Oakum and Tesla

Tommy was fifty-two and had been a welder for most of those years, and he knew what he wanted when he saw it. The oakum sitting on pallets under the tin canopy at the Kizimkazi road commission garage was old stock, tarred tight, from the ropeworks that had gone under in the spring. He had been looking at pictures of it for two weeks on the auction listing. Bundles the size of feed sacks, dark and stinking of pitch, exactly what he needed to caulk the iron gate he was building for a client up north. Not any old oakum. This stuff. The listing photos didn't lie and neither did the smell when the breeze came off the Indian Ocean and pushed through the canopy.

He was fifty-two. Debby was fifty. They had met three years ago at a welding supply trade show, when he was forty-nine and she was forty-seven, and started dating six months after that. Two and a half years together now, mostly long distance, seeing each other every few weeks when the job schedule and her lab schedule let them. She had taken leave for this trip. She said she wanted to see the ocean and watch him spend money, in that order.

She stood beside him in the shade of the garage wall, arms crossed, looking around at the place with that calm way she had. Low concrete building, dusty linoleum visible through the office door, a metal desk inside with a lamp on it and nothing else. Salt in the air. Flies doing their business around the pallets. A couple of local guys leaning on a forklift waiting for the auctioneer to start.

"You really need this much," Debby said. It wasn't really a question but she let it hang like one.

"I need about half this much. I'm bidding on enough to have some over, because if I bid short I lose the lot and drive home empty." He wiped his face with a shop rag he kept in his back pocket, a habit from work that drove her nuts at restaurants. "Tarred oakum like this, you can't get it anymore. Everybody's gone to synthetic. This is the real thing for a gate that sits outside by the water."

"Uh huh."

"Don't say uh huh like that."

"Like what." She was smiling a little. She did that. She could sit inside a man's head with two words and make him explain himself for ten minutes, and she knew it, and he knew she knew it.

The auctioneer was a local, a big voice in a small man, and he had a young woman with him at the folding table who did the paperwork. Maddie, twenty-seven, secretary at the road commission, volunteering her Saturday. She had a clipboard, a calculator, and a stack of bid slips with a paperweight on top to keep the breeze from taking them. Jamal, the road commission supervisor, forty-five, stood by the pallets and called numbers off as the auctioneer pointed. He wanted the garage cleared, that was plain. Every bundle sold was floor space back.

The bidding itself was quick. A couple of local contractors wanted small lots for mixing into their own jobs. A woman from the fish plant wanted two bundles for patching her loading dock. Tommy waited them out, the way he did everything, and then put his hand up on the big lot and held it there through four raises until the contractors shook their heads and let it go. Sixty bundles. More than he needed, like he said, but the gate was a paying job and the surplus would sit in his shed fine for a decade.

"There goes our kitchen floor money," Debby said.

"The kitchen floor was already gone. This is the bathroom money."

Maddie had his paperwork done before he got to the table. She was efficient about it, reading numbers off the slip, tapping the calculator twice, writing his name the way he spelled it out for her. Tommy had a wire transfer confirmation on his phone from earlier in the week, cleared with the auction house in advance, because he didn't trust himself to carry that much cash into a place where he'd already fallen in love with six thousand pounds of tarred rope fiber. Maddie checked the confirmation, printed a receipt off a laptop older than his truck, and had him sign two places.

"You're the big one today," she said, sliding the carbon copy across. "Mr. Jamal, he will be happy. This clears most of the back half of the garage."

"Happy is good," Tommy said.

Jamal had two guys with a pallet jack moving the winning bundles toward the corner where Tommy's rented flatbed was parked. They worked quick and didn't drop anything, which was all Tommy asked of strangers handling his purchase. He counted along in his head out of habit. Sixty bundles, stacked four high on two pallets, strapped with the last of the ropeworks' own rope, which struck Debby as funny and she said so.

"They roped the rope," she said.

"They did. Guess it's fitting."

The bidding on the last small lots went on another twenty minutes. A crate of shuttles nobody wanted went for nearly nothing. A pallet of split bamboo went to the fish plant woman. Then the auctioneer folded his table and the crowd broke apart into the heat, and Jamal walked over with a clipboard of his own to confirm the loading, and Maddie packed her laptop into a padded bag and gave Tommy a nod on her way to a pickup truck.

"Load crew will finish by four," Jamal said. "You want to stay or come back?"

"I'll stay. Rather watch my own stuff get strapped."

"Fine. Water is in the office if you want it. Door is open." He went off to yell at somebody about strap tension.

The garage emptied out the way places do, a little at a time, until it was mostly just the two of them and the loading crew across the yard. The office door stood open into the dim of the concrete room. Tommy looked at it. Debby looked at it. Then Debby looked at him, and he had learned to read something in the look over two and a half years, a stillness she got when she had decided something and was waiting to see if he'd follow.

She walked into the office. He heard the lock turn.

He stood outside a second with his hands in his pockets. Then he went in. She had set a canvas duffel bag on the metal desk, one of her lab bags, the heavy kind with a zipper that ran around three sides. It sat there square and patient. The office smelled like dust and old paper and, faintly, tar coming off him from standing near the pallets all morning.

"What's in the bag," he said.

She didn't answer right away. She unzipped it and lifted out a thing wrapped in a blue shop towel, and unwrapped it on the desk, careful the way she was careful with everything. It was a glass tube about two feet long, wound end to end in tight copper wire, coated in something clear and glassy so the whole surface was smooth under the winding. A coil secondary. He knew enough to know that much. A Tesla coil secondary, out of some lab shelf, polished up and brought four thousand miles in a duffel bag.

"It came out of storage at work," Debby said. "Surplus. It was going to be scrapped." She ran her palm along it once, slow. "I've been thinking about you and this for two months. About what you'd let me do with it."

Tommy looked at the coil, and then at her, and the loading crew outside was shouting about a strap and he didn't hear a word of it.

He had seen her handle specimens that way, the flat of the whole hand, no hurry, like the thing had a temperature she was reading through her skin. Twenty years in a lab did that to a person. Debby picked the coil up and held it level in both hands, the copper windings catching the weak light from the window over the sink.

"Here's the shape of it," she said. "This is glass under the coating. Smooth, cool, heavier than it looks. I want to use it on you. Touch you with it, all over, and you don't touch me back unless I say. I want to be in charge of the whole afternoon." She set it down on the desk and looked at him straight. "Or we can put it back in the bag and drive to the flat and I'll cook something. Either one is fine with me."

Tommy stood there with tar dust on his forearms and his receipt in his pocket, thinking it over the way he thought things over, slow, one option at a time. He was fifty-two years old and he had learned that saying yes too quick to Debby was a mistake, because she meant what she said, all of it, the part about being in charge included.

"If I say stop, you stop," he said. "And if I say stop, nothing changes after. You don't get sore about it later."

"Nothing changes after," she agreed. "What's your word?"

"Red. Same as always."

"Red, then. And slow means slow down, not stop."

"Slow means slow down," he said. "Yeah."

"Then take your shirt off and come here."

He pulled his shirt off over his head and dropped it on the chair by the door, and by the time he turned around she had a short length of the tarred oakum