Chapter 7 #3
It came out quiet. It came out almost gentle, which was the worst of it, which was the cruelest way it could have come out.
"You should go, Amos. You were always going to.
You told me yourself — bad bet for staying, gone with the tide, ask anybody who ever made it.
" He watched the words land on the man and he hated himself and he kept going, because a man reaching for the wound can't stop once he's got hold of it.
"I don't get to keep you. That's not—it was never on the table.
A man who owes what I owe doesn't get to sit in a warm house with a good thing while the bill goes unpaid.
I knew that going in. I should never have—" His voice wanted to break and he wouldn't let it.
"You were a few nights I didn't have any right to.
Go on around the point. Be free of it. Be free of me.
That's the last thing I've got to give you and I'm giving it, so take it, and go. "
The co-op was very quiet. Out the window the reefer truck hummed its patient hum.
Amos looked at him for a long moment, and the stone had come back over his face, all the way down, the way it had been the first night he'd come around the point with one fender and no name on his boat, braced for exactly this, braced for it his whole life.
And Gus understood, too late, watching the shutter come down, that he hadn't just pushed Amos away.
He'd proved him right. He'd taken the one man who'd let himself believe, for four nights, that he was a thing that got kept — and he'd shown him, kindly, gently, in the cruelest possible voice, that he wasn't.
"Yeah," Amos said. Very low. "There it is. I knew it was in there somewhere. You give everything away, Gus. I just didn't think you'd give me away too, and call it a present."
He went.
The door didn't slam. Amos wasn't a slammer; he was a leaver, quiet and complete, a man who'd had a lifetime of practice at it.
Gus heard his boots go down the ramp and heard nothing after, no engine, no splash, just the co-op ticking around him and the reefer truck humming and the pound down the shore holding its thousand pounds of everything they'd refused, once, for one bright day, to lose.
For a moment Gus's whole body wanted to go after him.
It was the strongest thing he'd felt in years — a pure animal pull, straight up out of the meat of him, that had nothing to do with the debt or the deal or any sum: just go, catch him on the float, take it back, take all of it back.
He'd spent twenty years teaching that pull to lie down.
It didn't lie down now. It stood up in him and strained toward the door like a dog at the end of a chain, and Gus stood at the desk and held the chain with both hands and did not let it pull him, because the man he'd decided he was did not get to go after the good thing.
The man he'd decided he was stayed at the desk with the pen and paid.
By the time the pull finally quieted, the float was silent, and it was too late anyway, which was, he understood, exactly why he'd waited for it to quiet.
Gus sat down at the desk. He picked up the pen.
He looked at the terms in his own hand, the clean beautiful arithmetic of his own drowning, and his eyes wouldn't focus on them, and he understood that he was going to do it anyway — sign the harbor's surrender and lose the one man who'd ever made him want to be saved, both, in the same week, and call the whole ruin mercy — because that was who he'd decided he was twenty years ago, and there was no arguing a Maine man out of what he'd decided he was.
He got up once. He got as far as the door, with some animal part of him already down the ramp and out onto the float, already saying the thing — don't go, you were right, help me kill it instead, I don't want to be forgiven half so much as I want you to stay — the whole true speech sitting right there in his chest, formed, ready, the easiest words in the world if a man could only be a different man than the one he was.
He put his hand on the doorframe. Down at the float, in the dark, he could just make out the peapod, and a shape moving on her, low and quick, a man stowing gear the way a man stows gear when he means to be gone with the light.
Gus stood in the doorway with the true speech in his mouth and his hand on the frame and did not go down the ramp.
He'd give Amos the clean leaving. That was the story he told himself, standing there, letting the man go — that it was a kindness, that it cost Gus more than it cost Amos, that this too was a thing he was giving away.
It was the finest lie he'd told himself in twenty years of fine lies, and he almost believed it, and he went back inside and shut the door on the one thing he wanted in the world, quietly, the way you close a door on a room you've decided you're not allowed in.
Then he sat back down at the desk and looked at the pen and waited for morning, and the reefer truck hummed, and the pound held its thousand pounds, and somewhere down the shore a man he'd given away was making his boat ready to run.
Dee had told Amos that. Amos had told Gus.
Neither of them had been able to make it not be true.