Chapter 3

The boardroom was one long room over the water.

Varnish, cold coffee, and a wall of crew photographs going back to 1926.

Marta pushed the door with her shoulder, clip board first.

Perry came in behind her with his cap in his hand.

The crew came in behind them and lined the wall.

Vernon was already at the head of the table, ledger open, gold chain flat across his coat.

"The boy is confused," he said.

Perry didn't sit.

He laid the weigh ticket on the varnish and smoothed it flat with two fingers.

"Ticket four-one-six," he said.

"Berth nine."

"Four hundred eighty cases."

"Your book says four hundred forty."

Vernon closed the ledger.

"Paper off a floor."

Marta laid her tally sheet down beside it.

"Union count. Same load. Same day."

"Four hundred eighty."

"Two counters. Two sheets. One number."

Then the door opened again.

Emmett Fisk came in with his hat in one hand and a folder under his coat.

He set the folder on the varnish and opened it.

Carbon copies, thin as onion skin, stacked in date order.

"I kept the carbons," he said.

"Every ticket I ever wrote."

"The true ones are in the back."

He slid the folder down the table.

He had weighed the loads light.

He had written two sets of tickets.

He had let the buyer's trucks load at night with the yard lights off.

He had signed the invoices to a name with no office behind it.

And he had done it for five years.

"Say the name," Marta said.

Emmett looked at Vernon.

Then he looked at the table.

"Salter and Mott," he said.

"Out of Oakland."

"Everything off the books went to them."

Vernon put both hands flat on the ledger.

"The land is worth more," he said.

"Empty."

Nobody answered him.

The cannery's 1921 charter did one thing the men at the head of the table never liked.

It gave the crew first refusal if the plant was ever sold.

Marta sent a runner to the union hall on the same block.

The trust's lawyer was on the pier by eleven.

The board met at noon.

Cypress Point Holdings pulled out before dinner.

The accounts were frozen before the evening whistle.

Perry took the pencil from behind his ear.

He opened Vernon's ledger to the last page and wrote one number.

One thousand two hundred eighty.

Then he closed it and set the pencil down.

"You called me slow for six years," he said.

"I was the only one counting."

By evening somebody had a brush out on the pier.

They painted the walk-in first.

Just PERRY, tall and crooked, over the door he used to sweep.

Marta taped the weigh ticket inside the cover of the union log.

Then she set Perry's cap back on his head.

They said he couldn't read.

They never asked what he remembered.