SLOT 1. Z. PETTAWAY. DEEDED.
Her grandfather had never once in his life called a boat slip a slip. He called it a slot, because that was what the fish house men had called it when he was a boy, when there was no marina and no yacht basin and no Declaration of Condominium, just a tin-roofed fish house on pilings at the mouth of a bend in Dog River where Black oystermen and shrimpers sold to a white buyer named Sumrall at whatever price Sumrall felt like paying that morning. Each boat had a slot along the fish house dock. You paid Sumrall for it by the season, and if you crossed Sumrall you lost it. In 1958 Zebedee Pettaway bought his slot outright, along with the piece of riverbank behind it where he mended nets and tarred lines, from Sumrall's widow, who needed the money and did not much care who had it. It had cost four hundred dollars. He had kept the bill of sale, handwritten on Sumrall Seafood letterhead, in a cigar box until he died.
When the fish house came down and the developers came in and the riverbank turned into a parking lot and the oystermen turned into old men, every other slot on that dock had been sold, or leased, or lost. Forty-one of them were deeded, owned outright by members of the Halyard Point Marina Association. And one of them, at the shore end of C dock, the old fixed pier with the tall greenheart pilings, was still a slot.
Claudine finished cutting the bimini free, folded it like a flag, and handed it down through the hatch into Ozro's waiting hands. He took it and set it on the settee without looking, because his eyes were on the engine gauges.
"Port's running warm," he said.
"How warm?"
"Warm enough I'm going to have to look at the raw water strainer before we go anywhere."
"You're not going down in that engine room."
"Then who is? You?"
"Yes, me."
"You don't know a strainer from a sneeze."
"I know it's the bronze bowl with the glass top on the left side of the port engine and you close the seacock before you open it or you'll sink us at the dock. You told me Tuesday. You told me Wednesday. You drew me a picture on a paper towel Thursday."