Chapter 2
Nothing to Sink
The stemhead fitting had a crack in it you could lose a fingernail in, and Amos had known about it for three hundred miles and told himself it would hold for three hundred more, which was the kind of lie a man told a boat when he had no money to tell it the truth.
He'd known it was a lie last night, coming around the point with the forestay singing a note he didn't like every time she took a puff.
He knew it worse now, on his knees on the foredeck in the gray before sunup, the whole harbor still asleep around him, working the fitting with his thumb and watching the crack open and close a hair with the boat's small breathing at the float.
Torn most of the way through the throat of it.
One good hard slam to weather and the forestay went, and then the mast, and then he was rowing a dismasted peapod out past the ledge into whatever the forecast was cooking up — which, he'd heard on the little radio at two in the morning, unable to sleep the way he was never able to sleep, was a southwester coming Thursday with some teeth in it.
So you don't leave Thursday. He sat back on his heels. You leave today, or you don't leave.
And leaving today meant fuel, and fuel meant money, and he had eleven dollars and some change in a coffee can in the forward locker, and he knew the exact count without looking, because a man with eleven dollars always knows the exact count.
He could row. A peapod would row all day if you asked her to; that was what she'd been built for, back before she was built up into whatever she was now — a home, a coffin, a habit, the last piece of dry land his father had ever owned, that he could not make his hands let go of.
But you didn't row out into a building southwester with a forestay ready to let go.
Not if you wanted to still be rowing Friday.
Nothing to sink, Del used to say, standing off a lee shore with the glass falling, easy as anything, the two of them soaked through. Only thing can drown you out here is what you're too proud to let go of, boy. Boat's just a boat. Nothing to sink.
Del had believed that right up until the week it stopped being true.
Amos wiped his thumb on his knee and looked at the fitting and did not think about the week it stopped being true. He'd gotten good at not thinking about it. A man could get good at anything with enough years.
***
"You're up before God," a voice said, "and you're already scowling at something. I like you better every minute."
Amos didn't startle. He'd heard the boots on the ramp two minutes back, heavy and unhurried, and known whose they were, because there was only one man in this harbor who came down a ramp at half five with a thermos in each hand like he was delivering the mail.
Gus Ouellette set one thermos on the float by the peapod's rail without being asked — the way he'd set down the plate last night without being asked — and stood in the not-quite-light going broad and easy and unbothered, a captain-shaped hole in the gray.
He'd shaved. That got at Amos somehow, that the man had shaved to bring a stranger coffee.
"Didn't order that," Amos said.
"Nope." Gus uncapped his own and drank and looked at the crack in the stemhead fitting like he'd been looking at it as long as Amos had.
He had a way of looking at things — quick, complete, filing them — that Amos had noticed last night and mistrusted last night, because a man who saw that much usually wanted something in trade. "That's your forestay landing."
"It'll hold."
"It'll hold right up until it doesn't. That's what forestay fittings do.
" Gus crouched, easy for a big man, and didn't touch the boat — Amos gave him that; he didn't put his hands on another man's boat uninvited — but he leaned and looked, and his mouth went flat, and it had nothing to do with judgment and everything to do with arithmetic.
"Bronze is fatigued through. That's not a tighten-her-up.
That's a new fitting and a backing plate under it, because whoever set that one bedded it on faith.
And the port shroud's one hard tack from a job too.
" He straightened. "You know all that. You were kneeling here doing the sum when I came down. "
"I was."
"How's it come out?"
Amos looked at the water. The tide was making, filling the dead pound down the shore, drowning the last of its rotted cribs the way it did twice a day, hiding the wreck so you'd never know.
"Comes out eleven dollars," he said, before he'd decided to.
He hadn't meant to say it. He didn't say things like that to men he'd known ten hours.
But the tin was warm through against his knee and the man had shaved, and something about the dark and the quiet had loosened a line he usually kept snugged.
"Comes out I don't leave today. And Thursday there's a blow.
So it comes out I'm your problem a few more days than either of us planned.
I'll get out of it. I always get out of it. "
Gus was quiet a moment. Which, Amos would learn, was the tell — the man talked over everything, filled every silence like it owed him rent, right up until something landed real. Then he went still, and you knew you'd struck something under the surface.
"You're not my problem," Gus said finally. "You're my sternman. If you want the berth."
Amos looked at him.
"I've been hauling shorthanded since April," Gus went on, easy again, quick, the way a man moves past a thing he doesn't want examined.
"Can't pay a proper share on this boat price, so my last kid went with a captain who can, and I don't blame him, and I've been pulling three hundred traps a day off the Second Wind on my own arm since — which is —" He stopped.
Rolled the right shoulder, and Amos watched the grind of it cross his face and get put away, the exact way Amos had watched a hundred captains hide a hundred hurts they couldn't afford to have.
"— which is stupid, at my age," Gus finished.
"You crew for me, I'll pay a real share, and the co-op'll pay you day rate on top for hands on the dock when we're not hauling.
Fitting's mine — comes out of the yard account, we've got the parts up the shop.
" He drank. "That's the offer. You can be rude about it.
I'm used to it. Man last night was very rude about a free plate of chowder and I forgave him instantly. "
The line that had loosened in Amos snugged itself back up hard.
Because there it was. The catch. There was always a catch, and he'd spent seven years learning to find it fast, before it found him.
A man didn't fix your boat and feed you and put you on a share out of the goodness of anything.
A man did it because he wanted your back turned, or your name on something, or your gratitude, which was the most expensive thing a man could ever agree to owe.
Amos had signed his life away once to somebody who smiled and said we just want to help you fellas hold on.
He knew what help cost now. He knew it right down to the boat and the man it had cost him.
"Why," Amos said. The same word as last night. It was, he was realizing, the only question he had left.
And Gus — this was the thing, this was the thing Amos would turn over for days — Gus didn't do what men did with that question.
Didn't get offended, or hearty, or launch into himself.
He looked at Amos with those warm faded eyes gone briefly, oddly tired, and said, "Because you sailed a shot rig around that point in the dark rather than call anybody for help, and I know a man who'd rather sink than owe.
I've got a whole harbor of them. Takes one to spot one.
" He capped the thermos. "And because my shoulder's shot and I'm too proud to say so to anybody who's known me longer than a day.
So it's not free. You'd be doing me a mercy and I'd be pretending you weren't. That's the whole deal. Nobody owes anybody. You in?"
Down the shore the tide finished swallowing the pound.
"I don't stay places," Amos said. It came out lower than he meant. Almost an apology. "You should know that going in. I'll crew till the fitting's good and the weather makes, then I'm gone. I'm a bad bet for staying. Ask anybody who ever made it."
"I'm not asking you to stay." Gus stood, knees cracking, and picked up the second thermos and pressed it into Amos's hands, closed Amos's fingers around it with one big warm scarred hand like the matter had been settled since last night, since before that.
"I'm asking you to haul traps and let me buy the part.
Drink your coffee. We splash in forty minutes, and I don't wait on the tide for any man. Sternman included."
He went back up the ramp whistling something off-key, a man who'd gotten exactly what he wanted and was pretending he'd given it away.
Amos sat on the foredeck of his father's boat with a stranger's coffee going cold in his hands and did not, for a full minute, know what he was.
***
The Second Wind was a Calvin Beal hull, thirty-six feet, older, kept the way a boat gets kept by a man with more care than money — everything worn and everything working, the paint tired and the machinery sound, which was backwards from most of the fleet and told you more about her captain than a whole conversation would.