The Empty Truck Arrived With Six Hundred Pounds Of Trouble

The truck arrived at twelve seventeen, when the gulls had finally stopped fighting over the bins.

Gordon Vale climbed down from the passenger seat and slapped the door twice.

"Just empty boxes, Eddie. Don't wake yourself up over it."

My name was Edwin. Nobody who used Eddie had ever fixed anything for me.

I was a white man of sixty-six, with pale blue eyes, a bent nose, and thin gray hair I kept tucked under a green work cap.

I worked as the shellfish depuration technician at Lantern Reach, a small plant in Narragansett. I checked the pumps, took tank samples, and watched clean seawater pass through clams that needed treatment before sale. I could spend an hour listening to a bearing other men said sounded fine.

I tested every valve twice.

On my pencil drawings, I marked each test with a small circle. Two circles meant I had checked it, then gone back and checked again.

"Still drawing your little submarines?" Gordon asked.

Gordon was a broad white man of fifty-seven, with a pink scalp, thick silver eyebrows, and a gold tooth that showed whenever he smiled.

He owned Vale Harbor Wholesale and the company that ran our plant. He brought doughnuts when he cut hours. He called the women in packing his angels while docking them for wet gloves.

That night, his smile stayed wide as he looked at my notebook.

"Must be nice, having a hobby on my clock."

"The left intake seat needs replacing."

"Write yourself a reminder. At your age, I'd write everything down."

I had written everything down for twenty-three years.

The truck stopped on our platform scale. Its plate matched the empty weight card clipped beside my desk. Same driver, same bins, same fuel allowance. Yet it carried six hundred and twenty pounds above its usual return weight.

Owen Pike leaned out of the cab.

"Want the slip, Ed?"

Gordon answered for me.

"No intake. No slip. We're borrowing floor space."

Owen looked at me, then at the dark glass above Gordon's smile. He lowered his hand.

I tore off the scale copy anyway. It was how the machine worked. One strip went upstairs. One stayed below.

Gordon went into the office to make a call.

Through the loading door, I saw Owen wheel four tubs toward tank four. He handled them with both hands and bent knees. Empty boxes did not make a man move that way.

I took the loading photograph required by our intake routine. A yellow catch tag hung from the nearest tub. Then I drew water from tank four, wrote the time on the bottle, and sealed it for the morning lab pickup.

Upstairs, Gordon laughed into his phone.

"They'll find the money. People always do when you explain things kindly."

I wrote his truck number beside the sample number. Then I put two circles beside the valve drawing.

Those were my field books. When Gordon had bought the operating company, I had kept the right to retain them. The sentence sat in Schedule C of my employment agreement. His lawyer had called them personal maintenance drawings.

My drawings had dates, weights, sample numbers, and photographs filed behind them.

Every Friday, I took the finished pages home. Company copies stayed at the plant. My originals went into a dry cabinet above my washing machine.

Gordon had never asked what was behind the drawings.

At four ten, Ruth Bell arrived to collect treated clams for her small boat crew. She stood outside the office with a white envelope pressed flat between her hands.

"Can I borrow your phone?" she asked.

"Yours dead?"

"I don't want this call on mine."

She dialed her brother, whispered about money, and stopped when she saw me listening.

"How much?" I asked.

"Twenty-eight hundred. By noon."

"For what?"

"A release charge. Our catch got held at the staging dock. They said a complaint could stop us working for weeks."

I glanced at her empty pickup bed.

"Who said?"

She shook her head. "You've got a job, Ed. Keep it."

After she left, I checked the loading photograph. Her boat's name, Little Mercy, showed on that yellow tag.

Six hundred and twenty pounds. Four tubs. A boat that suddenly owed $2,800.

I called the number on a fraud notice pinned by our break room sink. I asked for someone outside the local harbor office.

"Leave your name," a woman said. "And tell me whether you're safe speaking."

I liked that she asked the second thing.

"Edwin Mercer. I can speak until six. Then the owner comes back."

"I'm Leona Duarte. I'll come before that."

At five forty, headlights washed across the scale. A woman stepped out carrying a plain brown folder.

Behind her, another set of headlights turned into our yard.