Fishing With RayAnne (13 page)

“Okay, a
worrywart
, or ACDC or whatever it is you are.” Dot wraps her arm around RayAnne’s waist and they look out over the surf with their heads together.

“Whatever I am,” RayAnne concedes, “I miss you already, Gran. Maybe I should stay a day or two longer.”

“Don’t be silly. You’ve been hiding out here long enough. You have an important job now. Aren’t they sending you to that lake in the tundra? So go do it. I’ve packed cookies into your luggage.”

“Snickerdoodles?”

“See? Everything’s gonna be all right.”

S
IX

“Meet Missy Fox.”

“Wow, look what I caught!” Missy is standing in the stern, grinning ear to ear while holding an eight-pound walleye, trophy-size. At thirty inches, it’s longer than Missy’s torso. She hoists it higher for the camera, turning it this way and that to show angles. “I can’t believe this! I’ve never caught a fish!”

RayAnne is laughing. “Talk about beginner’s luck!”

Given her profession, Missy is not at all what RayAnne had expected. Open-faced and freckled, with strawberry-blond hair pulled tight in a scrunchie, looking closer to twenty than forty. With her compact frame, she could be a gymnast. She makes kissing motions at the fish’s mouth and gives it one last admiring look before releasing it back into the dark water on the lee side of Penelope. Earlier, RayAnne had stopped the taping a few moments after the catch to take photos and measurements that Missy might take to a taxidermist to have a graphite model made.

RayAnne turns to the camera. “
That
was one lucky fish. Missy’s typical prey don’t get off so easily—Missy Fox is a bounty hunter. She tracks down deadbeat dads for nonpayment of child support and hunts down abusive husbands that have active warrants for arrest.”

Missy is casually wiping fish slime from her fingers onto her sweatshirt. “Well, agencies don’t like the term ‘deadbeat dad’ since it’s not PC. ‘NCP’ is what they use. Noncustodial parent. It’s rare, but once in a blue moon, it
is
a mom who ducks out on child support.”

“Mothers?”

“Rare, like I said—the few moms we do deal with usually have some emotional issues or substance addictions messing up their maternal abilities, and most have some abuse in their own pasts. Ninety-nine percent of NCPs are men, and a surprising number are employed, law-abiding, pay all their other bills, but just won’t cough up for their own kid’s welfare. Did you know that in most states, a person’s credit rating isn’t even affected by nonpayment of child maintenance?”

“Really? So, it’s not always like they don’t have the money?”

“Honey, some of these guys have seven-figure incomes, but the swine just aren’t willing to pony up.”

Swine.
A term Dot might use. RayAnne looks up from her task of impaling a squirming leech onto a double hook. “What kinds of excuses do these dads come up with?”

Missy, watching the leech procedure, tries the same with her own. “With most nutcups—sorry,
NCPs
—it’s sheer selfishness, or they’re out to punish the ex, or just don’t give a rat’s . . . backside. It’s the kids who suffer. What I do is less about snagging the dads as it is about helping the kids.”

RayAnne quickly touches the feed in her ear. “I’m sure there are plenty of struggling parents watching who can relate to this story, and we’ll be listing a number of organizations and links on our website, including Missy’s agency, Fox Hunt, which has recently reached a milestone of having collected twenty million dollars in child maintenance.” She turns to Missy. “The alias,
Fox
. . . ?”

“Yeah. Missy Fox, a total stripper’s name—it’s my ace in the hole. When I start nosing around for some guy and his coworkers or drinking buddies see the name on my pink business card, they can’t give me phone numbers or addresses fast enough. Some have even offered to
drive
me to the NCP’s house.” Missy, having given up on her leech, hands it over. “Here, you seem to know how to handle these.”

“What got you started?”

“My own dad took off when I was ten. My mom was a drunk. My brothers and I barely made it through high school.”

She says it so matter-of-factly. RayAnne stops weaving Missy’s leech and looks intently at her. “I suppose plenty of us grew up in failing families and are scared to think of foisting that baggage onto the next generation?”

“Happens all the time, continuing the cycle.” Missy accepts the baited hook and casts her line. “There should be some program like Al-Anon for bad parenting, you know, instead of dealing with alcoholics.”

“Parents that are children?” RayAnne asks. “How about Adult Children of Adult Children?”

Missy snorts. “Or Adult Children of Dickheads.”

As a soft rain begins to pitter down, both women raise their faces to it, closing their eyes. After a beat, RayAnne turns to the lens and the camera crew beyond, who are trying to shield their equipment and gesturing for her to wrap. “After this word from our underwriter, we’ll finish our conversation with Missy back on dry land.”

Missy reels in her line while blinking wet lashes. “This is so fun.”

On the way back to the dock, RayAnne wonders if Missy would like to join her in the RV later for a glass of wine. Her temporary home is now parked and hooked up, the Tiffany end thankfully backed into a clump of alder. There might be a bottle of wine around somewhere. She’s never been very good at making friends, but, as Ky often reminds her, she never really tries.

RayAnne wakes as the last raindrops from the storm drip from the pines, hitting the roof of the motor home in nickel-sized splats. In between is the silence that is one of the best features of being on Location. They can all thank Cassi for scouting it; she has relatives in the area and spent summers on the lake as a kid, so she knows a dozen walleye holes that her late great-grandmother had fished and kept secret from everyone but Cassi. Apparently one of the sponsors has a cabin nearby as well, which helped green-light the choice. Location is leased from the owner of the decommissioned resort next door, its mailbox lettered with once-red paint: “Vacationland.” At first, most of the crew and staff complained mightily about the distance from Minneapolis, but after a week of unrivaled fishing and stunning views, they clammed up. For the next twelve weeks, this bit of the Northwoods will be home to
Fishing
: a little village of RVs and pop-up campers and tents, droning generators and mounds of equipment, satellite dishes, Porta-Potties, a tent kitchen, and the catering truck that arrives each dawn and leaves after dinner.

The nearest town is Hatchet Inlet, just miles from the border in an area of the state Big Rick calls North Armpit and the crew simply refer to as BumFuck. RayAnne has explored the lake with DNR maps, using her depth finder and Garmin to chart Cassi’s best fishing spots, trolling the shores for picturesque spots to film and fish.

This morning the surface of the bay on Little Hatchet Lake is calm as a sheet of foil, unlike the day before, when it was sloshing with whitecaps by the time she and Missy Fox docked. Their glass of cheer never materialized—Missy had to leave right after taping, hot on the trail of another “tool,” this one owing tens of thousands in support for four daughters, all under ten years old.

It’s safe to say RayAnne’s not keen on interviewing that afternoon’s guest, Mary Hawley, the psychologist featured in a documentary about juvenile psychopaths,
Why Does Jennifer Kill?
, which RayAnne dutifully watched on her laptop the night before, taking notes, then dragging the scenes along into her sleep. Thankfully, the storm woke her just as the senior prom in her dream was about to commence, and a flash of lightning illuminated the interior of the motor home, alerting her to the presence of not one but two silently frantic bats that had somehow squeezed inside to avoid the deluge. Had anyone been around in the predawn, they’d have been in for some cheap entertainment watching RayAnne dodge and flounder with every light blazing, casting her beach towel like a salmon net, determined to capture and liberate the bats and redeem at least part of her choppy night. If she hadn’t been on edge already, the searing lightning and ripping bursts of thunder set the perfect stage for thoughts of pimply murderers lurking among the pines with cleavers. RayAnne didn’t normally mind storms, but the RV was a large metal object smack in the middle of majestically tall pines, each a potential conduit for bolts of death.

Once the bats were finally trapped and ushered out, she’d crawled back under the covers—only to hear her phone alarm begin beeping and vibrating itself across her nightstand, landing on the carpet with a thud.

Though it’s not yet five a.m., the sky is light—July in the north, with their latitude not so far from the border and the tundra beyond—the subarctic midnight sun only a few hundred miles away. RayAnne bangs and stubs her way from bed to the little bathroom, then to the little kitchen to make coffee, yawning nonstop. After the high ceilings of her townhouse, she feels large and unwieldy in the RV, as if she’s suddenly grown extra elbows and knees. But she’s getting used to it, and after a week with the windows wide, the toxic new-carpet smell is fading under a mix of campfire smoke, the aerosol sting of OFF!, pine chaff, and fresh air shearing down from Canada. So much
daylight
.

Carrying her coffee and a towel down to Penelope, she’s anxious to see what the rain might have wrought on the docks and her boat. Hurrying, she stumbles on a tree root, coffee trickling down the knee of her chinos.

“Tarnation!”
Curses and oaths still sometimes erupt in the crotchety voice of Jack Crabb. RayAnne once read that Dustin Hoffman prepared to play the part of one-hundred-fifteen-year-old Jack by screaming in his dressing room beforehand for a solid hour—something she could easily manage herself some days. In more contemplative moments, she might hear the voice of Old Lodge Skins in her head. When feeling particularly coquettish (which admittedly was not often) thoughts come in the lisp of Little Horse, the gay Human Being who offers to become Little Big Man’s wife.

At the dock, RayAnne stops in her tracks. To her dismay, someone has not only unsnapped Penelope’s vinyl cover but has eased her from the slip—the same someone who’s now standing at the helm with his back to RayAnne, wiping spots from Penelope’s windscreen.

By the end of the first season, the crew had come to treat RayAnne less like a Mandy and more like one of them—mainly because she’d gotten to know them and earned some respect by taking time to learn each crew member’s duties, the basics of their equipment, and how
this
relates to
that
. They’re in this together, after all, isolated as they are up in BumFuck. While she’s still a little freaked by the amount of electrical cables lying coiled like cobras over the docks so near water, she’s learned what powers what, how the monitors and generators and lights work, and where most of the breakers are. She’s careful to step out of the way of the crew’s choreographed routines—she does her part; they do theirs.

All she has asked of them is that they leave Penelope exclusively in her care. The boat is her responsibility, her domain. And now some interloper has not only powered up Penelope, he’s all over her, rubbing at her dashboard like he owns her.

Most of the crew have heard the condensed version of how RayAnne found Penelope, then towed the wreck fifteen hundred miles to Ogunquit, Maine, where a reclusive restorer took nearly two years to bring her back from the brink, necessitating a hefty loan she reckons will be paid off sometime between clearing up her student loans and becoming eligible for Medicare.

RayAnne juts her chin at the trespasser’s back.

“Ex
cuse
me?” She’s barely able to keep the growl from her voice. “You’re in my
boat
, mister.” She sounds comically like Caroline Crabb, Jack’s gun-slinging sister.

The man turns, startled. Once recovered, he says, “Oh, hey. Hi.”

The guy from the parking lot—the Rod & Gun Expo guy. Again. His name wells up from nowhere, RayAnne thinking,
Sure,
now
I remember.
She’s able to make his name sound like an accusation: “Hal? It
is
Hal, right?”

The chamois in his hand drops to his side. He seems as surprised as she is and obviously unaware he’s breached some protocol. “Ah. Yes.
Yeah.
RayAnne, am I . . . ?”

“In my boat? Yes.”

“Oh.” He folds the chamois and lays it on the seat exactly as RayAnne had left it. “Sorry. It was quite a downpour last night and I wanted to check everything was okay.” When he hops up to the dock, RayAnne sees he’s barefoot, having left his wet sneakers on the dock. At least he’s a courteous trespasser.