He looked up at her through the hatch, eighty-one years old, white hair cut short as a Marine's, eyes the faded blue of an old work shirt, a canvas cap that said BAY TOWING & BARGE on it in letters that had once been red. He had lost twenty pounds since August. In the hospital they'd called it deconditioning, which was a word Claudine used herself, at work, in charts, because it sounded like something you could fix with a schedule.
"Well," he said. "I'll supervise."
She climbed down the flybridge ladder, ducked into the salon, and lifted the hatch in the sole. The engine room breathed up at her, hot and close, smelling of diesel and old bilge and the particular burnt-coffee smell of a Detroit that had been running for twenty minutes. She found the seacock, closed it, unscrewed the strainer bowl, and pulled out a basket so packed with eelgrass and what looked like the remains of a small jellyfish that she could not believe water had been getting through it at all.
"Well, there it is," Ozro said, looking down at it over her shoulder from his seat on the top step. "River's full of trash ahead of a storm. Everything that ain't tied down comes looking for an intake."
"Like Lawson," she said, before she could stop herself.
He didn't answer that. She cleaned the basket over a bucket, put it back, tightened the bowl, opened the seacock, and watched the glass top fill with brown river water and hold, no air, no drip. When she came up he was sitting with both hands on the head of his cane and looking out the salon windows at the long gray length of C dock, where the floating finger piers were already riding high and the boats on them were beginning to buck against their lines like cattle in a chute.
"I know what you think of my boy," he said.
"I don't think anything of him."
"You think a good deal of things of him, and most of them are fair, and I'd thank you to keep them in your mouth till I'm dead. Then you can say whatever you want at the funeral."
"I'm not coming to your funeral if you go down in that engine room again."
"Fair enough." He pushed himself up on the cane. "I have to make a trip to the head."
"Use the forward head."