A treacherous bridge of old timbers and planks spanned a ditch of black stagnant water and he rattled over it quickly, a trifle uneasy at the nail heads sticking up. Somebody had dropped a car through it once, some drunk who had to be winched out with a dozer. He turned right where the road forked and went beside a cotton patch and a wooden pen that sat listing to one side, made of small logs, the spaces chinked with mud and raw cotton and almost covered with briars and honeysuckle vines. Behind it loomed the big levee of the lake, a mile long, high with weeds, straight as a plumb line across the line of his vision. It was very green in the sun and he turned to the right, following the trail through the tall grass, easing along now because he couldn't see what holes there might be. The grade was gradual and it had gravel on it and the car climbed it easily. At the top where it leveled off he was in timber again and he drove through it and looked out over the water, the clean black expanse of it, tiny waves riffling over the surface and the far side dotted with cypress trees that towered into the sky, their spiky limbs furred a deep green, and beyond that small clouds that hung unmoving in a pale blue void. The house came into view and he pulled up in the yard and parked beside a new Ford pickup sitting there. A man more than twice his age was on the front porch cooking split chickens on a grill. There was a bottle of beer beside his foot and Glen got out and shut the door,
walked over toward the porch.
“Well look here,” the man said, and got up and came down the steps. Glen grinned and went up with his hand out and took the one that was offered. He squeezed hard but not as hard as the hand that shook his.
“Looks like I got here just in time,” he said. “How you doing, Brother Roy?”
“I'm doing all right. You hungry? I got some chicken on here. You want a beer?”
They climbed the steps together and Glen looked at the grill. The chickens were slathered with a red sauce and little droplets of reddish water ran from the holes that had been pierced in their skins.
“Hell yeah,” he said.
“Well just grab you a seat. I'll go in here and get you one.”
“All right.”
He sat down in a kitchen chair and turned it sideways. He looked out over the lake. There were bluffs of hardwood timber above the east side and the trees stood mirrored in a small cove where the land came out and formed a spot protected from the wind. He could see two boats tied up on the far bank. Just looking at the lake made him feel better. Roy didn't own it; he just took care of it for a rich man who rarely visited. There were five hundred acres to hunt on. In pens at the back lived Llewelyn setters and Roy was free to run them on birds, which were in abundance in the fields below the levee. He killed three or four deer every year and there were wild hogs in the woods. The lake was heavily stocked with crappie, bass, catfish.
Roy came back out with a dripping Budweiser bottle and handed it to him already opened.
“Thanks a lot, Roy. I just thought I'd come up here and see if you's home.”
His friend sat back down and took up his long-handled fork and his
own beer again. Smoke was rising up to the porch rafters, where it flattened and rolled out from under the edge of the roof.
“Well I'm glad you did. I heard you was gettin out. Thought you might come by. I won't ask you how it was.”
“Well,” he said, and took a drink of his beer. It was very cold and slightly bitter. He felt all his nerves unwinding, something smoothing out within himself. He lit a cigarette and held the beer between his knees as he leaned forward. “You still got it made, looks like.”
Roy poked at the chicken and it sizzled on the grill.
“Aw yeah. Mr. Duvall came out about two weeks ago, stayed two days.”
“He have another one of those good-looking women with him?”
“Shoot. You ought to seen this one. Made Marilyn Monroe look like a milk cow. I don't see how he stands it.”
“He's pretty old, ain't he?”
“Yep. It don't slow him down none I don't reckon though. He was happy with everything. Told me I's doing a good job. I don't do nothin. Set out here and fish and hunt and drink beer.”
Glen lifted his beer and took a long swallow. When he lowered it he said, “You ever get tired of it, tell him I want to put my application in.”
They both smiled at that. Roy turned the chicken over and set his beer back on the porch. “How's your daddy?”
Glen paused for a moment, thinking about what he had in his pocket. Thought of his mother's dresses. Those old pictures.
“He's all right I guess. I've seen him a few times.”
Roy nodded and picked up a Pepsi bottle filled with water and sprinkled droplets over the flames that were climbing up through the wire rack the chicken was laid on. The flames hissed and receded.
“I ain't seen him in a while. He still fish like he used to?”
“I guess. I guess he does. He always did.”
“He loves it about as good as anybody I've ever seen. You see him
again, tell him I said hi, okay?”
“I'll tell him.”
Roy sat there for a bit, looking at the birds. He lifted his eyes toward the lake and then turned back to Glen.
“I hate it about everything, Glen. I didn't come to the jail to see you I know. Didn't want to see you in there like that. I hope you understand about that.”
“I do. I'm glad you didn't.”
Later Roy brought out some paper plates and forks and a bag of potato chips and they ate on the front porch, looking out over the water, marking where fish leaped and dimpled small pools. When the sun began to lower in the sky they loaded a cooler into the pickup and drove across the levee and put the rods and reels and the beer into one of the boats and sculled out along the edge of the hardwood bluff, under the trees that reached shadows out into the water. Glen took off his shirt and took a great joy in the wind and the sunlight on his skin. In the little cove they cast their lures beside a log that lay in the water and the water swirled around Glen's lure and the rod bowed hard.
“Oh shit,” he said.
A green body flashed out there and the drag screamed as the fish peeled off line. It made one run toward the boat and the rod bent nearly double. Glen thought the line would surely break. But it held and the fish made hard circles deep in the water. Roy had put his rod down to watch. The fish pulled so hard that the little boat turned and moved.
“Damn, Glen. I knew they was some big ones in here.”
Glen didn't say anything. He kept the rod tip up and the old familiar pleasure came back into him like those distant mornings on the river with his old man. He smiled now, feeling the fish weaken.
“Watch him, now, he's liable to jump.”
He did jump. He leaped completely free of the water, an enormous chunk of shining living flesh, wet scales and wildly bowing body, rattling the plug in his head so hard they could hear the hooks shaking in their fasteners. He landed sideways with a big splash and water erupted and shot into the boat. Glen felt a drop land on his bottom lip. But he thought he had him now. The circles were smaller and he kept coming to the top but he never did jump again. Glen leaned forward and backward, taking in the line, and now he could see the fish and the plug in his mouth as he swam back and forth in front of the boat.
“Good God, what a fish, Glen.”
“You got a net?”
“It's at the house. I didn't think to bring it.”
“That's all right.”
Roy knelt in the boat and Glen towed the fish closer. Ten feet. Six feet. It was swimming slowly but he knew it could make another surge. Only when it turned on its side did he know that it was whipped. He lifted hard on the rod and Roy reached and caught it by the underjaw and pulled it dripping from the water and laid it gently in the bottom of the boat. It flopped around some at first but then it lay there heaving, the red gills exposed, the tail wider than Glen's hand. He reached to it and took the plug from its jaw. One hook had held it. For a few moments they just looked at it.
“How much you think?” Glen said.
“God, I don't know. Ten pounds maybe? I never seen one this big. We got to take it somewhere and try to weigh it.”
Glen looked up. He saw the trees above the water and the way the wind was moving through the branches. He looked at the dark water and the small ripples that lapped at the bank. He looked at a hawk soaring lazily by the cypresses on the other side of the lake, the beds of water
lilies floating in their mats of stems.
“You know who'd get a kick out of this?”
“Who's that, Glen?”
“My daddy. I lost one about this big when I was ten and he like to never got over it.”
“Well, shit, carry it home and show it to him. Let me find that stringer.”
Roy started to open his tackle box but Glen told him to hold it. Roy looked up at him. “What?”
“Let's turn him loose.”
“Turn him loose? Hell, Glen, lot of people fish all their lives and don't never catch a fish like this. You may have the state record here. You can't turn him loose.”
The fish lay in the bottom of the boat, the gill plates rising and falling. His dark green color was starting to fade under the merciless sun.
“I just don't want to kill him,” Glen said. “He never done nothin to me.”
Roy leaned back on the boat seat and put his hands down beside him. He looked at the fish. “I don't understand what you're talkin about, Glen.”
There wasn't much time to explain it. The fish would die if he wasn't put back in the water soon. “It's like this. I never killed a deer that I didn't wish was still alive after I looked at it. This thing's too pretty to kill. I'd rather have him back in here instead of hung up on some wall.”
Roy nodded, looking down at the thing. “He's pretty.”
“Let's turn him loose, then.”
“All right.”
Glen still had the rod in his hand and now he reeled the lure in to the tip and laid it aside. He knelt in the boat and got one hand under the belly of the fish and held its head by the lower jaw and eased it over the
side and immersed it in the water. It lay there breathing weakly and he watched its eyes. He released it. It turned slowly on its side, the gills working, then with one enormous spasm of its tail it righted itself and vanished into the deep gloom of the water. He knelt there looking after where it had gone.
“You're a good man, Glen,” Roy said to him.
“No I ain't,” he said to the water.
A couple of cold beers were still in the icebox, left over from Sunday night. Virgil hobbled back there after Bobby left and got one and found an opener. He dropped the cap on the table and looked at the whiskey sitting there. The level of it was lower than what he remembered. In the old days if he left it out Emma would water it down while he was drunk. He stood there looking at it for a minute, then set the beer down and picked it up. It was an inch or so lower. He wondered if Glen had been by. He didn't know who else would come into his house and drink his whiskey. It didn't matter. He didn't need it anyway. He just liked it was all.
His ribs were still hurting but the doctor had given him some little red pills for pain. He set the whiskey down and pulled the plastic bottle from his pocket and washed two of them down with a couple of swallows of beer. Then he walked slowly back up to the front room and eased himself down onto the bed, pulled a chair closer and set the beer on it, put his ashtray on it, then started taking off his socks. After he got them off he pulled a couple of pillows together and lay back against the headboard. The window was open and a small breeze was drifting into the room. He hated to be laid up. The damn well. No water in the house. Just a hell of a mess. He didn't want to call Puppy and worry him with it. He
was afraid that W.G. might have fired him over all this. But he hoped he hadn't. He started to get up and call him, but it seemed too much trouble. And he might be back at work anyway. He could always do it later. Right now he just wanted to rest.
The puppy was whining out on the porch.
“Settle down,” he called to it. He heard it go down the steps and into the yard. It was probably going around back so it could get in through the screen door. He needed to fix that one of these days. He couldn't do anything without his car, couldn't get to town to get anything. He hated to worry Puppy about it.
The beer was dripping water onto the chair and he reached up painfully and got it, leaned back, held it against his belly. He guessed he was lucky he hadn't hurt himself any worse than he had. Little son of a bitch. Saying things like that. But still hurt over his kid. In a way he didn't blame him for being the way he was. He was never going to get over it. There was no way he could. Not if you got to thinking about how things could have turned out. Virgil could see that even though none of it was his fault, Ed Hall somehow held him responsible. Probably for nothing more than bringing Glen into the world. You couldn't reason with people when they got to thinking like that.
All that thinking wearied him even more, so he just rested on his bed, listening to the puppy scratch at the back door. And it was only a little while before he walked into the front room and came up next to the bed. Virgil reached a hand out and patted him on the lead.
“I'm laid up, little buddy,” he said. “Got my damn ass whipped.” The puppy sniffed up and down Virgil's legs, wagging his tail, as if in agreement.
“Don't you take a shit in this house. I ain't up to cleaning it up today.”
The puppy walked to the window and looked out. Virgil eased back and sipped his beer. He wished he had the hunting magazine to read. But
it would be too much trouble to go out and get it. Best to just lay here and rest. He felt old, and his bones were tired.
He woke to soft knocking on the screen door, a timid voice calling his name. The puppy was standing at the door to the hall, looking out inquisitively to the porch. Part of his beer had spilled against him and he set it on the chair.