My Partner Locked The Dock Gate In Front Of Waiting Customers

Darren put the new padlock through the dock gate while I still had the replacement rib in my hand.

Three customers watched from the gravel lot. Beyond him, my floating workshop lifted against its lines. A cold May wind came off the St. Louis River and carried the smell of wet cedar through the fence.

Above the lot, houses climbed the West Duluth hill. An ore train clanked past the road crossing. I had spent two winters working under tarps in that yard before I could afford a roof over my barge.

"You can leave that here," he said, pointing at the rib.

"Open the gate. Mrs. Bell's canoe needs this before noon."

He smiled at the customers.

"Elias was our hired hand. We had to make a change. The whole repair season belongs to me now."

My name was Elias Wabash, and I was thirty-seven. I was an Ojibwe canoe restorer in Duluth, Minnesota. I was a broad-shouldered Native American man with brown skin, long black hair tied at my neck, and a pale scar across my left thumb.

That thumb found things my eyes missed. I could close my hand around a broken canoe rib and match its curve and thickness by touch alone. Darren used to bring people over to watch.

Now he called it hired work.

Darren Fiske was a forty-year-old white man with sandy hair, a neat beard, and a wide smile that made strangers trust him.

I had trusted him, too. He could talk a worried customer through a $900 estimate without making them feel poor. I could take apart their grandfather's canoe without losing its shape. We called each other partners because it sounded friendly.

The signed papers used other words.

"My father's canoe is in there," June Bell said. "Who is finishing it?"

"I am," Darren said. "Same address. Same shop."

He tapped the sign screwed to the gate. His dock address sat under our painted canoe.

"You can't take an address away in your truck, Elias."

I looked past him. The steam box stood along the workshop wall. Its boiler, bending straps, and rib forms had cost me $6,840. Eleven customer canoes rested inside or under the covered rack beside the dock.

One was upside down on bare gravel.

"Put pads under that hull," I said.

"You don't give orders here anymore."

I set the replacement rib in my truck instead.

June came over as I opened the door.

"Were you really just working for him?"

"I did the repairs. I also bought the barge."

She glanced back at the gate.

"Then why does he have the key?"

"Because I thought one key was enough for two people."

I did not argue across the fence. A crowd would only give Darren a bigger room to charm.

Before I left, I took pictures from the public lot. The gate. The canoe on gravel. The workshop's hull number, still clear beneath the green paint. Then I sent Darren a text asking for access to protect the customers' boats and collect my business records.

His answer arrived before I reached the road.

You walked away. Don't come back without $18,400.

He had picked a very exact number for something he had never mentioned.

At home, I placed the rib on my kitchen table. A tiny brass tack fell from my shirt pocket and clicked against the wood.

I used a white enamel cup for loose tacks at work. Every repair began with a count. Every repair ended with another. A tack left inside a hull could work loose years later and cut someone's hand.

My old teacher had said, "Count what comes out. Count what goes back."

It worked for more than canoes.

I took a flat gray document case from the closet. Darren had laughed when I brought it home each night.

"Afraid the receipts will learn to swim?" he used to ask.

Inside lay the vessel title in my name, the $12,600 hull purchase receipt, and the bills for the deck and roof. Under those sat the agreement Darren and I had signed eighteen months earlier.

His rent was $480 a month for one bench and shared tool access. His shore lease stayed his. My barge stayed mine. He had initialed that sentence.

I read every page before calling anyone.

There was a removal clause, too. Either of us could end the bench arrangement with thirty days' notice. I could move my vessel after giving forty-eight hours' written notice, provided the move was safe and I paid any tow costs.

I put a finger beside his initials.

Then I called the insurer listed on my policy and reported the lockout, the threatened demand, and the customer property still inside.

"Don't force access," the woman on the phone said. "I'm assigning someone to document the risk."

At six that evening, a message appeared from a marine insurance adjuster named Soraya Mahmoud.

Under her request for a morning meeting was a photograph Darren had sent with his own claim.

It showed my steam box with its bolts already loose.