when he jerked it. A link had caught sideways in the eyelet. He shook the chain loose and tugged again. It ran through and he kept it coming until it played out. He hung on to it, feeling his fingers going numb from handling the cold metal, and went down to his knees and peered behind the wheel of the backhoe to check the hook at that end. It was fine, still turned against the tension. He felt that someone was behind him, watching, coming near. Spooked, he froze, then slowly pulled out from under the backhoe and looked around. There was no one. He stepped up on the backhoe and looked over the truck's side panel to where he'd seen the man under the awning. The man was gone.
Lafleur went to the end of the bed and looked up and down the lot, then craned his neck and looked along the side of the truck. There was no one in sight—just the yard, machinery, warehouse, and across the street flickering neon signs and darkened shops, and everywhere the steady drizzle in the half-light. He ducked back into the truck bed. It was the running engines, he thought, that had spooked him, so surrounded him with noise that he conjured a presence out of his inability to hear. It was like the itch on an amputee's toe. It was absence, filling itself with emanation. He grabbed the chain, braced himself against the side of the bed, and tugged. Another link came through. He hooked the chain onto itself, then stepped over it and climbed up the side of the backhoe, entered the compartment, sat, and swiveled the seat so that he faced the bucket. He used the controls to raise the bucket, then made the light-colored articulated arm do a probing acrobatic in the gray air. The arm straightened, telescoped, folded, and the bucket came down neatly until its heel nearly touched the truck bed. He lowered the pods, the four flat steel disks mounted to hydraulic retractors on the insides of the wheels. He used the pods to lift the tractor, taking weight off the wheels and slack out of the chains, then he swung the door open and looked down at the chains. They were tight enough to play a tune on. He lowered the tractor slightly on the pods to ease up on the tension. He dropped the bucket to the bed, making the ninth point for the machine to rest on, to hold it steady on the trip across the mountains. He switched the backhoe off and climbed out, then jumped out of the truck bed to the asphalt. He picked up the end of each of the ramps, slid them under the backhoe, and climbed back into the truck to mount the tailgate, looking again as he moved, scanning the yard.
Heavy, the tailgate took everything he had to move it from where he had leaned it against the side panel. He slid the tailgate into position and lifted one end into the slot, then the other, grunting, feeling with satisfaction the pull of the cartilage in his knees and the thunk as the tailgate pivot fell into the second slot. It felt good to be engrossed with the manipulation of mechanical objects.
He clamped the gate shut, then eased down. He went around to the cab of the truck, climbed in, lowered the bed, backed the truck up and let it coast gently into the trailer hitch. It hit the mark and slid to, thumping resonantly. He got out, dropped the pins into the hitch and attached the safety chains between the trailer and truck, got back in the cab and pulled the trailer out of line and parked near the street. A car passed, illuminating cones of raindrops in the gray with its headlights. The truck engine idled and the windshield wipers slapped rhythmically.
He looked down at his toolbox on the floor of the passenger side and rapidly ran its contents through his mind. He had a steel case in the back of the truck, too, which held the heavier items: grease guns, filters, hosing, jacks, large tools, more chain, cable, spare parts…. He had his extra three-quarter-yard bucket in the back, and six ten-gallon cans of oil, two five-gallon grease cans. He was ready. His watch said ten after seven. It was time. He switched off the wipers. Rain dotted the windshield. He opened the door, stepped down to the ground, and headed for the warehouse to check his locker one last time.
At about thirty feet the idling truck became a pocket of noise behind him. He felt as though he had walked through a wall. The sun had dropped beneath the cloud cover. It shone laterally through the slit between clouds and distant mountains. The rain kept falling, but everything gleamed. The evening had taken on an unreal, luminous quality. He searched the yard for Dave Petra, for the big man. He looked between the machines to his right as he passed them. He saw no one. The puddles in the asphalt were a-quiver with light and had oily, coiling rainbows in them.
He climbed onto the loading dock and went into the office. Dave was not in here. Lafleur moved to a passageway that led to the shop and peered through the opening. Heavy tools lined the walls—jacks, bench presses, welding equipment, metal lathes—and in the dock nearest him stood a D-14 international tractor, disemboweled of its engine. The engine sat on the floor, a pig of a thing. A hook and chain hung from a rolling winch mounted on a track on a beam above the D-14. In the stillness it was a lethal-looking place. He called the watchman's name: “Dave?” His voice echoed in the cavernous room.
No one answered. Puzzled, Lafleur squinted. He turned back into the office and walked to his locker, opened it, and squatted.
An old sweater lay wadded in a corner. Scattered bits of things that had fallen out of his pockets over the several years littered the bottom. He scooped them out and looked: scraps of paper, tickets torn in half, a broken jackknife, pennies, paper clips, and a small, hard piece of clay. Junk. He picked up the clay. It was a head with protruding ears, agape mouth, and deep eye sockets, something slightly hideous made by one of his children, but he couldn't remember by which child, or when, or why he had carried it here. He turned the head slowly in his fingers, then put it in his shirt pocket. He put the pennies in his pocket and dumped the rest of the debris in a wastebasket, picked up his sweater, stood, swung the locker door shut with his knee, and moved back to the front door.
He went out onto the dock, stopped, and looked for Dave Petra. Usually Dave came out to talk to him when he loaded equipment after hours. The sun had sunk deeper and whitened light reflected off the bottoms of the clouds. He glanced over at his truck and trailer, which were waiting right next to the street. The truck rumbled. He snaked his eyes back along the line of huge, protuberant machinery, then he moved down the steps and started across the lot.
He felt cold under his slicker from being in the warm building. The air began to reverberate as he neared his truck. He looked around, across the street, even back over his shoulder, seeing no one. He went around the trailer, scrutinizing his load as he passed, checking it again, and walked to the cab. He had his foot on the step-up and the door half open when he saw a thick shape loom out from the front of the truck. The shape, a man, scurried under him. Startled, Lafleur froze. The man came up from beneath Lafleur, grabbed his belt, and thrust him into the cab. Quickly, Lafleur bent his leg up and kicked, and felt his bootheel strike, but there was another one inside the cab, who grabbed his coat and dragged him in, actually lifted and turned him and sat him down on the seat. The one outside got into the cab, jerked the door shut, slid over and pushed against Lafleur. Lafleur found himself wedged between the two of them. He had his foot caught behind the shift lever. He couldn't move. He smelled the men's wet clothing. The one on his left was bent over, rubbing his forehead through the black ski mask he wore pulled down to his neck.
“Caught you one, did he?” the one on the right said. He, too, wore a black ski mask. He was big. He had a big frame and a head like a huge black blot, but his voice came out sweet-sounding.
“Shit,” the one on the left said. “The sucker kicked me.” Then suddenly he turned on Lafleur, wildly punching Lafleur's chest and face.
“Easy,” the big one said. Lafleur had raised his arms to ward off the blows. He drew up one knee to try to shove the man off him. His other foot was still caught and he felt his ankle wrench. He heard himself shout. It sounded like someone else shouting, then he felt the big one lean over him, felt himself smothered by the body and pressed back into the seat, and he glimpsed the big one's arm move by and gently shove the man on the left away. “Easy,” the big one said.
“Okay,” the man on the left said. He slid back next to Lafleur, shoving against him. “Okay.”
“We thought we'd lost you when you first pulled this thing out to the street,” the big one said. The voice still sounded sweet.
Lafleur hadn't been hurt by the attack, just shaken. His foot was still caught and his blood was pounding. “Get out of my truck,” he said.
He felt the man on his left quivering. On his right, the big one's jaw worked