Oil on Slate

Only the stubbornness of paper against the dead skin of the thumb remained. It was a strip of coarse wrapping paper, trimmed with tailor's shears that must have hacked along the edge in jagged bites, already damp at the ends from a fine sleet smelling of cold soot and rancid grease. In the center, two thick strokes of greasy graphite slashed straight across the name—two black gashes like the timbers of a collapsed shoring over a ditch; below, the word 'BRUNA' lingered like the relief of a coin that has lost the king’s face but kept the rim of the crown. Mateo could not open his hand. Lactic acid had seized his tendons in a glassy contraction, locking his fingers into two claws squeezed with such violence that his pinky nail was digging into his palm without a single drop of blood escaping, only a whitish humectant fluid that grew cold upon contact with the air.

He moved forward, dragging his right boot, whose pegged rubber heel left a shining furrow in the industrial silt coating the concrete slabs. Pier Three was a plain of thick silence, broken barely by the muffled panting of the steam hammers beating four blocks away, raising an underground pulse that made the puddling water in the drainage troughs vibrate.

The world smelled of wet slate.

And of scorched turnip broth.

That second smell came from a corrugated sheet-metal sentry box where two hopper firemen were crouching to eat, taking turns with a tin spoon to empty a rusted pot resting on a brass stove. Neither of them looked up as Mateo passed by. One of them, who wore a filthy wool scarf tied around his calf to hold a bandage, scraped the bottom of the pot with a metallic screech that sounded like someone sharpening a scythe over a broken tile.

"If the grease climbs three quarters higher, the plunger blows," said the one with the scarf, his voice stripped of saliva.

"Let it blow," answered the other, chewing listlessly. "Tomorrow's not my shift."

Mateo kept going. He stumbled against the mooring bolt of a coal barge, a massive cast-iron piece covered in a crust of rust that tore his canvas trousers at the shinbone. The blow shook his entire leg with a dry stab, but he didn't stop to rub the wound; he lacked the cerebral command to do so, as if the circuit between the sore and the will had unraveled into a bundle of loose threads. In his head, there was no longer room for the calculation of distances or the memory of how one asked for a glass of water in a tavern. He had been leaving pieces of himself in the corners of the docks like someone losing coins through a torn pocket: the name of the street where he slept as a child, the exact way a spoon curves when heated over a flame, the feel of the dry hair of a roan mare that once crossed a ford in front of his house.

All of that had gone to the bottom of the mud, devoured by the strange fiber tugging at his shoulder blade with the rigidity of a rope soaked in brine.

He stopped under the monumental shadow of a ballast hopper. The cold crept through the seams of his buckskin vest, but in the graft—right where his own flesh was soldered to the dark patch by a line of scar tissue as thick as a hemp cord—the skin burned with a dry fever that cried out for ammonia or rotten mud. He leaned against the prefabricated granite pillar. The stone was damp, scratched by the steel cables of the unloading cranes that had carved a series of parallel grooves along its edges, as tiny and smooth as the strings of an ancient psalter.

He wedged his elbow into a crevice of the ashlar to keep from falling to his knees. The paper remained trapped between his thumb and index finger, already turned into a soft mass threatening to dissolve into gray pulp. He looked at the crossed-out word. The initial 'B' retained a round belly, drawn with the steady pulse of someone who does not fear wasting ink, but the two black strokes slashing through it had the rabid air of a summary execution.

Who was she?

He made an effort to reconstruct a chin, the line of some shoulders, the sound of breathing in a dark alcove, but only ownerless sensations came to his memory: the sour taste of the vinegar used to clean butchering knives, the creak of a pine floorboard under a light weight, and the violet glare of oily water sleeping in the railway mineral ditches.

He tried to think if he had ever loved that abstract shape hidden behind the letters, if he had owed her money or seen her bleed out over a sack of burlap.

Nothing.

The muscle in his jaw trembled with a brief, involuntary click, a tic that made his teeth chatter as though he were chewing lead pellets. There was no longer affection or dread left; only the blind inertia of keeping on, a purely mechanical impulse that his boots obeyed without knowing toward which dock it was leading him.

Two hundred paces away, behind a curtain of tarpaulin sheets dripping brownish water, a crew of riveters lit a carbide torch. The orange flare dyed the piles of slate stacked by the dock for a second, revealing the veins of black grease running down the stone like threads of hot pitch. Mateo pulled his back away from the pillar. He took three hesitant steps toward the entrance of the tool shed, shoulders hunched and his left arm hanging with the heaviness of molten lead, rigid from the collarbone to the clenched wrist.

The air in the alley between the sheds was thicker than outside. It smelled of quicklime and the sweat of draft mules that had rested there during low tide.

A shadow detached itself from the battered metal gate.

Mateo stopped dead. The mass grafted onto his spine reacted before his judgment could evaluate the bulk: a flash of sour heat climbed the back of his neck, straining the alien tendons until it wrenched a hiss from between his clenched teeth. The body in front of him had no face or history; it was an opaque mass occupying space, a warm obstacle threatening the last bit of air left in his lungs. Mateo raised his left arm. His stiffened fingers forced themselves open by the sheer hydraulic pressure of the implanted tissue, cracking like dry branches in a bonfire.

He was going to split it in two. He was going to hurl the weight of his heel against the bulk's sternum to carve a path toward nowhere, the way one shoves aside a rotten bale in a ditch.

The figure did not step back.

It took a step forward with a fluidity Mateo could not anticipate and raised a hand gloved in scarred leather. It carried a heavy object in its right hand. With a metallic click—the domestic, clumsy sound of a latch that doesn't fit quite right—the screen of a blind lantern slid upward barely two inches. No white watchman's beam came from it, but rather a tongue of yellowish, trembling light that smelled of whale oil.

The flash struck the hammered brass ring girdling the lantern's cylinder, a crude piece with file notches on the rim, dented by years of rolling among caulking tools.

Mateo's arm froze halfway down a strike at Nico's neck.

Air neither entered nor left his chest. The brass shone beneath the drizzle with a mute, stupid familiarity, like an old pot recognized in the darkness of a stranger's kitchen before anyone pronounces a single word.