Chapter 7
The Wrong Side
The delivery offer came in on the co-op pay phone at ten in the morning, which Roan would think, later, was the harbor's idea of a joke — the same phone, the same wall, thirty feet from where Hollis had almost kissed him on the night of the town meeting.
It was Petras, a broker Roan had moved boats for out of half the yards on the eastern seaboard, and it was a good one, the kind of job that came along maybe twice a season: a big Oyster ketch that needed to go from Camden to Fort Lauderdale before the weather shut the coast down, six weeks of work, real money, a fat bonus if he beat the first hard freeze.
Leave inside the week or lose the window.
You still up there in — where was it, Petras said, some little nothing harbor?
You've been off the board a month, Mercer, I was starting to think you drowned. This one's got your name on it. You in?
Roan stood with the receiver against his ear and looked up the hill at the yard, where the Petrel was standing on her cradle at the top of the ways with her new garboard faired and painted and her topsides gleaming and every last thing on the list done, because they'd finished her two days ago.
Finished her. The work-off was square. Hollis had run his thumb down the last seam and said "she'll float Thursday" in a voice that had something in the bottom of it neither of them touched, and that had been that.
That was two mornings ago, and something had been wrong in the yard ever since, a wrongness neither of them named — a courtesy gone brittle where there'd been ease.
The finishing of the boat had put a date on the leaving, and the date sat in the middle of everything they did like a hull blocking the ways.
Hollis had gone quiet in a different key.
And Roan had caught him more than once with his palm flat on the Petrel's topsides, that old habit of letting the wood know where he stood — except now it looked less like a greeting than like a goodbye a man was rehearsing where nobody could see him do it.
Roan was free. That was the deal. He'd sailed in owing a bill and he'd worked it off and now he owned nothing but a sound boat and the open water, exactly the way he'd always liked it, exactly the way that had kept him alive.
Two days finished, and he still hadn't stripped his gear off her.
That was the tell he wasn't looking at. A delivery skipper strips a boat the hour the job's done — sails flaked, lines coiled, ready for the next water — and Roan had left his half-unpacked in the cabin like a man who hadn't actually decided the thing he'd told everybody was decided.
He'd caught Hollis noticing it once, the un-stowed gear, and neither of them had said a word, because there was a whole conversation folded up inside it that neither of them could afford to open.
And now here was Petras on the line with the perfect reason never to open it at all.
"Yeah," Roan heard himself say. "Yeah, I'm in. Give me till the weekend."
The word was out of his mouth before the better part of him could get to the phone.
That was the thing about the leaving reflex — it answered faster than the rest of a man, had your mouth saying yes to the exit before your heart had finished lodging its objection, and by the time the objection arrived the yes was already on the wire and you could tell yourself it was decided, out of your hands, Petras counting on you now.
Roan had built a whole life on letting the reflex answer first. It had never once steered him wrong, which was to say it had never once steered him toward anything he was afraid to lose.
He hung up, and he did not feel like a man who'd just been handed the best job of his season.
He felt like a man who'd heard the trap spring and only then looked down to see his own foot in it.
Because the thing was — the thing he'd been not-looking-at for three days, the way he'd spent a month not-looking at the Petrel's garboard — he still hadn't told Hollis about Corliss.
Three days. Three days of the letter on that kitchen table and the name in his mouth and Hollis reaching for him in the dark, and every night Roan had lain there with the true thing and every morning he'd gotten up and made the coffee and not said it, because saying it meant watching Hollis's face do the math, and Roan was better at leaving than at being watched.
He'd told himself he'd find the moment. There is no moment.
That was the thing about the true ugly thing.
It doesn't have a moment. You make one or you run out the clock, and Roan Mercer had run out more clocks than any man alive.
He was still standing at the phone when the two cars came down the co-op road that didn't belong to anybody in Merritt Harbor — a black SUV and a low silver thing that cost more than the co-op cleared in a year — and pulled up at the head of the yard, and Sutter got out of the first one in his quarter-zip, and out of the silver car, unfolding tall and easy in a barn coat that had never been near a barn, came a man Roan knew.
Eighteen months fell away in a single breath — the cockpit of Fair Wind off Pemaquid, the gin sweating in the man's hand, that easy unhurried rich voice going on about vision and wasted frontage while Roan trimmed the sheet and said nothing and took the check.
Corliss. Of course Corliss had come to look at what he was buying.
Men like Corliss always came to look, eventually, to walk the ground with their hands in their pockets and price it with their eyes, and Roan had known this was possible — had known it for three days, had lain in Hollis's bed knowing it — and had done exactly nothing, because doing nothing was what Roan did with a true fact he couldn't sail away from.
No, Roan thought. Not here. Not today. Not with him thirty feet away.
"Well, I'll be damned," said G. Alan Corliss, pulling off his sunglasses, and his whole handsome weathered face opened into the warm, delighted, entirely genuine smile of a rich man seeing a favorite piece of help in an unexpected place.
"Roan Mercer. What in God's name are you doing up here in the weeds?
" He came across the gravel with his hand out, loud enough for the yard, loud enough for the fleet, loud enough for Gil and two of his crew and a couple of the fall-haul hands who'd all stopped what they were doing to watch the money arrive.
"Last I had you, you were bringing Fair Wind up from Newport and telling me she'd never point worth a damn.
You still on the delivery circuit, or —" and here it came, the thing, the innocent friendly killing thing, "—don't tell me Tern Point already hired the best hands in the business out from under me. Sutter, is this our guy?"
And Roan watched, from thirty feet away, Hollis Cyr straighten up in the door of his own shed with a caulking iron in his hand, and go still.
***
Hollis had been fitting a plank on the Cormier girl's boat when the cars came, and he came to the shed door with the caulking iron still in his fist to see who'd driven up, and so he was standing right there, in the plain light of a Thursday morning, when he learned it.
He learned it the way you learn a plank's rotten — all at once, your tool going through what looked sound, the give where you expected resistance.
Roan Mercer. Bringing Fair Wind up from Newport.
Don't tell me Tern Point already hired the best hands in the business.
Hollis stood in the doorway and watched the rich man in the barn coat shake Roan's hand, watched Roan not take it back fast enough, watched the whole shape of the last three weeks reorganize itself around a fact that had been there the entire time, sitting under everything the way rot sits under paint.
He knew the buyer's man. He'd known him the whole time.
Roan had delivered that boat, sat in that cockpit, worked for that money — and he had stood up in the town hall and gutted Sutter's pitch, and he had let Hollis take him up the hill, and he had lain in Hollis's bed with his head on Hollis's chest and never said one word.
Hollis did not feel it come up the way he'd have expected — hot, or fast. It came up slow and cold and total, the way water comes up in a bilge, patient and certain, and at the bottom of it was the thing that had lived at the bottom of Hollis Cyr his whole life, so familiar it was almost a comfort: of course.
Of course. He'd let himself reach, one time, at forty-six, for a thing he wanted out loud — he'd said please into the dark of his own bedroom, he'd opened his eyes and let himself be looked at — and the thing he'd reached for turned out to belong, root and branch, to the man come to take his yard and his railway and his whole life apart for parking.
Of course it did. That was the arithmetic of being Hollis.
You didn't get the thing. And when you forgot yourself and reached for it anyway, it turned into the exact tool of your undoing, because the world was efficient like that.