Tar Stains on the Pavement

The man did not wait for an answer. He spat a thread of dark phlegm onto the drain grate, kicked the stone edge with the broken toe of his greased-leather boot, and shuffled back up the slope, hunched beneath a burlap coat that smelled of rancid tallow. The water in the hoppers kept swallowing the remnants of the ore with the dull rumble of empty guts. Dawn broke with the slowness of a dying man over the blind backs of the foundry sheds: first a dirty glare behind the chimneys, then an acidic drizzle that fell obliquely onto the zinc roofs and stung exposed skin like hot needles. On the precast concrete cornices, the soot skull of the previous night began to dissolve into yellowish trickles that sought out the joints of the pavement, where the freshly cooled tar of the potholes still exhaled its dense, oily vapor.

Mateo Cerna remained seated on the basalt stone step, half-sheltered by the corrugated tin overhang of a tool warehouse. He did not move. His shoulders were jammed forward in that rigid posture loaders assume when the chill of dawn sinks into the bone and the joints protest; but beneath the skin of his nape, where live flesh was lashed to the fibrous cords of the graft, the ache was not rheumatism. It was a dry tightness, a harsh contraction that screamed for the icy lick of brine to ease the tension of the bolts poorly seated at the base of his skull. Beside him, Nico poked with the blunt tip of a bent nail between the seam of his left sleeve, trying to dislodge a clump of mineral grease that had hardened at the cuff.

"If this drizzle doesn't let up," Nico said without raising his head, "the rye roll I bought down the hill is going to turn into a caulking sponge. And it cost me two coppers."

"Keep it in the lining pocket," Mateo replied. His voice came out with a grain of sandstone, as if his vocal cords had glued themselves together during the night.

"It's already in the lining. But the lining has a hole and it keeps sliding down toward my tailbone."

No one answered.

Four blocks away, the steam hammers of pit four resumed their mechanical butchery rhythm: three heavy blows, a hoarse pause in which the steam whistled as it escaped the purges, and three more blows that made the violet puddles in the gutter vibrate. Mateo slid his hand under his hardened leather doublet—an old leather that creaked like dry bones every time he forced his elbow—and pulled out the notebook. It was a wad of cheap sheets with black oilcloth covers frayed at the corners, crudely bound with a scrap of greasy twine. The smell of damp paper and rancid iron-gall ink rose to his nose, sour and familiar, like the smell of hospital wards after a shift of bloodlettings. The tips of his fingers were stained with a perennial blackness that neither scrubbing sand nor ammonia had managed to erase in months.

He opened the notebook across his knees. The acid rain pelted the sheet metal above his head with the insistence of a deranged clock. He tried to hold the piece of graphite with his index finger and thumb, but his hand felt heavy; the artificial tendons of the wrist pulled inward, forcing his knuckles to close into an awkward claw. He wanted to pin down a name before the fog rising up his spine finished dissolving it. His sister's face was nothing more than a sharp chin and the hem of a gray flannel skirt; the name, a vibration of consonants that got stuck behind his palate without breaking into sound. Writing down who you used to be on a piece of paper is admitting that your own head is already occupied territory. The graphite scratched the rough pulp of the page with a tiny screech, tracing trembling, uneven letters, like the inventory of a bankruptcy: a house with green shutters in the lower valley, the aftertaste of goat's milk boiled with cinnamon, the sound of cowbells at dusk, the exact shape of the scar his father had above his left eyebrow.

Whatever the body lost in flesh, silence collected in names.

There was a path lined with linden trees before the furnaces—

The thought snapped. Mateo clenched his teeth until he felt the crunch of jaw cartilage forced against his molars. A fine pain, like a sack-sewing needle passed through fire, crossed from his seventh vertebra to his temple. Nico stopped scratching his sleeve. He raised his clear eyes, veiled by a layer of animal mistrust, and looked down the street toward the confluence of the ore loading docks.

"They're coming," the boy said in a flat whisper, stowing the nail in his vest pocket.

The footsteps did not run. They were measured, heavy strides, cushioned by standard-issue pressed-rubber soles on the soaked gravel. Bruna Varga rounded the corner of the foundry with her waterproof cape open over her torso to expose the studded leather holster and the wooden handle of the marking mallet. Her cheeks were flushed from the caustic wind, and in her right hand she carried a zinc bucket that oozed hot pitch; a coarse-bristle brush rested on the rim, dripping black threads that solidified almost instantly over the damp cobblestones. Two wardens followed her ten paces back, carrying measuring rods and a ledger bound in waxed canvas.

They advanced between the facades of precast blocks. The air smelled of arc welding and sulfurous vapor. Bruna stopped in front of the doorway of number twelve, where the pine wood frame already had two old eviction notches. She dipped the brush without looking at her men and drew a thick, diagonal black slash across the jamb.

"Exactly seventy-two hours at six in the morning," Bruna said. Her voice held neither harshness nor glee; it was the neutral cadence of a clerk crossing out a batch of rotten grain in a ledger. "The night shift didn't see him at the screens. Cancel the flour ration and haul the cot out to the pavement before the block foreman makes his rounds."

One of the wardens pushed the door open with a listless kick. Inside there was no weeping; only the sound of a drawer being dragged across damp floorboards and the dry thud of pliers hitting the floor. Bruna did not go in. She turned toward the overhang where Mateo and Nico stood motionless, like two bundles of discarded refuse leaned against the wall to keep carts from smashing them as they turned. Her gray eyes, surrounded by premature wrinkles marked by the soot of the coke ovens, fixed on Mateo's hands. She noticed the notebook the man was trying to hide under the skirt of his doublet, the stiffness of his neck, and the dark stain the acidic rain-saliva was drawing across his knees.

"Still here, Cerna," she said, shifting her body weight onto her right leg as she adjusted the leather chin strap of her standard-issue cap. "I was under the impression they'd assigned you to dredge pit three with the hopper brigade."

"My shift starts at eight," Mateo replied. He did not lower his gaze, though the tendon in his nape throbbed with a vibration so violent he feared the woman would hear the friction of metal against bone.

"Pit three flooded half an hour ago," Bruna said, looking at the tips of her fresh-tar-stained fingers. "The central drain water rose. The men who were down there are just standing around bunching up against the overflow grates. If you had any sense, you'd already have a shovel in your hand helping clear them. The weigher doesn't like men who sit and watch it rain while the ore cools in the ore-cars."

"I have a relief signed by the duty overseer," he lied, without moving a single muscle in his face.

Bruna twisted her mouth in a hint of a smile that was nothing more than a fold of fatigue at the corners of her lips. For three long seconds nothing could be heard except the wheeze of the escape valve at pit four and the rhythmic dripping of tar falling from the brush onto the pavement mud.

"I couldn't care less what you have signed," she muttered, turning halfway back toward the road. "Pitch dries fast in this wind. If when I walk back down the slope you're still sitting on this stone, I'll tell the wardens to bring the sediment log. Your name takes up too much space at the top of the list."

When the slosh of standard-issue boots faded behind the steam-boiler shed, Nico let out a small whistle between his teeth and pulled the squashed roll from his inner pocket. He broke off a piece with his thumbs, popping a hard crust that fell between the stones, and shoved it into his mouth, chewing with the slowness of an old ox.

"That bitch keeps her butcher apron well-pressed," he said with his mouth full of leathery crumb. "She looked at your neck, Mateo. She knows you're low on salt."

Mateo did not answer him. He leaned his back against the rough concrete wall, feeling through the damp wool the harsh cold of the industrial silt covering the ashlar blocks. He opened the notebook again. The trembling of his fingers had grown finer, almost imperceptible, but the pain behind his eyes was a tide of hot silt clouding the edges of his vision. The middle pages were glued together by the acidic moisture; he separated them carefully, using his thumbnail not to tear the rag paper's fiber, searching for a blank space to jot down the warning Bruna had just left hanging in the air.

Between two leaves stained by a ring of old rust, he found a sheet folded into four uneven creases. The paper was thicker, torn from a south dock customs cargo manifest, and its corners were eaten away by continuous rubbing against the bottom of his pocket. He unfolded the paper with the clumsiness of a cripple.

The ink was his. He immediately recognized the long, broken stroke of the capital letters, the way the crossbar of the t slashed diagonally to the right—a habit he had learned from his uncle at the pitch warehouses before the world shrank to this mire of sluices and tension cables. The note had no date, just a line drawn with greasy charcoal and three phrases squeezed against the top margin:

"Trust nothing of what you think you remember after the ballast falls. The blood of the pit invents a mother who never existed so you won't throw yourself beneath the wheels of the hoppers."

The screech of shoe brakes from a string of loaded hoppers echoed in the rail siding, sharp as an iron scream resisting a stop in the mud.

Mateo folded the paper slowly, following the same worn creases, and tucked it back beneath his tongue.