Chapter 6
Kept
Amos gave it two days.
Two days of Gus twice as useful and half as there.
Two days of the kiss sitting on the dock between them like a third man neither of them would name — Gus hauling and clamping and hosing and joking, pouring himself out over the fleet in that endless bright stream, and every time his eye caught Amos's it skittered off again, guilty, like a man caught at something, and Amos let him.
He set the thing down where Gus could see it and he left it lying, the way he left everything, and he waited for the tide to do the work.
The tide did not do the work. That was the trouble with Gus Ouellette.
Other men, you left a thing in front of them long enough and they picked it up.
Gus would walk around it for twenty years sooner than take a thing that might be his, would starve at a laid table out of a conviction that the meal belonged to somebody he'd wronged.
Amos knew the shape of that. He'd been starving at his own laid table six years, out of a different conviction that came to the same thing in the end.
Two men could stand on either side of the same set table forever, each one sure the food was the other's, and both go into the ground hungry.
The pound made it worse, if anything. It should have made it better — the win, the fleet coming alive again, near a thousand pounds of held catch and the price for once in the co-op's own hands — but every good thing the pound gave the harbor it seemed to take back out of Gus, who worked twice as hard now to keep the miracle miraculous, and slept, Amos was fairly sure, not at all.
A man couldn't run on giving alone. Amos had watched men try.
There came a morning where a body that only ever poured out and never took a thing back in simply quit — the way a well goes dry, the way his father had gone grey and sat down in the snow one January with the shovel still in his hands and not got up.
Amos was not going to stand on a ledge and watch that happen to a second man.
He'd sworn off a great many things in six years. He had never once sworn off that.
So on the third night Amos stopped waiting for the tide.
He found Gus where he knew he'd be, which was the last place any sensible tired man would be at ten o'clock at night: down at the pound in the dark with a light on his head, checking the flush gates on the ebb, because the holding was full now — near a thousand pounds of the fleet's catch alive in the water, worth a fortune the co-op didn't have to sell tonight — and Gus did not trust it to a soul, would not sleep until he'd walked it himself, because it was one more weight he'd decided was his alone to carry.
"They're fine," Amos said, coming down the ledge. "I checked them at eight. They'll hold till the flood."
"I know. I just—" Gus straightened, the light swinging. "I like to see it. Set my own eyes on it."
"You like to make sure it doesn't need you." Amos stopped an arm's length off. "So you can go home and lie awake being no use to anybody instead."
Gus huffed something that wasn't a laugh. "You've got me figured."
"I've had you figured since the first plate of chowder. Wasn't hard. You wear it on the outside." Amos took the last step. Close now, the pound black and full below them, the held catch faintly stirring the water, the whole harbor asleep around them. "Turn the light off, Gus."
"Amos—"
"You said you don't get to have this." Amos's voice came out lower than he meant, rough with the thing he'd been holding down three days.
"And I've been thinking on it. And here's what I've got.
" He reached up and thumbed the headlamp off himself, and the dark came down soft and total, just the harbor light far off on its pole and the water and the two of them.
"You're right. By your rules, you don't. A man that owes what you've decided you owe doesn't get to keep a thing for himself.
Fine. I'm not going to argue a Maine man out of what he's decided he is; Dee already told me it can't be done.
" He heard Gus breathe. "So I'm not asking you to take anything.
I'm asking you to give me something. That's different.
That door's open. You give things away — it's the one thing you'll let yourself do.
" His hand found the front of Gus's jacket in the dark, fisted in it, held on.
"So give me this. Not for you. For me. I'm asking.
I never ask anybody for anything and I'm asking you. Don't make me stand here having asked."
For a long moment there was nothing but the water working through the gates.
Then Gus's hand came up and closed over Amos's fist on his jacket, big and warm and shaking just slightly, and he said, wrecked, "That's the dirtiest thing anybody's ever done to me," and Amos said, "I know it," and Gus kissed him in the dark over a thousand pounds of everything they'd refused to lose.
***
Gus's house sat up the shore road, small and dark, and it told Amos everything before Gus had the lamp lit.
It was clean the way a boat is clean, everything stowed, nothing spare.
A table, two chairs, one of them plainly never used.
The co-op's ledgers stacked square on the table where a man would eat if he ever ate at home.
A good chair by the cold stove with a lobsterman's paperback splayed on the arm and a lamp beside it, and that one corner was the only place in the whole front room that looked lived in — the rest of it was a place a man passed through on his way to being useful somewhere else.
No pictures to speak of. No comfort bought.
Twenty years of a man spending everything he had on everybody but himself, made into rooms. Amos stood in the doorway and read it the way he'd read the pound, and understood that he had never in his life wanted so badly to give somebody something and had it be received.
"It's not much," Gus said, of the house, apologizing for it the way he apologized for everything by getting there first.
"It's a man who won't spend a nickel on himself," Amos said. "I've slept in it my whole life. Different weather, same house." He took Gus's face in both hands. "Stop apologizing to me. Tonight you don't get to be sorry for one thing. That's the only rule I've got."
It should have been a strange thing, to want a man's bare rooms the way Amos wanted these — the one worn chair, the ledgers squared on the table, the whole sad monastery of a life spent entirely on other people.
But it wasn't strange at all. It was the clearest Amos had felt in years.
He looked at the evidence of twenty years of a good man giving himself away to the bone and he wanted, with something that had teeth in it, to be the one thing in the world that got poured back the other direction.
To fill one corner of these empty rooms with something Gus had let himself keep.
And then there wasn't any more talking for a while, because Amos kissed him, and Gus made that low undone sound again, and the careful went out of both of them at once.
It was clumsy at first, the way it's clumsy when two grown men who've each spent years alone remember all at once that they have bodies, that the bodies are good for this, that this is allowed.
Gus's hands didn't know where to go — Amos felt them settle and lift and settle again, a man who'd forgotten how to touch somebody without a task in it — and Amos took one of them and put it flat on his own chest, over the tattoo, over the heart going hard under it, and held it there.
"Here," he said, against Gus's mouth. "You don't have to do anything with it. Just keep it there. Just — take up room. For once in your life take up the room."
He got Gus's jacket off him, and his shirt, careful of the bad shoulder, and there in the low lamp was the whole of the man — barrel-chested, going soft in the middle the way a working man does at forty-seven, wind-burned to the collar and pale below it, the ruined shoulder knotted and scarred, a body that had been used hard for other people's sake for thirty years and never once, Amos would have bet the boat, been looked at like this.
Like a thing worth looking at. Amos put his mouth to the bad shoulder, to the knot of it he knew now better than he knew most people, and Gus's breath went ragged, and his hand came up into Amos's hair, and Amos worked his way in from there — slow, sure, the way he did everything, the way he'd tended the shoulder in the dark office except that this time there was no pretending it was only tending.
Because that was the door, and Amos had known it walking in.
Gus could not receive. He'd sooner die than be given to.
But he could be needed — that door stood wide — and so Amos made himself need, out loud, in his hands, with his whole body, until the two things ran together and Gus couldn't tell anymore which he was doing, giving or getting, and it stopped mattering, and somewhere in there the last of the careful burned off him and he took hold of Amos like a man taking hold of the thing that was keeping him afloat.