The Foreman's Gauge

My name's James. I'm thirty-two, and six months ago my life fell apart, in the boring way. No drama. No screaming. Ari just sat on the edge of the bed one Tuesday and said she didn't think we were a "we" anymore. Then she helped me pack, which somehow made it worse.

Work dried up around the same time. Architectural photography, freelance. Nobody's building anything pretty in a recession, and nobody's hiring a guy to shoot the buildings they can't afford to finish. So when I heard about a restoration project on the coast, some old cannery the county wanted documented before they decided whether to save it or bulldoze it, I took the gig for half what I should've charged.

The town was called Pelican Reach, if you can believe that. Somebody named it with hope once and then everybody left. Two blocks of storefronts, half of them papered over. A diner with one truck in the lot. And a motel, the Anchor, run by a guy named Larry who took my cash without looking up from his crossword.

"Number six," he said. "Ice machine works. Mostly."

That was the entire welcome package.

I dumped my bags and should have gone to sleep. Instead I grabbed the camera out of habit and walked. That's the thing about me. When things go bad I don't drink or cry, I walk and point a lens at stuff. Ari used to call it my coping mechanism. She said it kindly, mostly.

The old pier was at the end of a gravel road past the cannery. It went maybe three hundred yards out over gray water, and it was dying. Pilings slumped like tired old men. The planking had gaps you could drop a leg through. A sign at the entrance said DANGER, CLOSED in letters so faded the word closed was just a rumor.

Every instinct I had said don't walk on that. So of course I walked on it.

I got about forty feet out and stopped, because the light was doing something. Late afternoon, low clouds breaking up, and the water under the pilings turned this weird copper color. I knelt down to shoot through one of the gaps, framing the rot and the reflection together, and I heard footsteps behind me.

"You're going to want to mind the fourth board back."

I turned. Big guy. Six-three, maybe, built as if he had spent years hauling lumber, with close-cropped hair going silver at the temples. Work boots, canvas jacket, a tape measure clipped to his belt. He looked fifty. He wasn't, I found out. He was forty. Some guys just weather hard.

"Fourth board," I said. "Which one's that?"

"Count from the shore. The nail heads have pulled through. I've been meaning to fix it and then I remembered the pier is condemned, so." He shrugged. "Funny thing to keep meaning to fix."

I moved my foot back without looking. "You the pier police?"

"Building inspector. Tommy." He stuck out a hand and I shook it. His grip was careful, like he knew he could crush things and chose not to. "You're the photographer. Larry told me somebody checked in for the cannery job."

"News travels fast."

"News travels slow. Larry just likes telling people things." He nodded at my camera. "Get the shot you wanted?"

I checked. I had. "Yeah. This pier's a hell of a model. Structurally it's a crime scene, but visually it's honest about it."

That got a laugh out of him. A real one, from the chest. "Honest about it. I like that. Half my job is buildings lying to me. Stucco over rot. Fresh paint over water damage. This thing just stands out here and admits it's dying."

We stood there a while, watching the water. I don't usually talk to strangers. Ari said I could share a room with someone for a decade and they'd still have to guess at me. But something about the town, about the whole week, had loosened something.

"You live here?" I asked.

"Born elsewhere. Been here eleven years. Came out to run a contracting crew, crew folded, county needed an inspector, and now I inspect the same kind of buildings I used to build." He said it flat, no self-pity in it. "You?"

"Just here for the cannery job. I'm at a crossroads, I guess. Career stalled out. Relationship ended in the spring." Saying it out loud felt strange and okay at the same time.

"Crossroads," he repeated, like he was tasting the word. "I use 'stagnant water' myself. Water that doesn't move starts growing things you don't want growing."

"God. That's bleaker than mine!"

"I'm a building inspector, James. My poetry is load charts and moisture readings." Wait, I hadn't told him my name. He caught it at the same time I did and held up a hand. "Larry again. He reads ID badges off wallets while he's making change. It's a character flaw."

"It's a superpower, more like."

The clouds kept breaking up and the copper light kept going, and neither of us left. He told me which pilings were original, ninety years old, and which were replacements from the eighties that were failing faster because the eighties were cheaper. I told him about shooting empty buildings for banks, foreclosures mostly, rooms with nobody's shadow in them. He listened without filling the silences, which is rarer than you'd think.

* * *

It was getting dark when he said, "You eat yet?"

"No!"

"Come on, then. There's a place that does fried clam strips and one thing that's not clam strips. After, if you want, I've got a workshop you should see. You'd appreciate it."

"A workshop. Is this a situation where I get murdered?"

"Sure is," he said, deadpan, walking. "Serial killers always announce the murder first. It's regulation."

The clam place had four tables and a TV mounted too high, playing a game neither of us followed. He asked questions and actually waited for the answers. Where I grew up, what my dad did, how I got into photographing buildings instead of people. "Buildings don't perform for you," I told him. "They can't help it. They show everything."

He went quiet at that, chewing. "Yeah," he said finally. "They do."

The workshop was a restored boathouse set back off the water on the north end of town, and when he got the lights on I stopped in the doorway. Half-built boats. Three of them, in various stages, plus a fourth frame that was just skeleton, ribs curving up like something breathing. Wood shavings on the floor. Hand planes on a rack, chisels, a steam box in the corner. It smelled like cedar and oil. Everything squared, everything in its place, every tool hanging on its painted outline.

"Okay," I said. "This is not what I expected."

"What did you expect?"

"Honestly? A garage with a dead lawnmower in it."

He laughed again and picked up a curved piece of oak, held it out. I took it. Smooth as a table top, and the grain ran through it in a spiral like water going down a drain.

"Stem piece," he said. "For the frame over there. Steamed it, bent it, and now it has to sit and be that shape forever."

I ran my thumb along the edge. It was the best-made thing I'd touched in a year, maybe. "This is beautiful. I mean it. This is actually beautiful."

"It's not done."

"Doesn't matter."

He took it back from me, slow, and our hands stayed in the same bit of air a beat longer than they needed to. His knuckles brushed mine. Warm, rough. Neither of us said anything about it, and neither of us moved away from it, either. He set the oak down on the bench and turned to look at me, and the workshop light did that copper thing the water had been doing an hour ago.

"You photograph buildings," he said, quiet. "You ought to shoot these boats sometime. Nobody documents them. They get built and launched and forgotten."

"I'd want to do it right," I said. "Not snapshots."

"I know," he said. "I could tell already."

The steam box ticked as it cooled. Somewhere out on the water, a buoy bell rang, once.

He stepped closer. Not fast. He crossed the workshop as a man checking his own footing, and stopped a hand's width away.

"James," he said. "I'm going to kiss you now, if that's all right."

"Yeah," I said. "That's all right."

He put one big hand on the side of my neck, thumb along my jaw, and leaned down. He was a head taller than me, so I tilted back and he came to me. The kiss was slow. Careful. His mouth was warm and he tasted like the coffee from dinner, and my hand came up