Tar and Tenderness

The tarworks smells like a bad decision that got left out in the sun, and that night it smelled worse than usual, because they'd fired up retort number three and the whole yard was breathing out creosote and coal smoke like some big animal with a chest infection. I was twenty-five years old, sitting in the dispatch office with a radio in one hand and a clipboard I wasn't reading, and I want to tell you the honest truth, which is that I was thinking about Jack Whitmore instead of about the truck schedule. Not fondly. Not at first.

Jack had been gone two years. We dated from the time I was twenty-one until just past my twenty-third birthday, and then he took the mechanic job on the base outside Eunice and I ended it, because a man who moves an hour away and calls you on Sundays is not a boyfriend, he's a pen pal with benefits. That was how I explained it to Poppy at the sleeve factory, anyway, and Poppy had said well, honey, that's a better speech than he ever gave you, and we'd gone back to jamming silicone sleeves onto hotel key cards for eight bucks an hour and laughing about men in general.

So when the phone rang that night and a voice I knew too well said "Yvonne? Yvonne Kelley?" I recognized it in half a second and hated that I did.

"Depends who's asking," I said, which was a lie, because there was only one man left in Louisiana who said my full name like that, like he was reading it off a form.

"It's Jack. Jack Whitmore. I'm on leave, two weeks, and my buddy Nolan needs to find a guy named Seth Cade who supposedly works your yard. I didn't know you were here."

"You didn't know I was here," I repeated. "You didn't know the dispatcher of the only tarworks in Evangeline Parish worked at the only tarworks in Evangeline Parish." I let that sit. "Well. Life is full of surprises, Jack."

He said something about how it had been a while, and I said it had been twenty-six months, and he went quiet at that, because of course I'd counted. Then he said they'd swing by around nine. I said fine, gate three, and hung up, and then I sat there listening to the retorts groan and thought about what a stupid small parish we all lived in.

Here is the thing about me that Poppy figured out before I did: I do not get sad, I get competitive. I had spent two years being angry at Jack Whitmore in a mostly orderly fashion, the way you organize a toolbox, and now he was going to walk into my yard with his leave haircut and his base paycheck and I was going to feel something, and I decided right then and there that whatever I felt, he was going to feel it worse. That was the plan, if you can call revenge a plan. I'd tell you it was a good plan but the truth is it had a hole in the middle of it shaped exactly like me, and I didn't find that out until later.

At nine the headlights came up the gravel road and a base pickup rolled to the gate, and out climbed Jack and a big easy-looking guy in a ball cap. Nolan, obviously. Twenty-eight, three years with Jack on the base, hands like catcher's mitts. Jack was twenty-five now, two years older than the last time I saw him, and I will admit under oath that the leave agreed with him. He'd filled out across the shoulders. His hair was shorter. He still had that way of standing like he was waiting for permission to come inside.

"Nolan Patton," the big one said, sticking out a hand. "You must be Yvonne. Jack talks about you."

"Does he," I said. "Must be brief."

Jack laughed, which annoyed me, because he laughed like it was a real laugh and not a guilty one. "Seth Cade," Nolan said, all business. "Owes me six hundred bucks from a card game in March. Somebody at the base said he took nights here."

"He does nights here, off the south loading ramp." I pointed with my clipboard. "Big fella, gravel voice, allergic to paying people. If you get the money tonight, take it in cash and count it twice, because Seth would short his own mother and then tell her she owed him gas money."

Nolan thanked me and headed off across the yard toward the ramp, boots crunching, and then it was just Jack and me and the ovens and the smell.

"So," Jack said.

"So," I said. "Two weeks' leave. Come all this way to chase a card debt and stand in my gate office."

"Came to see if you'd talk to me at all." He said it plain, no angle to it, and that was the first crack in my plan, because I'd built my whole evening around him being smug.

I looked at him for a moment. The yard lights were sodium orange and they made everything look like a photograph from a worse decade. Down the line, retort three ticked and breathed. The air was heavy. That's the word I keep coming back to for that night, heavy, the way the oil hung in the air between the ovens so thick you felt like you could take a bite of it.

"There's a spot between two and four," I said. "Where the ovens sit close. It's the warmest, stinkiest corner of this whole operation and I like it, because nobody goes there and the radio doesn't reach. I go there on break to rub oil on my shoulders when the tension gets bad." "I'm not inviting you there to reminisce, Jack. I'm inviting you there because I have something to say and I'd rather say it where the tar can cover the sound of it."

He didn't ask what. He just nodded and followed me, and I led him through the dark between the machines, over cables and around a coil of hose, into the cavern where the two retorts stood facing each other like a couple who'd stopped speaking years ago and just kept sharing the kitchen. The heat off them was low and steady, like the side of a truck that's been driven all day. The oil smell down there was thick enough to chew.

I told him to take his shirt off.

He looked at me, and I watched him decide not to ask questions, and he pulled it over his head, and I confess my plan wobbled right there, because his back was a lot of back. But I got a grip. I rubbed my hands together to warm them and started working his shoulders, and I'll tell you it was not tender, it was punitive, I dug my thumbs in like I was trying to find something to arrest.

"Easy," he said, half laughing. "You always did go at things like they owed you money."

"Everybody I know owes me money," I said. "You especially. Two years of Sundays."

He didn't argue. My hands warmed against his skin, and the heat from the ovens came up around our ankles, and somewhere out in the dark I heard Nolan's voice asking Seth Cade about six hundred dollars, and I kept working down Jack's spine and thought, coldly, clearly, that I was going to ruin this man's leave. That was still the plan. I swear it was still the plan.

He stood there in the orange light with his shirt off and his shoulders bare, and I told myself I was doing surgery. That's the word I used in my own head, surgery, like I was a doctor and he was a problem on a table. I dug my thumbs into the muscle alongside his spine and he made a low sound, not a word, just air, and I felt something in my chest go warm and ugly and satisfied. There it is, I thought. There's the hurt. Give it to me.

"Harder's fine," he said. "If you're wondering."

"I'm not wondering. I know exactly what I'm doing."

That was a lie even as I said it, but I said it anyway, and he didn't push, because Jack never pushed. That was always the whole trouble with him. He'd sit in a silence like he was waiting for a bus he knew wasn't coming, and he'd wait you out, and somehow you'd end up being the one who filled the quiet with everything you didn't want to say. Two years of Sundays I'd waited by the phone. I was done filling his quiet.

I stepped back and reached into my coat pocket for the blue glass bottle. It was a perfume bottle originally, some drugstore thing Poppy bought me for my birthday the first year we worked together, but I'd washed it out and filled it with massage oil because it poured clean and it fit my hand. I told him it was for my dry hands, which was half true, the way most things I said that night were half true. My hands did get dry in that yard. The creosote ate the skin right off you if you let it.

What I actually did was pour a stream of it onto his wrist.

The oil ran warm down over his pulse and dripped off the heel of his hand onto the concrete, and he looked at his own arm like it belonged to somebody else, and I took the wrist in both my hands and rubbed it in. His pulse was going. I could feel it under the oil, quick and honest, quicker than his face was letting on, and there was a small mean joy