Chapter 7 #2
Gus hadn't hidden them well because Gus had never in his life had cause to hide anything from anybody — the terms he'd been drafting in his own hand, the counter he meant to take to Boyce, the shape of the least-bad surrender, spread on the co-op desk under the lamp where he'd been working them after the fleet went home.
He came back from checking the pound gates and Amos was standing at the desk with a page in his hand and his face gone to stone, and Gus stopped in the doorway and knew, the way he knew weather, that the hour had come early and he wasn't ready for it, that he was never going to be ready for it.
"Tell me this is you finding a way to beat it," Amos said.
He didn't look up. His voice was very flat and very careful, the voice of a man holding something with both hands.
"Tell me these are the notes of a man figuring out how to kill this deal.
Tell me that, Gus, and I'll put it down and we'll never speak of it. "
"It's the notes of a man trying to make it survivable."
Amos closed his eyes.
"They're going to sign," Gus said, and his own voice came out steady and reasonable and it horrified him how reasonable it was.
"You know they are. You saw the truck. You saw Petras this morning.
It's over, Amos, the vote's just the funeral.
And when a thing's going to happen anyway, the only question left is whether it happens to them blind or whether somebody who knows the trap gets in the room and fights for a cap and a term and a door they can get back out of.
Somebody has to sit across from Boyce and bleed him for every protection there is.
And it has to be me. It has to be a name that's already—" He stopped. "It has to be me."
"Because you're the one that owes." Amos opened his eyes.
They were terrible, flat and dark and seeing everything.
"Say the rest of it. You've been saying it in your sleep for four nights.
It has to be your name because you already ruined them once, so your name's already dirty, so what's a little more.
You're not getting in that room to save anybody, Gus.
You're getting in it to hang. You found a deal that lets you finally, finally pay the thing you've decided you owe, and you're calling it mercy, and it is the exact same thing you did twenty years ago — you've done the arithmetic and it's clean and beautiful and it's going to drown every one of them, and this time you're going to be so proud of yourself while it does it, because this time you'll have gone down with the ship. "
"That's not—"
"It's not what? It's not true?" Amos took a step, and there was nothing soft in him now, the whole hard length of him lit up with it.
"Tell me the part that's not true. Tell me you're getting in that room to win.
Tell me you've got one move in those notes that ends with this harbor free and the co-op standing and you not nailed to the front of it.
Show me the page, Gus. I'll read it right now.
I read that whole language once with my father's hand shaking next to mine.
Show me the page where the fella who owns your bait and your fuel and your boat note doesn't own you by year three, and I'll get down on this floor and help you fight for it. "
Gus didn't show him the page. There was no page. They both knew there was no page.
"You can't," Amos said, quieter, and the quiet was worse.
"Because it's not in there. It was never going to be in there.
There's no version of signing that isn't drowning, and you know it better than any man alive, and you're doing it anyway — not because you're stupid, God knows you're not stupid, you're the smartest man on this whole reach of water.
You're doing it because some part of you has been waiting twenty years for a wave big enough to finish the job, and here it comes, and you're wading out to meet it with your arms open and calling it looking after your people.
" His voice dropped to almost nothing. "You want to know the worst of it?
They'd forgive you. If you just stood up at that meeting and said I got it wrong once and I won't watch us do it again, so here's the hard road and here's why — they'd follow you.
They've been waiting twenty years for you to let them forgive you.
But you won't take that either, because being forgiven means the debt's done, and you can't have the debt be done, because then who are you.
" He was breathing hard. "You'd rather hang than be forgiven. My God, Gus. You'd rather hang."
He put the page down on the desk, careful, like it might go off, and when he spoke again the anger had burned down to the thing under it, which was grief.
"I sat in a kitchen and watched a man I loved do this.
You understand me? I watched my father sign a thing a smiling man swore up and down was the only way — and it wasn't the only way, it was just the only way he could see through being tired and scared — and it killed him.
Slow. Two years. A shovel in his hands in the snow.
" His throat worked. "And now I'm standing in another kitchen watching another man I—" He didn't finish it.
He didn't have to; the unfinished word hung in the lamplight between them, bigger than anything he could have landed on.
"I can't do it twice. I told you what I was, the first night, I told you plain.
I can't watch it take a second one, and I can't stop you doing it, and so I can't be here to watch.
That's the whole of it. That's all I've got left. "
And that was the thing that got in past everything — because it was true, it was the truest thing anybody had said to him since Dee sat down across a Formica table and told a stranger his whole life, truer even than you can't pay a debt by drowning slower, and the truth of it reached into Gus and closed a hand around the one thing he had left that he couldn't afford to have touched.
So he did what a cornered animal does when a hand gets that close to the wound.
"That's not—" Gus started again, and stopped, and then he didn't reach for the truth, because the truth would have meant surrendering the whole architecture of twenty years standing up. He reached for the wound instead. He always reached for the wound. It was the only thing he trusted not to leave.
"Then go," Gus said.