I walked into the middle of that lot, past the banners and the radio station out front, in my clean shirt.
The salesman saw me coming and his smile slipped, because he knew which old timer had watched a boat sink out from under him a mile from shore.
I did not cuss him out. I set a folder on the hood of the nearest boat.
He had told me the boat was sold AS-IS, that once I hauled it off it stopped being his problem. So I had the wreck pulled off the lake bottom and paid a marine surveyor to look her over.
What the surveyor found was not an honest old crack. It was a crack that somebody had ground down, fiberglassed over, and painted to match, so a buyer standing on the dock would never see the ruin waiting under the waterline.
AS-IS covers the faults a man can see, I said, it does not cover the ones you sanded down and painted over to take nine thousand dollars off a grandfather.
The folder had the survey, with photographs, signed and dated. Concealing a defect like that to make a sale is not a loophole. It is fraud, and no line on a bill of sale covers it.
I had already carried the whole thing to the state consumer protection office. And it turned out mine was not the first boat off this lot to go to the bottom.
The radio crew was broadcasting live twenty feet away. They have ears. When they heard a calm old man lay out nine thousand dollars of concealed fraud with a surveyor report in his hand, they put a microphone in front of me, and I told the whole county.
You never saw a grand opening clear out so fast.
The state came down on that dealer hard. Rather than lose the license that let him sell at all, he gave me my nine thousand dollars back, in writing, with an apology his lawyer plainly wrote for him.
I bought a good honest boat off a retiring fisherman, one who showed me every soft spot in the hull before he would take a dime.
My grandkids and I are out on the lake most Saturdays now, the way my daddy took me, the way it was always meant to be.
Two other men who lost boats off that lot came forward once word got around. We are not rich men, any of us, but we are not fools either, and a dealer learns that lesson slow or he learns it hard. This one learned it hard.
I did not raise my voice once. I just let a marine surveyor and a live microphone tell the truth for me.
Have a blessed day, I told that salesman on the radio. The whole county heard me mean it.