Steel and Scale

The brake pedal went soft about two miles out from the landfill, which is how I learned that a brake booster hose can rupture without asking your opinion first. I pumped the pedal down to a rolling stop at the scale house gate and sat there with my heart in my throat, watching the van creep the last few feet onto the weighbridge.

It was Thursday night in October, the sky the color of wet cement. Off to the east the micro-mill furnace was cooling down after a pour, throwing that faint orange haze it does, like a coal in an ashtray. I was twenty-three that month, and I had a plan, which I will get to.

The scale house is a concrete booth as big as a garden shed, one window with a readout, a radio, and a space heater that sounds like a dying wasp. Shay Jordon worked the night shift there, four nights a week. She was twenty-seven, and she knew me only as the guy Marissa had thrown away, which was exactly what I was counting on.

I rolled down the window and waved. The door of the booth opened after a minute and she came out in a high-vis vest over a hoodie, clipboard in hand. Her hair was pulled back and she had a travel mug in the other hand. She looked as though she had been bored for three hours and was grateful for anything.

"Kurt Winthrop," she said, squinting at me. "Well, that's a face I haven't seen since the wedding that wasn't a wedding."

"You mean the divorce," I said.

"That's the one." She walked a slow circle around the van with her clipboard. "Empty, mostly. What's all this?"

"Batteries. I change the batteries on the navigational buoys up the river. Twelve pound chunks of lead acid, forty-two buoys." I stepped out and the van settled on its springs. "Anyway, I'm here to dump the old ones. That's the whole load, dead cells, no good to anybody."

"You're dripping something," she said, and pointed at the pavement under the front end. There was a dark spot spreading, shiny under the booth's floodlight. I crouched and looked. The booster hose had split along a seam and every tap of the pedal had been pumping brake fluid onto the road like a small mechanical confession.

"Ah," I said.

"Is that brake fluid?"

"It's brake fluid."

"So your brakes are, what, spongy? Worse?"

"Worse," I said. "I did fifteen miles an hour the whole way here. A cyclist passed me. He said something."

She laughed, a real laugh, quick and surprised out of her. "What did he say?"

"I didn't catch it. He was going downhill."

She stood there with the clipboard against her hip and looked at the van, then at the gate, then at me. Behind her the landfill stretched out dark and flat, gulls somewhere out there making their noise even at night. The orange haze from the mill sat low on the horizon like the sky couldn't decide.

"Look," she said. "I can't let you drive that thing back on the road. That's not me being nice, that's just a fact. There's a yard inside the gate, gravel by the fence. Park it in there tonight and figure out your fix tomorrow. I'll write it down as held for safety inspection, nobody questions it."

"That's a big favor," I said.

"It's a smaller favor than scraping you off the Bog Road." She tucked the pen behind her ear. "Besides, I've got six hours left on this shift and the most exciting thing that's happened all night was a fox. Come on, get it inside before it quits altogether."

So I put it in first and rolled the van through the gate at a walking pace, engine grumbling, and she walked alongside with the mug, directing me with little waves of her free hand, left, keep coming, there, that's grand. The gravel crunched under the tires and I shut it down next to the fence. The mill haze caught the top of the fence wire and turned it faintly copper.

"There," she said. "Now it's somebody else's problem till morning."

"Mine," I said. "It's still mine."

"Well, sure, but it can't kill anybody from inside a fence." She checked her watch. "Do you want tea? There's a kettle in the booth and I have a spare chair. Fair warning, it's the good chair but it wobbles."

This was going better than my plan, which I suppose I should explain. Marissa had left me in March, the year I was twenty-two, with a note on the counter and half the joint account, and she'd done it in a way that made it clear she'd been planning it since Christmas. Shay had been at the wedding. Shay had helped her carry boxes. So the idea, the stupid little idea I'd been carrying around since the furnace schedule came out and gave me a free Thursday, was that I'd drive out here, turn on the charm, and get some kind of even. Even for what, and how, I hadn't exactly worked out. It made more sense in my head at three in the morning than it did standing in a gravel yard with a dead van and a woman offering me a wobbling chair.

"I'd love tea," I said. "I've been drinking thermos coffee since noon. It's got a flavor."

"Everything from a thermos has a flavor," she said, and led the way.

The booth was tight for two people, warm from the heater and smelling faintly of energy drink and diesel. There was a kettle, a shelf of mugs with logos on them, and a window looking down on the weighbridge. She made two mugs and gave me the one with a faded picture of a lighthouse on it.

"You still do the buoys, then," she said. "I remember Marissa saying you were never home."

"I'm never home because the buoys are never where the calendar says." I sat in the good chair. It wobbled, as advertised. "Spring floods move them, autumn storms move them, barges knock them around. You go out expecting a buoy at marker fourteen and it's having a holiday at eleven."

"That sounds lonely, actually."

"It is lonely," I said. "That's the part nobody puts in the brochure."

She nodded at that, slowly, and looked out the window at nothing for a second. "Night shift is lonely too, if you're wondering. People think it's peaceful. It's mostly just quiet in a way that gets into you."

We talked after that, and it went easy in a way I hadn't planned for and hadn't wanted, if I'm honest with myself, which I mostly wasn't that night. She asked about the mill furnace cool-down and I told her that was the only reason I had a Thursday free, since normally I'd be on call for the night loading. She told me about the fox, which apparently came by most nights and once took an entire sandwich off the step while she watched through the window. She told me the scale had been broken for six weeks before anyone fixed it and drivers had been guessing their own weights, and some of them guessed generously.

"Would you?" I asked.

"Once," she said. "A man with a horse trailer and an honest face. I gave him two hundred kilos. I've regretted it since, not because it was wrong, but because he told everybody and now they all try the honest face."

The clock on the booth wall said half ten. My van sat dead in the yard, which meant I wasn't going anywhere, and the thing I'd come here to do sat in the back of my head, getting quieter and harder to justify. Outside, the haze from the furnace was fading as the steel cooled, the orange going gray at the edges.

"So what's the actual fix for a booster hose?" she asked, wrapping both hands around her mug.

"Hose clamp and a sleeve, as a roadside bodge. Proper fix is a new hose, and the parts place in Ballina doesn't open till nine."

"So you're stuck here till morning either way." She said it lightly, but she was looking at me over the rim of the mug when she said it.

"Looks like it," I said.

* * *

I stepped out to make a call I'd been promising myself since the gate closed. Marissa answered on the fourth ring, and I could hear a telly behind her.

"It's me," I said.

"I know who it is, Kurt. It's half ten."

"I'm out at the landfill. Shay's work. Van broke down and she took me in." I laid it out flat, as one would a weather report, waiting for it to land the way it had in my head all afternoon.

There was a pause long enough for the telly to get through a whole joke. "Okay? What do you want, a medal?"

"That's not, I'm telling you because I thought you'd want to know."

"Why would I want to know what Shay does at work, Kurt? She's worked there two years. You've known this." A sigh came down the line, the kind she used to do at me when I was explaining why a battery had to be changed at night. "Is this the thing? Is this the thing you were doing?"

"I don't know what you mean by the thing."

"You rang me in June and went quiet when I asked what you meant by even. You said you'd get even. I told you then it was sad and I'm telling you now it's sad. Shay's my friend. Whatever you're doing to her to get at me is going to land on her, and she hasn't done anything to you."

"She carried your boxes," I said, and immediately heard how it sounded.

"Right. Well." Something moved on her end, a door maybe. "The brakes on that van have been soft since August. I told you. I'm glad you're not dead in a ditch. Goodnight, Kurt."

She hung up before I could answer, and I stood in the yard with the phone getting cold in my hand, feeling like I'd rehearsed a speech for a room that had already emptied. The furnace haze had gone fully gray now, just a bruise on the sky. I had driven out here with a plan, and the person the plan was against had just told me it was sad, and the worst part was some quiet part of me agreed with her, and the louder part got stubborn instead. Fine, I thought. Fine. I put the phone in my pocket and went back in.

Shay looked up from her clipboard. "Everything all right? You've a face on you."

"Wrong number," I said, which was nearly true. "Anyway. About the tow."

"About the tow?" She set her pen down.

I dialed the recovery number I had saved from a year ago, put it on speaker so it was honest, and let it ring out. Then I tried the second number, the one for a fella Ryosuke that a coworker had mentioned once at a Christmas thing, and that went to a mailbox that was full. I did this all with a frown on, my best concerned-face, the one I'd practiced in the mirror of the van about an hour before I'd ruptured the hose.

"Nobody answering," I said. "Which is typical for a Thursday. Everybody's run off their feet till the weekend."

"Ryosuke's mailbox has been full since about the time I started here," Shay said. "It's famous locally."

"So the van stays where it is." I turned my phone off and put it face down on the shelf. "I'll just sit it out here. Head back on the chair, sleep till half seven, be at Ballina when they open. You don't have to do anything. I'll be quiet as furniture."

She didn't say anything right away. She looked at me, then at the chair, then at the clock, doing some arithmetic I couldn't see. Six hours left on her shift, and the two of us in a booth the size of a small bathroom.

"You can sleep in the van," she said. "Seats go back, I'd imagine."

"They go back about forty degrees and then they stop and think about it."

"Then you've a bad night ahead of you either way." She picked her pen back up, tapped it twice on the clipboard, and I watched her decide something. "You can come in at half eleven. There's a proper break room behind the office, past the weighbridge, with a couch in it that's actually a couch. Not the good chair's cousin. A real couch. Nobody