Ben pulled off to the side of the trail and shut the engine off. “Good ol’ Ronnie. He’s quite the character. Just wait until you meet him.” He motioned for me to get out of the truck.
I jumped down and pulled up my pants, making a mental note to wear briefs rather than a thong my next shift. At least then if my pants fell, the fishermen wouldn’t get an eyeful.
“We’ll go down and make conversation, check licenses, and then move on. These are the interactions that make up at least seventy-five percent of our job.”
I trudged through the brush and tried to keep up with Ben’s long steps. My brand new work boots were already hurting my feet. As we approached, the smell of something rotting made my insides heave. It was even worse than the stench wafting from my hat.
“Hey, Dave,” Ben said. The fisherman I’d seen in the office before my interview stood with his back to us. “How’s the fishing?”
“It’s shit,” he said without turning around. He held out a blue piece of paper, folded several times to be the size of a driver’s license. Ben took it from him and looked it over. “How many times have you checked my license this week?” He glared at Ben with contempt.
“You know I have to check everyone. If I skip you, the next person will ask why I didn’t check yours.”
“There ain’t nobody else out here.” Dave scanned the area until his eyes came to rest on me. He looked me up and down before letting out a low whistle. “You sure know how to pick the pretty ones, Benny.” He winked at Ben and grinned at me, demonstrating the side effects of chewing tobacco.
“Don’t give her a hard time,” Ben said. “She’ll be with us for the summer.”
“Someday you’re gonna have to keep one of them.”
I tried my best not to grimace at the way his eyes lingered on my chest while he ran his tongue between his rotted front teeth.
“It’s gotta be boring working with the same six dudes for the past ten years.”
Ben shrugged.
“I’m sure you’ve seen a Colorado fishing license before.” He handed me the long, unfolded piece of glossy blue paper. “But you’ve probably never inspected one as closely as we do when we do our checks. The biggest thing is to make sure it’s the proper year and that the physical description matches the person who gave it to us. We can always ask for a driver’s license to verify their identity if we need to.”
“You guys take this fishing business way too seriously,” Dave said.
“We do?” Ben handed him the license back. “As I hear it, you were giving Carmen quite the earful about your suspicions the other day.”
Dave’s eyes narrowed. “He’s cheating, Benny. We all know he didn’t catch that fish legally.”
“We found nothing to suggest Ronnie caught the fish illegally.” Ben lifted his hat from his forehead and scratched at his receding hairline.
“What about those traps back in Muddy Cove? Those ain’t suspicious to you?” Dave cast his lure back into the water.
“And how exactly do you know about the traps?” Ben’s tone was still jovial, but his eyes focused in on Dave as if searching for a sign of guilt.
“You know how it goes. No one can keep a secret around here.”
Ben didn’t immediately respond.
I looked back and forth between the two men. Just as the silence was becoming awkward, Ben took a step toward Dave, his voice so quiet I could barely hear, “What secrets do you keep?”
Dave turned to look Ben in the eye. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Dave muttered. “All I’ll say is if I knew for certain Ronnie caught that state record catfish using an illegal trap, he’d be in a world of hurt.”
Ben let out a sigh. “Have a nice day, Dave.”
Once we were back at the truck, I let out a small laugh. “He’s intense.”
“You’ll get used to him, and all the others. Fishermen are a different bunch, a lot of them don’t have much of a filter.”
Probably not that different from some of the cretins I encountered as a firefighter. It could be downright infuriating having to put up with their crap, but biting my tongue was the professional thing to do.
“So, that’s the basics of what we do. We check licenses. If someone is fishing without a license we can give them a ticket or a warning—but we’ll get into that in training.”
“I hate to ask, but what was that awful smell? Does Dave have something against personal hygiene?”
Ben let out a laugh so loud, I thought Dave might hear. “No, no. That’s catfish bait. They call it stink bait, for obvious reasons. Catfish love it—can’t get enough.”
I wrinkled my nose. Why a fish would want to eat something that smelled worse than a rotting corpse was beyond me.
“But I wouldn’t be surprised if Dave hadn’t showered in several days either.” He laughed again. “You’re going to fit right in.”
He put the truck in gear.
“How about we go back and check Muddy Water Cove for traps?” He aimed the truck down a dirt path.
“From what Dave said back there, it sounds like there’s not much room for advancement.” I kept my eyes trained on the path ahead of us.
“Oh, yeah,” Ben said. “I hope that doesn’t mean you’ll be leaving us.”
Did it? “Nah, I need the job, even if it is only for the summer.” Maybe I could save enough to get a tiny apartment. In the slums.
“Great.” Ben let out a breath. “Looks like we might have some action in the cove.” He turned toward a beautiful, tree-lined bit of water that branched off the main reservoir. The depths were deep blue and anything but muddy.
“Why do you call it Muddy Water Cove?”
“Because that’s its name.” He smiled at me and then turned off the ignition.
How had Ben
