The Grease Rag

The call came in on a Tuesday. A client of mine, Karin, an older woman I'd sold a condo to the year before, had heard her dog was loose somewhere near the old rail bridge. Not her dog exactly. Her daughter's dog. The daughter was out of town and Karin was too nervous on stairs to go looking.

So she called me. Because I sell houses and apparently that means I find dogs.

"I don't know who else to ask, Vivian. You're always driving around over there anyway."

I was thirty-four and I said yes, because that's what I do, I say yes to small favors. I drove out to the industrial edge with the windows down and a leash on the passenger seat. The town ends there and then it's water and cranes and a bus depot that looks like it lost a fight with the weather.

That's where I saw the truck. Gray, dented, a bridge inspection sticker on the door. A man was standing at the tailgate sorting gear, and I remember thinking he stood like someone who expects the ground to move under him. Weight low. Knees loose. Ready to fall and not worried about it.

I asked him about the dog. He asked me what it looked like. I told him, and he nodded once.

"Heard it crying up in the beams this morning. Bridge crew left a gap in the walkway grating. It climbed in and couldn't get back."

I said that was probably it, a shaggy brown mutt, answers to Pelle.

"I'll get him down. Give me an hour. There's a bench by the depot if you want to wait."

And I will be honest with whoever reads this. I didn't want to wait an hour. I wanted to stand there and watch this man work. But I sat on the bench as anyone would and thought about how every man I'd dated in my twenties and thirties had soft hands and a clean car and a way of talking about risk like it was a stock portfolio. Politicians of open houses. I'd shaken a hundred hands at open houses and none of them had ever made me think about anything.

This one made me think about things.

He came back down the embankment forty minutes later with Pelle under one arm, muddy, shaking, alive. The dog leapt off him and into my car like he'd paid for the ride.

"You're Vivian, then? Karin's realtor?"

"How'd you know my name?"

"Karin called the depot too. Asked for Sal. I'm Sal." He stuck out a hand and I took it and his palm was rough in a way I felt in my whole arm. Grease in the creases. A scrape across one knuckle already scabbed.

"Sal Burke." He said it like I might need it later.

He was forty-one, I learned later. He looked it. Twenty years of hauling himself up steel with a harness and a clipboard, and it showed in his shoulders and in the scars on his forearms, which were bare because he wore his coveralls with the sleeves pushed up past the elbow. I noticed the forearms. I want that on the page. I noticed them a lot.

"Thank you," I said. "For the dog."

"He did the hard part, staying alive. I just climbed."

"Is there some way I can pay you back? Dinner, at least."

He wiped his hands on a rag that had probably started as a t-shirt. "Not really a dinner guy."

"So what are you a guy for?"

He looked at me then, properly, and grinned. He had a chipped tooth on the left side. "That depends on what you're asking."

And here's where I could have done the polite thing. Driven home. Told Karin the story over the phone. Gone back to clean-handed men. Instead I heard myself say, "I'm asking to skip dinner."

He didn't laugh. That surprised me. A lot of men would have laughed, either at me or at their luck. He just studied my face for a second, then tilted his head toward the depot.

"One thing first," he said. "The dog's got nothing to do with this. You don't owe me for him, not dinner, not anything. Whatever happens in there happens because we both want it, and either of us can walk out whenever we like."

"Repair bay's through there. I've got a second shift, inspects due Thursday. You want to talk, we talk there."

The depot smelled like diesel and cold seawater. Inside the bay, half the floor was a pit, covered with steel plates, and along the back wall were scrapped coaches, gutted, stacked like something out of a war. His office was a glass box in the corner. Desk covered in inspection logs. On the desk, a metronome.

A metronome. Wooden case, brass weight, the kind my grandmother had.

"You time things with that?"

"Weld checks. You hold a bead for so many seconds, you count with the metronome. Phones die. That thing hasn't missed a beat since before I was born." He set the rag down. "So. Skip dinner and then what?"

I could have played it cool. I'm not cool. "Then what scares me, I guess."

"And what's that?"

"Men like you." I said it before I could sand it down. "I've never been with a man who works in a pit. Under traffic. With steel. Every man I've ever had has been afraid of getting dirty, and I've been afraid of the opposite, and I've never done anything about it."

He leaned back against the desk, next to the metronome, arms crossed. "That's a first time, then."

"Yes."

"Say it out loud. All of it. I don't do guessing."

"Yes. I want that. With you. Tonight, if you'll have me."

"And you understand I don't do soft. I do honest. There's a difference."

"I'm counting on the difference."

He picked up the metronome and set it ticking. Slow. Tick. Tick. Tick. "This is the only timer I trust. We go at its pace. You say stop or wait, everything stops, and it stays stopped until you say different. That's not romantic, it's just how I work. Everything gets inspected before it gets used."

"That's the most romantic thing anyone's said to me in ten years."

He laughed at that, a short bark, and started unzipping the coveralls.

Underneath he was lean, not gym-lean, work-lean, and scarred. A long groove across his ribs where the skin had healed shiny and tight. Another on the shoulder. He was forty-one and looked like a map of every job he'd ever done.

"Beam grazed me in twenty-nineteen," he said, following my eyes. "Eight inches over and it's a closed casket."

"Can I?" I asked, and he nodded once, and I put my hand on it, and my fingers followed the groove from his ribs toward his hip. The skin there was warm and raised and real. Everything about open houses is fake, staging and candles and bread in the oven. This was the opposite of that.

I looked up at him. "Can I?" "Yes," he said. I leaned in and put my mouth on the scar. Salt. Sweat and salt and steel. I tasted it and something in my chest came unhooked.

"Vivian." Tick. Tick. "You sure about the pace? It's slow."

"I'm sure."

"Then tell me the rules out loud. What you want. What you don't."

"I want everything," I said. "I don't want to be handled like I'm breakable. And I want you to tell me what you want too, because I've spent my whole life with men who expected me to guess."

He reached out and took my chin, gentle, which I hadn't expected from those hands.

"What I want," he said, "is you out of that blazer and on that couch, and I want to hear you say yes to each thing before I do it. First thing I want is your mouth. Yes or no?"

The metronome ticked. Pelle had settled on the shop floor by the door, asleep like nothing in the world was wrong.

"Yes," I said.

The tick filled the room while I slipped the blazer off and hung it on the back of a chair that had three other jackets on it, like the chair knew about mornings after. He walked me backward to the couch, unhurried, matching the beat, and sat me down, and stood in front of me with his thumbs in his belt and that chipped-tooth grin.

"Last chance for dinner," he said.

"Sal. Shut up."

Tick.

He laughed and undid his belt.

Tick. Tick.

I took him in my mouth, slow, and he let me set it for a while. Then his hand came to the back of my head, not pushing, just there, and he said, "Match the clock. One stroke a tick."

I did. It was strange how fast my body learned the rhythm. In. Tick. Out. Tick. My knees on the couch cushion, oil still on the denim from where he'd wiped his hands earlier, the scrape on his knuckle rough against my jaw. He kept his eyes open. I could feel it.

"Good," he said. "You listen well."

I pulled off and laughed. "That's the nicest thing a man's said to me in a bedroom."

"This isn't a bedroom."

"No. It's better."

He stepped back and dug a foil packet out of the desk drawer, along with a highlighter and a granola bar. Forty-one years old and he kept condoms next to inspection logs. I liked him more for it.

"You planned this?" I asked.

"No. I keep them there. Been there two years." He rolled the condom on, unhurried, no shame in it. "Rule's a rule. New partners get wrapped."

"Good rule."

"You on anything, or do we need to talk more before anything happens?"

"Implant. And I'm clean, tested in March." I said it flat. He nodded like I'd read off a torque spec.

"Me. Tested in February. So the rubber's for you, not me. Your call if it stays."

"It stays. First time with you, I want everything simple."

"Simple," he said, and almost smiled. "All right."

Tick. Tick.

He turned the brass weight up the pendulum. The beat dropped lower. Heavier. Like a door closing somewhere down a long hallway.

"That's a heavier beat," I said.

"That's the working pace. Weld checks. You hold the bead and you count, and if your hands shake, the count tells on you." He looked at me. "You'll shake.