Chương 26: After the Season

The busy season for a guard crew runs from August to November, and it had just ended. On Wednesday afternoon three of them came to do something about Salt Row. Peg had called it in on the sixth of October, from the phone in the servery, on her break. A woman had taken the details and told her there was a list. The list moved in the order things could be got at. Then nothing happened for seven weeks. The street stopped waiting, and the boards on the steps turned into another thing nobody looked at.

Abe found out the same way everybody else did. He turned the corner off the Corn Road and walked into the backs of forty people. They'd put a van across the bottom of the row and a light on a stand, because the afternoon was already going. They were in dark waxed coats that had been mended at the shoulders. They carried their gear the way Riddell carried a knife, which is to say without thinking about it at all. Two long hooks. A bar with a head on it and a grip worn down to the shape of somebody's hand.

Nobody in that crowd stood within ten feet of them, and nobody had been asked to.

"They've been at it since one," said a woman he'd seen at that bus stop his whole life.

"It's in pieces. They're bringing it up in pieces." He'd known that. He was the reason there was anything down there to bring up. The first thing up was a plate off its back, on a strop, turning slowly in the light. It came over the top of the steps into full view of the road, and the whole street made a noise at once. It was the size of a door. Wet brick color, and the edge of it was torn ragged along one side. Abe knew that edge.

It was the third plate, and he'd gotten it up with eighteen inches of sharpened flat bar and one working hand, kneeling in the water, about a minute after the thing stopped moving. The one on the winch put two fingers flat on the cable as the plate came over the top, and it stopped turning. He never looked up off the drum while he did it, and nobody remarked on that either. Then one of the crew lifted the plate off the strop on his own and carried it across to the van under one arm, like a trash can lid.

Nobody in the crowd said anything about that, because everybody in Calder knows what a guard is. Abe had been measuring people for two months and he watched the man's feet the whole way across the road.

"That's one of nine," a man said at the back, loudly.

"There's nine of them things on it. My brother-in-law does the tanks at Witherby and he says nine."

"Your brother-in-law says a lot of things."

"He says nine." A boy of about six was up on his father's shoulders at the front, being told he could look for one more minute and then they were going in for his dinner, and he wasn't remotely interested in going in for his dinner. Abe stood in a street full of his neighbors and watched a piece of the worst night of his life go round and round in the air on a rope. What he wanted was two minutes with nobody in them.

Two minutes to stand in a stopped street and look at the thing he'd done in October, on his own, with the whole road holding still and nobody's opinion in it. He wanted out of it, and there had only ever been one way out. He breathed out, and let his shoulders go, and started counting himself down into the quiet. The world did not stop. He gave it another go. Fifty seconds was what it took him, near enough, and he could always feel the last ten of it coming. He got about twenty and lost it. The winch went.

Somebody laughed at something behind him. A woman said her sister had told her about this on Monday, and the boy on his father's shoulders wanted to know if it had a face. Abe stood in the middle of forty people and could not get quiet. He'd known that rule since the first week and he'd never minded it, because until today it had never taken anything off him that he wanted. Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

The plate went down on the road with a sound like a skip being emptied. The boy on the shoulders got his one more minute, and then another one, and in the end his father stopped arguing and stayed. He wanted to know if it had a face. Nobody on that road could tell him, and three or four of them tried. It got dark on them at four and nobody went in. Forty people stood on a wet road in the cold watching three strangers work a winch, and the only ones who left were two mothers who had run out of arguments.

Abe watched the crew instead of the hole. Nobody else on that road was. None of the three ever hurried. None of them put a hand out to steady anything twice. The one who did the writing came up the row asking about the boards. He asked it three times, at three different doors, in the same flat voice. Who put the boards on the steps. When did they come off. Nobody knew, though everybody agreed the boards had gone on around the start of October, and that at some point after that they had not been on.

That was as far as forty people could get between them.

"There should have been a barrier down there," he said.

"A proper one, on a frame. It's on my sheet as done."

"Well, it wasn't there," said the woman from the bus stop.

"No," he said.

"I know." He wrote that down too and went back to the steps, and that was the last anybody said about the barrier, because by then the street had found something better. Peg was on a shift at the servery and she'd hear all of it secondhand off two people at a bus stop. She'd made the call. Abe stood in her road and watched her seven weeks come up out of a hole in pieces, and she was going to get it at the table off Mrs. Bewley, thirdhand, with the potatoes. It was Mrs.

Bewley who said it first, two floors down from Abe's own front door. She had lost a dog down those steps in October, and she said it like somebody who wanted that remembered.

"Somebody killed it," she said. That went along the row faster than the winch could turn. Abe looked at the back of her head and thought about a dog he had never seen. Somebody had killed it. It hadn't drowned and it hadn't starved and nobody had come for it. It was in pieces at the bottom of a stairwell on Salt Row, and somebody had done that to it.

"Guard did it. Back in October. They don't tell you."

"They'd have taken it away in October, then, wouldn't they."

"Would they?"

"They'd have taken it away, Ron." Mrs. Bewley said that was rubbish, because a guard always says so at the door, and she'd had one at her door years ago and he said so.

"That was a burst main."

"He still said so, though." An old man by the van said his money was on a crew off the water. Everybody wanted to know why, and he was extremely pleased to be asked.

"Because of how it's cut," he said.

"I had a look before they roped it. Whoever did that stood in the water and leaned. That's a water man's cut. You get it off working long stuff off a boat all day."

"They've had the core out of it as well," said one of the winch crew.

"Third plate's off and the chest is empty. You don't do that by accident in the dark."

"That's what I'm telling you. Somebody came down here and did a job and went home." The back of Abe's neck went hot. They were describing him, out loud, in the road, and not one of them knew it. He'd stood in the water. He'd leaned. He'd done it because there was no other way to get any weight behind the bar, with the bottom four steps under water and his left hand strapped up. He'd worked all of that out on his own, in a stopped stairwell, at two o'clock in the morning. Now the road agreed.

Somebody who knew exactly what he was doing had come down here and done it. Nobody had ever said anything that good about his work. He couldn't have any of it. He caught himself standing up straighter and made himself quit it. There were forty people on that road and any one of them could have turned around. Then he had to stand in the cold and listen to the old man take two more people through the cut, getting it right every time, and adding a detail on the third telling that was also right.

Somebody only had to say a kid from the block. Nobody said it. Nobody was ever going to say it, because a schoolboy going down eight steps at two in the morning with a bar is not a thing that happens in Calder, and everybody standing in that road knew it. The last thing up the steps was the heap. It came up in a grab bucket, in three loads. It was no part of the thing itself, and not one person on that road had the first idea what they were looking at.

The three of them put the bucket down and stood over it for a while without saying anything to each other, which they hadn't done about any of the rest of it. Two people at the front asked what it was and got nothing back at all. The one who did the writing wrote nothing down about it either, and Abe noticed that, because he'd watched the same man write down a woman's opinion about boards. Then they put the whole lot in the van and shut the doors on it. Nobody up on the road ever found out.

Abe had worked out on the night that the thing was standing on something, because it was further up out of the water than eight steps allowed for. He had never let himself wonder what it was. Standing in the road watching them shut the van doors on it, he wondered. They were finished by half past four. One of them ran a tape across the top of the steps, blue and white, and tied it to a downpipe.

"Are you coming back?" said Mrs. Bewley.

"To have a look for the others."

"There aren't any others on this row."

"How do you know that?"

"Because we've been down it." He wound the rest of the tape onto his arm.

"The cuts get swept when there's a boat and a day, and there's no boat until March."

"March."

"Four hundred streets," he said, "and three of us," and he got in the van. Mrs. Bewley said something to his back about her dog. He didn't hear it, or he didn't want to. The van went up the row and took the light on the stand with it, and the bottom of Salt Row was dark and empty for the first time in seven weeks. She stayed at the tape after it had gone, with her arms folded and her coat done up wrong.

"They never said what it was," she said, to Abe, because Abe was the one going past.

"Down there. Nobody's said."

"No," said Abe.

"You'd think they'd say."

"You would." He went up the stairs to his dinner.