The Night Crossing

Dianne was sixty-two years old and she had been driving trucks for the better part of forty years, and if you'd told her at twenty-two that she'd spend her sixty-second birthday rolling a rig onto a midnight ferry, she probably would've laughed and asked for another beer. But there she was, third in line at the Port Angeles terminal, watching the deckhands wave their flashlights, feeling every single one of those years in her lower back.

The *Sea Swan* was an old boat, rust freckling her hull like liver spots, and Dianne had ridden her maybe a hundred times over the years on the crossing up to Victoria. She knew the drill. Cab over the ramp, chocks, up the stairs to the lounge, buy a coffee she wouldn't drink and sit in a vinyl booth watching the black water slide by. It was a routine, and routines were what kept a woman like her upright at midnight.

What she did not expect, climbing those stairs with her jacket over her arm, was to see a man hunched at the bar who could only be Ron Kellerman.

She stopped dead about six feet from the door, because honestly what do you do. Forty-one years, if she was counting from the summer he shipped out, and she had counted plenty of times on long night hauls with nothing but the radio for company. He was heavier now, gray to the scalp, sitting there nursing a beer like a man waiting on somebody, and when he glanced up at the mirror behind the bottles his face did something complicated.

"No," he said, turning around on the stool. "No way. Dianne? Dianne Corbett?"

"Hey, Ron." She came the rest of the way in, sort of drifting, the way you do when your legs aren't sure they're invited. "Somebody told you that, or you just guessing?"

"It's the walk." He stood up and then neither of them knew what to do with their hands, so they did a sort of half hug, one arm each, patting like they were putting out small fires on each other's backs. "Lord. You look, I mean, you look good. You look like you."

"I look like a woman who's been driving since yesterday, is what I look like." She laughed and sat down on the stool next to his, because her knees had made the decision for her. "What are you doing on this boat at midnight? You living up in Victoria now?"

"Retired there, sort of. Been on the island three years." He sat back down and pushed his beer around on the coaster. "Wendy, you remember Wendy, she flagged me down at the dock this evening and told me I should take the overnight crossing for old times' sake. I figured, why not, I got nothing going on."

Wendy was down at the far end wiping glasses, fifty-something now, and she caught Dianne's eye and gave her a look that was way too pleased with itself. Dianne pointed at the tap.

"Whiskey, Wendy. Double."

"Comin' right up, hon."

"So how's the trucking life," Ron said, and it was a little too casual and they both knew it. "Still running the long hauls?"

"Mostly. Cut back some. My knees filed their complaints years ago." She got her whiskey and held it up and he tapped his bottle against it, a little clink that sounded way louder than it should have. "To old times' sake, apparently."

"Apparently." He drank, and she watched his throat move and felt like she was twenty-one again, which was ridiculous and also kind of wonderful. "You know, I thought about you more than I ever admitted. When I was out on the water. All those years."

Well. That was a hell of an opening shot, and Dianne took a breath before she answered it.

"Ron, we were babies. Twenty-one, we didn't know what we had."

"I knew what I had. That's why it stung so bad when the Navy took me." He smiled but it was a crooked smile, and behind them the ferry horn went off, that long low groan, and she felt the deck start to move under her stool. "I wrote you. Did you get the letters?"

"I got two." She looked into her glass. "Third one I never got, and by then I figured, well, figured a lot of dumb things."

The lounge was mostly empty. A couple of old sailors at the far booth muttering over cards, the radiator ticking, and that hum the old boats got when the engines were working, low and steady, almost like breathing if you let your mind go there. Dianne had heard it a hundred crossings and never thought twice about it.

"So what do you do now, besides ride ferries at midnight," she asked, turning on her stool to face him, and up close his eyes were still that same warm brown and it did something to her chest.

"Woodwork, mostly. Fix up old boats for rich people who never use them." He shrugged. "It keeps my hands busy. You ever marry?"

"Nope. Came close twice, got cold feet both times, kept the truck instead." She said it easy but it didn't come out as easy as she wanted. "How about you, there a Mrs. Kellerman somewhere?"

"Divorced going on fifteen years now. No kids." He turned his bottle label around and around. "You know what's funny. Wendy said to me this afternoon, she said, Ron, you take this crossing, maybe you get lucky. And I told her luck's for younger men. And then you walk in that door."

Dianne felt her face go warm and she hid it in the whiskey, which didn't hide a thing, and he had the grace to laugh at both of them.

"Well," she said. "Wendy always did think she was running the world."

"Give her time, she might get there." He looked at her then, really looked, no mirror, no pretense, and said, quieter, "You want to grab a booth? My back's not what the bar stools were built for."

"Ron, nothing's what it was built for. That's the whole deal at our age." But she slid off the stool and followed him to the booth by the window, the vinyl sighing when they sat, the black water sliding past outside, stars trying to poke through the cloud cover.

They talked for an hour like that. Her routes, his boats, the diner where they'd both worked that summer in Bremerton, the night he'd walked her to her car and kissed her good and she'd thought, this one, this one's going to matter. He remembered the song that had been on the radio. She remembered the exact dumb thing he'd said after, and when she quoted it back to him he turned red like a kid, sixty-three years old and red to the ears, and she laughed until the card players looked over.

The lights flickered once. Just once, quick, and the hum in the walls seemed to deepen, and one of the old sailors glanced up at the vent above the bar and then went back to his cards like he'd seen it before. Dianne barely noticed. She was busy.

"So here's a question I got no business asking," Ron said, turning his beer glass a quarter turn. "You staying over in Victoria, or you riding back tonight?"

"Staying. I got a load tomorrow out of Sidney, figured I'd sleep somewhere that isn't the cab for once." She paused. "Why. You asking me to stay up with you, or are you asking me something bigger?"

He blew out a breath and looked at the table, then at her, and God love him he was old-fashioned in his manners even now.

"I'm asking if maybe we don't let this one slip again," he said. "But I'm asking slow, Dianne. We can drink this whole ferry dry first if you want. I just, I didn't want to spend another forty years not saying it."

The deck hummed under their feet, that low breathing sound, and Dianne noticed the lights over the bar had gone a shade dimmer, like the boat was leaning in to listen, and she thought that was odd for maybe half a second before she answered him.

"Ron Kellerman, I have been waiting on you to say that since I was twenty-one years old." She put her hand flat on the table between them, palm up, an offer, and he covered it with his. "I'm not saying yes to anything yet. But I'm not saying no. How's that for a start?"

"That's the best answer anybody's given me in thirty years." His thumb moved once across her knuckles, slow, asking permission with it, and she let him, and outside the black water slid by and the old boat breathed on around them both.

Wendy came around the bar with a rag over her shoulder and a look on her face that Dianne recognized from forty years of reading customers, the look of a woman with something to say and no good way to say it. "Dianne. Can I borrow you a minute, hon, keep Ron company, don't let the cards deal themselves." Ron saluted her with his glass and Wendy walked Dianne back toward the register, wiping her hands the whole way like she was stalling.

"Is that Ron Kellerman, the one from the diner summer," she said quietly, and Dianne shrugged as if it were nothing, which fooled nobody, and Wendy smiled for a second before the smile dropped off her face. "I'm happy for you, I mean that. But I got to tell you something and I need you to not laugh at me." She leaned in over the register. "There's something wrong with the boat tonight."

"Wrong how, she's forty years of rust, everything about her is wrong."

"Heavier than that. It started around eleven, before you boarded even. The hum down in the hull is different, it's, I don't know, awake is the dumb word but it's the one I got. And the cold comes and goes in the vents, and the draft doesn't go with the weather, I checked the weather." Wendy rubbed her arms through her shirt. "I've worked this route twenty years. I know what she sounds like at midnight, all hundred and some moods of her. This isn't one of them."

Dianne thought about the sailor glancing at the vent, thought about the lights, thought about Wendy, sensible Wendy, who once talked a drunk logger down off the top deck with nothing but coffee and patience. "Okay," she said. "Okay, I believe you're worried. What do you want me to do about it."

"Nothing. Just, if things get strange, stick close to people. And stick close to him." Wendy nodded toward the booth where Ron sat watching them with his eyebrows up. "Whatever happens tonight, don't be alone with it. Al will tell you the rest if he can get the words out, he's been into the whiskey since eight and it's not working."

"Al. The deckhand."

"The one with the cousin." Wendy's face did something complicated and then flattened out. "Go on back to your fella. I didn't mean to scare you, I meant to warn you, there's a difference and I hope tonight you don't learn what it is."

Dianne walked back to the booth slower than she'd left it, and Ron read her face the way he always had. "That wasn't small talk," he said. "What'd she want."

"She says the boat feels wrong tonight. Cold in the vents, hum's off, whatever that means." Dianne slid in across from him. "She's not a person who spooks. Twenty years on this route and she says she's never heard the hull sound like this."

Ron was quiet a second, and his hand had never left the table, his fingers still resting over hers, and Dianne realized she'd stopped noticing because it felt like it had always been there, like a hand-shaped spot saved for forty years. "Well," he said. "Old boat, rough night, cold vents. Could be all of it."

"Could be. You believe that?"

"Not even a little." He rubbed his thumb along the side