"Pump's out on the forward head. And the aft head's been making a noise like a bull alligator since Monday. I'm going up to the dock house. I'll be ten minutes."
"It's a quarter mile up that dock."
"It's six hundred and eighty feet," he said. "Your granddaddy and I measured it with a lead line in 1987 so the lawyers would quit lying about it. I can walk six hundred and eighty feet. I walked out of Springhill Manor on Thursday, didn't I?"
He had. She had been there, standing beside her car in the circular drive of Springhill Manor Rehabilitation and Skilled Nursing at six-fifteen in the evening, still in her work scrubs, when he came out the front door in a hospital gown and khaki trousers with his cane in one hand and a plastic bag of his belongings in the other, while a nurse's aide followed him out saying Mr. Tillery, Mr. Tillery, you have to sign the form, and he said, Young lady, I have been signing forms since before your mother was born, give it here, and signed it against the car door, and read it first, all of it. Against Medical Advice. He had initialed every paragraph.
It was the most legally careful thing she had ever seen anyone do, and she had watched him do it with her heart going like a bilge pump, because she had known exactly who would get the phone call about it, and exactly what he would say.
She stood on the aft deck and watched him go up the dock, slow, the cane and then the left foot and then the right, his free hand trailing along the top of the dock box rail when there was one. The wind was pushing his windbreaker flat against his back. At the head of C dock the walkway rose up a ramp to the boardwalk, and beyond the boardwalk was the dock house, a gray-shingled building with a ship's store, the dockmaster's office, the restrooms, the laundry, and a deck where in better weather the liveaboards drank beer and argued about whose boat was more paid off.
She had four more lines to rig and two to take in.
Her plan, which she had talked over with Ozro so many times since Thursday that it had stopped feeling like a plan and started feeling like a hymn, was this. At slack water, if there was a slack water, they would take Clementine out of slot 1, down the fairway, out into the river, and three miles up Dog River under the Dauphin Island Parkway bridge to the mouth of Halls Mill Creek, where the banks were high and wooded and the water was deep enough for a five-foot draft for a mile in. There was a cove there, the third bend past the old Boy Scout landing, that Ozro had used as a hurricane hole for every storm since Frederic in 1979. They would set two anchors, a big Danforth and a forty-five-pound plow, in a V off the bow, and run stern lines to two live oaks on the bank, and strip everything off the deck that could become a missile, and leave her there with her bilge pumps on the batteries and a prayer. And then Claudine would drive them both back to her house in Theodore, eleven miles inland, where she had a generator and a spare bedroom and an oxygen concentrator she had borrowed from the respiratory department with a signed equipment loan form, and they would sit through Hurricane Ophira together and listen to it go by.
The alternative was to leave the boat in slot 1.
She did not want to leave the boat in slot 1. The slot was a fixed pier. When the surge came, if it came at the eight to ten feet they were saying on WKRG, a boat in a fixed slip rose up the pilings on its lines like a man climbing a rope, and if the lines were too short it hung itself, and if they were too long it beat itself to death against the pier, and if the pilings were too short it floated over them and went wherever the water went. Her grandfather's pilings were tall, twenty-two feet above mean low water, taller than anything else on the river, because he had seen what Camille did in 1969 and had decided never again. But Clementine was fifty-three feet of boat in a forty-foot slot, and her stern stuck out into the fairway, and the floating docks on either side were new and cheap and Claudine did not trust a single one of them.
There was also the other reason, which she did not say out loud even to herself very often.
The other reason was that if Clementine stayed in slot 1 through the storm and something happened to her, or to the dock, or to the boat in the next slip over, Lawson Tillery would be there afterward with a clipboard.