Slide Pack Shuffle

I'm on my knees in the storage bay, cinching a tether strap around a rolled evacuation slide, when I hear the door roll up behind me.

"Stella, you got a minute to lose a bet?" Yuri says.

I look over my shoulder. He's sauntering down the narrow aisle between the slide racks with that walk he does, as if the floor is indebted to him, and he's got one of his grandmother's leather pouches swinging from his fingers.

I'm twenty-three and I've been packing marine evacuation slides here at the Ludington jetty for three years now, and I'm one shift away from lead packer, which means I should not be talking to him at all. But Yuri's twenty-four and he's got that face, and okay, we hook up sometimes, when the mood strikes, and the mood has been known to strike in this very bay.

"Yuri, I've got thirty-seven slides to pack before the final inspection tomorrow," I say. "The seasonal layoffs are coming and if I don't get this backlog done, Maria gives lead packer to Deshawn and I'm back to swing shifts."

"One minute," he says. "You're cinching that strap wrong anyway. Too high on the roll. I've been watching you for like ten minutes."

"You've been watching me for ten minutes instead of prepping your tractor?"

"The tractor's fine. Championship's Saturday. It's Wednesday. I've got time." He squats down next to me, and the pouch hits the concrete with a little click. "New dare. Hold your breath. Whoever lasts longer wins."

"That's the dare? That's the dumbest dare you've ever made."

"That's the opener," he says. "It escalates."

"It always escalates. Last month it escalated to you climbing the gangway rails."

"And I made it, didn't I?"

"You made it and then you fell off the second one."

"Into water, though. Marine jetty, Stella. That's what all this water's for." He waves a hand at the bay, at the rows of packed slides stacked on their pallets, at the retractable gangways sticking out past the roller doors like gray tongues. "So. Breath holding. You in or you out?"

I should say out. I've got thirty-seven slides, the inspection is at nine, and every time I take one of his dares I end up with bruised elbows and a story. But the pouch is sitting there between us on the concrete and something about it is bothering me, has been bothering me since he walked in, and I want to look at it longer without it being weird.

"In," I say. "What are we betting?"

"If I win, you help me push the tractor onto my trailer tonight. It's got a flat spot on the rollers and I need an extra set of hands."

"If I win?"

"You pick. Anything."

"Then you bring me dinner tomorrow and you do it during my shift and you don't talk to Deshawn about the promotion at all. You make that face at everyone, Yuri, and everyone loves you, and I need Deshawn nervous, not charmed."

"Deal. Lungs ready?"

"Born ready," I say, which is a lie, my lungs were born mediocre, I got cut from swim lessons when I was a kid for floating wrong.

We both take a big gulp of air and pinch our noses.

The bay is quiet in the way big concrete rooms are quiet, just the hum of the vent fans and somewhere out on the jetty a hovercraft idling low. I watch Yuri's face go red. He's got big shoulders from the ground crew work and he can hold his breath a long time, I know this from dares past, but I've got a trick, which is I don't think about holding my breath, I think about slide packing, tether tensions, strap angles, the little arithmetic of it, and my body just sort of forgets to panic.

His eyes start to water first. Then his shoulders start to shake, and then he blows it all out through his nose with a sound like a balloon losing its fight, and I keep going another ten seconds just to be rude about it, and then I let it out too.

"Cheater," he says, wheezing.

"Winner," I say. "You owe me dinner and silence about Deshawn."

"Yeah, yeah." He picks the pouch back up and shakes it, and this is where the evening goes sideways, because the beans inside click together and it doesn't sound right. It sounds like teeth. Like small dry teeth in a small dry jaw, clicking, and there's a cold wash that goes through me, I mean a real physical cold, like I stood up too fast in a walk-in freezer.

"Yuri," I say. "What's in that thing?"

"Beans," he says. "My grandmother's counting game. You pour them out, you count them, you pour them back, you count again. She taught me when I was..."

He stops. He looks at the pouch like he's never really looked at it before, and his thumb rubs the leather where it's gone dark and shiny from decades of hands.

"When you were what?" I ask.

"I don't remember," he says, and he laughs, but it comes out thin. "That's weird. She taught me. It was at the kitchen table. I remember the table."

"Maybe you just remembered the table and the beans came later," I say, because I want this to be normal. I have a backlog. I have a promotion. I do not have bandwidth for whatever this is.

"Anyway," he says, and the grin comes back, and the grin is easier so I let it. "You won the opener, so here's the real dare. Blindfold."

I laugh at him. "No."

"With a packing strap. The wide ones. And you finish that whole slide fold while I've got it on you. Win, and I throw in the tractor push anyway, I'll do it solo. Lose, and, well, you'll figure out what you lose."

"Yuri, I pack these blindfolded in my soul already. This is not a dare, this is Tuesday."

"Then it's easy money, isn't it," he says, and he's already pulling a strap off the spool by the rack, the two-inch webbing, clean, no hooks, and he holds it up. "Okay to put it on you? Say it plain, I'm not doing the thing where I guess."

I look at him. He does this, he's actually weirdly good about it, asks every time, waits every time, even when we're, you know, not doing dares. It's one of about six things I like about him. The other five I'm not listing.

"Yeah, okay, put it on," I say. "But I keep my hands free and if I say stop, it's off."

"Deal. Stop means stop. Always has." He winds the strap around my eyes, twice, snug, ties it off with a knot I could get out of in two seconds, which I appreciate. The world goes black and warm and smells like nylon.

I hear him step back. I hear the pallet creak as I pull the next slide off the stack, and I start the fold by feel, which is mostly muscle anyway, roll the cylinder tight, seat the gasket, bring the tether strap around, cinch. My fingers do the work and my ears pick up everything else, the fans, the idling hovercraft out on the jetty, Yuri's boots on the concrete, moving.

And the beans.

He's got the pouch in his hand again, I can hear it, that dry click click click, and it keeps time wrong. That's the thing I can't shake. Rattles don't keep time. Rattles are chaos. This one clicks in a pattern, evenly, patient, like something counting, and the cold from before comes back and settles into the back of my neck where the strap sits.

"Yuri," I say, mid-cinch. "Stop shaking that."

There's a pause.

"I'm not shaking it," he says. "It's sitting on the chest. On your tool chest."

"Then why is it clicking?"

Silence. Long enough that I pull the blindfold off, and Yuri is standing six feet away with his hands at his sides and the pouch is sitting flat on my rolling tool chest, not moving, and it is clicking, soft and even, click, click, click, and the air around it is doing that thing, that warping thing, like heat off asphalt except it's cold and it's evening and the fans don't reach back here.

"Okay," Yuri says. "That's new."

"You think?" I'm up off my knees, and I do not feel brave, I feel like somebody left a door open somewhere and the wrong draft came in. "Your grandmother's beans are clicking on their own and the air around them looks like the air around my grandma's freezer in July. That's not new, that's a whole category of new."

"We could just... leave it," he says.

"Or we could find out what it is before it clicks all night in a storage bay I'm in charge of."

He picks it up. The clicking stops the second his hand closes around the leather, and he goes pale in a way I've never seen on him, and he says, real quiet, "Stella, it's warm."

It's a Wednesday, I've got thirty-seven slides to pack, and I'm about to lose my whole mind over a bean pouch.

"It's Wednesday," I say, because that's the part I grab onto, the part that still makes sense, "inspection is tomorrow at nine, and you're holding a warm leather pouch that stopped clicking when you touched it, so please, for the love of God, put it down."

He doesn't put it down. He turns it over in his hand like he's checking a part for cracks, and the leather is dark and shiny the way old things get, decades of palms on it, and I can see even from here that it's warm because the air above his knuckles is doing the waver. The cold-waver. My skin crawls in a way I don't have a word for.

"Stella," he says, "she counted with these. Me and her, at the table, we'd lay them out in rows, and..." He stops. He does that thing where the sentence just walks off a cliff mid-thought.

"And what."

"And she always laid them out the same way. Grid of nine. Nine rows, nine across, she said the count only worked if you could see it." He looks at me. "I never once saw her spill them. Not once. You spill, you start over, that was the rule, spilling was..."

"Was what?"

"Was her saying no." He says it like it means something more than a game, and then he shakes it off, and he sets the pouch down on the chest, gentle, the way you set down something sleeping, and the clicking starts again the instant his fingers leave the leather. Click, click, click. Even. Patient.

"I hate this," I tell him. "I want you to know that. I hate this a lot."

"I know."

"Okay." I rub my face with both hands. "Okay, so we look at it. We look, we don't touch, and then I go back to packing and you go back to your tractor and we both pretend this was a weird fan noise, deal?"

"Deal," he says, and we both step in, and neither of us touches it, and that's when I see the spill.

It's on the chest, next to the pouch, a scatter of dried beans across the scarred steel top of my rolling tool chest, maybe thirty of them, white and kidney-shaped, and they are not scattered. That's the thing. A spill is random. A spill has clumps and gaps and beans on the floor. These are in lines. Rows. A grid of nine by nine with the corners empty, laid out neat as a packing diagram, on a chest that neither of us opened, from a pouch that was tied shut when he picked it up.

"Yuri."

"I see it."

"Those came out of the pouch?"

"Where else would they come from, Stella."

I look at the grid. Nine rows, nine across, corners empty, and it's wrong in a way I can't name, the way a face is wrong when one eye is a millimeter higher, and I count the rows and get nine, and I count again and get nine, and then I look at Yuri and back at the grid and one of the rows has ten now. I did not see it move. I looked away for exactly the length of one breath, and a row grew a bean.

"Yuri, count those."

"Why?"

"Because one of the rows just got longer and I need to not be the only person who saw that."

He counts. His lips move. He gets to the end and stops, and his face does something complicated. "Nine," he says.

"Count it again."

"Stella..."

"Count it again, Yuri."

He counts it again, slow, touching nothing, and I watch his finger hover over the row, and I watch the row, and the row is nine, it is nine now, it was ten when I looked, and I am starting to understand that this thing only moves when you're not watching, which is not a property of beans, that is a property of things that don't want to be caught.

"It moves when I look away," I say, and my voice comes out flat and steady, which surprises me. "It's a grid of nine and one of the rows keeps getting longer and then going back, and it only happens when nobody's looking. Your grandmother's beans are doing arithmetic, Yuri."

He sits down on a pallet. Not casually. His legs just quit. "She used to say the count had to balance," he says, to the floor, mostly. "Balance the count before you sleep, she'd say. I thought it was about the game. I thought..." He trails off and doesn't come back from it.

Click, click, click, says the pouch.

"So we don't look away," I say. "Simple. We stare at it like it owes us money until I finish my slides, and then..." And then what. I don't have an and-then. "And then we figure it out. Deal?"

"Deal," he says, getting up slow, and there's a second there where he's standing close to me, both of us looking down at the shifting grid, and his shoulder is against my shoulder, and the cold coming off the pouch is raising the hair on my forearm, and it should be horrible but it's also, God help me, it's also him, and we've always been good at standing in bad places together.

"Stella," he says, quieter.

"You're going to dare me something right now. At a time like this."

"I need my hands free for the rest of the night. Tractor, trailer, straps, all of it. And you've got thirty-seven slides and you work better when somebody's on you about the clock." He holds up a slide tether cord, the short ones with the soft loop ends, and he's looking at my hands, not my face, which is how he looks when he's not sure of himself. "So here's the dare. Let me tie your wrists. Loose, loops only, you could get out in a second, I'll show you the knot first. You keep packing while you're tied, and if you finish three slides that way, I'll..." He thinks. "I'll never dare you again this week. Full ceasefire. And dinner's still on tomorrow."

"You want to tie me up so I'll work faster."

"Basically, yes."

"That's the least sexy dare in the history of dares."

"That's not the point of it and you know it," he says, and now he does look at my face, and there's something under it, the same something