Chapter 3 #2
It happened on a Tuesday, at the Foghorn, at the tail of the supper rush, and Gus was there because he was always there — wedged into the end of the counter doing the co-op's books over a plate of Rory's meatloaf he wasn't eating.
Amos was in the last booth where Dee had parked him with a bowl of chowder and no clear way out.
And Dee slid in across from him — Gus saw her do it, saw her fold her hands on the table the way she did when she'd decided a thing needed saying — and Gus knew, the way you know weather, exactly what was coming down the pipe, and there was not one thing on God's earth he could do about it short of standing up and making a scene.
Gus Ouellette had not made a scene in his life.
So he kept his eyes on the books and his pen moving and listened to a stranger get handed the worst year of his life across a Formica table.
"You want to know about Gus," Dee said, "you being his sternman and all — before somebody tells it to you wrong."
"I don't need to know anything," Amos said.
"Everybody says that. Then they hear it from the wrong mouth and it curdles.
" She stirred her coffee, unhurried. "Twenty years back, this co-op was dying.
Real dying — not the slow kind we've got now, the fast kind.
Fuel doubled overnight, boat price fell through the floor, half the fleet was into the bank past their gunwales.
And there was this young fella ran the numbers for us.
Sharp as a filleting knife. Everybody's golden boy.
Old men who wouldn't trust their own sons trusted him with their money, because he never once in his life got a sum wrong.
" Gus's pen stopped moving on the page. He made it move again.
"And a buyer came up the coast. Smooth. Cheap suit, expensive words.
Offered to save the lot of us — sign the co-op's whole catch over to him exclusive, ten years, and he'd pay a floor price that'd carry every boat through the bad water.
Guaranteed. Right there on the paper. And our golden boy, he ran the numbers on it six ways to Sunday, and he stood up at the co-op meeting in front of a room full of men who'd known him since he was in short pants, and he told them it was the only way to keep the doors open. "
Down the counter Gus sat very still and was twenty-seven years old again, standing up in the co-op hall with the figures clean and beautiful in his hand and his whole chest full of the certainty of them.
"They signed," Dee said. "Course they did. He'd never been wrong."
"And the floor price," Amos said. Flat. He already knew. Of course he already knew — he'd stood in the same hall in a different harbor and heard the same man in a different suit.
"Held one year. Then there was a clause, way down at the bottom where the young fella's good eyes had skated right over it, and the floor turned into a ceiling, and the ceiling came down, and we were locked in nine more years selling our catch to a man who owned us at whatever he cared to pay that morning.
" Dee's voice had lost its needle. It had gone quiet and old and kind, which was worse.
"We near went under for good. Emile Lachance lost the Rosemary, and then the house his own father built with his hands, and he went to Lewiston to work in a mill and was dead inside five years, and everybody said it was his heart.
It wasn't his heart. The Bourques lost two boats between them.
And Gil Levesque near lost this whole co-op and his own boat besides, young man with a young family, and there were a couple of winters in there his kids ate what the rest of us quietly left on his step in the dark. "
She looked over then, down the length of the counter, right at Gus, who did not lift his eyes from the books.
"And the golden boy never left. That's the part they leave out when they tell it ugly.
He could've gone anywhere — man that good with figures, he'd have had an office in Portland and a boat he never had to work a day.
He stayed. Twenty years he's stayed, and worked that shoulder of his clean to ruin holding this place up one trap at a time, and paid every man he could reach a nickel over the scale out of his own end, and never once — not one single hour in twenty years — let himself off the hook for a minute of it.
He thinks we don't know. We know. We've always known.
We just learned a long time ago there's no use telling him, because the man's decided what he is, and there's no arguing a Maine man out of what he's decided he is. "
The Foghorn clattered on around them, ordinary — dishes, talk, the bell on the door.
"I'm not telling you so you'll feel sorry for him," Dee said.
"God knows he won't stand for that. I'm telling you so that when you watch him drown himself an inch at a time doing for every soul in this harbor but his own self, you'll understand it isn't kindness you're looking at.
It's a bill. He's been paying it twenty years and it hasn't come down a dollar, because that kind of bill never does.
And you'll find you can't hardly get near a man like that — because getting near him means letting him owe you something, and owing is the one thing on God's green earth Gus Ouellette will not do. "
She got up. She patted Amos's fisted hand on the table, and she lifted Gus's untouched meatloaf away on her way past as if she'd never said a word, and she left the two of them there — one man at a counter with his pen gone still, one man in a booth with his chowder gone cold — and twenty years lay open on the table between them like a chart nobody wanted to read.
Gus closed the books. He didn't look down the room at Amos. He put money on the counter that was too much, the way it was always too much, and he went out into the evening because there was nowhere else to put himself, and the warm noise of the place swung shut behind the door.
***
Amos found him at the co-op an hour later. Gus had known he would, the way he'd known weather all his life and stood helpless in front of it every time.
He was in the office with the light off, sitting at the desk not doing anything, which was so unlike him he'd have been alarmed if he'd had it in him to be alarmed.
The arm had locked up somewhere between the Foghorn and here — seized solid the way it did when he'd asked too much of it — and he was sitting in the dark waiting for it to decide to be his arm again.
The door opened and Amos came in and didn't turn the light on either, and that was a mercy, that he left the light off, that of all the men in the world to walk in on Gus Ouellette sitting broken in the dark it was the one who'd know to leave the light off.
"Shoulder," Amos said. Not a question. He'd have read it off Gus at the wheel that afternoon; the man missed nothing.
"It'll pass."