Chapter 6: Ninety Feet

On Monday morning at six, Harborline's biggest tug put its nose into the Braddock berth.

It hit the fender piles hard enough to shake the pier.

I watched it from the foredeck of the Santa Rita with a coffee in my hand and Anselmo beside me.

Neither of us said anything.

The fog had burned off to a thin gray lid.

Along the rope at the end of the pier stood the dock families again, all of them.

They wore orange vests and work boots, and they had brought their thermoses and folding chairs.

Nobody had invited them this time.

They had come to see what would happen.

The Clarissa B. sat against the pier, nine hundred feet of black hull and white cranes.

On her bridge wing, a man in a navy jacket raised a radio to his mouth.

His voice carried across the water on every handheld on the dock.

"Harborline, this is the pilot. Back off. You are touching the piles."

A voice came back, flat and tired. "Pilot, we've got the fix. Mr. Braddock's financier said this berth takes our boats."

"Tell your financier to come stand on the pier and watch you try."

"Pilot, we have orders to swing her."

"Then you're going to put a hole in the Port's pier and in her stern," Ruel said.

His voice did not rise at all.

"These tugs are ninety feet. This slip needs a boat under seventy."

"I will not take a ship out on your lines," Ruel said.

A long pause crackled on the radio.

Then the big tug backed off, slowly, and a cheer went up from the dock families that rattled the gulls off the rail.

A Braddock manager in a hard hat stood at the pier edge with his phone to his ear.

His face had gone deep red.

"Ninety feet," Anselmo said, with deep satisfaction. "Your father drew that line in 1991, and the Port never moved it."

"The Port moved the berth three years ago," I said.

"But not the water," Anselmo said.

I laughed, and he put his big hand over mine on the rail for a moment.

On the bridge wing, Ruel lowered his radio and looked across the bay at me.

He didn't wave.

He only looked, steadily, for as long as he wanted to.

I felt it in my knees.

At nine o'clock his white pickup was waiting at the end of the yard road with the engine running.

"You've got the day off," I said, climbing in.

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