Shuford blinked. "Yes sir."
"He was all right," Ozro said. "He paid his deckhands. Not everybody did." He pushed himself up off the dock box. "Claudine. I believe we've got lines to take in."
They took Clementine out at three-ten in the afternoon, forty minutes before the high tide that never really came, because the water just kept rising past it.
Tuan came. Nobody asked him to. He walked back to the fuel dock and told the Viking's captain, who had finally gotten clear, that the pumps were closed, and he locked the pump-out station and the fuel shed and hung the key on the hook inside the office, where it would be found, and then he came back down C dock with a backpack and a pair of sea boots and a look on his face like a man who has just stepped off a ledge and decided he might as well enjoy the air. He said, "I'll take the bow lines," and Claudine said, "You understand Coastwise is going to fire you," and he said, "Yes ma'am. I think I got fired around one-fifteen. I just hadn't been told," and went forward.
Ozro sat in the helm seat at the lower station, because the flybridge ladder was beyond him now, and Claudine stood beside him with one hand on the back of the chair. He started the engines, port first, then starboard. They caught and settled into their low uneven Detroit rumble, the boat shivering under them. He watched the gauges. The port temperature needle climbed and stopped where it belonged.
"Strainer," he said.
"Strainer," she agreed.
She went aft and took in the stern lines and the last of the spring lines, while Tuan cleared the bow, and the wind was pushing Clementine hard against the windward pilings so that she had to time the last line between gusts, waiting, waiting, then off the cleat and around and aboard in one motion, the line burning through her good hand. The bruised arm she held against her side. She stepped up onto the swim platform as the stern came away from the dock and climbed the transom and stood on the aft deck and looked back.
Slot 1 was empty. She had not seen it empty in three weeks, and before that, not since the year her grandfather died, when they had sold the Ozella P. to a man in Bayou La Batre who wanted her for parts. Just the tall greenheart pilings, black with creosote and ringed with barnacles and the high-water marks of fifty years of storms, and the brass plate, and the river pushing in between them, brown and white and climbing.
Ozro backed her out with the engines, not the wheel, the way tug captains do, a little port astern, a little starboard ahead, the fifty-three-foot hull pivoting in the fairway like a dancer in a doorway, the patrol boat backing off to give him room. When the bow was pointed at the river he put both engines ahead slow and let go of the throttles and put his hand on the wheel, and they went out of the C dock fairway past the fuel dock and the pump-out station and the long empty face of the dock house with its shutters, and out into Dog River, and turned north, toward the bridge.
The river was a different animal from the one she knew. It was running backward, the surge pushing up from the bay, a brown chop with whitecaps tearing off the tops, and Clementine took it on her starboard bow and put her shoulder down and shook it off with a sound like a slammed door. Behind them, fifty yards off their stern, the patrol boat rode with its blue light turning, not lit for emergency, just there.