came down after the deck had taken their weight. He picked up the bills without counting them in front of her, folded them, put them in the pocket where he kept the pump receipts.
“Ship’s extras,” he said. “You can get off the rope. Hose is on the hook if you want the piss off before he comes down the lot. Dress is clean. That was the point.”
Mara sat up. The hawser had printed her.
She could feel the welder cooling on her chest, tightening.
She used the hose, once, not thoroughly, salt water running off her into the bilge with everything else the hold already understood.
She put the yellow on over damp skin. The cotton clung and then didn’t, mostly.
On deck the crane was slinging ice. Elias was not back. The three men were among other men now, loaders, a foreman, a joke she did not hear. The welder did not look at her. The younger one did, once, and looked away as if the yellow dress were weather.
Lila passed Mara a mug without comment. Nia, coming up from the galley with a net bag of dock onions, glanced at Mara’s knees, at the damp at her neckline, and said, “Hold’s going to smell like a head. I’m not scrubbing rope.”
“Nobody asked you to,” Cole said.
Elias came down the lot with a paper sack and a grin that had survived paperwork.
“There she is. You have to see what I found. Look. Look at this.”
It was a tin pin in the shape of a fish, painted badly, a hole for a chain it did not have. A harbor trinket from a jar on a counter. He pinned it to the yellow dress himself, over her heart, over the place the welder had used as a wall, and stepped back to admire it as if he had given her a pearl.
“There. Now you’re the town too. I missed you. They had one pen in the whole office and a man who wanted to tell me about his brother. I thought about you the whole time. Isn’t that stupid? An hour.”
He kissed her temple. His mouth landed half on salt he would have called sea air.
“She behave?” This to Cole, fond, meaning the boat.
“She behaved,” Cole said.
“That’s my girl.” Elias touched the tin fish with one finger. “We’ll get ice in and we’ll get out. I want that light on the water before it goes copper. You hungry? You look hungry. Harbor does that.”
“I’m hungry,” Mara said.
He bought her a fried thing in paper from a stall by the lot and watched her eat it as if eating were a trick he had taught her. Grease on her mouth. He wiped it with his thumb, missed what was under the grease, and licked his thumb because he was a man who did not waste a dock.
The three men tipped nothing this time. They were already gone into the town. The cash was in Cole’s pocket. The coil was a coil. The hold was a hold.
Elias started the engine like a hymn. The tin fish flashed once in the wheelhouse sun and then was just a cheap pin on a dress that had been on a crate while its owner was on her back on a rope asking, still asking, with her mouth open for whatever a port was willing to pour.
The *Merrily* slid out past the limp crane. Elias waved at the sheds. Mara stood under his arm and felt ice rattle in the hold and, under the rattle, the ghost of a stream on her chest and a billfold closing, and she watched the town go small without telling him the extras had already been paid.