pacing the floor and sitting in the chair and lying on my back on the bed with my hands behind my head, smoking and not drinking anything but water. I had the little thirteen-inch TV set turned on for company but with the sound off so I wouldn’t miss hearing a car pull up to one of the other cabins, and if I didn’t go out and skip stones I was going to turn fishy like the natives. I got as far as the door, then went back and took the Smith & Wesson Chiefs Special out of my bag and snapped the holster onto my belt behind my right hip. I almost hadn’t packed it; I’d thought if a man couldn’t catch his limit without artillery support he might as well stay home and eat Mrs. Paul’s. That was before I knew about the guest in Cabin Five. I untucked my polo shirt and let the tail fall over the rubber grip.
The air was chilly coming off the lake. In a half hour or so I’d be able to see my breath. I pulled a zipfront jacket out of the car and put it on. The pickup was still there and so was the old van. Vehicles tend to resemble their owners. I could imagine the old woman in fisherman’s gear driving the van, but the Yankees rooter didn’t match up with the truck and camper any way I tried to do it. He was strictly high performance and low clearance, bucket seats and twelve cylinders or better to open. I’d taken note of the number on the license plate, but if it didn’t belong to a rental or a borrow job I was a sleuth without instincts. Maybe he didn’t have a gun. Maybe his left arm was in a cast and it embarrassed him. Except he wasn’t the getting-embarrassed type, any more than he was the type to throw a sleeping bag into the back of a camper and take off north of 110th Street. And I still knew him from somewhere.
A hollow footpath worn down through the grass led to the redwood dock a hundred feet behind the motel. I walked out to the end and leaned on a painted piling and watched some gulls swooping at water-striders on the lake’s surface, wrinkling it like a silk flag in a light wind. When they missed they cried, the sound like the creak of an old hasp. A lone fisherman in a mackinaw and an old slouch hat stood on the opposite shore, waggling a fly rod in the approved four-count rhythm between ten and two o’clock, or so I supposed; I’m a worm-drowner myself and never found the knack. I watched him for a couple of minutes before I realized it might be Eugene Booth I was looking at. My binoculars were in the car and from that distance I couldn’t tell if it was a man in his seventies or a boy fourteen years old. Whoever he was, he was good. The red sun caught his wet line in a beautiful glittering spiral curve twelve feet above his head as he swung it like a lariat, feeding it by hand, and I could have watched until sundown without caring who he was if I hadn’t heard a car door slam a hundred feet behind me.
I trotted back just in time to see a man fumble a big square box into Cabin Four, two doors down from mine, and kick the door shut. I had an impression of gray hair and glasses and a thick build in work twills, high-top shoes with metal hooks. Parked in front of the cabin was a twenty-year-old Plymouth, mint green with a white vinyl top. The plate matched with the registration I’d gotten from Lansing. The fisherman was home from the sea.
I glanced toward Five, just to see if the pickup was still there. It was, and as I looked, a movement in the window of the cabin attracted my attention. It was the shade sliding back into place.
12
I went back into Two. I wanted to wait for dark before I made my move. I wasn’t sure why, unless it was habit. If it weren’t for Cabin Five I’d have been knocking on Four as soon as the door closed.
The television was still playing without sound. A teenage local anchorman mouthed words off a TelePrompTer, a graphic showing behind him of a gun clamped in a Popeye fist. I switched off the set. There were more than enough guns at the Angler’s Inn that day.
The air was chilly coming off the lake. In a half hour or so I’d be able to see my breath. I pulled a zipfront jacket out of the car and put it on. The pickup was still there and so was the old van. Vehicles tend to resemble their owners. I could imagine the old woman in fisherman’s gear driving the van, but the Yankees rooter didn’t match up with the truck and camper any way I tried to do it. He was strictly high performance and low clearance, bucket seats and twelve cylinders or better to open. I’d taken note of the number on the license plate, but if it didn’t belong to a rental or a borrow job I was a sleuth without instincts. Maybe he didn’t have a gun. Maybe his left arm was in a cast and it embarrassed him. Except he wasn’t the getting-embarrassed type, any more than he was the type to throw a sleeping bag into the back of a camper and take off north of 110th Street. And I still knew him from somewhere.
A hollow footpath worn down through the grass led to the redwood dock a hundred feet behind the motel. I walked out to the end and leaned on a painted piling and watched some gulls swooping at water-striders on the lake’s surface, wrinkling it like a silk flag in a light wind. When they missed they cried, the sound like the creak of an old hasp. A lone fisherman in a mackinaw and an old slouch hat stood on the opposite shore, waggling a fly rod in the approved four-count rhythm between ten and two o’clock, or so I supposed; I’m a worm-drowner myself and never found the knack. I watched him for a couple of minutes before I realized it might be Eugene Booth I was looking at. My binoculars were in the car and from that distance I couldn’t tell if it was a man in his seventies or a boy fourteen years old. Whoever he was, he was good. The red sun caught his wet line in a beautiful glittering spiral curve twelve feet above his head as he swung it like a lariat, feeding it by hand, and I could have watched until sundown without caring who he was if I hadn’t heard a car door slam a hundred feet behind me.
I trotted back just in time to see a man fumble a big square box into Cabin Four, two doors down from mine, and kick the door shut. I had an impression of gray hair and glasses and a thick build in work twills, high-top shoes with metal hooks. Parked in front of the cabin was a twenty-year-old Plymouth, mint green with a white vinyl top. The plate matched with the registration I’d gotten from Lansing. The fisherman was home from the sea.
I glanced toward Five, just to see if the pickup was still there. It was, and as I looked, a movement in the window of the cabin attracted my attention. It was the shade sliding back into place.
12
I went back into Two. I wanted to wait for dark before I made my move. I wasn’t sure why, unless it was habit. If it weren’t for Cabin Five I’d have been knocking on Four as soon as the door closed.
The television was still playing without sound. A teenage local anchorman mouthed words off a TelePrompTer, a graphic showing behind him of a gun clamped in a Popeye fist. I switched off the set. There were more than enough guns at the Angler’s Inn that day.
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