Chapter 2 #2
Amos found the rhythm of her deck inside the first ten traps and stopped thinking after that, which was the mercy of the work, the only mercy it had ever reliably paid: it took your hands and your eyes and your back and left no room over for anything else.
Gus ran the hauler and the wheel; Amos took the traps off the rail, cleaned them, rebaited, set them on the washboard, sent them back over.
They didn't talk much. Didn't need to. Twice Amos moved without being told — cleared a snarl before it fouled the block, gaffed a buoy Gus hadn't reached for yet — and twice Gus glanced back with a look that wasn't surprise exactly but was in the family, the look of a man who'd been carrying a weight two-handed for months and just felt somebody take one end.
And Amos watched the shoulder. Couldn't not.
It was a deckhand's eye and he'd never lost it — reading the captain, because on a boat the captain is the weather.
Gus favored the right arm on the hauler in a way he plainly thought nobody could see, took the strain across his body, paid for every trap in a wince he swallowed before it reached his mouth.
He hauled on an arm that had no business hauling and he did it whistling, telling stories Amos hadn't asked for — the Cormier girl's father, a sternman named Danny who'd once gone overboard sober and blamed the moon, the whole harbor and everybody in it — warmth poured out in a steady stream over a body quietly failing under the weight of the pouring.
He gives it all away, Amos thought, coiling a warp, and he'll go on giving it away till his arm comes off at the shoulder, and then he'll apologize to the arm for the inconvenience.
It should have made Gus a fool. Amos had known men who gave like that and every one had been a fool, or a drunk, or working an angle.
This was neither of the first two, and he spent the whole morning waiting to catch the third, and it never showed, and by the last string he was more unsettled than if it had.
A skiff crossed their wake off the second ledge — low and workmanlike, two men in it, one at the outboard lifting two fingers off the tiller in the flat coastal wave that meant everything and nothing.
"Cyr and Mercer," Gus said, lifting his own hand.
"Boatyard. The big one's Hollis, best shipwright on the coast and he'll tell you so by refusing to.
The other's Roan. Came around that same point a couple summers back half-sinking and never did leave.
" He said it lightly. He said everything lightly. "Roan'll like you."
The one called Roan wasn't waving. He'd throttled the skiff back to idle and he was looking across the water at Amos — at the Second Wind's deck, at Amos on it — with a still, level, unhurried attention that Amos felt land on him like a hand between the shoulder blades.
Not unfriendly. Worse than unfriendly. Knowing.
The way you'd look at your own face in a window you hadn't expected to be a window.
"Long way in a small boat," Roan called across, easy, over the idle. Not a question.
"Far enough," Amos said.
"Water's honest up here." Roan's mouth did something that wasn't quite a smile.
"It's the dry land'll get you." He put the skiff back in gear and the wake carried him off toward the yard, and the big man beside him said something and Roan didn't answer, the same way Amos didn't answer, and Amos stood on the washboard with a bait bag in his fist and the strangest feeling he'd been read cover to cover by a man he'd traded nine words with.
"Told you," Gus said, and swung the next trap up.
They hauled the last string in a rising chop with the sun gone flat and white, and steaming in Gus put Amos on the wheel and went aft to square away the deck, and it was there, with the harbor opening ahead and nobody's eyes on him, that Amos felt the thing he hadn't meant to say work itself loose.
Gus had seen the tattoo on the last string — the sleeve shoved up, the two words on the inside of Amos's forearm gone gray now like everything else. He hadn't made anything of it. That was the danger of the man; he never made anything of anything, so you told him things.
"Cora Lee," Gus had read, the way you'd read a name off a transom. "She a boat?"
Amos had let it go three trawls. Now, wheel under his hands and the town coming up, he heard himself answer it.
"My father's boat. Longliner, out of Digby.
" He watched the co-op float come up, the dead pound, the window with the card pinned inside by the phone.
"Named for my mother. We fished her thirty years, him and me.
Then a company came up the shore buying — came up smiling, said they only wanted to help us fellas hold on.
And I was the one told him to sign. I did the arithmetic.
Told my father it was the only way to keep her, and he trusted me, because I was the one good with numbers.
" His voice had gone flat and far off and he let it.
"Two years, they had the boat, the license, the house.
He had a stroke shoveling another man's snow for the wages.
And I got out ahead of the tide. That's what I do now. "
Gus didn't say he was sorry. Amos would have hated him if he'd said he was sorry. He came forward and stood at Amos's shoulder, looking at the co-op coming, and said, low, "The company. The one that smiled."
Amos looked at the card through the window.
"You already know," he said.
***
They landed at noon and the co-op was going — the hoist complaining, the ice plant knocking its patient knock, a handful of the fleet across the scale.
A kid was landing at the far corner off a boat he ran like he'd been born standing up in it, big for his age and grinning, and Gus lit at the sight of him the way he hadn't lit all morning.
"Petey Levesque," he said under his breath.
"Gil's grandson. Nineteen, outfishing men twice his age, and don't you dare tell him I said it.
" The kid hollered something across the water and Gus hollered something back that set two other boats laughing, and for a moment the whole miserable dock was warm with it, a fleet ribbing one of its own.
Amos stood at the edge of it the way he stood at the edge of everything, and felt the old ache of a thing he'd once had and traded for the freedom to leave.
Then Gus put Amos on day rate the way he'd said, which meant Amos spent the afternoon doing the ten hundred small things a working dock always needs and never has hands for. Shifting totes. Splicing a mooring pennant. Hosing the fish blood down through the boards so the gulls would give it up.
Gil Levesque crossed the dock twice that afternoon, and both times he looked at Amos the way a man looks at a stray that's followed his softhearted brother home — not unkind, but keeping a hand where the dog could see it. The second time he stopped. "Ouellette says you crewed a longliner."
"Thirty years."
Gil grunted, which from Gil was a paragraph.
"He gives things away." He jerked his chin down the dock at Gus, who was at that moment pressing half his own lunch on the Blue Inn girl over her protests.
"Always has. Somebody ought to make sure he don't give away the one thing he can't get back.
" He didn't say what that was. He went on up to the office and left it lying on the boards between them like a trap that hadn't sprung.
Honest work for honest pay, the first honest pay he'd taken in longer than he wanted to count, and his body remembered how to be useful and his mind went quiet doing it, and he was most of the way to all right until the tide dropped and uncovered the pound.