A Tommy’s Big Red Fish Truck sat in front of the fancy double-wide, whose neat deck and shady porch held thick leafy ferns in pots and a variety of tropical plants. All the flower beds were mulched and free of grass, and the big red truck was dusty from the road. The left front tire was almost halfway down.
There was some kind of notice on a flimsy piece of pink paper tucked beneath one of the windshield wipers, but it had been rained on and the ink had smeared and there were rain spots in the dust on the truck.
On a hill behind the trailer, five well-manicured ponds were scattered down its length, each of them connected to the other by pipes and pumps. The big hatchery barn down below them stood quiet under the sun. A lot of white fluffy clouds were drifting very slowly in the sky.
Inside the double-wide, muffled by the walls, the phone rang. It was shrill and insistent, and it sat there ringing, maybe twenty times. It stopped. In the front lawn were some ten-year-old pecan trees, mere babies compared with the leafy giants standing down behind the trailer.
The phone started ringing again and it kept ringing constantly until it had been ringing for ten minutes. It finally stopped and then there was nothing to hear again but the something-like-whispering noise green leaves made from breeze in the trees.
Up in the sky above all this a bald eagle soared in the blue void, its wide brown wings white tipped and flared for the thermal updraft he was surfing. He circled as he soared, ever lifting, so small he became not much more than a speck. And then he leveled off and began a gradual glide that curved and came back over the land behind the trailer. He was coming fast and he was getting lower all the time. He untucked his talons just before he touched the top of the bream pond, making a thin splash, and without actually slowing down much he flapped his wings and pulled back up, droplets of shiny water falling from the fat and still-flopping bluegill, little diamonds of just a wink of light as the eagle climbed with him, the long feathers gliding them through the air, until they became smaller and smaller and then flew away into the solid blue above the green line of trees that overlooked that part of Arkansas.