down. Broken boards in the docks, busted steps into the cabins. You had to be careful you didn’t trip and break your neck.”
“If it was a safety issue, I’m sure Dad was all over it,” I said. I don’t know whether I was comforted or distressed by the fact that I might have come by my own safety phobias honestly.
We were walking along the lake’s edge, listening to the water lap up against the shore. We passed a high, small wooden table with a hole cut in the center, and positioned directly under it, a short metal trash can with a lid on it.
I pointed. “What’s this?”
“That’s where we clean our catch,” Bob said. “Scrape what’s left into the hole, falls into the bucket. Has to be emptied every day. That right there would be incentive for a bear to wander down here. Need to mention that to Arlen.”
My eyes darted about nervously. I reached under the table and gingerly lifted the lid for a peek inside. An eye, still tucked into a fish’s severed head, glared at me.
I put the lid back on.
“Anyway,” Bob continued, “your dad’s kept what was good about this place, and fixed what was bad, and I’m grateful to him for that. This lake, it means the world to me, coming up here year after year. The fish don’t bite quite the way they used to, there’s a few more people fishing out of this lake than used to, but it’s still beautiful up here. I’m up here three weeks of every year, and the other forty-nine I’m wishing I was. I’m thinking, now that my wife is gone-she passed four years ago from cancer, awful thing-that maybe I’ll spend my whole summer here. If I thought your father would go for it, I’d sell my home in the city, get cabin two winterized like the one your dad lives in, just live up here year-round.”
“You should talk to him,” I said. “I bet he’d go for it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But first, he’s going to have to figure out what to do about them.” He nodded his head back in the direction of the farmhouse. “They’re trouble.”
“Dad doesn’t want to talk about them.”
“That’s ’cause he don’t know what to do about them. And that embarrasses him.”
“Just what’s the problem?”
“They remind me of that bunch at Waco, remember them?”
I nodded.
“Cutting themself off from the world, thinking everybody’s out to get them, getting themselves ready to defend themself against attackers.”
“What attackers?”
“The government, most likely. But if not them, black folk, homosexuals, Communists, who knows? That woman, the young one whose boyfriend got eaten by the bear? She’s got a ten-year-old boy. He don’t go to school. They teach him right there, up at the house. Y’imagine the kind of poison that’s going into that boy’s head?”
A hopeless feeling washed over me.
Bob led me out onto one of the five docks. On one side, secured with braided white nylon rope, bobbed an aluminum boat, about fourteen feet long, loaded with fishing poles, tackle boxes, nets, and life preserver cushions. “That’s my rig,” Bob said. The other side of the dock was empty, and Bob reached for a metal chain slipped around one of the posts. I recognized it as a stringer, with oversized hooks that closed like a baby’s safety pin through a fish’s jaw and kept your day’s catch fresh, and underwater, until such time as you wanted to bring it in and clean it.
Before Bob pulled the stringerful of fish out of the lake, he said to me, “Whaddya say, tomorrow morning, I take you fishing? We’ll go out early, before you have to start helping your dad with camp chores.”
I shrugged. “Sure,” I said. It actually sounded like a fun thing to do. More fun than with my son Paul, griping about not having his Game Boy with him.
Bob gave me a thumbs-up. “Wait’ll you see what I got today. We got some good eatin’ here, that’s for darn-”
He pulled the stringer out, and there was nothing there but five pickerel heads that had been raggedly, savagely separated from the rest of their bodies.
“Jesus H. Christ,” Bob said, shaking his head slowly. “Those fucking dogs. Again.” He looked back in the direction of the farmhouse. “They love their fucking fish.”
7
“SORRY,” BOB SPOONER SAID when he came into Dad’s cabin later. “No fish. They made a break for it.”
“You’re shittin’ me,” Dad said, sitting at the kitchen table, breaking up romaine leaves into a bowl. “They got off your stringer?”
“It’s amazing,” said Bob. “I must notta snapped the clips shut. I’m an idiot.”
Bob had told me he wasn’t going to tell Dad about the pit bulls eating his fish. Dad had had a bad enough day, what with a dead guy being found on his property and wrecking his ankle. When I asked him how he could be sure it was the Wickenses’ dogs, Gristle and Bone, Bob explained that Timmy Wickens, or one of his grown sons, often brought the dogs down by the lake, letting them off the leash to splash around in the water.
“Couple times, I’ve seen those little bastards coming out of the water, fish in their mouths, chewing them up and swallowing them like dog biscuits. And then we go out, check our stringers, there’s nothing there but the heads.”
“You complain?”
Bob smiled at me, like I was a poor, simple soul. “You try talking to those people.”
Sooner or later, I felt, I was going to have to.
Before Bob came over with his fish story, I went back to Dad’s cabin and found him leaning up against the kitchen counter, slipping a key off one of four nails that had been driven into the wall. He tossed it to me, and, not being particularly sports-inclined, I panicked as it flew through the air toward me. You don’t want to miss a toss from your father. Somehow, I got it, and he said, “That’s for cabin three. You can use it long as you want.”
“Okay. But I don’t mind camping out here on the couch, in case you get a chance to rent it. Besides, you could probably use the help around here, like grabbing you the TV remote.”
“No, it’s okay. You take it. You should have some privacy. There’s some sheets and blankets in the closet in my bedroom you can use.”
Fine, I thought.
“Tomorrow, I’ll show you what needs to be done around here. Couple days, I should be back to normal.”
“I can take as much time as you need,” I said, although I knew I couldn’t stay away from work that long. With only a year in at
“How’s she doing? You still making her life hell?”
“Like father like son,” I said.
The words were out of my mouth before I could get them back. They just slipped out. You could almost see them hanging in the room. I wished there were some way to reel them back in, stuff them back into my big, fat mouth.
Dad looked at me, and I was expecting him to give me a blast, but instead, he turned his back to me and washed his hands in the sink.
“Dad, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, studying his hands as though getting them clean was the most important thing he’d ever had to do.
“Really, I’m sorry. That was a cheap shot. That’s not how I feel.”
Dad grabbed a towel, wiped his hands off. “Sure it is,” he said. “You’ve always thought I was hard on your mother. I know that.”
