They went under the Dauphin Island Parkway bridge at three thirty-one. Claudine looked up at the gray concrete going over them, gulls sheltering on the beams, and the wind came funneling under the span and set them down toward the east bank just as Shuford had said it would, and Ozro, without seeming to do anything at all, gave the starboard engine a touch more and held her off.
"How'd he know that?" Tuan said, coming in out of the rain, dripping. "The sergeant. About the bridge."
"His daddy ran a shrimp boat," Ozro said. "You learn the river from the man who teaches you. Sometimes that's the only good thing he gives you."
Past the bridge the river narrowed and the banks rose and the wind dropped a little in the lee of the trees. At the mouth of Halls Mill Creek there was a green daymarker with a pelican on it, as there had been since Claudine was a girl, and Ozro turned in past it, slow, and the creek closed around them like a hand. Live oaks hung over the water on both sides, gray with Spanish moss that streamed sideways in the wind. The water went from brown to black. It was so quiet, suddenly, out of the worst of the wind, that she could hear the Detroits' exhaust bubbling at the waterline.
"Third bend past the Boy Scout landing," Ozro said. "Watch the depth."
"Eleven feet," Tuan said.
"Watch it anyway."
They set the anchors at four-fifteen in the cove at the third bend. Claudine knew the drill; she had done it with her grandfather on the Ozella P. for Georges in 1998, when she was eighteen, and again for Ivan in 2004, when he was too old to be doing it and did it anyway. Tuan dropped the plow off the bow on Ozro's word and paid out chain while Ozro backed down on it, and then they motored up and over to set the Danforth thirty degrees off, so that the two rodes made a V. Then Claudine took the dinghy with the stern lines, two long coils of one-inch nylon, and ran them to two live oaks on the bank, wrapping them three times around trunks, and made them fast with bowlines, and the oaks took the strain without noticing.
She came back aboard soaked through and stood on the aft deck and looked at the lines, four of them going out from Clementine in four directions, a boat held in the middle of a web, and thought of her grandfather saying a line is a promise.
The patrol boat had stayed at the mouth of the creek. When they came back out in the dinghy, the three of them and Ozro's oxygen bottle and his plastic bag of medicines and the manila envelope with the revocation in it, wrapped in two Ziplocs, Shuford brought the patrol boat alongside and Brannon put out a hand and helped Ozro up over the gunwale, and Shuford ran them back down the river to Halyard Point at an easy fifteen knots, and nobody spoke the whole way. When they got to the fuel dock Shuford helped the old man out himself, lifting him nearly bodily onto the dock, and held him by the elbow until he had his cane.
Then he looked at Claudine. She was standing on the fuel dock in her soaked fishing shirt. The marks on her arm showed purple through the wet cotton.