Fairing

Arlen Coombs has hauled lobster traps off the east side of Little Spruce Island for thirty-eight years and has never once been afraid of the water, so it is a bad sign that he stands in Neil Prouty’s dooryard for six minutes with the truck engine off and does not knock.

It is the first hard freeze of the year. The stars are thick as spilled salt over the spruce, and the cold comes up through his boots. Fog would be easier. Fog he knows what to do with. On the seat beside him is a pie his sister left on his porch, and he has not been able to eat a bite of it. The kitchen light is on in the old keeper’s cottage, a yellow square in the dark, and through it he can see Neil moving about with a pencil behind his ear.

On the seventh minute the kitchen door opens.

“Arlen,” Neil says. “You’re letting the heat out of the dooryard.”

“I’m thinking.”

“I can see that. Is it going to take much longer? I’ve got cribbage set up and a stove that’s going to burn to coals.”

Arlen gets out of the truck. He takes the pie. He feels as if he is carrying an anchor up a ladder.

---

Neil Prouty is fifty-seven, and his forearms have pushed against oak for forty years. He came to the island twenty years ago from away, which on Little Spruce means Portland, and has built boats in the barn ever since. He built Arlen’s hull eleven years back from lines he drew on the kitchen table in a week, and wouldn’t take a dime above the cost of the wood. Every Wednesday since, the two of them have played cribbage across the same scarred table, in front of the same woodstove, and talked about nothing.

“Pie,” Arlen says, and puts it down.

“Cherry. Your sister’s?” Neil lifts the foil. “She’s a saint. Sit.” He fills the kettle and leans on the counter, all barrel of him, with his arms folded. He doesn’t ask. He has never, in eleven years, asked Arlen a question that Arlen wasn’t ready for, and it has been the most restful thing about him. “You look like a man who’s going to sign something.”

Arlen sits. He lays his big red hands on the table and looks at them, scarred across the knuckles by line and bait knives. He opens his mouth and the thing that’s been in it for forty years refuses to come out.

“Ayuh,” he says, which is not a word he meant to say. “I’ve got something. It’s stupid.”

“Then it’ll be short.”

“It isn’t.”

“Then I’ll sit.” Neil sits down across from him and the chair creaks under him. “I’m in no hurry.”

The kettle starts to tick. Arlen says to the table, so low that Neil has to lean forward to hear it, “I’ve never said it out loud. Not once. I’m fifty-five and I have never said it to a living person, and I thought I’d try it on you. If I can.”

Neil doesn’t move. His eyes are very steady. They are grey and a little bloodshot with sawdust, and there is nothing in them but attention.

“Try it,” he says.

“I’m a —” It sticks. Arlen’s jaw works. The stove pops. He tries again, and it comes out hoarse and enormous in the small kitchen. “I’m gay. I’m gay, Neil.”

It sits in the room.

“There,” Neil says quietly. “That’s out. How was it?”

“Wicked,” Arlen says, and starts to laugh, a helpless thing that shakes his shoulders. “It was like pulling a trap in a following sea. I thought I’d drown.”

“You didn’t.”

“I didn’t.” He wipes his face with his palm. “There’s more.”

“I imagine there is.”

“I picked you because you’re the only man on this island who’ll be standing there tomorrow morning and not make it a thing.” Arlen looks up. His eyes are wet and he doesn’t hide it. “And because I’ve wanted you for eleven years. Since the hull. Since you stood on that trailer in the rain with a caulking mallet in your hand and said she was fair and true. I know that’s a hell of a line to give a man in his own kitchen table with a pie.”

“It is,” Neil says, with his mouth shaking. “I’ve been waiting politely.”

“You knew?”

“Arlen. I plane a board for a living. I can tell when something’s been sanded against the grain.” He reaches across the table and puts his hand over Arlen’s, a short thick hand, warm and dry. “I’ve been wanting you for eleven years. I never said, because you looked at me like I might bite. And because I thought you had your own reasons for a closed door, and I wasn’t going to kick it in. I’ve been out so long I’d forgotten it’s something a man has to work up to.” Neil’s thumb moves over his knuckles. “Arlen, I’m going to ask what I want to know, and you can tell me to shut up. What do you want to do about it?”

His voice is perfectly gentle. The kettle starts to scream, and neither of them gets up.

---

“I want to take you to bed,” Arlen says. “That’s the whole of it. That’s where I got to.”

“All right.”

“I don’t know how. I mean I know how. I’ve thought about it, God knows. I mean I don’t know anything. I was with a man in Portland for two nights in 2003 and nobody ever knew his last name, and I haven’t any sense of what’s done or how it’s said.” His voice is cracking again. “I’ve thought about being inside you. For a long while. I’d like that, if you’d have it. I don’t know if you’d want that, or if you’d rather —”

“Arlen.” Neil takes the kettle off the stove, finally, and turns it down. “I’d like that very much.”

“You would?”

“I would.” He puts a hand to his own chest. “I’ve wanted it since about a week into the hull. You’re a patient man and you don’t hurry a job. I think you’d be a wonderful lover.”

“I’ll be terrible.”

“You’ll be new. I like new.” Neil’s eyes crinkle. “We can go slow. And we need a word, something either of us says without thinking if we need to stop. Not ‘stop.’ People say that in the middle of other things.”

“Slack.”

“Slack?”

“If a line’s got too much load. You ease off, you give it slack.” Arlen scratches his jaw. “It’s what you say on a boat.”

“Slack,” Neil says, and says it again, as if trying a new lock. “Slack. Perfect. If either of us says it, everything stops, right there. No explaining and no hard feelings, and then we decide whether to go on. Does that suit?”

“That suits.”

“Now.” Neil comes round the table. “I think the right next thing is that you wash your hands.”

“My hands.”

“You smell like herring, Arlen. I like it. I’ve liked it for eleven years. But I would like it to be behind a door.”

Arlen looks down at himself, and then he laughs so hard that he has to put his forehead on the table.

---

Arlen scrubs at the kitchen sink with the Lava soap until his knuckles sting, and Neil hands him a towel and turns the lamp down low. By the time Arlen has dried his hands, the stove has been fed and Neil has dragged the braided rug out and laid it flat in front of the stove door, where the iron glows orange at the seams, with the quilt from the bed folded on the settle and a tube of water-based jelly beside it. He stands on the rug in his socks.

“You can have the bed,” Neil says. “It’s a double. It’s quiet and it has a quilt. But the rug is warmer, and I thought you might like a fire.”

“The rug.”

“The rug.” He steps forward, rests his palm on Arlen’s chest, and kisses him.

Arlen has imagined this so many times, in the pilothouse on long hauls with the engine thumping, and in every version he always knew where to put his hands. Now he doesn’t. He stands there like an oak being kissed. The beard, cut straight along the jaw, is softer than he thought, and Neil’s mouth is warm and tastes faintly of tea, and a sound escapes him that he has never made before.

“Easy,” Neil whispers against his lips. “I’ve got you.”

“I don’t —”

“Put your hands on me. Wherever you like.”

He does. He puts his hands on Neil’s back, the broad warm slope of it through the flannel, and slides them down, and Neil sighs. The flannel comes off. Under it is a thick white-haired chest and a belly curved like a hull, and Arlen puts his palm on it and feels it rise and fall. His own breathing is loud. He fumbles his shirt buttons open with thick fingers and drops the shirt, and Neil runs his hands up through the red-grey hair across his chest, thumbs finding his nipples, and Arlen jerks.

“Good?”

“Good. God, that’s good.”

“What do you want to do next?”

“Your —” He swallows. “I want to see all of you.”

“Then look.”

Neil unbuckles and steps out of his trousers and what is under them, and stands in the orange light, broad and heavy, his thick cock rising from white hair, watching Arlen with such open patience that Arlen has to look at the floor for a second.

“Your turn,” says Neil.

When he opens them, he does the rest himself: boots, socks, trousers, long underwear. He stands there at fifty-five, naked in a kitchen with his heart going like an outboard, big and hairy, red going white, his cock already hard and flushed to the tip. He expects to feel foolish. What he feels, when Neil looks at him, is huge.

“Arlen Coombs,” Neil says softly. “Eleven years I’ve been sitting across a cribbage board from that. I’ve been wasting Wednesdays.”

“Don’t.”

“I’m not teasing. Come here.”

They go down together onto the rug. It’s thick and warm and smells of wool and wood smoke. Neil lies on his back and draws Arlen over him, and the sensation of that heavy bare warmth, belly against belly, makes Arlen groan. Neil drags a kiss down the red-grey hair of his chest. “Salt,” he says into it. “I’ve wondered about that for eleven years.”

They rock together, and Neil gets a hand between them and closes it round both their cocks. Arlen’s whole body jumps.

“Oh, Christ.”

“Easy. You’ll want some left.”

“I’ll want all of it.”

Neil laughs into his mouth and lets go. “Slow,” he says, breathless. “Let me show you. Take your time.”

---

He is shown. Neil guides his hand to the tube on the floor, shows him how much, and tells him where to start. Arlen kneels between his legs, sweating in the heat of the stove, and does exactly as he’s told. Neil’s face goes loose and open. He breathes out through his mouth, and his fingers close around Arlen’s wrist to steady it.

“That’s it. Slow. You’re doing it right.”

“Am I hurting you?”

“No. Go on. Curl it, a little.” A long pause. “There.”

The noise he makes goes straight through Arlen like current down a line. He does it again, and Neil’s back arches off the rug, and his hands knot in the braids.

“Right there?”

“Right there. Stay on it.” Neil, who has not raised his voice once in eleven years of cribbage, says a word Arlen has only heard from men with a finger caught in the hauler. “Christ, Arlen. Don’t take it away. Give me another.”

“You’re burning up in there.”

“That’s your doing.”

“It’s hot in there, and it feels like —” He can’t find it. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

“You’re doing wonderfully.” Neil’s voice is rough and loving. “A second one now. You’ll feel me open.”

He feels him open. He feels the hard hot muscle grip him and give, and the moan that comes out of Neil is something he will be hearing for a week. His own cock jumps, wet at the tip. He wants to say something clever. What he says, hoarsely, is, “Neil. Can I? I want to be inside you.”

“Yes,” Neil says. “God, yes. Come in.”

“How?”

“Like this.” Neil reaches for him, hauls the nearest cushion off the settle and puts it under his own hips, draws his knees up and back. His calves slide over Arlen’s shoulders, warm and heavy, and he reaches down, slicks Arlen with a palmful of jelly, and guides him in his fist. “Gently. Hold it just there. Now lean in, and don’t push, just lean.”

Arlen leans.

The head of him meets that hot ring and then, quite slowly, past it, and the feeling is so total, so far beyond any picture in the pilothouse, that his arms nearly give out. Neil’s face tightens, and Arlen stops dead. “Slack?” he gasps. “Say it and I stop.”

“No,” Neil breathes. “No, keep going. I only need a second.” He draws a long breath. “All right. All right, go on.”

Arlen goes on. It takes a while, the long slow slide, the heat closing round him, and when his hips come to rest against Neil he makes a noise like someone coming up from under the ice.

“There,” he manages. “That’s as far as I go.”

“I can feel it,” Neil says, with his eyes closed. “God, you fill the whole of me. Arlen. Don’t move yet.”

“I don’t know what to do now.”

“Whatever feels right. You’ll know.”

He moves. First it is a little rock, forward and back, hardly at all. Then more. Neil’s hands flex on the rug. He has Arlen’s wrists, and then he has his hips, guiding the rhythm until Arlen learns it, and after that Arlen doesn’t need telling. He finds the pace the way he finds the swell on a morning haul, the long deep lift and the drop, and Neil lets out a groan with every stroke.

“Yes. Like that. Don’t stop. You’re a natural, Arlen —”

“Faster?”

“Faster. Fuck, yes, right there.”

“Say what it’s like.”

“Like being filled up to the brim.” Neil’s voice cracks. “Like you’re mine, and I’m yours, and the whole island can go to hell. Come on, don’t spare it. I’m built like a barn.”

“You’re built like a hull.”

“I’m built to take it. Deeper. Let me feel the whole weight of you.”

“Neil. You feel like —”

“Say it.”

“Like I’ve been hauling empty for thirty-eight years.”

“Then fill the hold. All of it.”

“Put your back into it, Arlen. I’ve watched you haul traps for years, I know what you’ve got. Fuck me the way you’ve longed to since the hull.”

Arlen gives it to him. The stove ticks, the rug slides under them, and the smack of belly on thigh and the groans of two big men fill the little kitchen. He holds Neil’s thighs in both hands, Neil’s calves heavy across his shoulders, and drives in long and steady, and something he has carried in his chest for forty years feels finally lifted off him.

“Neil. I’m close. You first.”

“I’m there.” Neil’s whole body tightens. His fingers claw at the rug. “I’m — Arlen, don’t change a thing, don’t change a thing, I’m right —”

“Neil.”

“Come in me. Every drop, Arlen. Come on.”

Neil comes, shouting at the rafters, without a hand on himself, across his own belly and chest, clenching round Arlen in great slow waves. The grip pulls Arlen over after him, and it is a flood, far past anything he imagined. He says Neil’s name and then nothing at all. He spills into Neil in thick hot pulses and stays there, held, his whole body shaking.

---

They lie a long time on the rug, with the quilt dragged down off the settle and the stove burning red.

“Well,” Neil says eventually, “that was a fair first haul.”

Arlen laughs. His chest is still going. He is lying on his back on a braided rug in a boatbuilder’s kitchen, with his arm under Neil’s shoulders and the quilt up to his chin, looking at the rafters, and he cannot stop smiling at the rafters.

“Does it get easier to say?” he asks.

“No. It gets quicker.” Neil turns his face against his arm. “You say it enough, it stops being an event. It becomes a fact, like the tide table. Try it again.”

“Now?”

“Humor me.”

Arlen looks at the rafters. He takes a breath.

“I’m gay.”

“Again.”

“I’m gay, Neil.”

“Again. Louder.”

“I’m gay.” He is grinning now, at the dark beams, at the ticking stove, at the ridiculous size of the word. “I’m a gay lobsterman. I’m fifty-five years old and I’m lying on a rug with a boatbuilder.”

“Louder.”

“I’M GAY.”

Across the road a dog starts barking, wild and offended, at the whole night. Neil buries his face in the quilt and wheezes. Arlen throws back his head and roars with laughter, and the dog barks again, and now, for the first time ever, he does not wonder who might hear.