WE DRIVE through the city, through the rain, January: a man I’ve never met before, Jack, and my best friend, Kirby, still my best friend after twenty years. Jack and Kirby live in the city and are practically best friends themselves now. A dentist and a real estate appraiser. I drove three days and nights to go fishing with them—not just wade fishing, not sissy-pants shore fishing, but in a boat. Jack has a boat with a motor and everything.
I watch Jack as he drives. He looks serious, intent. He’s poor, even though he’s a dentist, because he’s got a wife and three kids, and because this is not a good time in Houston, for dentists or anyone else. Jack’s boat is old, and the chances are good that something will go wrong with it today—if we even get out on the water. Kirby is not so poor. Both he and his wife work, and they have only one child, a little girl, who is also named Kirby.
We drive slowly through the thunder and lightning in downtown Houston. Tall buildings leap into the sky all around us with each lightning flash. We pass the building where Kirby works; we pass the building where his wife works. They look like high-rise jails to me, the shutdown of a life. I feel like an outlaw sitting in the back of the jeep, riding with two married men, the fathers, up front. I feel almost as if one of them is my father, and the other one of my fathers friends. In fact, I am a little older than both of them. It doesn’t help that I have never fished from a boat before.
It has been so long since I’ve been around anyone, man or woman, other than my girlfriend. We’ve separated. We have done this before, and I think we’ll get back together again, because we’ve been together far too long not to get back together.
This time, after Margie left, it was a little different. I felt alone right away, and also, I wanted to do something new, and I did not want to be in that house alone.
It wasn’t the usual list of griefs this time—not, Why don’t we get married? not, Why are you always traveling so much? not, Who was that woman who called? Those are the little things, the things that can be erased. Or if not erased, at least put aside.
This time, Margie said, she was tired. Just tired. A little frightened, but mostly tired. She went home, back to Virginia.
I did not want to be in that house alone. I just wanted something new. And after a while, that gets hard to find.
We listen to the crackle of the local AM station, the early morning fishing report. The roads are slick, and there are other cars out, so many other cars, but none of them are pulling boats.
Kirby and Jack lean forward and watch the road and sip their coffee. The rain is coming straight down, beating against the windshield. We all try to hear what the Fish Man is saying on his talk show. He is telling us the fishing has been poor to spotty the past few days. Kirby grins, but Jack scowls and says, “Got-damn.”
I don’t really care one way or the other.
In Texas young men and women are taught to believe the world can be tamed. It’s a bull that can be wrestled, and with strength and courage and energy you can lift that bull over your head, spin it around, and throw it to the ground. In certain parts of the world, and even in certain individuals, such a thought would be ludicrous. But in Texas I have seen the myth become truth, lightning strikes, men and women burning across the prairie of their lives, living fast, living strong. I have seen it, in my father, my mother, and others, and I feel like an imposter, not having any children to follow after me, even though I am trying to live one of those strong lives myself—fast and free, scorning weakness.
A bolt of lightning smashes down on our left, tingles the hair on our arms. Jack shouts in his fear, and Kirby laughs, leans back in his seat, and rolls the window down a little. A few flicks of rain blow in on his face, and on mine in the back seat. It feels good, and I crack my window a little too.
I mean, Margie takes care of me. Sometimes I get really wild, just run out of the house and up onto the mountain behind our cabin, just running. I’ll be gone all afternoon, lying up there on some damn rock or something, like a dog in the high mountain sun. When I finally come back, late in the day, she’ll be very quiet, and we’ll sit together and all will be real calm. What I’m saying is, she takes care of me. And I take care of her, I do. But it’s not enough, I think.
Not only are Jack and Kirby best friends now, but their wives are too.
“I dreamed you were in my garbage can last night,” Kirby tells Jack matter-of-factly. “I dreamed you were a raccoon, banging around in the garbage, sorting through my trash.”
“Uh-huh,” says Jack, seemingly amused at the thought of being taken for a raccoon.
There’s a metal box in the back of the jeep, a strange-looking box with small holes punched in the sides of it, and I keep imagining I hear grunts and clicks coming from it.
“What’ve you got in the box?” I ask Jack.
“A coyote,” he answers, without even looking back. Eyes on the road.
“No shit,” I say, happy that he trusts me enough, already, to bullshit with me. “Where’d you get it?”
Jack doesn’t answer, and I can tell that Kirby thinks we, Jack and I, are playing some sort of joke on him, one that he refuses to pick up on, and so the subject is dropped. But I can still hear something in that box behind me, something alive, moving around from time to time, occasionally making what sounds like spitting noises.
Near Galveston the night ends, and the flags on buildings are snapping straight out to the northwest, toward Montana, from where I’ve come. There’s a warm southeast wind, which is the best for fishing, and though we are still in the squall, Jack appears crazed by this good omen, rolling his window down, despite the rain, to smell it. He believes there is the tiniest chance that it will be raining on land but not out in the bay, that it will be wet and storming in one place, but dry and breezy at that place’s edge. As we start driving past the refineries, past the tidal inlets, Kirby and I begin to believe in his wild hope; we have only a few miles to go, but it’s true, the rain has slowed to a drizzle.
“We did it,” Jack says, delighted. “We fucking outran it.”
There’s no one else out on the bay, though soon others will begin showing up, diluting the space with their presence. For now it is just us, and we get out and watch as Jack backs the trailer down the boat ramp into the water. Colonies of barnacles cling to nearby pilings, and there’s a little bait shop at the end of the dock, which is not open yet because the weather has been so bad, even though it’s early light, dawn, fishing time.
Towering above our launch spot is a huge billboard with the photograph of a dark-haired woman on it, perhaps the most beautiful woman we’ve ever seen; it’s one of those “Wanted: Missing Person” advertisements. She’s smiling on the billboard, and way above us like that, up in the windy, cloud-parting sky, she looks like a goddess, granting us permission to go fishing, to go out and play.
“HELP FIND RENEE JACKSON,” the billboard says, and I study the woman closely as I try to remember if I have ever seen her before, and then I think how the name sounds familiar. Perhaps she is someone I went to school with. But that is too long ago, it is old pork, stored in salt, gaps in memory, and there is only the future. I would like to help if I could—I would like to lift that bull too—but it’s all I can do to hope that Renee is all right, to give her my earnest, best hope. It is not a good feeling.
We’re lowering the boat into the water with a winch, the click-click-click of the wire cable spooling out. Kirby’s operating it. He’s been on a hundred fishing trips with Jack. I get the sack lunches that Tricia, Kirby’s wife, packed for all of us, and carry them down the dock and hand them to Jack, who is already in the boat arranging things, checking the fuel tanks and such.
“Tricia make these?” Jack calls up to Kirby, who’s about to pull the jeep and trailer away, to go park.
“Yep,” says Kirby.
“She’s so sweet,” says Jack.
“Would Wendy make a lunch like that for you?” Kirby asks.
“Hell,” says Jack, looking through the lunch as if it’s a discovery, “she didn’t even get up to say goodbye.”
Kirby is beaming, as if he’s gotten away with something.
Kirby and I climb into the boat. The first thing I notice is that there aren’t any life vests, and I can’t swim, but I’m not worried. I’m not going beyond the bay. I look above me at Renee Jackson, the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, and it seems, this early in the morning, having driven through the night and the rain to get here, a blessing to launch ourselves beneath her gaze. The wind whips at my windbreaker, and I feel my eyes beginning to blur and go to water.
“Hey, are you crying, man?” Jack asks, and I wonder if Kirby has told him about Margie and me separating. “It’s okay if you are, man,” he says. The engine has finally caught and is sputtering clouds of blue smoke out over the bay, giving off the summer-sweet smell of outboard fuel. Jack the dentist is another man now, down low in the boat, working the throttle, turning the wheel with one hand. He’s suddenly an outlaw too, the happiest one, and I think that’s how it always goes, how the longer you go without something, the happier you are when you finally get it. I think about how happy Renee Jackson’s parents would be if she were to show up at their front door today.
“I mean, it’s all right,” Jack says again, squinting at me in the weak light. Every raggedy cloud is fleeing, burning flame red above us as the sky begins to light up, though down here on the water it’s still dusky and gloomy, still foggy gray. “Kirby cried for half an hour after we lost a redfish last year,” Jack says. “I don’t mean lost it on a hook—I mean lost it, dead. She was a forty-five-pound female with eggs, and it took so long to land her that she wasn’t any good by the time we got her in. We tried to let her go again right away, but she just lay there in the surf, gasping, and then rolled over on her side. We worked with her for two hours before she died. For a while we thought she was going to make it,” Jack says. “She was as big as a dog. Two hours. What else could we do but cry?”
I have to turn away from the picture of Renee Jackson or I will cry.
“Hand me one of those Rolling Rocks,” I tell Kirby.
“Running like a fine watch!” Jack shouts, revving the engine.
An alarming thump shakes the back of the boat, where the motor is housed, followed by an even more alarming miscellany of piston noise and exhaust. Slowly we creep into the bay, following the lane of driven cedar piles into deeper water.
We run around in large circles before entering open water, to iron out the engine’s kinks before we get too far from shore. Sure enough, the engine cuts out, just as the sun is completely up, brilliant and golden in our eyes, and the strong salt wind is in our faces.
We sit like fools for a while, too far from shore to wade or swim back—the water is four to six feet deep throughout the bay, but the current is strong. Kirby and I, out of old habit, begin to despair and open bottles of beer. Jack, though, is still riding the crest of being captain, and the change in him is still evident, even from the set of his jaw. He lifts the cover of the engine and spies the problem immediately: the wire leading from one of the spark plugs is bare and wet from the storm, and has shorted out. Jack has some electrical tape in his toolbox, and he wraps the offending wire quickly.
I don’t mean to make Jack look like such a genius. The reason he was able to go straight to the problem is that he and Kirby had taken Jack’s seventy-nine-year-old father out in the boat the week before, and the old man, a perfectionist, had ranted and raved for the first hour of the trip about the terrible condition Jack had let the boat fall into. Evidently the boat had belonged to Jack’s father fifteen or twenty years ago, and the old man’s loopy hearing had picked up on the spark-plug wire’s shorting right away.
“He was really howling,” Kirby says of Jack’s father. “Man, is he a hardass.”
Chastened by the memory, Captain Jack slouches a little lower in the seat. Something is troubling him now; his face looks like it did when he was driving through the rain.
“Dollar-bill green!” he shouts, looking down at the water we’re skimming across. I’m sitting up in the high-perched bow like a mascot, sniffing the sea. “When the water’s this color and the wind’s out of the southeast,” Jack says, “you’ll catch fish.”
Kirby moves up to the bow with me, still drinking his beer, and tries to fill me in as quickly as possible on all the things I should know, all the things he and Jack have learned from fishing together for the last five or six years.
“There’s dolphins out here, but you never catch them,” Kirby says. “They only follow you. Sometimes they come right up to the boat and stick their head out of the water and look you in the eye. A lot of times you can tell where the speckled trout are by the way the seagulls are acting. In warm weather, the summer usually, you can look for slicks. A slick is an oily, flat spot on the water where the fish have gotten into a feeding frenzy on the shrimp and have eaten so much they’ve regurgitated it, and all the oils and digestive juices make this big slick on the ocean. It smells like watermelon. You smell watermelon out at sea and you’d better be ready.”
“We may run aground,” Jack shouts from the back. “Be careful.” I picture us sliding to an immediate stop, beached by a barely submerged sandbar. I picture myself not stopping but being catapulted out of the boat, a human cannonball, and I sit a little lower in the bow and grip the sides.
It all looks the same to me. I can’t see the shore anymore, can’t see where any sandbars might be that could cause us to run aground, though I keep watching. We bounce across the chops of waves a little longer—seemingly by whim, with no plan, no landmark, and then Jack cuts the engine, and we’re adrift.
The silence sounds wonderful. “Start fishing,” Jack says. He is already scrambling like a child, eager to get his lure—an artificial shrimp, blood red (“strawberry”) in color—threaded onto a quarter-ounce jig and into the water. It’s a big deal, I find out, to catch the first fish of the day.
“We bought Kirby her first pair of shoes this week,” Kirby says, once he has his rod set up and is working it, casting, retrieving, casting again. There’s high anticipation among us—any one of us could catch the first fish at any given second, even me. “Man, was she mad!” Kirby laughs, remembering. “She kicked and waved, trying to throw them off.” He’s been a father for seven months.
Jack’s silent, intense, almost manic. It’s a lovely day. The sun is warm on our shoulders, though just off to our left, where land is, we can see the black squall line—savage thunderstorms, wicked cold streaks of lightning. Also coming from that direction, far in the distance, is a line of boats raising big wakes, bearing down like a posse.
“You got any popdicks in Montana?” Jack asks, glancing in the direction of the oncoming boats.
“Say what?” I ask.
“Popdicks,” Jack says. He’s watching his line again, reeling it in. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone as serious about anything as Jack is about catching that first fish.
“What’s a popdick?” I say. I’m almost afraid to ask. Kirby and Jack howl, delighted to hear me say the word. It’s a private joke between them, some word they’ve made up, and I feel as if I’ve crossed a magical boundary and been initiated into something important. Suddenly I feel farther away than ever from Margie.
“Popdicks,” Kirby says, “run their boats across the water in front of you, going too fast, and they scare all the fish away.”
Just then Jack’s rod bows. He’s got a big one, the first saltwater fish I’ve ever seen caught. Only I haven’t seen it yet. It’s still out there in the bay, fighting to get free. But Jack’s bringing it in, and Kirby clambers about the boat trying to get the landing net ready. Presently we see flashes of silver, like underwater lightning, then Kirby has the net under the big fish, a club-length speckled trout, fierce-toothed, metallic gray with a yellow and white belly and smart eyes. Jack quickly unhooks the fish and slides it into the ice chest, where it thrashes and beats its tail against the sides—a sound we pretend not to hear, or rather, understand.
“Easy, big fella,” Jack says, readjusting his strawberry shrimp; it’s been half pulled off, like a woman coming out of her slip, and he slides it all the way back on the hook. We can’t cast out again, though, because by now all the popdicks have converged in a rough circle around us. They are casting shamelessly into the school of speckled trout that was ours first. They’re catching them and hooting with joy and excitement, as if they’ve done something special.
“I’d rather be dead than be a popdick,” Jack mutters, and gives the old boat its full throttle, gunning us through the center of the schooling trout. Several fish leap out of the water, bright and glittering in the sun, and then we’re past the ranks of the popdicks, running again for the open sea.
In the afternoon Jack finds another school, and both he and Kirby hook a trout on the same retrieve. There are a few other boats following roughly the same drift line as we are, but they aren’t close enough to see our poles, and if we’re careful, we can keep the fish a secret.
“This is how you do it when the popdicks are watching,” Jack says, speaking through his teeth like a ventriloquist and holding the rod down low to the water, reeling in nonchalantly, as if nothing were happening. I see that Kirby is doing the same thing. They land the fish quietly, without the net and around the back side of the boat, so that it looks like we are getting beer out of the ice chest.
I’m not getting any strikes. Jack and Kirby try to give me pointers as they fish, but it’s hard to fish and teach at the same time. Like most things, it’s just something that I am going to have to work out by myself. They each catch two more fish before the popdicks realize what’s going on and start their engines and come racing over.
“Hey, you popdicks!” Kirby shouts when he sees the secret is out. He holds the bent pole high in the air with one hand. The fish that is on the other end struggles and dives, and with his other hand he begins waving the boats over. “Hey everybody, come on over here! I’m catching em! Hey, come on!”
Jack curses, shaking his head, as if disciplining himself to say nothing—I can tell he hates scenes—but Kirby is giggling, and we leave the spot in a full spray just as the first of the boats arrive, friendly and curious, shameless, looking for fish.
After that we go far inland, past the point where anyone can possibly see us. In the shallower water we begin catching hook-jawed flounder and gulf trout. Jack catches a fair-sized redfish—a big, dull-looking, bullheaded fish that keeps its mouth open all the time, and which, before being landed, with its great strength runs around and around the boat, circling it like a shark five or six times before tiring. Kirby has a tube of some magic fish-catching attractant that he wasted three dollars on at a sporting-goods store in Houston. “Kawanee” is the magical name Kirby and Jack have given to it, and after several more beers, and with the ice chest beginning to fill with fish (fish for dinner, fish for the freezer, and fish for their wives), we grow slightly goofy, and Kirby insists on smearing my lure—still a strawberry shrimp, which is what is working for them—with Kawanee before each cast. I still haven’t caught a single fish.
There is the requisite talk of sex.
“You know, Jack, when your assistant leans over me in the dentist’s chair, I can see her bosoms,” Kirby says. “I mean, I can really see them, even the tips.”
“No shit,” Jack says, nursing a beer. There is a slack spot in the fishing, perhaps because we have all put Kawanee on our lures. It is a waxy, greasy substance like Chap Stick, and it smells like something dead. “No shit,” Jack says again, perhaps imagining it. Then he says, “Well, that’s fine, but you can’t look at things like that anymore. You’re married. Hell, you’re even a father.”
“Yeah, but I’m still a wild sonofabitch,” Kirby says, and he sounds almost angry.
The wind out of the southeast is warm and salty. It’s blowing us toward shore. The tide, too, has turned and is running back in—we can drift all the way to where we came from.
“Wendy’s mean,” Jack says, picking up another bottle, “but she’s a hellcat in bed. Thank goodness.”
Kirby just grunts. I can tell he isn’t going to bring Tricia into this, and I’m not about to bring Margie into this either. I don’t really want to hear about Wendy, don’t want to picture her being a hellcat. Maybe someone else, maybe even Jack’s dental assistant, but not his wife. I don’t want to hear about that, and I don’t think Kirby does either.
We drift like that, fishing slowly and drinking beer, with a dark purple cloud bank hanging over the shore.
“I can’t get over how upset your old man was about those spark-plug wires,” Kirby says. “I thought he was going to blow a clot. Do you know how happy he was to be able to really rip into you? He’ll be talking about it for the rest of his life. He’ll never stop.”
“Aw, that’s okay,” Jack says, sighing. “I know he’s losing his mind, but he’s still my dad. I guess I can put up with it for a few more years. We’ll be dopey old fuckers ourselves someday.”
We are close enough to shore that I can see the billboard of Renee Jackson again. We drift toward her lazily.
“She’s been missing for a long time, hasn’t she?” Kirby asks Jack.
“I think so,” Jack says. “But I think they found her. I think that’s the one whose skeleton they found over on East Beach last spring.”
We have to look at her as we drift in. There is nowhere else to look but straight at her, and she’s looking back at us, smiling. It is that point in the day—and always, each day, whether you are two blocks or two continents away, you feel it—when you are too far away from your wife, your family—cut loose, cast off, drifting away—and when you wish so strongly that you could see them again, could reach out and hold their hands. We drift near the boat launch, maneuvering the last several yards with the motor, suddenly tired from our day. Kirby hops out and gets the jeep and trailer, lowers it into the water so we can drive the boat up on it. We hook the cable winch up to it and reel it in, ready to go home.
I know what Margie meant about feeling tired. I am tired too. But we have to keep going on.
It is about four-thirty in the afternoon. Jack stops along a deserted stretch of beach on the way home—splatters of rain beginning to strike our faces, another storm starting up—and he asks Kirby and me to help him carry the steel box from the back of the jeep down to the dunes.
I’d forgotten about it, but as soon as we lift it, it becomes apparent that there is something alive in the box after all, something spitting and snarling, and we set it down in the tall salt grass and then step back.
“I trapped it in my back yard,” Jack says proudly. “I really did.”
The gulf wind stings our faces with salt mist blowing off the waves. But it is a warm wind. The beach, at high tide, is a long, narrow strip of tan. The sky is a lurid purple-black, like the bruise on the inside of a woman’s thigh. We can see condominiums and high-rises farther down the beach. Lightning crackles and speaks all around us.
“Let her rip,” Jack says, opening the door to the metal box. A small coyote about the size of a collie shoots out without looking back and begins running down the beach in a straight line. It is running with its tail floating behind, running—and this is the most beautiful thing—directly toward the condominiums and townhouses, running north and into the wind, without looking back, as if it knows exactly where it is going.