Chapter 1 #2
Roan saw him before anyone said the name — a big man crossing the co-op dock against the grain of the crowd, not hurrying, and the crowd opening for him the way water opens for a hull, everyone stepping aside without appearing to decide to.
He was built like something you'd use to haul a boat out.
Six-two and thick through the chest and shoulders, gone a little soft over what was clearly still real strength, the way working men went in their forties.
Rust-and-gray hair cut close and cut badly, like he'd done it himself and given a job that didn't matter exactly the care it deserved.
A short beard grayer than the hair, and a smudge of something pale worked into it near the jaw that Roan would later learn was the fine dust of sanded paint and would come, later still, to associate with the man the way you associate a smell with a house.
He came down onto the town float and it took his weight without a word of complaint, which Roan noticed, because Roan noticed floats.
He stopped at the Petrel's stern. He didn't look at Roan.
He looked at the boat.
That was the first thing — that a man would come down to a stranger in trouble and give the stranger nothing, not a nod, not a word, and give the whole of himself to the hull.
His eyes went along the waterline and down under the counter and back forward, slow, reading her, and his hands hung at his sides while he did it, and Roan clocked the hands because there was no not clocking them.
They were enormous. Dark to the knuckle with something that had stopped being dirt years ago and become part of the skin.
Scarred across the backs. Half a fingertip gone off the left one, old, healed down to a smooth blunt end that his eye kept snagging on.
The hands of a man who put them inside things for a living and had paid the going rate.
"Where's she taking it," Hollis said. Not quite a question. He'd already decided most of it.
"Garboard, port side, aft of the mast step. Running maybe two feet." Roan set the coffee down on the side deck. "Started as a weep back in the spring. Got opinionated this week."
Hollis crouched at the lip of the float, and for a full boat-length of silence he only looked, and above them the noise of the town went on like weather, and the pump ran, and Roan waited for the verdict the way you wait for weather you can already smell coming.
"You've been running her wet a while," Hollis said.
"Define a while."
"A season." Flat. No accusation anywhere in it, which was worse than accusation, because you could argue with a man who was scolding you.
He reached down and laid one of those ruined hands against the planking below the rubrail, just laid it there, the way you'd put a hand on a horse so it knew where you were standing.
"She's carvel. Old growth. Fastened in bronze.
Nobody builds like this anymore, hasn't in fifty years — you can't buy this, you can only keep it.
" He took the hand back. "Somebody did right by her once.
Long time ago. And then quit." He said quit like it was the only real sin he knew.
"You can't sail out of it. You know that, or you wouldn't be tied to my float. "
"I'm tied to your float because your harbormaster's got a nice radio voice."
Hollis looked at him then. First time. His eyes were a deep steady brown and they gave up precisely nothing — not cold, just patient, the patience of a man who'd worked out long ago that if you waited without flinching, people filled the silence themselves and generally told you the truth to do it.
Roan had a whole repertoire for eyes like that, a locker full of easy portable lines he could deploy and then sail away from, and he reached for the top of it out of nothing but reflex.
"What's the number," he said, before Hollis could make him say anything real. "Round figures. I'm a round-figures kind of client."
"Haul her. Pull the sole boards and the ballast, get her light, open her up and see what the frames look like where they've been sitting in that water.
Replace the garboard, likely the broadstrake above it.
Re-fasten what's let go. Re-caulk the seams either side.
Fair it, paint it." Hollis recited it the way other men said the alphabet, no drama in it, a list he'd run a thousand times.
"That's not a weekend. That's the back half of the summer.
That's more than you've got on you, or you'd have done it in April instead of pumping her across three counties. "
There it was.
Roan kept his face where he kept it — pleasant, faintly amused, entirely absent — and somewhere down under the sole boards of him a thing turned over slow that he had been keeping the boards down on for a month, maybe for seven years.
The back half of the summer. He had never in his adult life spent the back half of a summer anywhere.
That was the whole architecture of the thing, the load-bearing wall of it.
You moved before the water got warm and you moved before it got cold, and you were never in one harbor long enough for it to learn your name or for you to learn the particular way its light came down the hill at six in the evening, because the way a place's light came down at six in the evening was exactly the sort of thing that could reach into a man and take him apart at the seams.
"I've got a delivery," he said. "Camden. Day after tomorrow."
"Then you've got a problem in Camden, day after tomorrow.
" Hollis stood. It was a whole event, the standing, unhurried, every joint reporting in.
"Because that boat goes back in the water this week and she goes down in it next week, in deeper water, somewhere I can't see her do it.
And I don't haul a man's boat so he can go drown it out of my sight.
So." He wiped his palms down his thighs, a gesture that transferred the dirt without removing any.
"You want her hauled, I'll haul her. But you'll haul out with her.
You don't get to leave her on my ways and mail me a check from Newport. "
"Nobody asked you to feel responsible for either of us."
"Nobody ever has to," Hollis said, and it wasn't self-pity — it landed too plainly for that, a fact about himself he'd stopped turning over a long time ago and had simply learned to carry, the way he carried everything.
He looked back at the boat one more time, at the tired gilded bird on her bow.
"Petrel," he said. "Storm bird. Spends its whole life out there.
" He tipped his head at the harbor mouth, the open gray water past the point.
"Only comes ashore to nest. Rather die at sea than land, most of them. "
"That a diagnosis?"
"Observation." And there it was, the ghost of something in the corner of the beard, not a smile so much as the exact place a smile would stand if the man ever let one out the door.
"You've wanted to be gone since before you tied up.
I can see it on you like salt on a jacket.
But she's done, and you know she's done, and you came around my point anyway.
" A slow shrug, tectonic. "Boat's smarter than her skipper. Happens more than you'd think."
Roan opened his mouth to hand him something light and portable, the kind of line he could step off of onto the next tide — and found, and this was the part that would keep him up that night if he let it get any traction, that the line was not there.
He, who always had the line, stood on a stranger's float in a town in the middle of blessing itself, with three inches of the Gulf of Maine in his bilge and a dead man's boat under his feet, and had nothing at all to say.
Behind him, quietly, Dee said to Verne, "Told you."
"So haul her," Roan said.
Hollis nodded once, like it had never for a second been in question. "Slack water's in about an hour. She'll float over the cradle. Where you sleeping tonight?"
"Aboard."
"She'll be twelve feet in the air by dark."