Chapter 5 #2
"You could have asked me."
"With what," he said. "Out of what? Out of the forty-one thousand you're under? Out of the injectors you won't fix?" He shook his head slowly. "You'd have given it to me. That's why I couldn't ask."
And that — that right there is the thing I couldn't get around, then or since.
He didn't do it because he didn't love me.
He did it because he did, at a specific and terrible exchange rate, in a math I have never been able to prove wrong.
"They told me it was survey work," he said. "Said they were partnering. Said your name'd be on it."
"You didn't believe that."
"No." He picked the line back up and looked at it and put it down again. "No, I didn't believe that."
"Pop."
"I know."
"You gave them my field."
"I know what I gave them," he said. "I've known every day since. I sit here and I splice line on a boat I sold." He finally looked at me. His eyes were wet and completely steady, which is the worst combination in the human face. "You want me off, I'm off. Right now. I'll take the bucket."
"It's my bucket."
"It's my bucket, I brought it in '89."
"Pop."
Junho came out of the wheelhouse then, and he'd heard enough of it, and he went absolutely white and then absolutely red in about four seconds.
"You — " he said.
"Junho."
"He sold us — "
"Junho, go inside."
"He sold us to the guys who bought the fuel dock, Ris — "
"GO INSIDE."
He went inside. He slammed a hatch that doesn't slam and it made a pathetic little click, which took all the air out of it, and I have never been more grateful to a piece of hardware.
I sat there with an old man in the four o'clock light.
Here's what I thought about.
I thought about being nine and getting my thumb caught in a winch and Pop putting his own hand in after mine so the line would take his fingers first.
I thought about my father's funeral, where Pop stood at the back and didn't come to the front because he said the front was for family, and then drove me home and made me eat.
I thought: thirty-one thousand dollars.
I thought: I would have paid a million and I don't have eleven.
"You're staying on the crew," I said.
He looked up sharply.
"Girl — "
"You're staying on the crew," I said, "because in three weeks a judge is going to ask who bought that data, and there is exactly one person on this planet who can put a name and a face and a bar and a date to it, and he is sitting on a bucket he stole in 1989."
Pop stared at me.
"You want me to testify."
"I want you to finish it," I said. "You handed them the knife.
Fine. You're going to walk into a federal courtroom and tell them where you got it, and it is going to cost you every friend you have on this island, and you're going to do it anyway, and then you're going to come back here and sit on that bucket. "
His mouth worked.
"You should hate me," he said.
"I'm going to. Give it a week."
"That's fair."
"It's not fair, it's just true. I'm going to hate you in about nine days, hard, for about a month, and then I'm going to stop, because I've done this before with my father and I know the shape of it.
" I wiped my face with the back of my wrist. "You don't get to be forgiven today, Pop. You just get to stay."
"That's worse."
"Yes."
"That's a lot worse than being thrown off."
"Yes," I said. "That's why I'm doing it."
He laughed. It turned into a cough halfway and went on longer than I liked, and I put my hand flat on his back and felt every one of his ribs through his shirt and thought about February.
"And the hospice?" he said.
"Is on the boat's books as of tonight," I said. "We'll be more broke. We're already broke. Broke's a state, Pop, it's not a slope, you can't get more broke, that's a myth invented by people with money."
He put his face in his hands.
Seventy years old. Hands like rope.
I sat next to him on the fish box and I put my arm around him and neither of us said anything for a long time.
Later, on the foredeck, Torren said, "Junho's going to be a problem."
"Junho thinks I'm insane."
"Junho's twenty-six and he loves you and somebody hurt you. That's not thinking, that's weather. It'll pass."
"You've got a very generous read of my cousin."
"I've got a very accurate read of your cousin. He's already made him a sandwich."
I sat up. "He what?"
"Twenty minutes ago. Slapped it down in front of him without a word and left." Torren shrugged. "Boy's furious. Boy's also not going to let a dying man skip dinner. Both are true."
I lay back down on the deck and looked at approximately nine hundred billion stars, which is what you get nineteen miles out with no moon and no shore glow.
"Can I ask you something," I said.
"Yeah."
"When you got here. Thursday. First hour. You walked the boat and you didn't say anything and then you went straight to the air rack." I rolled my head to look at him. "Why the rack first?"
He was quiet a second.
"Because that's the part that kills people," he said.
"Not the hull?"
"The hull gives you warning. Hulls complain for months. Nobody's ever drowned by surprise because of a hull." He kept looking up. "Air's the only thing on a boat that goes from fine to fatal without a middle."
"That's grim."
"You asked."
"No, I like it. It's the most useful thing anybody's said to me in a year, and you said it about o-rings."
"They were 2011."
"They were fine."
"Nerissa."
"They were fine and they're also changed now, so we'll never know, and I'm going to claim that as a win in perpetuity."
"They bought a fuel dock," I said, after a while.
"Yeah."
"Who buys a fuel dock."
"People who are going to lose in court," Torren said, "and know it."
I turned my head. He was on his back too, hands folded on his chest, taking up a truly unreasonable amount of foredeck.
"You think we win?"
"I think we've got a bell with the wrong name on it," he said, "a hole in their map they don't know about, and a witness."
"That's not what I asked."
He was quiet a second.
"I think I'm going back down tomorrow," he said. "And I think that's the only part of this I actually control."
Which was, I would later realize, the most words he'd said in a row since Arizona.