Chapter 4 #3
Amos got out to the dark of the wharf because his hands were still going and he didn't want a soul to see it.
He braced them flat on the pound rail and looked down at the black water filling the cribs he'd mended and breathed the cold in until the shaking eased, and he thought, with the clarity that comes after you've done a thing you can't take back: Well.
You've gone and stayed now. You planted your feet in another man's harbor in front of forty people.
That's not filling your water and leaving.
That's the other thing. The thing he didn't do.
The thing that had cost him everything the once he'd let it.
"You could've let it go by," Gus said, behind him.
He'd come out quiet for a big man, the way he did.
He came up to the rail and set his forearms on it beside Amos's, not touching, close.
"The fleet. This co-op. It's not yours. You could've kept your head down and been gone on the fourteenth with nobody the wiser and no skin off you.
" His voice was low and rough and Amos couldn't read it in the dark. "Why'd you stand up."
And Amos, who had been asked why by this man twice now and dodged it twice, found he had run clean out of the strength to dodge it.
"Because you wouldn't," he said. "Because you stood there in the back of your own co-op with the one thing they needed to hear locked behind your teeth, and I watched it cost you, and I couldn't—" He turned his head.
Gus was close, closer than he'd thought, the harbor light catching the side of his face, those tired warm eyes on Amos and nowhere else.
"You saved every man in that room from drowning a hundred times over, twenty years running, and you've decided you're not allowed to save them one more time, because of a thing you did before half of them were born.
And it's the stupidest, saddest thing I ever saw, and I couldn't stand in it.
So I stood up." His own voice had gone unsteady.
"That's the why. There isn't another one. "
They were very close. Amos could feel the warmth coming off him. The pound lay black and mended below them and the whole harbor held still the way it had held still in the dark office, and this time there was no shoulder to work, no reason to be this near a man but the wanting to be.
And Gus hadn't moved off. That was the thing that undid him — Gus, who moved toward everything, who was always already halfway gone toward whatever needed him next, stood dead still at the rail with his shoulder a hand's-breadth from Amos's and his eyes on Amos's face and went nowhere at all.
The harbor light caught the gray in his beard and the tired warm blue of him.
Amos could smell the coffee and the salt and the whole long day of work on him.
Six years he'd kept every living soul at arm's length and a fair tide's distance, and here he stood leaned into the heat coming off this one, wanting to close the last dark inch between them so badly his ribs ached with the holding of it.
Amos watched Gus's gaze drop to his mouth and come back up, slow, and stay. Neither of them said the thing. Neither of them had to. And Amos thought, tide's turning — right now, I can feel it turn —
The ice plant let go.
It didn't knock this time. It screamed — a metal shriek out of the shed, then a bang, then the compressor's patient counting-down knock stopped, all at once, into a silence that was worse than any sound it had made in three weeks, and both their heads came around, and Gil's voice came sharp across the yard — "Gus!
" — and the moment broke like a wave on the ledge, gone to foam and cold spray, and Gus was already moving, already gone, the way he was always already gone toward whatever needed him, and Amos stood alone at the rail with his heart slamming and the taste of what had almost happened still on the air.
He stood there a long while with the cold coming up off the water and his pulse slowing and the whole shape of it settling onto him at last, heavy and certain and strange.
He had come around that point to fill his water and go.
He had told this man, told Dee, told himself a dozen times over — bad bet for staying, gone with the tide, out ahead of the owing.
And instead he'd stood up in a room full of strangers and spent the one thing he'd been hoarding for six years, the story, the shame, the I was the one told him to sign, spent it whole and public on people whose names he barely knew, to buy them a little time against the thing that had already eaten him once.
A man didn't do that for a place he was leaving.
He did it for a place he'd decided, somewhere down below the part of him that got a vote, was his.
And the man he'd done it for — the man he'd damn near kissed at this rail with forty futures still hanging in the dark air — a man didn't do that for someone he meant to sail away from, either.
He knew it. He'd known it a week and been too much a coward to say it to himself in daylight. He wasn't leaving. God help him, and God help the both of them, he wasn't leaving.
The ice plant was dead.
And somewhere in a rental truck on the co-op road, Amos knew without having to see it, a man in good boots was smiling, because a co-op that can't make its own ice is a co-op that can't hold its own fish, and a fleet that can't hold its own fish will, in the end, take any price at all.