Chapter 3 #3
"It'll pass faster if you let me at it." A silence. "Strapped my father's for years. Longlining's worse on the shoulder than lobstering — all that setting, hand over hand, day on day. I know the joint. I know that joint better than I know most people."
And there it was. There was the whole thing, the thing Gus had spent twenty years making dead sure would never once come up: a man was offering to put his hands on him.
Not to take. To give — to give Gus something, for nothing, in the dark.
And every muscle Gus owned wanted to say what he always said, I'm fine, leave it, you've done plenty already — the words worn smooth as a stair tread from twenty years of saying them — and he opened his mouth to say them.
"All right," he said instead.
He never did know where it came from. He'd turn it over for a long time after.
Out of the dark, maybe. Out of Dee's voice still going in his ears — owing is the one thing Gus Ouellette will not do.
Out of the plain animal fact of the arm, which hurt, which had hurt for a year, which he had never once in that year let another living hand help him carry.
Amos came around the desk. He worked Gus's jacket down off the bad shoulder with a care that undid something twenty years of being needed had welded shut — not gentle, exactly; gentleness would have been unbearable; but sure, the sureness of a man who knew the thing he had his hands on and respected it.
He found the knot at the top of the joint with his thumb, and Gus made a sound he wasn't proud of.
"There," Amos said, low. "That right there. That's a year of not asking anybody for a thing. Feel it? That's the shape it takes when a man won't set anything down."
He worked it. Slow. Thumb and the heel of his hand, into the ruined joint, and it hurt, and then it hurt less, and then it was something that wasn't hurt at all, something Gus had no name for because he had not felt it in so long — the specific, dangerous undoing of being cared for by a pair of hands that wanted nothing back off him.
The office was dark. Out the window the harbor lay flat and pewter under the last of the light, and the dead pound stood up out of the falling tide with its whole north side bare and mended now, their afternoon's work showing pale against the black water.
Gus sat with a stranger's sure hands on the worst part of him and felt his eyes sting in the dark, and was glad — so glad — that Amos had left the light off.
Neither of them said anything for a long time. Amos's hands worked. The tide fell.
And somewhere in it the thing changed under his hands — Gus felt it change, felt the exact moment the tending stopped being only tending, the way weather turns while you're looking straight at it.
Amos's thumb slowed and went still. His other hand had come to rest flat against the side of Gus's neck, warm, not working now, only resting there, and Gus was all at once and entirely aware of it, of the calluses of it, of the breath of the man close at his back in the dark.
Neither of them moved. The whole office held still around the not-moving.
Gus could have turned his head. It would have taken nothing — an inch, less — and he knew, the way he knew weather, the way he'd known Amos would come, that if he turned his head there would be no untangling the two of them ever after.
He sat there with a near-stranger's hand warm on his throat and wanted to turn his head so badly his teeth ached with it.
He didn't. Amos's hand stayed where it was a moment longer. The moment held, and held — and then Amos let out a slow breath and went back to working the joint, and let it pass, and Gus could not have told you whether he'd been sorry or saved.
"You can't pay it back, you know," Amos said, at last, quiet, right at his ear, his thumb finding the deep place again and staying there.
"The thing you owe. You've been at it twenty years and it hasn't got a dollar smaller, has it.
Because that's not how any of it works." His hands stilled, warm and flat on the ruined shoulder, holding it the way you'd hold something you'd decided not to let fall.
"You can't pay a debt by drowning slower.
All that buys you is a longer way down."
Gus opened his mouth.
Nothing came. For the first time in longer than he could remember, Gus Ouellette had no useful thing to say — no joke to lay over it, no task to hand across, nothing to give a man to get him to look somewhere else.
He sat in the dark with the truest thing anybody had said to him in twenty years resting warm and certain on his shoulder, and he had no answer for it at all.
And the terrible, tender fact of it was that he did not want one.
Out on the water the tide finished falling and left the drowned pound standing black and bare against the last of the light — all its broken bones showing, and the new work with them, the way a thing looks when the water finally goes down far enough to show you what was really under it the whole time.