The Mast Step Collar Auction

Petra came up the metal stairs with a six-pack swinging in one hand and her jacket collar up around her ears, because of course the fog had rolled in thick that afternoon, the way it always did when anything interesting happened out here. She was thirty-four years old, she had spent the whole day elbow-deep in a sea chest strainer, and she had promised herself one thing on the drive over: tonight she was going to feel something other than the grind.

"Carlo? You alive out here?" she called, because the platform was vast as a tennis court and still you could lose a man in this soup.

"Over here! Don't step on the chains!" His voice came from somewhere near the rail, warm and easy, the voice of a man who had been sitting alone with fog guns and buoy parts for six years and was clearly starving for company.

She picked her way past the stacks of mothballed gear, anchor chains coiled like sleeping snakes, brass fittings wrapped in plastic, and there he was, thirty-six and looking exactly like he always did, sitting on a pile of folded tarps near the old film clapperboard that somebody had bolted to the railing years ago as a joke. Nobody remembered which film. Everybody had a theory.

"Beer delivery," she announced, holding up the six-pack like a trophy.

"Petra! You absolute saint. Sit, sit, I saved you the good tarp."

She dropped down next to him and popped two bottles, and the cold went down her throat like a reward for surviving Tuesday. Below them the sea slapped against the pilings, patient and endless. The fog cannon sat in the middle of the platform like a dead whale, all corroded bolt heads and plugged nozzles, and behind it someone had hung a bedsheet between two poles to serve as the auction backdrop, which was honestly the most festive thing she had seen all month.

"So this is it, huh," she said. "The big auction. The social event of the season."

"Don't mock. Manuel has been planning this for three weeks."

"Three weeks. For a mast step collar?"

"For a historic mast step collar, thank you very much. From the old lifeboat station. It's brass, it's over a hundred years old, and some collector in Baku supposedly wants it bad."

Petra squinted at the crate sitting on a sawhorse near the sheet. It didn't look like much, just a ring of green-crusted metal in a nest of old newspaper. "That thing? Cammie was telling me about it at the last get-together. She's coming, right?"

"She's already here. Down by the boat ramp doing diver things to it. Looking at it with her little loupe."

And sure enough, there was Cammie Fowler down at the edge of the platform, twenty-nine and compact and completely absorbed, crouched over the open crate with a light strapped to her forehead, turning the collar over with gloved hands like it was a baby bird. She had moved to Khinalug two years ago for salvage work and had turned up at every emplacement party since, and she had been talking about this collar nonstop for a month because of some restoration project Petra only half understood.

"I still don't get it," Petra said. "What does a mast step collar even do?"

"it sits at the bottom of the mast, holds the whole thing steady," Carlo said, gesturing with his beer. "The mast goes in, the collar takes the load, the boat doesn't lose its stick in a storm. Simple. Beautiful, really."

"You're romanticizing a ring of brass."

"I'm a night guard at a fog gun emplacement, Petra. My standards for beauty are extremely low."

She laughed, and it surprised her a little, how easily it came out here. Carlo had that quality. Nine years since trade school, one weird fizzled almost-relationship four years back that neither of them ever talked about in detail, and somehow he was still the easiest seat in the world. She leaned back on her palms and let the fog dampen her hair and felt, for the first time that day, that she was a person and not a pair of arms in a strainer pit.

Manuel Zimmer arrived at six sharp, which meant he arrived at six, stood at the rail, and checked his watch for ten minutes. He was fifty-two, retired coast guard, built like the dock he used to walk, and he had agreed to run this auction as a favor to the port authority, which he reminded everyone of approximately every four minutes.

"Alright. People," he boomed, once Cammie had scrambled up from the ramp and a handful of other locals had wandered in from the stairs, men in work jackets, one woman from the ferry office, somebody's uncle. "Gather round. Before we start, a word about our venue."

"Oh no," Carlo muttered happily, "he's doing the bit."

"This fog gun," Manuel said, laying one hand on the cannon like a minister at a wedding, "has not been fired since nineteen eighty-seven. The last time it went off, a fisherman three miles out reported an attack by an unknown sea monster. We investigated. It was the fog gun."

"That's not even true," somebody shouted.

"It is in my report, and my reports are scripture. Now. Lot one." He gestured at the crate, and Cammie practically vibrated. "One mast step collar, brass, reclaimed from the lifeboat station before the port authority demolition crew got anywhere near it with a hammer, thank God. Do I hear an opening bid?"

"Two hundred," Cammie called immediately, hand up.

"Two hundred from the diver. Do I hear two-fifty? Two-fifty? Anyone? Come on, this brass has outlived three governments."

"Two hundred fifty," said the ferry office woman, who had apparently come just to be contrary.

"Three hundred." Cammie shot back, and Petra nudged Carlo with her elbow.

"She's going to fight somebody over that thing."

"She's been talking about it for a month. I'm almost rooting for her."

"Almost?"

"I was going to put in a token bid so you'd have something to gossip about."

"You rat," Petra said, delighted, and stole a sip of his beer.

The bidding crawled up in grudging increments while the fog thickened and the light went blue-grey around them. And that was when Petra heard it, or thought she heard it. A dry little clack from the direction of the railing. The clapperboard, the film one, swinging slightly on its bolt, though there was no wind to speak of.

"Did you hear that?" she asked.

"Hear what?"

"That clack. From the clapper thing."

Carlo looked over. The board hung perfectly still. "It does that," he said, and shrugged. "Everyone says the place is haunted. I say it's loose hardware. But I also work nights here alone, so what do I know, maybe I'm haunted."

"That's supposed to be comforting?"

"It's supposed to be true. Haunted or hardware, either way it's not your problem for one more night."

"Four hundred," Cammie said, with the flat tone of a woman who had money saved and a project on her mind and no patience left.

"Four hundred," Manuel repeated. "Going once. Going twice. Sold. To the salvage diver with excellent taste."

A little cheer went up, mostly from Cammie herself, and she laughed and raised her beer to the crowd, and Manuel started writing up a ticket on the back of a delivery slip like it was nineteen fifty. Petra realized she was grinning and had been for a while. Twenty minutes into the evening and she had already felt more than the last six months of strainer cleaning combined.

"One more thing before we pack up," Manuel said. "The port authority wants the platform cleared by Friday. Carlo, that means you're supervising loaders Thursday morning. Petra, he volunteered you."

"Excuse me, he did what?"

"I volunteered us both," Carlo said quickly, hands up. "There's beer in it."

"There had better be beer in it."

"There's beer in it," Cammie confirmed, walking over with her receipt and her collar wrapped in newspaper like a burrito. "He told me there's beer in it too. He's spending his whole paycheck on beer this week."

"It's a good paycheck," Carlo said. "I guard a gun that has never once shot at me. Very low risk."

Petra laughed and looked out at the water, where the fog and the sea had become one grey thing, and she heard the clapperboard clack again, soft and dry, right behind her.

"Okay, that time you heard it," she said.

Carlo turned. The board was swaying, just slightly, settling. He watched it for a moment, then looked at her, and something in his face was doing that thing it did sometimes, the thing from four years ago, the thing they had both agreed to file under history.

"Yeah," he said. "I heard it."

Manuel counted out Cammie's four hundred dollars on the top of the crate, bill by bill, like he was dealing cards. "Pleasure doing business. The collector in Baku will weep, by the way. He offered me three fifty over the phone last week."

"Then he can come weep at Cammie," Petra said.

"He can," Manuel agreed, tucking the money into a canvas bag. "Now, everybody, help yourselves to the rest of this gear. Bids were thin, so most of it goes to the junk pile Friday. Chains, buoy parts, that sad little crate of signal flags. I'll start loading what sold." He checked his watch again, the tenth time that night by Petra's count, and began shooing people toward the stairs.

The little crowd broke apart. The ferry office woman left first, muttering about the cold. Then the uncle, then the men in work jackets, each of them pausing to thump the fog gun's barrel like it was a horse they were saying goodbye to. Within ten minutes it was just the four of them, and then Cammie clutched her newspaper burrito and said she had an early dive, and then it was two.

And the fog came in.

It didn't drift, it arrived, a grey wall rolling over the railing so the sea vanished completely. The sound of the water went soft and far away, like it was happening in another room. The platform that was as wide as a tennis court shrank down to a lit circle around the flood lamp and the big dark shape of the cannon.

"Well," Petra said. "That's atmospheric."

"That's Tuesday," Carlo said, but he was smiling.

They drifted, the way you do, over to the fog gun. Petra leaned her back against the barrel, which was cold even through her jacket, and Carlo folded himself down next to her, their shoulders almost touching. Up close the cannon smelled like old grease and rain. She put her hand flat on the metal.

"Do you remember the boat race?" she asked, before her brain could stop her mouth.

"Which boat race? We went to several."

"You know which one. Nine years ago, almost. The one where your engine died at the buoy turn and you drifted into the breakwater like a lost shopping cart."

"Oh, that one. The humiliation race."

"That's the one. And afterward you were so miserable about it that we sat on the seawall drinking that terrible peach thing you brought, and..." She trailed off, because he was laughing.

"And we hooked up in the back of your car," he said. "I remember. You had a tow strap in the trunk and I kept hitting my head on it."

"You kept hitting your head on it. Every time. And you'd go ow and then keep going, which, honestly..."

"Honestly what?"

"Honestly it was very funny and also very good, and then we made it weird by pretending it wasn't, for like a year."

"We dated for a while after that."

"We dated for a while, and it fizzled, and then we became friends, and now we don't talk about the seawall." She said it lightly, but her hand was still on the cannon and his shoulder was still almost touching hers and the fog had eaten the whole world except this platform.

"Except apparently tonight," Carlo said.

"Apparently tonight."

He turned his head and looked at her, and it was that look from four years ago, the one they'd both agreed to file away. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"Do you?"

"I asked first."

"You're thirty-six years old, Carlo, you're a night guard, you can't claim asked first."

"I absolutely can. It's in the guard handbook."

She laughed, and the laugh turned into something quieter, and for a while neither of them said anything. The clapperboard clacked once, softly, across the platform. They both looked. It was swaying again, gently, like someone had flicked it with a finger.

"Okay," Petra said. "Hardware. Definitely hardware."

"Definitely."

"Definitely," she said again, and she didn't believe herself either.

Carlo stood up, brushed off his trousers, and offered her his hand. "Come on. Manuel will be back from the van in a minute, and I want to show you something before the fog eats the stairs too."

She took his hand and let him pull her up, and he didn't let go right away, and neither of them pretended that was an accident. He walked her along the railing to the far corner, where a film clapperboard hung bolted to the corroded metal, its black and white stripes faded to grey and its painted numbers barely legible. Somebody had written on it in marker, years ago: SCENE 44, TAKE 2.

"This thing," Petra said, reaching out. "Why is it even here?"

"Some film crew shot here in the eighties. Weather scene, I think. They left it as a joke when they wrapped, and the port authority never took it down because nobody at the port authority has ever made a decision."