Trapped in the Compass Factory

Kyle Webb pulls his truck up to the loading dock at four in the afternoon, and the whole island feels like a kettle somebody forgot to take off the burner. Dry thunderstorm just rolled through. No rain. Just lightning and heat and a sky the shade of a worn nickel.

He kills the engine and sits there a second. Forty-seven years old, delivery driver for a crate company, and he can already feel the sweat starting at his hairline. The air outside is thick. Electric. His shirt sticks to his back before he even gets out.

The crate in the truck bed is for the Coastal Tides Compass Factory. Oak staves, packed special, for the wooden compass housings they still make here the old way. Kyle has delivered to this dock maybe twenty times over three years and he has never once seen it this empty. No cars in the lot. No forklift running. Just the building sitting there with its metal siding ticking as it cools.

He hops down. Checks the manifest on his phone even though he already knows what it says. Six crates. Sign here. Nobody to sign.

He knocks on the roll-up door. Nothing. Knocks again, harder, and the sound goes out over the empty lot and dies somewhere in the wet air.

Then a side door opens, off to the right, and a man leans out. Kyle knows him from past deliveries. Lucas. The cooper. The guy who repairs the wooden compass housings when they crack, and who apparently makes new staves too, because that is what is in Kyle's crates.

"Hey," Lucas says. "You're early."

"I'm on time," Kyle says. "Everybody else is gone."

"Storm chased them off. The whole floor cleared out around two." Lucas wipes sweat off his brow with the back of his wrist. He is forty-three, Kyle knows this because they have talked on the dock before, man of few words usually, but talkative today for some reason. Maybe the heat. "Come around. I'll sign."

Kyle walks the truck around and they get the crates down. Six of them. Lucas checks each one against his own list, initials the manifest, hands the clipboard back. Business is business. Kyle should get back in the truck and go.

He does not get back in the truck and go.

"So," Lucas says, and looks at the sky. "You driving back to the mainland in this?"

Kyle looks too. The horizon over the water is a solid brown-gray wall. Heat burst, they call it around here. Dry storm, then the humidity comes down on you like a wet blanket thrown by God.

"I was going to try," Kyle says.

"Truck will cook you. The drive will cook you. Come inside a while. I got water."

And Kyle hears himself say okay before he has even thought about it. He locks the truck. Follows Lucas in the side door.

Inside is worse and better at the same time. Better because there is shade. Worse because the air is like soup. The main floor of the factory is long and dim, rows of assembly benches, brass dials in trays, a whole wall lined with cork for the compass cards. Everything smells like oak shavings and shellac. Lucas grabs a thermos off a hook by the door, pours water into the cup, hands it over.

Their fingers brush when Kyle takes it. Neither of them makes a thing of it. Kyle drinks half the cup in one go.

"Hot one," Lucas says.

"Hottest I remember this year."

Lucas pours himself some water. Drinks. Pours more. Kyle notices his forearms, the sawdust ground into the creases of his knuckles, the way his shirt is plastered to him. He notices and then makes himself stop noticing, which lasts about four seconds.

Then the heat burst hits.

The whole building shudders with it. Somewhere a door slams. The humidity comes down like a physical thing, a wave of it rolling through the open dock door, and the temperature jumps five degrees in a minute. Kyle's shirt goes from damp to soaked.

"Well, hell," Lucas says.

"That's not going to let up, is it."

"Not for an hour, maybe two." Lucas screws the cap back on the thermos. He looks like he is deciding something. "Come see the workroom. Back of the building. It's got a window unit and it's the only room on this island with air worth a damn right now."

Kyle follows him down the length of the main floor. Past the benches. Past the cork wall. Through a door at the back into a smaller room, and the window unit is rattling away and it is maybe ten degrees cooler in here. Barely. But cooler.

This is Lucas's shop. Cooperage tools on every surface. A drawknife, a froe, a shaving horse worn smooth in the middle. Staves leaning in bundles against the wall. A croze and a howel, and Kyle does not know what those are but he does not ask.

And there, hanging from a hook on the far wall, a garment.

Kyle stares at it before he can stop himself. It is a petticoat. Flannel, soft gray, the kind of thing that should not look like anything, except it is trimmed at the hem and the neckline with rows of black jet beads, faceted, each one catching the light from the window unit. It is sewn, not bought. You can tell. The stitching is even and deliberate and someone spent a long time on those beads.

Lucas is quiet. Kyle feels him go quiet.

"That's, uh," Kyle starts, and does not know how to finish.

Lucas clears his throat. He crosses his arms, then uncrosses them. "It's mine," he says. "I made it. The flannel and the trim both. Took me a winter."

Kyle nods slowly. His mouth is dry again even after all that water. "You wear it?"

"Sometimes. When the shop's empty. Like now." Lucas says it flat, but his ears have gone red, and he is looking at the floor between them instead of at Kyle. "Five years on this island and I've never told a soul. So there it is. You can unsee it or you can't, I guess."

"How long have you, uh. Worn things?"

"Since my twenties. Off and on. More on, lately." Lucas finally looks up. "It's not a kink thing. Or it is, a little, fine, but mostly it's just. It feels right. You know how a tool feels right in your hand the first time you pick it up? Same thing."

Kyle knows exactly what he means, which surprises him. "Yeah," he says. "I know what you mean."

And then, because the heat has cooked something out of his brain, because nothing about today has gone the way it was supposed to, Kyle says the thing.

"Can I see it on you?"

His own voice comes out rough. Lower than he meant. Lucas goes still, and for a long three seconds the only sound is the window unit rattling.

"You sure?" Lucas says. "It's not a small ask."

"I'm asking, aren't I."