Chapter 5 #2
Because it was one thing to want a man. Gus had wanted men before; that was weather, it passed.
It was another thing entirely to stand on a dock and watch a man be relied on by everyone you loved and not break under it — to watch him be, in fact, the strongest thing on the whole waterfront — and to feel the wanting turn into something with a keel under it, something that meant to stay afloat, something Gus had no business feeling and less business acting on and could no more have stopped than he could have stopped the tide from flushing the pound clean twice a day, on schedule, forever.
And here was the truth he kept arriving at all afternoon and shying off of: the fleet leaning on Amos wasn't costing Amos a thing.
Gus knew what it looked like when a man got ground down under other men's weight — he saw it in the shaving mirror every morning of his life, he'd been that man for twenty years.
This was the opposite of that. Every load of trust the fleet set on the stranger, the stranger came up out of the water a little more solid, a little more here, a little less like something that might be gone with the next fair tide.
Being needed was building him back crib by crib, the same as he was building the pound.
Gus watched Petey ask him a question and watched Amos answer it and watched the boy nod and take it as gospel, and watched something in Amos's shoulders settle another quarter-inch toward staying, and thought: it's medicine to him.
The thing that's poison to me is medicine to him.
He'd spent two decades being needed until there was nothing left of him to need, and here was a man being put back together by the very thing that had taken Gus apart — and Gus stood on the ledge with cedar in his arms and wanted, with a want that had a keel under it and every intention of staying afloat, to be one of the hands that got to go on setting weight on this man and watching him rise to it. For years. For good.
By six o'clock the first live catch of the co-op's day went over the rail and into the pound instead of onto a truck at Portland's mercy — three hundred pounds of it, holding easy in the cold clean water, worth full price in a week or a month whenever the fleet cared to sell it, and not one cent taken off it by a man in a rental truck.
It wasn't much. Against eight years of exclusive and a whiteboard number and a machine that owned half the coast, three hundred pounds of held lobster was almost nothing.
It was also the first thing this co-op had refused to lose in twenty years. Gus watched it go under the black water alive, and had to turn his face to the harbor for a minute, and let on it was the wind.
***
The fleet went home at dark, loud and pleased with itself, and Gil last of all with his hand on Gus's good shoulder and something working in his hard old face he didn't have words for and didn't try to find.
And then it was just the two of them, the way it kept coming down to just the two of them — Gus and Amos on the ledge above the pound in the last of the light, soaked to the waist, wrung out, the water below them thick and quiet with three hundred pounds of everything they'd refused to give away.
"You did that," Gus said.
"Fleet did it."
"The fleet did it because you told them they could.
" Gus looked at him. Amos was watching the pound, the way he always watched the pound, but there was something loose in his face now, the tightness gone out of it, and it caught the last light and it did things to Gus's resolve that his resolve was in no shape to withstand after a day like this one.
"You want to know the truth, I stood on that dock this morning with nothing.
Twenty years I've always had the next thing, and this morning I had nothing, and you—" He stopped.
He was doing the thing Amos did now, letting it quit before it said too much.
But the day had worn him down past the place where he kept things, and it came out anyway.
"You walked onto my dead dock and gave me back a thing I grew up on.
I didn't even know it could come back. I'd decided it couldn't. I decide a lot of things can't."
Amos turned his head.
They were close. They were always close, that was the trouble, three weeks of always ending up close and never once closing it, and Gus was tired, tired in a way that had burned off all the careful, and Amos's dark eyes were on him with the guard gone all the way down, and the water lay black and full and alive below them with the one thing they'd kept.
Neither of them moved. The last light was going off the water and the harbor had gone that deep summer-evening quiet where you can hear a mooring chain mutter to itself two hundred feet out, and Gus was close enough now to see the salt dried white at Amos's temple, and the small old scar through one eyebrow, and the exact dark of his eyes — which weren't flat now, weren't giving-nothing now, were giving Gus the whole of themselves and only waiting, patient as the tide, to see what Gus would do with it.
Three weeks of this. A hand resting on his throat in a dark office and a head that wouldn't turn.
A rail and a dying ice plant and a moment broken clean in two by a scream out of a shed.
Every time the tide had come up to the turn, and every time one of them had let it turn back and slide out again.
Gus was so tired of letting it turn back. He was tired down to the keel of being the man who always let the good thing slip back out to sea, because he'd decided somewhere in his twenties that good things weren't his to keep.
Gus kissed him.
He didn't decide to. He understood, distantly, that it was the second unwisest thing he'd done in his life and that he already knew the first, but his body had gone ahead without waiting on the part of him that kept the books — reached across the last cold inch of dark and got a hand in the salt-wet hair at the back of Amos's neck and kissed him, and Amos made a low sound against his mouth like something giving way, like a line finally cast off a cleat it had strained against too long, and kissed him back.