Chapter 6 #3
He woke before light, the way he always woke, and for one suspended moment did not run — lay still in the strange bed with the big man's arm heavy over him and let himself have it, ten seconds, twenty, the most dangerous thing he'd done in years.
Then he heard the truck.
He knew the sound of it before he was fully awake — a big diesel, coming slow down the shore road and turning off toward the co-op, air brakes sighing — and he was up and at the window with his heart going before Gus had stirred, looking down through the gray at the co-op road, and there it was.
Not a rental pickup this time. A truck. A long white reefer truck, spotless, a wave embossed on the door in a corner where it had never been near water, backing down to the co-op wharf in the first light with its refrigeration unit already running.
HALYARD SEAFOOD, down the side of it, in letters you could read from the house.
"Gus." Amos's voice came out flat and cold. "Gus, wake up. He's here."
Gus came up out of sleep fast, a man used to being needed at four a.m., and crossed to the window naked and squinting, and went still.
Down at the co-op, Boyce got out of the truck's cab in his good boots, and stretched, and looked up at the dead ice shed with a small pleased proprietary care, and then he did the thing that turned Amos's blood to meltwater: he waved.
Up at the house. At the two of them in the window.
Friendly. He'd known they'd be watching. He'd counted on it.
"Good faith," Amos said. He understood it whole, all at once, the way he'd understood the offer in the meeting.
"He's going to fix your ice. Free. No signature, no obligation, nothing to sign — a gift, before the vote.
So the whole fleet stands on that wharf today and watches Halyard save the co-op that Halyard's trying to swallow, and by the fourteenth every drowning man in this harbor thinks of Boyce as the fella who kept their catch cold when their own co-op couldn't." His hands had gone to fists on the sill.
"The pound doesn't matter anymore. That's what that truck means.
We spent three weeks giving them a reason not to need him, and he just backed a reason right down our own ramp.
They'll vote yes. They'll vote yes out of gratitude, and gratitude's the one bill a proud man always pays. "
Behind him, Gus said nothing at all.
Down at the co-op a couple of the fleet were already drifting toward the wharf through the gray, pulled by the sound of a running unit the way cold men drift toward a fire.
Amos watched Petras Gauthier come out of the fog in his slicker and stop, and take his cap off, and stand looking at that white truck with its refrigeration humming like a promise kept.
And Amos knew to the ounce what the old man was feeling, because he had felt it himself once, in a kitchen in Digby, with the glass falling and a stranger pouring coffee: relief.
The plain animal relief of a drowning man who sees a hand come down over the side.
It never mattered whose hand it was. When you were going under you didn't check the hand — you grabbed it.
Boyce knew that better than any man alive; Boyce had built a whole company on the arithmetic of it, on the certain knowledge that a frightened man will trade eight years for one warm morning every single time.
By the fourteenth there'd be forty of those mornings banked in forty memories, and the pound — the pound Amos had hauled back from the dead with his own two hands, the pound that was supposed to be the thing that set this harbor free — would be a quaint little heap of cribs down the shore that a nice man from Halyard had been good enough to make unnecessary.
Amos turned. And the look on Gus's face — on the face of the man who'd finally, last night, for a few hours, let himself have one thing that was his — was the look of a man watching his own worst hour come backing down the ramp with the engine running.
He wasn't looking at the truck like a man who meant to fight it.
He was looking at it like a man doing a sum he already knew the answer to.
Because if the fleet was going to drown holding Halyard's hand no matter what anybody did or said, then better it be Gus who signed the paper — Gus who took the weight, Gus who paid, again — so that no other man in this harbor had to carry a single ounce of it.
Amos could see the whole ruinous shape of it assembling behind the man's eyes already: the martyrdom dressed up as mercy, the same disease that had kept Gus out of a warm bed for twenty years now reaching for the one lever that could sink them all at once.
"Gus." It came out of Amos afraid. "Gus. Don't you do that sum. I know that face — I've worn that face. Don't you dare do the sum."
But Gus was already doing it. Amos could see him doing it. And out on the wharf the refrigeration unit hummed and hummed, patient as a clock, counting them all down toward the fourteenth.