The trooper carried the manila envelope up my dock as carefully as if it were a live fish. The rain was coming sideways off the lake, and the boards were slick, and behind him on the water the blue lights of the patrol boats were smearing in the gray. He held out the envelope, and I did not take it. I wanted to see what it did to my hands. They were steady. “Mr. Haskins, please look inside,” he said. I opened the flap. It was not the sale papers for the marina at all. The top sheet was a promissory note for four hundred and ten thousand dollars, and my name was typed at the bottom.
I knew my signature the way I know the lines of my own palm, and this was not it. The L was too round. The H leaned the wrong way. Beneath the note was a second paper, a loan agreement from a company in Kansas City, listing Haskins Marina and the island cabin as collateral. It was dated three months earlier, back when Judy was alive and in the hospital, and she and I had sat together each night with the television off. Clipped to the back was a one way airline ticket to Cabo San Lucas, in the name of Brett Haskins, for the following Monday. The trooper watched my face. “Sir, we think your son planned to leave,” he said.
Brett sat in the bow of the trooper boat with a gray blanket around his shoulders, wet to the skin, his bass boat bobbing on a tow line behind. He looked small. I had been looking at that boy for forty four years, and I had never seen him look small. “Dad, I can explain,” he called across the water, in a voice cracked by cold. “It was only supposed to be a loan. A bridge. The man in the black truck said it was safe.” The trooper beside him shook his head. “Mr. Haskins, he has already told us about Vince Dalton,” he said. “He wants to make a deal.”
A manila envelope carried across a rainy dock gave one widower the weekend to bring his son back to the island on the Lake of the Ozarks.
I stood on my dock in the rain with the forged note in my hand and set out my terms for the trooper, as calmly as a man ordering lunch. The marina was not for sale. The note was a forgery, and I would swear to it in any court. The man from Kansas City could answer to the state, and I would help in any way I could. Brett would be held until a judge could hear him, and then I would ask for a program, not a cell, if he agreed to tell the truth about everything. And my pontoon would get a new fuse, because it was my pontoon, and Judy had loved that boat.
The patrol boat pulled alongside the dock, and a young trooper hopped up to tie the line. Brett stood, wobbling, in the boat, and the blanket slid off his shoulders. He was a big man, thirty seven years old, soft in the middle from too many nights at the poker tables. He looked at me across three feet of dark water. “Dad, I did not think you would come to the dock,” he said. “I thought you would sit in the cabin until I got back.” His lip trembled. “I thought you would be too scared.” I almost laughed. “Son, I am seventy eight years old,” I said. “I have outlived scarier things than you.”
He wept then, as the rain ran down his face. He did not try to wipe it away. “Mama knew,” he said. “She found out in April, before the hospital. She wanted to tell you. I begged her not to.” He wiped his nose on his wrist. “She said she would give me until summer.” A knot rose in my throat. All those evenings in the hospital room, with Judy holding my hand, and the thing I had not known sat between us like a third chair. “Brett, your mother loved you,” I said. “She gave you a deadline. I think she hoped you would meet it.”
Brett lunged. It was a clumsy, desperate thing, a lunge for the envelope as the rain beat on the dock. He thought, I suppose, that he could snatch it and throw it in the lake. The trooper was faster. He stepped between us, took Brett by the elbow, and spun him easily, the way a man turns a boat into the wind. “Sir, that is enough,” he said. Brett went down on one knee on the wet planks, with his hands behind him. My son knelt there in the rain with his head bowed, and the lights of the patrol boats went round and round over the lake.
The money consequences were not dramatic, but they were exact. Vince Dalton was arrested the following week in Osage Beach, and the state charged him with usury, extortion and a count of forgery. The loan agreement was voided by a circuit judge in Camden County, and the lien on the marina was removed. Brett pleaded to a count of forgery and one of attempted fraud, and the judge, after hearing me, ordered a treatment program in Springfield, restitution, and five years of probation. The marina was unharmed.
In the name of my wife, Judy, who passed in June and who tucked a yellow radio into my tackle box with a note that said For the old fool, I started the Channel Sixteen Fund. It pays for marine radios, safety checks and legal help for older boaters and marina owners on the Lake of the Ozarks whose own families have put their property at risk. In the first year, we gave out one hundred and four radios. A fisherman of eighty four, in a faded cap and with a thermos of coffee, sat in the office and said, “I never learned to use the thing.” I showed him.
On the Fourth of July, a year later, I sat on the dock of the island of Judy with a thermos of coffee and a folding chair, and watched the party boats go by with their music and their laughter. A pontoon came across the water, slowly, with a quiet engine. It was mine. At the wheel, in a clean white shirt, stood Brett, eight months clean and thin from the program, with a small fuse in his fist. He tied up at the dock and climbed out. He held the fuse out on his palm. “Dad, I put in a new one,” he said. “I tested it three times.” I took it, and I put it in the pocket of my shirt.
