Chapter 4 #2
Gus had not said one word. That was the thing Amos couldn't get past. The man who filled every silence on this waterfront like it owed him rent was standing at the back of his own co-op with his arms folded and his jaw shut and his eyes on the whiteboard, on that number, and he was saying nothing at all, and Amos understood, with a lurch, what he was looking at.
He was looking at a man in front of his own ghost. Twenty years ago Gus had stood up in a room like this one with a number in his hand and told these people's fathers it was the only way.
And now the same deal in a better suit was writing a better number on the same wall, and the one man in this harbor who knew exactly how this ended — knew it better than Amos, had paid for it longer than Amos — could not open his mouth.
Because who was Gus Ouellette to talk a room full of drowning men out of a lifeline.
Him. Of all men. The one who'd handed them an anchor and called it a lifeline the last time and watched them go down holding it.
His debt had finally found the one thing it could take from him that mattered. It had taken his voice.
And Gil was looking at Gus, waiting, the way the whole fleet had spent twenty years waiting for Gus to tell them what a thing was really worth — and Gus looked back at Gil and gave a small helpless shake of his head, not me, don't ask me, I'm the last man on earth who gets to weigh in on this, and Gil's face closed, and the room started to murmur toward the thing it wanted, and nobody was going to stop it.
So Amos put down his splice.
***
He hadn't decided to do it. He'd think about that later, the same way Gus had thought about all right in the dark office — that the truest things he'd done in years had none of them been decided, they'd just come up out of him past the part that knew better.
"The fourteenth's too soon," Amos said.
He didn't say it loud. He didn't have Gus's carry or Dee's carry.
But the room was Maine-quiet, the kind of quiet that hears a low voice better than a loud one, and forty faces turned to the stranger on the edge of it, the drifter, Ouellette's new sternman, the one nobody's father had known in short pants.
Boyce turned too, unhurried, pleasant. "And you are?"
"Nobody. Crew." Amos came off the doorframe.
His hands were shaking and he put them in his pockets so the room wouldn't see the one thing he couldn't afford it to see.
"But I've read that contract. Not that one — I never saw that one.
The one before it. The one it's copied off of.
" He looked at the number on the whiteboard, that beautiful painted number.
"Digby, Nova Scotia. Six years back. A man came into my father's kitchen in good boots and told us he'd fished, and he wrote a price on a piece of paper better than the buyer in Halifax was paying, and he said company bait, company fuel, company credit, and he said just sign exclusive so we can build the thing knowing it'll still be standing.
" His voice was going flat and far and he let it, because flat was the only way he could get it out at all.
"We signed. My father's boat was called the Cora Lee. We'd fished her thirty years."
The room had gone very still. Boyce's pleasant face had not changed, and that, too, told Amos everything.
"The price held one year," Amos said. "Then there's a clause.
There's always a clause, down where a tired man's eye slides over it — a review clause, a market-adjustment clause, they've got a hundred names for it.
And the floor becomes a number they set, and by then your co-op's gone, because why would you keep a buying station running at a loss when Halyard's right there on your own wharf, so you let it go, you let the pound go, you let all of it go, and then one morning you wake up and there's exactly one buyer on this whole reach of coast and he owns your bait bill and your fuel bill and your boat note, and he sets your price, and you cannot say no to him.
Because you can't hold your own fish. You can't wait him out.
A lobster won't keep on the boat and your bills won't wait, so you sell fresh at whatever he offers, every single day, forever.
" He was looking at the fleet now, not at Boyce.
At Petras. At the Cormier girl. At the Blue Inn couple with their hands locked white.
"That's how they win. Not with the low price.
With the waiting. They take away your ability to wait, and then a man who can't wait will take any price at all.
My father took it two years. Then they had the boat and the license and the house, and he had a stroke shoveling another man's driveway for the wages, and I —"
His voice quit. He let it quit. He'd said the part that mattered.
"I got out ahead of it," Amos said, quiet.
"That's the only thing I ever did right.
And I've been running from that kitchen for six years, and I sailed around your point three weeks ago meaning to fill my water and be gone, and I stood up just now because I will be damned to the bottom of the sea before I stand on another dock and watch it happen to good people twice. "
Nobody moved. The Cormier girl had gone still with her arms uncrossed.
Petras Gauthier was looking at his own boots like they'd betrayed him.
Somewhere in the middle of the fleet a woman said, low, to nobody, "Cora Lee," turning the name over the way you'd turn a stone to see what lived under it, and the room let out a breath it had been holding, and even the ones who'd been reaching for the plank a minute ago were reaching a little slower now.
Boyce let the silence go a respectful beat — he was good, he was so good — and then said, gently, "That's a hard story, friend, and I'm sorry for it.
But one bad operator up in Canada isn't Halyard, and I'd never ask a man to sign a thing he hadn't had a lawyer read every line of.
That's exactly why I'm giving you till the fourteenth. "
"Read it to the comma," Amos said. "Read the review clause out loud, in the kitchen, twice.
And ask him one question." He looked at Boyce, and for the first time the man's eyes had gone flat too, the pleasantness holding on the surface over nothing at all, and Amos knew he'd been right, knew it the way you know the bottom's come up under the keel.
"Ask him what happens to your price the day your co-op can't hold its own catch anymore.
Ask him that. Watch his boots when he answers. "
And in the back of the room, for the first time in an hour, Gus Ouellette lifted his head.
***
It broke up slow and unsettled, the fleet going out into the evening arguing low among themselves, the number on the whiteboard still up there glowing at them, Boyce shaking hands he was welcome to and getting a few cold shoulders he'd expected, unbothered, a man who'd planted what he came to plant and knew it took a while to root or rot.