water. The planking smells of salt and weed and blood. He can hear the creak of the oars against their locks and the slow and rhythmic hiss of his brother’s line cast out, drawn in, and then cast outagain. The waves slap against the hull. He looks up at the sky. It is a perfect sky. Endless. Blue. Domed like the inside of a robin’s egg.
The shadow of his brother’s arm breaks across his hips. It startles him: the elbow hooked scythe-like, the knob of Wes’s hand gripping the rod, and Jake realizes that the boat has begun to edge north under the sun. The shadow of the arm snaps out again, extending smooth and long as the line is released. Back and forth, the arm cuts across Jake’s body, curling, lengthening, then curling in again, and it is as if the shadow is a solitary thing, divorced from weight or body.
The current has begun to shift. He can feel the slackening of the tide through the plank floor, the turning toward the flood. The nose of the boat pulls around. Water runs into his ears, filling them with a hollow purling sound. His brother will have more luck now. The fish will begin to run in the slack the same way they begin to feed, ravenous, at dawn. Jake knows it is the change that matters. The change from dark to light, the change from one tide into the next.
He closes his eyes. He can feel the white sun eat the corners of his face, the shallow skin around his lids. It bleaches his lips until they crack, and it occurs to him, lying there, that the world men walk through is the world men dream. They stretch their lives into long journeys of barely lit roads, corners, vagabond turns. He thinks of his mother buried in the small graveyard south of Central Village and of his father’s boat that returned on its own into shore. He had known only the coolness between them, and yet there was something—at one point there must have been something—a moment that had burned enough to draw them in to one another. And it strikes him that love is the only thing that is truly wild. It cannot be grasped or built or made and yet, in the end, it is the seed that is always left over.
“Got ’er,” Wes shouts. He kicks Jake in the shoulder. “Get yourself up, she’s a weight.”
The rod tip hooks down hard to the surface. Wes jerks it, gives slack to the line, then plays it left and reels in. “Get the gaff,” he says as he draws the fish against the gunwale. Her tail slaps at the surface, her nose slamming hard into the hull as she tries to swim herself loose,back down into the shadow. As Wes draws the line tight, Jake slips the gaff hook under the gill of the fish, and together they lift her over the side. She is tremendous. Her body is huge and old and marked with scars, but the skin shimmers, still wet, steel blue and green with that queer iridescence that a fish will only keep for several minutes once she has been exposed to air. Jake can see the rim of fresh blood along her gill.
Wes sets the rod down. He kneels on the floor of the boat and holds her body down with one hand. The tail beats against the boards, her jaw snapping at his wrist. He holds her at the throat to keep her from biting. Drops of water cling to the fine pale hairs along his forearm and glimmer there, brilliant with the salt and fish oil in the sunlight. He taps her flank with the tip of the knife. Her belly is huge, stone-hard and swollen.
“Pig’s been feeding.”
Jake doesn’t answer.
Wes cuts into the head and the body goes flat. Her color has already begun to dull. With the edge of the knife, he scales both sides of her, working against the root. Then he dips the blade into the throat and, in one swift motion, slivers her open from gill to tail. Her guts are crammed with silversides. They spill out, half-chewed. A few have been swallowed whole and the bodies are still intact. One is still alive. Tiny—a childfish—flipping through the mass of the rest. Its small mouth gasps, the eye round and unblinking, rimmed with a perfect
The shadow of his brother’s arm breaks across his hips. It startles him: the elbow hooked scythe-like, the knob of Wes’s hand gripping the rod, and Jake realizes that the boat has begun to edge north under the sun. The shadow of the arm snaps out again, extending smooth and long as the line is released. Back and forth, the arm cuts across Jake’s body, curling, lengthening, then curling in again, and it is as if the shadow is a solitary thing, divorced from weight or body.
The current has begun to shift. He can feel the slackening of the tide through the plank floor, the turning toward the flood. The nose of the boat pulls around. Water runs into his ears, filling them with a hollow purling sound. His brother will have more luck now. The fish will begin to run in the slack the same way they begin to feed, ravenous, at dawn. Jake knows it is the change that matters. The change from dark to light, the change from one tide into the next.
He closes his eyes. He can feel the white sun eat the corners of his face, the shallow skin around his lids. It bleaches his lips until they crack, and it occurs to him, lying there, that the world men walk through is the world men dream. They stretch their lives into long journeys of barely lit roads, corners, vagabond turns. He thinks of his mother buried in the small graveyard south of Central Village and of his father’s boat that returned on its own into shore. He had known only the coolness between them, and yet there was something—at one point there must have been something—a moment that had burned enough to draw them in to one another. And it strikes him that love is the only thing that is truly wild. It cannot be grasped or built or made and yet, in the end, it is the seed that is always left over.
“Got ’er,” Wes shouts. He kicks Jake in the shoulder. “Get yourself up, she’s a weight.”
The rod tip hooks down hard to the surface. Wes jerks it, gives slack to the line, then plays it left and reels in. “Get the gaff,” he says as he draws the fish against the gunwale. Her tail slaps at the surface, her nose slamming hard into the hull as she tries to swim herself loose,back down into the shadow. As Wes draws the line tight, Jake slips the gaff hook under the gill of the fish, and together they lift her over the side. She is tremendous. Her body is huge and old and marked with scars, but the skin shimmers, still wet, steel blue and green with that queer iridescence that a fish will only keep for several minutes once she has been exposed to air. Jake can see the rim of fresh blood along her gill.
Wes sets the rod down. He kneels on the floor of the boat and holds her body down with one hand. The tail beats against the boards, her jaw snapping at his wrist. He holds her at the throat to keep her from biting. Drops of water cling to the fine pale hairs along his forearm and glimmer there, brilliant with the salt and fish oil in the sunlight. He taps her flank with the tip of the knife. Her belly is huge, stone-hard and swollen.
“Pig’s been feeding.”
Jake doesn’t answer.
Wes cuts into the head and the body goes flat. Her color has already begun to dull. With the edge of the knife, he scales both sides of her, working against the root. Then he dips the blade into the throat and, in one swift motion, slivers her open from gill to tail. Her guts are crammed with silversides. They spill out, half-chewed. A few have been swallowed whole and the bodies are still intact. One is still alive. Tiny—a childfish—flipping through the mass of the rest. Its small mouth gasps, the eye round and unblinking, rimmed with a perfect
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