Chapter 7
The One Who Pays
By the second day the reefer truck was just part of the co-op, and that was how Gus knew they'd already lost.
That was the genius of it, and Gus could admire the genius the way you admire a wave that's going to break on top of you.
Boyce hadn't argued. Boyce hadn't pushed.
Boyce had simply solved the one problem the whole harbor was standing in — backed a humming white truck down the ramp and made the fleet's catch safe, free, no signature, a gift — and then he'd gone back to Portland and let the gift do the talking.
And the gift talked all day. Every man who ran his lobster into that cold clean box instead of watching it die in a tote said something to himself about Halyard while he did it, and what he said got warmer by the day, and by the second day nobody even looked at the truck anymore.
It was just there. It was just how you kept your catch now.
And a fleet that had gotten used to a thing in two days would vote to keep it in two weeks without hardly feeling the pen in their hand.
Gus stood at the buying counter and watched Petras Gauthier come off the truck ramp with his empties and say, to nobody, to the morning, "Well, that's civilized," and Gus felt the last of it go out from under him like sand on the ebb.
The pound still held its thousand pounds.
Amos still walked it every tide. But the fever had broken — the beautiful desperate fever of the day the whole town had waded into the dead water to save itself — and in the cool light after the fever the pound looked like what a tired fleet would decide it was: a lot of hard work, down the shore, to do for free the thing a man from Halyard would do for you with a truck.
Gus had watched hope die in this harbor before.
He knew the exact color of it. It was the color of a man saying well, that's civilized about the thing that was going to eat him.
Gil felt it too. Gus watched him feel it, the old man coming down the ramp that second afternoon with his hands jammed in his pockets and his face doing a thing Gil's face never did, which was waver.
"I don't like the truck," Gil said, low, stopping at the counter.
"I want it on the record I don't like the truck.
" But he said it the way a man says he doesn't like a thing he's already decided to live with, and when Gus didn't answer — because Gus had nothing, because Gus had had nothing to say in a co-op meeting since he was twenty-seven years old — Gil looked at him a beat, waiting for the thing Gus used to be able to hand him, the read on what a deal was really worth, and Gus looked back at him with his mouth shut, and Gil nodded, slow, like the silence had told him something, and went on up to the office.
He'd stopped asking Gus to weigh in years ago about most things.
He'd only kept asking about the one thing Gus couldn't do it for.
That was the joke of it. That was the whole joke of Gus Ouellette's life.
June caught him at the end of the day, by the truck, of all places, the two of them looking at the thing hum.
"You've gone somewhere," she said. Not a question.
June never asked questions she already knew the answers to.
"I've seen that particular gone on you exactly once before, and it was a long time ago, and it scared the whole town.
" She put her small hand on his arm. "Wherever you're about to go, Gus.
Come back from it first and tell somebody.
Don't do it quiet." But Gus only smiled the smile that ended conversations, and June — who was not fooled, who had never once been fooled — took her hand back and looked at him with an old grief, and let him have the smile, because there was no arguing a man out of a gone she'd watched take him before.
So Gus did the sum. He'd been doing it since the truck came, the way Amos had seen on his face and begged him not to, and by the second day it came out the only way it had ever been going to come out.
They were going to sign. Not today, not because anybody was a fool, but because they were drowning and a hand had come down over the side and a drowning man does not check the hand.
They were going to sign on the fourteenth, and when they did, the price would hold a year and then the clause would wake up, and in three years there'd be one buyer on this reach of coast and he'd own the bait and the fuel and the boat notes, and Merritt Harbor would be a company town with lobster instead of lumber, and the young ones would leave and the old ones would die and the co-op Gus's grandfather built would be a Halyard sign on a wharf.
Unless.
Unless a man who knew exactly how it ended got in front of it.
Unless somebody who'd read the last contract to the comma sat down with Boyce and fought him line by line for a better clause, a shorter term, a cap, a way out — took the deal that was coming anyway and bled it for every protection a doomed thing could be made to carry.
Unless one man put his own name on it, alone, so that when it went bad — and it would go bad — there was exactly one throat for the fleet to cut, and it was already the throat of the man who'd cut this harbor once before.
Who better. Who in God's name better than Gus Ouellette to be the name on the second bad deal, a man already carrying the first?
He could give them that. It was the last thing he had left to give, and it was, he told himself, standing at his counter in the ordinary morning, a mercy.
A man spends twenty years learning he doesn't get to be saved.
The least he can do with what he's got left is stand between the people he loves and the blade, and take it in his own two hands, one more time, for good.
He had it all worked out by the second day. He felt almost peaceful about it.
That should have told him something. Peace like that only ever came to Gus when he'd found a new way to drown.
***
It was good with Amos. That was the cruelty of the timing, and Gus would think about that for a long while after — that the days he spent quietly deciding to throw himself under the wheel were the best days of his life.
Three nights now. Amos in his too-empty house, filling one corner of it, then another.
Amos's boots by the door that had only ever had one pair of boots by it.
Amos at the never-used chair at the table, finally using it, so that Gus looked up from the ledgers one evening and there was a man across from him in the lamplight, and the sight of it did something to Gus's throat he had to look down from.
Amos didn't fill silences the way Gus did; he sat in them, easy, and let Gus's own quiet be quiet next to his, and Gus who had never in his life been quiet with another person learned in three nights that it was the best thing there was.
Amos tended the shoulder without being asked and Gus let him.
Amos slept hard and deep now, a man who'd stopped keeping one foot toward the door, and Gus lay awake beside him in the dark memorizing it, the weight and the warmth and the plain unbearable fact of him, because Gus already knew what he was going to do, and he knew what it was going to cost, and he was stealing every hour of it he could before the bill came due.
He kept thinking he'd stop. Kept thinking, tonight I'll ease off, tonight I won't reach for him in the dark, I'll start the letting-go early so it's gentler when it comes.
And then Amos would come in off the pound smelling of cold and salt and drop into that never-used chair, or he'd fit himself along Gus's back in the narrow bed and go heavy and trusting against him inside a minute, that man who used to sleep with one foot toward the door now sleeping like the drowned — and Gus couldn't do it.
Couldn't ease off a single degree. He took every hour like a thief who's already been caught and has stopped caring about the sentence, and each one was better than the last, and each one was one closer to the one where he'd have to hand it all back.
He'd catch Amos looking at him across the lamp sometimes with a small crease between his brows, a man who read the shoulder, a man who read weather, sensing the front that was coming and not able to name it yet — and Gus would smile the smile that ended things and Amos would let him, for now, and go back to his coffee, and the front kept coming.
Because a man signing his life away to Halyard didn't get to keep a good thing while he did it.
That went without saying. That was so obvious to Gus it didn't even feel like a decision — of course he'd have to let Amos go; of course the penance and the keeping couldn't share a house; you didn't get to be the harbor's martyr and a happy man both.
He'd let Amos go when it was done. Gently.
He'd find a way to make it Amos's idea, so it wouldn't cost the man anything.
Amos was a bad bet for staying anyway; Amos had said so himself, first night, ask anybody who ever made it.
Gus would just be the one who finally proved him right, and he'd do it kindly, and Amos would be gone around the point and free of a co-op's death and a broken old man's penance, and that would be the last gift Gus gave anybody, the biggest one, the one that cost the most.
He had that worked out too.
He should have known better than to think a man who read the shoulder could be lied to by the mouth.
***
Amos found the papers on the fourth night.