"He knew," Ozro said. "That's why he needed a police report. A police report don't care what the Declaration says. A police report just says a Black woman was on a white man's boat and a sergeant took her off it. You attach that to a notice and send it to the board and the insurance company and the management company, and nobody reads Twelve, Two, A. They read the report. And they look at her." He coughed for a while. Claudine came over and stood beside him and counted. It went on too long. Then it stopped. "That's what he was buying," Ozro said. "Not the slot. The way people look at her."
The wind peaked around five. By seven it had begun to drop. By nine there were stars in the west, ragged between the clouds, and Claudine went out into her front yard with a flashlight and stood in the wet, ruined quiet, pine limbs everywhere, a neighbor's carport roof lying in her driveway like a dropped playing card, and looked at her arm in the beam. Five marks. Four inside, one outside. Purple going to black at the centers. She took a picture of it with her phone, holding a ruler from the kitchen drawer beside it, the way she had been trained to document wounds at work. Then she took another, with the date showing on the screen.
Halyard Point lost most of B dock and a third of C. The new floating fingers tore loose from their pilings when the surge rose over the tops of the short ones, and nine boats went up into the parking lot and into the marsh and one, a forty-foot Sea Ray, into the second floor of the dock house through the laundry room wall. The fixed pier at the foot of C dock lost its decking. The pilings did not move. When Claudine walked out on Tuesday morning, picking her way along the stringers in rubber boots with Delmas Whitsett Junior beside her, the brass plate was still on the outermost one, a little greener, with a strand of marsh grass caught under the bottom screw at the high-water mark, nine feet above where it ought to have been.
"Twenty-two feet," Delmas said, looking up the piling. "He said twenty-two and everybody laughed at him. Spent his whole Camille money on greenheart from Guyana." He shook his head. "My daddy wrote it down. Fool. Then he wrote, brave fool."
"I know," she said. "Tuan read it to me."
Clementine came back down Halls Mill Creek on Thursday with all four lines holding and nothing worse than a missing antenna and a dinghy full of rainwater and live oak leaves. Ozro brought her down himself, Claudine beside him, Tuan on the bow, and put her into slot 1 between pilings with no deck between them, in one try, and they rigged a gangplank from the swim platform to what was left of C dock with two-by-twelves Tuan scavenged from the wreck of the dock house deck.
Coastwise Marina Management fired Tuan Vo by email on the Monday after the storm, citing unauthorized absence during a weather emergency. His work-exchange arrangement on D dock was terminated in the same email. D dock was gone by then anyway. Fiddler had been found three-quarters of a mile up the marsh, upright, with her mast snapped and her bilge full of crabs.
The Halyard Point Marina Association held an emergency meeting on the twenty-second of October, in the fellowship hall of a Methodist church on Dauphin Island Parkway because the dock house had a boat in it. Forty-one slot owners were entitled to vote. Twenty-two of those votes belonged, through five LLCs, to Lawson Tillery, which was enough to keep him president and to keep the redevelopment alive on paper. He did not come. He sent a letter, read aloud by the secretary, resigning from the board effective immediately for personal reasons and withdrawing, quote, any draft notices that may have circulated in error. A retired dentist from B dock moved that the association direct Coastwise to rehire its fuel dock attendant, and Delmas Whitsett Junior, who was not an owner and was not supposed to speak, stood up at the back of the hall and said that if they didn't, he'd retire, and he was the only person alive who knew where the water shutoffs were. The motion passed nineteen to zero, with twenty-two abstaining. Tuan went back to work in November at a dollar more an hour. He did not get the slip back. He lives aboard Fiddler on a borrowed trailer in Claudine's side yard, re-stepping a mast, and pays her no rent, under protest, because she says her grandfather would come back and haunt her.
Claudine filed a complaint with the Mobile County Sheriff's Office on the fourteenth of October. She attached the photographs of her arm and a copy of Tuan's footage, nine minutes and forty seconds of it, shaky and mostly wind, in which you can see the patrol boat turn into the fairway and a big man step onto the stern of a boat and take a woman by the arm, and hear, very clearly over the wind, a young man shout, Officer! She owns this slot! In January a lieutenant from the Office of Professional Standards called her to say the use-of-force complaint had been sustained. Sergeant Wiley Shuford had received a written reprimand and been reassigned from the Marine Unit to patrol in the north district for six months. The investigation had also found that he failed to disclose a personal relationship with the complainant, Lawson Tillery, with whom he had fished in the Alabama Deep Sea Fishing Rodeo on a boat owned by Tillery Coastal Properties for three consecutive summers, and that a new policy on such disclosures was being drafted. Then he said that the sergeant had written a statement for the file that he'd asked them to share with her, if she wanted it. She said she'd think about it.
She thought about it for two weeks. Then she asked for it. It was one page, handwritten. Most of it was what she expected. One sentence was not. I took hold of you because I had already decided who you were from a phone call, and I've been trying since to figure out how many other times I've done that and never had a boy on a fuel dock to yell at me. She read it twice and folded it and put it in the cigar box with her grandfather's bill of sale, and she has not decided what that means.
Lawson filed a petition for guardianship and conservatorship in Mobile County Probate Court on the twentieth of October. The court appointed a guardian ad litem, a careful young woman from Fairhope who sat in the salon with Ozro for two afternoons, and a court-ordered evaluation by a geriatric psychiatrist who was not from USA Medical Center. The hearing was set for March. In February, without explanation, Lawson asked the court to continue it, and then to continue it again.