Chapter 5 #2
He showed him where the wind was, made him feel for it on his face and his neck until Hollis could find it without the telltales.
He showed him how you couldn't just point where you wanted to go, how the wind wouldn't let you sail straight into it, how getting to weather meant a long series of turns, a zigzag, giving up ground to gain it, tacking back and forth across the eye of the thing.
"Feels like cheating," Hollis said, watching the wake stitch its way out behind them. "Or losing. You want to go there, and you sail everywhere but there."
"That's the whole trick of it." Roan trimmed the sheet a hand's width and the Ada stood up and footed faster.
"You can't go straight at the thing you're after.
Not into the wind. You try it, you just sit there luffing and going nowhere, and every beginner who does it is sure he's doing something wrong.
You've got to take it on the slant. Give up the straight line for a while.
It's slower and it's sideways and it's the only way anybody ever made it to weather in the history of the world.
" He said it lightly, the way he said the things that weren't light at all.
"Boat taught me that. Took me years to believe her. "
Hollis watched him while he said it. Roan at the tiller was a different creature than Roan in the yard — the wariness gone clean out of him, the constant quarter-second pricing of the exits simply absent, because out here the exits and the destination lay the same direction and a man could stop counting them.
He looked, Hollis thought, like what he probably was under all the rest of it: not a drifter at all, but a man who'd found the one place where running looked like belonging and mistaken the one for the other.
He looked happy. It was almost more than Hollis could stand to watch, knowing what he knew — which was that this same happy would carry the man right back out the harbor mouth the day the Petrel floated. And then he showed him the turn itself.
"When you're ready, you call it," Roan said.
He'd moved back, given Hollis the tiller, and he was close behind him now, one hand on the coaming by Hollis's hip, near enough that Hollis could feel the heat coming off him over the cold of the wind.
"You say 'ready about,' so I know to handle the sheets.
Then you put the helm down — toward the sail — and you bring her bow up through the wind.
There's a moment in the middle where she's pointed dead into it and everything goes quiet.
Sails empty out. She loses her drive. Feels like the whole thing's about to stop, or stall, or go backward.
" His voice had dropped, close to Hollis's ear, and Hollis had stopped, entirely, breathing normally.
"That's the part everybody's scared of. That still, empty second where you've left the old tack and you haven't got the new one yet and it feels like you've made a terrible mistake. "
"And then?"
"And then you keep the turn on. You don't panic and shove her back.
You trust it. And she comes through, and the sails fill on the other side, and she heels the new way and takes off, and you're sailing again — just going somewhere you couldn't get to before.
" Roan's hand came over Hollis's on the tiller, not taking it, just there, warm and rope-scarred over Hollis's own scarred and bigger one. "Go on. Call it."
"Ready about," Hollis said. His voice came out wrong.
"Ready," Roan said, against his ear.
"Hard —" Hollis put the helm down, and the Ada swung her bow up toward the wind, and the world tilted and then leveled, and they came up into the eye of it, and everything went quiet.
It was exactly as Roan had said. The sails stopped their pull and hung empty and luffing, snapping soft, and the boat lost her heel and sat upright and nearly still, head to wind, the water going flat and hushed alongside, the whole driving argument of her suspended — that hanging, weightless, terrifying second where they'd left the one course and not yet found the other, where it felt like everything had stopped and might not start again.
And in it, in that quiet, Hollis turned his head, because Roan was right there, closer than the tiller made him be, his pale eyes bright and fixed on Hollis and not, for once, not for one second, on the exits — and Hollis, who had never in his life reached first for a single thing he wanted, who had watched every good thing sail away from a dock he refused to leave, closed the last of the distance while the boat hung in the wind, and kissed him.
Roan went still. Then he made a sound low in his throat, and his hand tightened over Hollis's on the tiller, and he kissed him back like a man who'd been holding his breath since Merritt Point — hard, and then not hard, then careful, then like it cost him something and he was going to spend it anyway.
He tasted like salt and coffee and the cold clean wind.
Hollis got his free hand into the front of Roan's jacket and held on, and for the length of that suspended, head-to-wind second, the whole of the wanting Hollis had spent twenty years refusing came up through him and out and landed, for once, on somebody who was kissing him back.
It was not like being needed. That was the thing that went through him, even then, even with his eyes shut and the wind loud in his ears — that this was the other thing, the thing Dee had said he'd gone twenty years without, the thing he'd quietly stopped believing was a real category of experience available to a man like him.
Roan Mercer needed nothing from him. Not the railway, not a haul, not a favor, not one single thing Hollis's hands could fix or make or hold up.
He would be gone before the leaves, and he owed Hollis less than anybody in the whole harbor, and he was kissing Hollis anyway — kissing him like it mattered, like Hollis himself was the thing worth having and not just the thing that held the thing worth having up.
Some plank in him that had been fastened shut for twenty years let go of every fastening at once, all down its length, quiet, the way they do.
The Ada, untended, kept her turn. Trusted it, the way Roan had said she would.
Her bow came the rest of the way through the wind on its own, and the sails caught aback and then filled with a soft thump on the new side, and she heeled the other way and gathered herself and took off, sailing again, going somewhere she couldn't have reached before — and the two of them came apart just enough to grab for the tiller and the sheet, laughing, breathless, the boat surging under them on the new tack, and Hollis Cyr, forty-six years old, kissed for the first time in a decade by a man who wanted him, understood that he had just come about, and that there was no putting the helm back.
***
For about ninety seconds, sailing fast on the new tack with Hollis's mouth still warm on his and Hollis's laugh still in his ears, Roan was purely, uncomplicatedly happy, and it was the happiness that gave him away to himself.