Lumpy is a no-show for work, which isn’t uncommon with the temps we hire at Front Street Packaging. Most of these men are from the scrap heap; bums from local Native American tribes: Skagit, Shoshoni, Quinault. After cleaning up this shit-hole for a day or two, they smarten-up and realize working at a fish-packaging warehouse isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. They grab a bottle or a needle or a straw and never show their faces here again.

Lumpy is different. On the surface, he’s an old white hobo. Honky, as they say, and over the last few weeks, this honky has proven to us there’s more to him than eating out of trash bins and substance abuse. He’s currently on Front Street’s permanent payroll. The man needs us, and, little did I know, we need him. The afternoon rush is a disaster but we make do. The next day, after another no-show, I get the phone call.

“Sean Berry?” the man on the phone asks, and right off the bat I notice an inquisitiveness purebred in cops.

“This is Sean Berry,” I say. I’m standing in my office, the day’s invoices tucked deep into the nook of my armpit, the gassy breath of forklifts shooting up into my nostrils.

“This is Daniel Devore from the Seattle Police Department.”

Daniel’s voice has a soft lilt to it. It’s as if his wife made him quit the pool league on Tuesdays. He’s got that dismal gloom about his tone, too, the kind that tells me he’s bummed to spend more time with his seven-year old boy. Ice cream stains, petting zoos, hoof and mouth.

“What can I do for you Mr. Devore?”

I act nervous and make the man work. That’s what cops want. It’s a game. I flutter the pages on my desk in absent-minded chaos and cough nervously. Before I became shipping manager of this warehouse (the most responsible position in my 42 years) I’ve had brushes with the law all my life. I’m on the wrong side of the law for a reason.

Devore gets right down to biz. “Do you employ a Charles Rogers?” he asks.

“Charles Rogers?” I pause and dig deep. “Sorry. That name doesn’t ring a bell, officer.”

“You’re sure?”

“Charles Rogers. Charles Rogers. Wait—do you mean Lumpy?”

To my delight, the detective gets confused and irritated.

“I’m not sure of any aliases he might have,” Devore says. “But Charles Rogers is the man’s Christian name. So, I’ll ask again, does Charles Rogers work there or not?”

“I believe Charles is on sabbatical.”

“Sabbatical?”

“Thesis work,” I say and think that hump could be anywhere in the Pacific Northwest right now. Whether I have or whether I haven’t seen Lumpy in the last two days is beyond the point. It’s never good when cops call, and I usually skirt their questions and exercise my natural instinct to cover for guys in my trench. I now imagine Lumpy’s unshaven mug next to me in that foxhole, the sting of napalm in our eyes, both of us battling trench foot, him asking me to lead the bastards astray. He might do the same for me.

“Is there a problem, officer?”

“Mr. Charles Rogers jumped off the Bremerton ferry yesterday morning. We found a Front Street Packaging check stub in his wallet.”

Devore’s words hit me hard and my stomach tightens as if I’d choked down a handful of walnuts, shell and all. I get an image of Lumpy floating in the Sound; a bloated porpoise, his lips soaked blue like he was sucking on toilet bowl cleaner.

“Is Charles dead?” I reel back, make myself distant, and pretend I had nothing to do with Charles’ death, but I wasn’t so sure that I didn’t. I thought this phone call would have me picking the prick up from the drunk tank, his breath smelling like rotted leaves, and later watching him toss up rotgut wine onto the cement outside my car door. When you’re around drunks often enough, they seem to need favors of this nature.

“I’m afraid so.”

Devore then explains: The ferry was full of early-morning commuters, one of which saw a man (presumably Lumpy) dive headfirst into the icy, black pond. Before anyone could toss him a life preserver, he disappeared into the early morning fog, swallowed whole.

“Hypothermia,” he says. “Puget Sound Coast Guard fished him out a few hours ago.”

“Poor son of a bitch,” I say, suddenly dyspeptic.

There’s no real reason for making this any harder on Devore, so I tell the cop what I know: About a month ago, I found Lumpy sleeping out on Front Street’s back dock one morning like a discarded bag of garbage, gnats swarming. Instead of booting him off the property, we gave him a job. He was homeless and had been camping on the back dock three or four nights a week. The guy turned out to be a hard worker, and Katherine, the owner of Front Street, has a soft spot for hiring hard-luck cases, men on the rebound.

“I’ve got a favor to ask,” Devore says.

“Of course you do,” I say.

“Could you come down and identify the body?”

I stall and conjure up an excuse, but my well is dry. “Why me?”

“Everyone we tried to contact is dead, in jail, or in a mental facility.”

Again, I draw a blank, an empty register.

“You were his manager,” he continues. “Probably closest thing to family he’s got.”

After a long drone of static, both of us uncomfortable, I concede. It’s the very least I can do for the guy, and I’m accustomed to doing the very least.

“He’s at the medical examiner on First Hill,” he says. “Meet me there in an hour.”

After we hang up, I file the invoices and arrange the day’s deliveries.

•

Before heading out, I call and awaken Katherine at home and tell her about Lumpy.

“You’re kidding me?” she growls like a bathroom sink clogged with muck. There’s not much empathy in her voice, but underneath she’s wounded. I picture her entwined in silk bed sheets, a sleep blindfold pushed up around her head, hair matted yet grizzly.

Katherine is a dwarfish woman who looks like she should be spreading make-up on old ladies at a trashy mall, a heavy perfume-squirter. She also runs a sweatshop next door to the fish-packaging warehouse, but overall, she’s a good soul. Katherine only hires from a distinct crew of foreigners, misfits, cretins and ex-cons like myself. We’re a cheap labor force.

The Chinese people she “employs” in her sweatshop next door put together cardboard partitions and work for $5 an hour, sometimes more, sometimes less, but mostly less. The Chinese speak no English, and they often cram ten family members into a one-bedroom apartment in China Town, and they smell like weird fish.

Eventually, I broach the Lumpy subject with Ray, my assistant at Front Street. When I leave, he’ll be in charge of the warehouse for the rest of the afternoon, which doesn’t entail much: poker with the day laborers, chatting up the truckers, and feigning interest. All in a good day’s work. “I’ve got some bad news about Lumpy, Ray,” I say as I approach.

Ray stops scribbling on a PO order. Unlike my light skin and frumpy body, Ray is tall, black, and oddly stained, like Orson Welles when he played Othello. He has that same staged beard and that same painted-on darkness, except that Ray is born-again; a Moor with the passion of Christ. We stand near the truck bays with errant delivery drivers waiting for their trucks to be unloaded, forklift fumes coughing out and staining the concrete walls.

After I briefly explain Lumpy’s death and its sordid circumstances (which doesn’t really seem to surprise Ray), the only thing he has to say is, “It’s a shame Charles couldn’t find God.” Ray then tsks his tongue between his thin teeth like he always does.

“It’s a shame Lumpy couldn’t find anybody, Ray,” I say. “Let alone God.”

I bite my tongue and remind myself, in the guise of outward respect, that his real name is Charles Rogers. Ray and I called him Lumpy because he had a cyst on the crown of his forehead the size of a newborn’s knotted hand. We never asked, but we had our theories.

“He’s a hydrocephalic,” I once joked. “Water on the brain.”

“I think he got stung by a hornet,” Ray would counter over the din of forklifts. We’d often park next to each other and chat when business was slow. “It must’ve gotten infected and never healed properly. I have a cousin in Olympia who’s got the same problem.”

The knot, depending on Lumpy’s mood or time of day, fluctuated and breathed like the gills of a fish. Sometimes the bugger was small and calm, but when he got angry the thing bulged out like a swollen beet.

“Maybe he got it in jail?” I said another time.

Ray, too, has spent time in jail. Armed robbery. Drugs. The works. He’s got a real family now, kids scurrying around in pajamas, tucking them into bed, a wife that makes him pot roast. Ray doesn’t talk about the pen much, but his eyes are a dead giveaway. They’re brown and greasy like timid mice, the only characteristic that will never leave him.

We all have stains only ex-cons notice. Me, I’m missing my right pinky finger, which I lost during a work program while serving time for involuntary manslaughter in the Hamtramck Correctional Facility in Detroit. Who knew a simple fistfight would wind up with the other guy bleeding to death in a ditch? Not me, you can bet on that.

We’d been refurbishing abandoned houses, and I remember that it felt good to be outside doing work like real men instead of squabbling around in a hot laundry room like scullery maids. I lost my concentration and that coping saw got the best of me: rusty blade, infection, amputation. When I go to bed at night, I can see that dead finger sitting in a cup of ice, the bone sticking out like a mangled worm. The docs couldn’t save him.

After my second stint in jail (a fertilizer bomb test gone completely awry) I left what little family I had and hoofed it on out to the farthest corner of the world in my mind. When I stepped foot in Seward Park in Seattle – a 120 acre patch of forest land on the Bailey Peninsula – I felt like I was at the end of the earth, hidden in one of its many nooks and crannies. That’s when I felt I finally had a home.

•

Wheeling over to the King County Medical Examiner, I try to convince myself that Lumpy was an upstanding citizen, a man of virtue, morals, all that jazz. This proves difficult. I hardly knew him. I have, however, been told that people are good deep down, no matter how damaged we are on the outside. I delude myself, make the sentiment stick.

Over the course of the last few weeks, Lumpy had moved on from the odd jobs Katherine gave him (cleaning up the back dock, sweeping the warehouse, stacking pallets) and began driving a forklift for the Chinese next door. He was still temporary, he was still drunk, and he was still sleeping on the back dock, but his experience working as a longshoreman in Long Beach made him extremely valuable.

I went out to the back dock and kicked his feet every morning for work. From underneath a blanket of cardboard, Lumpy would lurch forward and glare at me with his red, gluey eyes. He would then caress his misshapen head, mumble incoherently and clean up in the bathroom, punching in with a pasty yawn.

Because Ray and I were so busy with the “legitimate” side of Katherine’s operations, we didn’t have much contact with the Chinese, or Lumpy. But, every once in a while, he’d come over and fill us in when business was slow, tell us stories, his cyst bristling.

“Those guys are crazy,” he’d say about the Chinese immigrants. Lumpy would always have a steaming cigarette in one hand and a cup of gashouse coffee in the other. He was a chain-smoker, flipping one cigarette into his mouth after another, the good tarry ones.

“Know that little fucker Lin Yong?”

“Which one is that?” we’d ask.

“The one that looks like the rest,” he’d say, jerking his thumb over his shoulder.

“What about him?”

“Bastard was arrested for shooting squirrels in the middle of the God damned city.”

“Squirrels?”

“He’s been to jail twice for shooting squirrels!”

And then he’d laugh with a hoarse death rattle, choking on his damaged lungs until tears came to his eyes. Even the Chinese immigrants Katherine hired were tough-luck cases.

“Suppose those guys eat them things when times are tough. Or maybe they was out just having fun? Hell, I’ve eaten squirrel before.”

“They’re rats of a different name!”

“They ain’t too bad. Little gamey, but not bad.”

Later in the rainy afternoons, staring out the front bay doors, losing ourselves in the boggy, broken streets in front of the warehouse, Lumpy would get more serious and sentimental. He wanted to feel the plight of the Chinese. They were heroic to him. They’d survived dissolute poverty and had flourished after the long voyage across the sea.

“Those chinks will do anything to get out of that country, Sean,” he’d say. “You know half those guys were shipped over in a container illegally?”

We knew. Last year, the port of Seattle found a container at Terminal 18 with a slew of illegal immigrants from Hong Kong inside. Three were dead and had deteriorated like rotten peaches. Illegal immigration in this port was a big problem. INS would show up at the warehouse once in a while and snoop around. They would ask the Chinese questions through an interpreter, scribbling in black handbooks. Their investigations never amounted to much, but it always put us on edge because we employed a lot of these stow-aways.

Eventually, Lumpy got back on his feet and stopped drinking and rented an apartment over in Bremerton, which is a shitty little Naval town on the other side of Puget Sound. He took the ferry into Seattle every day and fed the seagulls that hovered around the deck, throwing crumbs of stale bread into the air from a brown paper bag.

We were all on track, a one-way ticket to respect. We recited and preached each other’s stories. I remember Lumpy telling us one afternoon that he’d lost his mother and grandmother a year ago, and then his brother in a car crash out in the Sierra Mountains.

“We were pheasant hunting and drank a lot that day,” he’d said. “Next thing I know, the truck is face down in the ravine and my brother isn’t in the cab of the truck.” He whistled and made a motion with his hand like it was his brother’s body shooting through the window. “BANG! Right through the windshield!”

Lumpy said he spent the next few months hitching his way up to Seattle, stopping in every boon-dock town and drinking until his face grew yellow. Instead of the Betty Ford clinic or the nut ward, he flopped on our back dock and waited for me to kick him in the boots. “Crash where you land,” he’d said. “That was my motto.”

“You ever consider the Lord’s help?” Ray had once asked.

Unlike most born-agains, Ray isn’t too pushy about his beliefs. His preachings of the Lord are like a helpful hand he holds out in case someone needs it. He did the same with me. The key is to stop the courtship early. Tell him, politely, that God didn’t make the cut.

“I can’t say I trust the Lord right now, Ray.”

“Jesus is always there if you need him, Charles.”

“Sure he is.”

No one wanted to push.

After proving his salt, Katherine placed Lumpy on payroll. It was a path all of us took. She was building a competent fleet of defectives and wanted only a few commitments: stop drinking, stop sleeping on the back dock, and show up to work on time. It was that simple. Lumpy had been straight for the last three weeks and you could tell because his eyes were no longer hazy or jaundiced. He’d waited patiently for his chance and was bursting that day Katherine let him in on the good news, his eyes aflame like he’d won the lottery. “Man, ever since that accident in the Sierra’s, not one soul has given me such an opportunity.” Lumpy looked squarely at Ray and said, “No one. Not even God.”

This made Katherine look pretty good. It made Lumpy look good, too. God, on the other hand, well, let’s just say his jumper had been catching a lot of iron.

•

As it often happens, things changed without rhyme or reason. Lumpy was constantly moping around the warehouse, and he was often difficult and pissy when addressed. Two nights ago, I’d locked up the warehouse and slapped him on the back. “You’re doing a great job,” I’d said. “Keep up the good work.”

I hated to play the bit of caring manager, but Katherine had asked me to boost the guy’s self-esteem, inflate his morale. She’s been to seminars on this stuff.

Lumpy thanked me and grinned as we parted, his gums the color of an irritated clay pot. “Yeah, things look pretty good from down here.”

He had the tender tone of thankfulness to his voice, so that’s why I was surprised to see him and his girlfriend an hour later in a broken-down bar I visit after work on occasion. I’d cleaned up my life after my stints in jail, but never stopped drinking. It was never a problem for me. I simply kept a mellow buzz and avoided trouble. When I beat that man to death in Detroit, I wasn’t drunk, and I didn’t start it. I just finished it.

As I walked into the bar, I spotted Lumpy’s hobbled body from across the dark room, his eyes sickened with drink. He noticed me immediately and waved me over. “We’re celebrating!” he yelled and raised his foamy glass.

“What are you celebrating?” I asked.

Grabbing me around the shoulder, Lumpy pulled himself closer. “I’m celebrating the end of my sobriety!” His breath was boozy and warm, and his greasy nose had grazed my cheek. I watched him take a swig of his beer, his mouth smacking, savoring the taste. “Whooee! It’s been weeks since I’ve had a drink!”

A pint of watery beer and a shot of rail whisky arrived in front of me. I strangled the shot glass and hoisted it into the air, the cool contents sloshing onto my fingers.

“Cheers!” I said and slammed back the drink and felt the liquor spread into my tummy like warm moss growing on the side of a wall. We then drank solidly together for an hour, trading quips about jail.

“Terrible food,” I said.

“Awful,” he said.

“The rice was slimy and had bugs in it.”

“I couldn’t sleep on those beds.”

“I lost twenty pounds when I went in.”

“Me too,” he said and slapped his flabby belly. “The sex is good, though.” Lumpy then nudged my elbow and said, “Just kidding, buddy.”

I wasn’t so sure that he was. I did know, however, that he was busy getting trashed. The whisky had him frayed at the edges and he bounced between friendliness and downright meanness. Soon he was flipping the bird to patrons for no reason and tossing pretzels on the ground, stomping them into a mealy paste, and calling the bartender a phony.

I was uncomfortable. I thought about the word enabler and tried to drown that word with alcohol. I got drunk, too. Later, after taking a spill from his barstool and landing on the floor with a thud and a giggle, Lumpy screamed at me when I asked him to calm down.

“I will not calm down!” His nose grazed my ear again.

I didn’t know why he was yelling, and I tried to forget it, but he wouldn’t let it go.

“What is the matter with you?” he said and hopped back on the stool like a rodeo cowboy. “I’m just having some fun.”

This sudden bitterness turned the switch in me, and I simply decided not to care about him anymore. I gave him a flit of my hand. “Carry on,” is the only thing I said to him.

Sloppy, hardcore drinkers like Lumpy were part of the reason I left my hometown, and I was good at pretending nothing was wrong. You can ask the family and friends I left back in Detroit. They’ll tell you I was the best.

After we played a game of pool, and after I bought rounds for him and his current shack-job, Veronica, Lumpy found his humor again. He got chummy and watered up like a fruit. Out of something that resembled kindness, he invited me to his side of the Sound.

“Whatta ya say we grab a bottle, take the ferry and then hit the bars over in Bremerton?” He retched and almost lost his stomach on the floor. The man was seething at this point. “They got Pai Gow Poker. Place called The Mermaid. Right off the boat!”

I was a loner myself. I’d been in this port for over three years now and still found it tough to make friends and meet women. I guess Lumpy had recognized that in me and wanted to cling. None of us, Ray included, ever talked about the magnetic pull that Front Street had, but I think we all realized how far we had come just to work at this dumpy little fish-packaging warehouse in Seattle.

I felt bad about turning him down. It might have been the first time Lumpy reached out to someone. I could see there was no solace with Veronica. She was just a bar hag and only worried about the next drink, a stiff lay. I bet she was a real brute in the morning, too.

“Come on,” he begged me. “Veronica works there. We can have a few on the house and finish off the night at my place.”

Though it would have been ridiculous and fun, something I could never again conjure again in a million years, going back to his place was what scared me most. If I went, I would stay, and I couldn’t stay.

“Nah, I don’t need a couple of drunken losers to put me back in the slammer.” I meant it as a joke, but as soon as I said it, I felt guilty. I’ve never been one to preach. People can only help themselves.

Lumpy’s face sagged like a bloodhound. Undeterred, he pulled me aside and said, “Don’t worry about anything. I got it all set up.” He then made a motion over to the pool table behind him and gave a sly wink with the eye just below the cyst. I peeked at his girl bending over the next shot, deliberately showing me handfuls of droopy cleavage. She smiled, her lips curling around teeth that resembled tree bark. Things had gotten out of hand. “Sorry, pal,” I said.

“Come on! Celebrate with us!” Lumpy waved to the bartender and signaled for another. I watched the fed-up bartender shake his head and said something about 86-ing him. “I’ve got a job. I’ve got a girl. I’ve got my own apartment. I have stability in my life.”

Lumpy put his arm around my shoulder and squeezed. I noticed his blackened fingernails, the knobby bones inside his skin. With his free hand he reached over and tried to tickle my stomach. I doubled over. “Don’t make me beg, man. Come join us.”

That’s when I looked him square in the eyes. I looked past the despondency, past the desperation. “I can’t do it,” I said. “I gotta get back up the hill.” I listened to the snap of pool sticks and clicking balls and imagined the lonely but satisfying walk home in the spitting Seattle rain, maybe stopping off at the porno booths for a quick stroke.

Lumpy’s warm arm fell from my shoulder and he pushed me away. “Suit yourself then sailor!” He said the ‘sailor’ with a lisp, insinuating that I was queer or weak, I couldn’t tell which. Perhaps both. He parked himself at the bar and downed another shot. I could see the dark, dreary place these drinks were sending him. This was my cue. I put on my coat and placed my hand on his shoulder, tightened my grip.

“You should slow down on that stuff, Charles,” I said.

He scoffed and looked at my reflection through the bar mirror and nodded, as if he understood. “Fuck it,” he said and switched to bravado, signaling the barkeep for another. “Crash where you land. That’s my fucking motto.”

I finished my drink and walked out the front door. From the street, I gave him a friendly wave through the front window and noticed that distant look in his eyes. He gave me the finger and smiled sarcastically, mouthing the words ‘Fuck you.’

This made me laugh and I thought all was good.

As I walked home, I tried to consider what he had in mind with him, Veronica, and me, but whatever it was, I wasn’t into it. I wasn’t going to say anything to Katherine about the incident, either. I didn’t want Lumpy to get into trouble on my account. He’d been showing up to work on time and doing his job. That’s all that mattered to me. So what if he fell off the wagon?

I had no idea the poor sot would never show up at Front Street after that night.

•

With traffic, I arrive at the King County Medical Examiner on First Hill in the late afternoon. I cut my wheels by a man waiting outside on the steep marble steps, smoking a cigarette, and by the way he watches me, I know this is Detective Devore.

Last year, I’d read a story in the newspaper where this facility had lost an infant’s remains, which was big news in Seattle. People were upset. Presumably, the body was either stolen or misplaced, but the child was never found again. It was strange because over the past nineteen years, this particular morgue had permanently or temporarily lost a total of five bodies, three of which were from the Green River serial murders in 1984.

I park the car and pray the facility has misplaced Lumpy’s body. I didn’t want to see the remnants of a man laying on a steel gurney with no direction but down into the earth.

I approach the detective as the lost Seattle sun nuzzles its way through the white cumulus clouds; the orange rays licking our side of the world for a change. The man tosses his butt, walks over, blows out a plume of rat-colored smoke, and puts out his hand. Our hands clamp together like old school mates.

“Sean Berry?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry about all of this.”

I nod and we hover awkwardly.

“I know this isn’t what you want to be doing on such a sunny afternoon,” he says and looks up into the sky.

“Just trying to be a good citizen, detective.”

Devore steps back and eyes me curiously, his pupils beady and beryl. The man has a stocky chest and a thatch of hair tilted to one side. Probably a bad rug-job, though I can’t be sure. I can tell that he notices something about me. Just like bums and fellow ex-cons, cops usually recognize us right away. It’s a vicious kinship we have.

“You ready?” he says and his breath hits me like air from a deflated beach ball.

“You bet.”

We enter the through the back door. The metal door behind us slams shut and we’re enclosed within a cloud of formaldehyde, cold linoleum. We circle through a maze of hallways and I see nurses with vapid faces, orderlies with jailhouse tattoos, and doctors with erections. We’re all silent because the dead people want us that way.

We eventually happen upon a chilly room where I see blue feet hanging out from underneath white sheets. There are rows of gurneys neatly divided up like a high school classroom, some empty, some not. Toe tags dangle and flutter. We walk over to the far corner where Devore checks the John Doe tag and then lifts up the sheet.

“This him?”

“Jesus!” I curl at the sight. I didn’t even have time to brace myself. But there’s Lumpy’s dead, swollen body, which looks like he’d been filled with a series of saline injections. Patches of purple decorate his chest and torso like a mismatched Easter egg. I check his forehead. The cyst is still there.

“That’s him,” I say. “It’s definitely Charles.”

“Good,” he says. “We can put him to rest then.”

I think about life’s weird circles: I’d discovered Lumpy while he was asleep and I’ll leave him the same way. I feel like kicking his foot and waking him up to help me unload a rail car full of salt or sweep the back dock or stack some pallets. I want to take him back to the warehouse, punch him in to a place both of us will find familiar, accepted.

Devore drops the sheet. I fight the urge to head for the exit and burst with vomit.

Back in the main part of the facility, after the paper work is signed and filed, we then disappear from the scene. No one notices our exit. We don’t matter because we’re still alive. The entire process of identifying a dead body is all over very quickly.

Outside, I shake the detective’s hand and attempt to leave. I want to rid myself of this clinging mess and get back to my life as a lonely warehouse manager in the middle of Seattle. I want to continue to steer clear of old paths I’d found too easy to travel in Detroit.

But Devore is in a chatty mood.

“Mind if I ask you a few questions?”

This makes me leery, but I agree.

“Why do you think Charles jumped off that ferry?”

“I don’t know.” I scoff. “Wish I knew what makes a man tick.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Like what?”

“Anything that might’ve given an indication he wanted to die?”

I think about it. “We all have a death wish,” I say. “Isn’t that what Freud said?”

Like any normal cop, he wants answers. And like any normal ex-con, I didn’t have answers. I knew little about the guy, but more than I cared to admit.

“Why do you think he jumped?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Come on. Give me something here, Sean. Give me a theory.”

I shrug and then give him my best speech. “Maybe Charles wanted to change,” I say. “I’m sure the urge was there. Then again, maybe he didn’t feel it necessary to change, no matter what opportunity had been given to him. Maybe this is who he was. Maybe he was a man whose fate was to jump off a ferry and into Puget Sound?”

“Go on,” he said. “You might be on to something.”

“We all need a crutch, right?”

“A crutch?”

“Yeah. Something we keep around to make life easier to choke down. Hope, God, a warm woman in the sack.”

“And?”

“And this guy didn’t have anything. He had no one. His corner of the ring was empty, and there was nobody there to throw water on the man’s face between rounds, nobody to take that drink away, nobody to tell him not to jump off that ferry.”

The detective didn’t seem fazed. “Well,” he says and lights up a square, the tip turning orange. “Having spent years dealing with suicides, I guess all we have is speculation.”

“Unless they leave a note,” I say.

“A note always helps.” Devore chuckles and looks up into the dark sky. The complexion of the day has suddenly changed. Rain is on its way again. Wet and gray. “The weather doesn’t help much, huh?”

I study the swirling clouds. “It’s just rain.”

“Rain is why Seattle is the suicide capital of the world.”

“What happened to Russia?”

“Never mind Russia. This is Seattle.”

Devore needles me for another beat. Maybe he senses I’m on the same path as Lumpy. Maybe he senses I’m a little stronger than him, but maybe he also realizes that the strength I do have probably won’t last very long. It never does.

“I appreciate the help, Sean.” Devore shakes my hand again.

“Sure thing,” I say.

And we leave it at that. No I call you or you call me.

I watch as he humps his oafish body into his unmarked squad car, the suspension sagging to one side. I doff my imaginary cap and watch Devore maneuver his black sedan through the parking lot, the tires bald and squeaking. He weaves his way into rush-hour traffic. Maybe I’ll see him again someday.

Walking to my car, I choke back the guilt. I try to forgive myself for not reaching out to a soul who might’ve needed me. I try to forgive myself for being so selfish, and I hope that someday I can find somebody to stop me when I’m ready to jump off that ferry.

But none of this will change the fact that the world is full of lonely people like myself and Charles Rogers, and it’s not uncommon for some of these people to end up at places exactly like Front Street Packaging.