Chapter 8: The Friday Route

Tomo's POV

The first Friday of December came in cold and black, with ice on the pilings at McKees Rocks.

I stood on the Bartos dock at five in the morning with a thermos of my own.

A list of thirty boat names was folded in my coat pocket.

Zuza's father came down the gangway with his cap pulled low.

He was seventy, tall and stooped.

He had not said a word to me since I walked into his kitchen with his daughter on a Sunday.

"You're the Croat," he said now.

"Yes, Captain."

"The lodge boy. The one who runs the dues." He looked me up and down. "She says you can be trusted."

"I'd rather she was right than I was," I said.

He grunted. It might have been a laugh.

"What do you want from my captains, Vukovic?" he asked.

"One Friday, the twelfth," I said. "Supper at the union hall, every man there, with his wife if he has one."

"A supper," he said.

"With the man in the tan coat as the guest of honor," I said.

His eyes narrowed.

"I have paid that envelope nine years," he said slowly.

"Eighteen hundred a month. Dock fees, they told me."

"Then my daughter looks at the books and tells me what a dock fee is."

"Thirty captains pay it, Captain," I said. "None of them knows the other twenty-nine do."

He turned to look at the river.

The tows lay in the dark with their running lights on, six of his and a dozen more tied up along the bank.

"If she asks me to stand up in front of all of them," he said, "I will stand."

"She will ask you," I said.

"But I signed the merger, Vukovic," he said. "A man's hand is his word."

"Then wait until she asks, Captain," I said. "She'll tell you why."

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