I did not stop to finish my hot dog. I climbed down into the bass boat of Buck Tolliver with my knees complaining, and he cut the motor and let us drift across the dark cove with only the stars to steer by. Behind us, on the deck of my son lake house, the music went on, and the laughter, and somebody dropped a glass. Buck said nothing for a long while. Then he said, “Earl, I have been a coward for a year. I should have called you in March. But I did not want to be the man who told a father something that would break him.”
His boathouse was a long gray shed on stilts at the end of a gravel lane, with a rusted padlock on the inside door, and Buck had cut the chain with a pair of bolt cutters that afternoon, in case I came. He raised the tarp with a flashlight in his teeth. Under it, in neat rows, side by side, were three pontoon boats, white and clean, with a green stripe, and on each hull in black letters I had painted myself in 1999, PUCKETT S LANDING RENTAL. They were the three rental pontoons the marina had reported stolen from slip 1 the previous winter.
Stacked on pallets against the back wall were twenty six outboard motors, with the serial numbers filed down. Beside them, in a plastic crate, was a stack of paper. Copies of insurance claims. Invoices. A signature I knew as well as my own. My son had been selling insurance to the marina, and he had been filing the claims himself. Three pontoons, twenty six outboards and a fuel dock pump had been reported stolen over three winters. Insurance had paid out three hundred eighty thousand dollars to an account at a bank in Cumming. Buck laid a hand on my shoulder. His beard was wet. “Earl,” he said, “I am so sorry.”
A tarp in a boathouse and a painted name on a pontoon gave one marina owner the length of a single night to bring his son back to the truth in Gainesville.
I gave my terms to Buck in the boathouse. He would take a photograph of everything, from every angle, and send it to the Hall County sheriff in the morning. And I would go back to the lake house, climb the dock, finish my hot dog and say not one word to Dale or Brandi, because I wanted to see what my son would do when I put the first pontoon on the table. Buck shook his head. “Earl, you are a better man than I am,” he said. I said I was only a slow one. I said it takes me twenty minutes to see what Nell saw in two.
I asked them both to meet me on the dock at nine the next morning, where I sat on the bench with a thermos of coffee. They came down the stairs in matching robes. I laid the photographs on the boards between us. Brandi looked, and her tan went the color of a candle. Dale looked at his shoes. “Dad, it was only a loan against the insurance,” he said. “You were getting old. You were selling anyway. I figured nobody would miss it.” I said, “Dale, it was not mine to lend. It was a gift from the people of this lake. Every boat in that shed belonged to a child who learned to swim off my dock.”
Dale snatched the photographs off the bench, meaning to run along the dock to the boathouse path and wipe the memory card, and he sprinted down the long wooden pier in his bare feet, with Brandi crying out behind him. He made it forty feet. At the corner of the dock, where the walkway turns, Buck Tolliver had brought a pontoon boat in broadside overnight and tied it off, a big flat gleaming barge, and it filled the whole end of the pier like a closed gate. Dale put on the brakes. He did not quite stop. He slid.
His feet went out from under him on the dew, and with a great cry he went off the end of the dock in his good robe, still holding the photographs over his head, and landed in six feet of cool Lanier water with a splash that sent the geese into the air. He came up sputtering. Buck, who was standing on the pontoon, tossed him a life ring with perfect accuracy, and the ring landed on his head. “Son,” Buck said mildly, “wear your jacket next time.” Dale hung on to the ring with both arms. Brandi began to laugh and cry at once, on the dock, in her bare feet.
I paid the insurance company back what it had lost, three hundred eighty thousand dollars, from the sale of the marina, so that no one at the company would have to take the loss for a lie of my son. I did it in the name of Dale, with a letter. Dale pleaded to a single count of fraud, and the judge in Hall County, who had been a boy on the lake, gave him a sentence that included five hundred hours at a boat ramp, pulling trailers out of the water. Brandi left real estate photography and went to work at a bakery. They live in a rental now.
In the name of Nell, who passed in 2020, I started the Nell Puckett Fund. It pays for life jackets, swim lessons and boating safety classes for children and families who live around the lake and cannot afford them, in Hall, Forsyth and Dawson counties. In the first year we taught five hundred nineteen children to swim. A boy of eight, from a trailer court on Atlanta Highway, who had been afraid of the water all his life, floated on his back in the shallow end of the Gainesville pool and said, to nobody, that he was a log. His mother cried into a towel.
Dale pulls trailers at the Puckett s Landing ramp on Saturdays now, under the wine bar sign. The hospitality company let him keep the job, and they pay him nothing, and he does not ask. Last week I sat on the fuel dock with my feet in the water, and he walked down the pier in his orange vest, and he sat beside me with his shoes off. He did not say anything for a long time. Then he said, “Dad, why did you finish the hot dog?” I told him it was a perfectly good hot dog. I said that was the point.
