Chapter 5: Convent

The grain terminal at Convent rose out of the flat land like a city nobody lived in.

It was concrete silos, steel galleries and conveyor housings a hundred feet long.

Over all of it burned a white glare of sodium lamps that turned the night orange.

Soren's driver let me out at a gate with a guardhouse.

Soren was waiting there in a canvas work jacket with his hands in the pockets.

He looked different out of the tuxedo.

He looked like what he was, a man who ran something enormous with his own hands.

"Flat shoes," he said, looking down.

"You said."

"You listened."

"I read everything," I said.

He took me up a steel stair in the side of the largest silo.

It switched back and forth, steep and narrow against the steel.

At the top a narrow gantry ran out over the river, a catwalk with a rail on both sides, forty feet above the barge slips.

The Mississippi lay below us, black and wide and shining.

The lights of towboats moved slowly on it.

The wind came up cold off the water.

"The grain goes down a spout from here into the barges," he said. "Twelve thousand bushels an hour. On a night like this nobody is up here but me."

"Nobody?"

"Nobody who'd see you."

I turned to look at him.

His eyes were steady on me.

"Line two," he said. "Nothing where anyone can see."

He looked out over the water.

"I picked this place because it's dark above the lamps and nobody walks the quay after ten. Tell me if I'm wrong."

I looked over the rail.

The floodlights lit the dock and the water, and the gantry sat above them in shadow.

Nobody was on the quay or the slips.

"You're not wrong," I said.

"Then I'd like to kiss you."

"You don't have to ask."

"I know," he said. "I like to."