hosed down the hold. It was one o’clock when I walked up to the plant office. Marcel ran his enterprise with a machinelike efficiency, but his office looked like a hurricane had hit it: piles of paper everywhere, file cabinets full to bursting, invoices and shipping orders and punchcards for employees long gone stacked on every surface. One time I’d noticed, held in place between the mounds of paper, a half-full cup of coffee, tipped at a thirty-degree angle and somehow suspended at least six inches above the desktop. It hadn’t spilled a drop.
Marcel removed an envelope of cash from the top drawer and handed it to me: a hundred and five, plus ten more. I held up the extra bill.
“What’s this for?”
He smiled, pleased I’d noticed. “A little bonus. For finishing by noon.”
“We didn’t, Marcel. We only just got done five minutes ago.”
“I put ten in Lewis’s envelope too. I don’t hear him complaining.”
I deposited the envelope in the chest pocket of my slicker. “That’s because Lewis only has nine fingers to count on. You know, this is no way to run a business.”
“Maybe not, but I’ll do as I like.” He leaned back in his chair. “Listen, Joe, I heard Ford Conklin’s offered you a spot on the Bodie. You considering it?”
The truth was, I’d barely thought about it. “Might be. The money’s good. Everybody says Ford’s been doing well.”
Marcel gave a measured nod. “He has. Ford’s put more than a few dollars in my pocket, I’ll say that. But the banks are a haul, Joe. And it’s getting late in the season. I’ll tell you, if it were up to me, I’d say what the hell, go. But Abby, she’s not so hot on the idea.” He paused and looked out the window beyond his desk. It was a sunless day, the seaway and the sky above both gray as slabs of granite. Far off to the north, a pair of tankers plied the water at the crook of the horizon. Twenty thousand deadweight tons of oceangoing steel apiece, though at this distance, they looked no bigger than a couple of tin toys moving through the crosshairs in a carnival shooting gallery. “Anyway,” Marcel said, and rapped his desk, “I just thought I’d tell you. If it makes a difference, I might be having an opening for a foreman in the next couple of weeks. With you the paperwork’s a little funny, of course, but I think we could work something out. And we sure could use you.”
I’m sure my face showed my surprise. “Thanks.”
“Just keep it in mind. And the person you should thank is Abby, because this is really her idea.” He turned to one of the piles, fingering the contents, and produced an envelope. “Before I forget, this came to the house this morning.”
He handed me the letter over his desk, and at once I saw it was from Lucy. With anybody else I might have waited to read it, but not Marcel. He and Abby had taken good care of me, and if my time of exile had a bright spot, it was those two. I took a chair before his desk, its great towers of paper, and read.
“Everything all right?” Marcel asked me when I was done.
I folded the letter and tucked it into my slicker with Marcel’s envelope of money. “Sure. Why wouldn’t it be?”
“No reason. Just, a lot of guys get letters from home, it’s not necessarily good news.” For a moment neither of us spoke. “Well, think about the other, won’t you?”
“I will,” I said, and rose to go. “Thanks, Marcel. I really will give it some thought.”
I saw Ford that night at the Breakaway. Michelle was with me; she had left her daughter, Naomi, with her mother, our custom on nights when either of us had just been paid. Like all the bars in town, the Breakaway was little more than a dirty box to drink in, the scene of so many fistfights of such chaotic brutality that the owners had long since given up replacing the glass in the front windows and just left them boarded up. We decided to spring for a couple of real drinks, good Scotch in tumblers instead of the fifty-cent beers we otherwise drank. We were drinking our second when I saw Ford come in.
In a town like LeMaitre, a fishing boat captain, particularly one who was making money, has an exalted status. As Ford moved through the bar, the crowds parted