Chapter 1 #3
That got it. Not a laugh — Gus doubted the man had a laugh left in inventory — but a breath out through the nose that was the ghost of one, and a fraction of the wariness went out of Amos Kean's shoulders. An inch of line paid out.
He ate standing up, fast, the way a man eats who's teaching himself not to look hungry, and Gus made himself turn and fuss with the peapod's cleat so as not to watch him do it.
***
Getting Amos up off the float and out of the worst of the crowd took some doing, because half the fleet wanted a look at the boat and the other half wanted a look at the man, and Dee had appointed herself quartermaster and was already refilling the plate over his flat objections.
Gus ran interference the way he ran everything — with his body and his voice and a low running patter that gave a cornered man room to breathe.
That's Gil, he owns your soul now that you've eaten our chowder.
Don't mind Verne, he's older than the harbor and twice as stubborn.
That's the Levesque kid, nineteen and a highliner, makes the rest of us look bad.
He steered Amos up the ramp toward the co-op, toward the quiet, toward the hose.
The shortest way ran along the shore below the ice shed. Past the pound.
Amos stopped.
Not the wariness from the float — that had been a live thing, a coiled thing, a man ready to leave.
This was a working man's stop. He stood at the rail and looked down at the dead pound, the half-sunk cribs, the rotted netting gone to lace, the whole drowned acre of it — and for the first time since he'd come around the point he was looking at something in Merritt Harbor like he wanted to be looking at it, like it had reached out and taken hold of some part of him the chowder and the crowd and the kindness hadn't touched.
"That was a car," Amos said. Quiet. Not to Gus, quite.
"A pound. A good one." He tracked the ring of it, the shape under the water, reading the bones of the thing the way Gus read a barometer.
"Somebody knew what they were about. That's not slapped together.
That's laid out — see how the cribs take the set of the tide there, so she flushes clean twice a day and never goes stale.
" His jaw worked. "You could hold a whole season's catch alive in that.
Sell it to Portland at Christmas prices with your feet up. Whoever let her go under ought to be —"
He heard himself. Stopped. The shutter came back down over the dark eyes, and he stepped back from the rail like it had gone hot.
"None of my business," Amos said. "Just water. That's all I'm after."
But he'd looked at that dead pound like it was the only living thing on the dock, and Gus, who had spent his whole life able to tell exactly what any man on his waterfront needed and hand it to him before he asked, filed that away too, and didn't understand it any better than the fender or the missing name.
***
He got Amos up into the co-op building where it was quieter — the buying counter, the price board, the wall of curled photographs going back to Gil's grandfather's day, the whole tired warm guts of the place. Gus flicked the light and the room came up around them.
"Spigot's inside, by the office," Gus said, holding the door. "Jugs are yours if you need them. We've got more jugs than sense. Sink's good, pressure's better than the house, even — you can top your tanks, wash up, whatever you —"
He stopped. Because Amos had stopped.
The man stood just inside the door, plate forgotten in one hand, gone still again. Not the working stillness from the pound. Not the coiled stillness from the float. This was a stillness that went all the way to the bottom — the stillness of a boat that has quit answering her helm.
He was looking at the wall by the pay phone.
He was looking at the card.
HALYARD SEAFOOD GROUP. Cream stock, curled in the salt, the little embossed wave.
"Where'd you get that," Amos said. Quiet. Too quiet, under the noise of the Blessing still coming through the walls.
Gus glanced at it, then back at him. "The card?
Fella left it Tuesday. A buyer, or a buyer's man — one of the outfits been sniffing up and down the coast at the co-ops.
" He kept his voice light, but he was reading the stranger now the way he read the sky before he crossed the bar, and the needle was doing something he didn't like at all. "Why? You know them?"
Amos Kean didn't answer.
He set the plate down on the buying counter, careful, both hands, like it had gotten heavy.
And he looked at that little curled card the way a man looks at a face in a crowd he'd crossed an ocean to never see again.
And Gus — who had spent his whole life knowing what every man on his dock needed and handing it over before the asking — stood in the door of his own co-op with no idea in the world what this one needed, or why the name of a fish company had just landed on him like a fist.
Outside, the fleet stamped the boards for Verne one more time. To them that stay.
Inside, Amos said, so low Gus nearly lost it under the noise, "I'll be gone with the tide."
But he didn't look away from the card.