Wade Toups had worked the Gulfline Terminal for twenty-six years, and for twenty-two of them he had not worn a uniform shirt. He had worn steel-toed boots and a hard hat and work gloves with the fingertips gone shiny, and he had been a member in good standing of the International Longshoremen's Association, Local 1938, and he had lashed and unlashed cars on the decks of ships just like the one leaning off Berth Four, and driven them down stern ramps at night in the rain, and tied up ships and let them go, and he had been good at it, and proud of it, and paid well for it. Then his left knee went, and then his right one, and then the terminal brought in the new automated gate system and the new yard software and cut the gang sizes, and at fifty-four he had found himself sitting in an orthopedic surgeon's office in Beaumont being told that if he wanted to walk when he was sixty-five, he was done with the docks.
So now he sat in a white shed at Gate Two, four nights a week, six p.m. to six a.m., for a contract security company called Sentinel Gulf Services, for seventeen dollars and forty cents an hour, which was less than half of what he'd made on the docks, and he watched other men walk through his gate to do the job he used to do. One of those men was his son.
Beau Toups was twenty-four, and he worked on the line-handling crew for Gulfline, the men who caught the mooring lines when a ship came in and dropped them over the bollards on the wharf, and threw them off again when a ship left. Wade had gotten him the job. He had called in every favor he had left from twenty-two years in the local, and he had been prouder of that than he had been of almost anything in his life, and he had also lain awake more nights than he wanted to count since then, because he knew exactly what a parted mooring line could do to a man standing in the wrong place. He'd seen it once, in 2006, on Berth Two. He did not talk about it.
Beau was on the dock at Berth Four right now. Wade knew because Beau had driven through his gate at five-thirty in his lifted gray Silverado and slowed down and grinned through the window and said, "Evening, Officer Toups," the way he always did, because he thought it was funny that his father wore a badge now, even a little cloth one sewn on the shoulder of a shirt, and Wade had said, "Keep your head on a swivel down there tonight, there's weather coming," and Beau had said, "Yes sir, Officer Toups, sir," and saluted, and driven on.
And three weeks ago, Wade had let a man through Gate Two who should not have been let through.
It had been a Tuesday. The man was in his thirties, clean cut, in a hard hat and a high-visibility vest and khakis, with a clipboard and a laminated badge on a lanyard that said GULF COAST SURVEY ASSOCIATES, and he had said he was there to take soundings at Berth Six for the dredging contractor, and he had sounded bored and impatient, the way contractors always sounded, and he had a truck with a magnetic company sign on the door. His name was not on the list, but contractors' names were never on the list, and the TWIC reader had already been broken for a week by then, and the man had flashed a card that looked like a TWIC card, and Wade had looked at it for maybe a second and a half, and waved him through.
Forty minutes later the man had climbed a ship-to-shore crane at Berth Six and chained himself to the top of it, and unrolled a forty-foot banner about fossil fuels and the Gulf, and stayed up there for nine hours, and the terminal had to stop all operations at the north end of the wharf, and it was on the Houston news and the Beaumont news and somebody's footage of the banner went around the internet, and the Coast Guard came and asked questions about the terminal's security plan, and the terminal manager called Sentinel Gulf and said a number of things. The man's TWIC card had been real, it turned out. It just belonged to somebody else, his roommate, who looked a little like him if you didn't look hard. Wade had not looked hard.
His supervisor, Ernest Fuselier, a heavy, tired man who had been a sheriff's deputy in Jefferson County for twenty years before he went private, had sat him down in the Sentinel office in a strip mall off the highway and slid a piece of paper across the desk and said, "Final written warning, Wade. I'm sorry. I went to bat for you, and this is what I got. Next time somebody gets through that gate who shouldn't, I can't save you. You understand? I can't. They'll pull the contract. You look at every face. You look at every card. You compare. You call it in if you have any doubt at all. I don't care if it's the Pope. You make the Pope wait."
So Wade made people wait now. He looked hard. He had turned away a fuel truck driver whose card was expired by two days and a chandler's delivery kid with no card at all. He did not care how mad they got. He had been mad himself for four years. He knew how to wait it out.
He also had, though he would not have put it this way and would have been offended if anybody else did, a set of pictures in his head of what certain kinds of people looked like. A harbor pilot looked like Clint Daigle, who had piloted ships into Gulfline for twenty-five years and who used to bring boudin to the line crew at Christmas, or like the younger ones, crew-cut men with Oakley sunglasses pushed up on their heads and good boots and big trucks, who made, everybody on the docks knew, somewhere north of four hundred thousand dollars a year, and who walked through the gate like they owned the channel, because in a sense they did. A woman with her head wrapped up in a scarf looked like the people on the news, on the channels Wade watched in the guard shack at three in the morning, the ones with the red banners at the bottom of the screen. He had never met a Muslim person in his life, so far as he knew, other than to buy gas. He had not thought about it much. He had not needed to.