Rainbow's End by James M. Cain Page A

to have bait, and we can’t in the dead of the night start digging for worms.”
    â€œAren’t shrimp good enough?”
    â€œHow do you catch them ?”
    â€œWith a can opener.”
    â€œYou goof.”
    We laughed and went up the path to the house. I found the handline in the porch closet and the shrimp in the kitchen. As soon as I’d opened the can, I said: “OK, we’re in business, but I warn you right now that fishing’s bad for that dress, that beautiful dress Mr. York bought you.”
    â€œI’ll put on your pants.”
    â€œThen OK.”
    We went in the den where both of us changed our clothes, putting on something rough. We went to the back porch again, picked up the line and bait, and went down again to the river. I showed her how to bait up and said: “You can be the fisherman. I’ll row the boat. Now what do you want to catch?”
    â€œWhich is the biggest?”
    â€œCarp.”
    â€œThen I want me a carp.”
    â€œHe’s big and fat, but the flavor’s not too good. He’s what’s used for gefilte fish.”
    â€œWell, 10 million Jews can’t be wrong.”
    â€œOn carp, they could be.”
    â€œHe’s big?”
    â€œOh, big and fat and thick.”
    â€œI want carp.”
    â€œThen we’ll go where carp is.”
    I explained that pike and muskalong like it out in the middle, catfish down on the bottom, but carp up in the shallows, “so that’s where we’ll go after him.” On the near side, above my landing, was a creek that had no name, for the reason that it wasn’t there except in flood time. But it was flood time now, and I had an idea that carp might like it. So I rowed over, past the snag, past the lower end of the island, and on up to the creek mouth. Jill had never fished before, and I explained what she should do—drop the line overboard, let it run till she felt it touch bottom, then pull it up a few inches, to leave the baited hook above the mud, where the fish would swim to feed. So she reached in the can for a shrimp, baited the hook, and dropped the line overboard. She had hardly pulled it off bottom when she gave a little squeal: “Oh! It twitched! I could feel it! It was a nibble!” But I had her pull in, and of course her hook was bare. We baited the hook and she tried again. Then 10 or 12 feet away, a flash of silver showed, but a big flash, to the sound of a loud flop. “Dave!” she yelped. “One is out there, a great big one. I could see him!” She pulled in, checked that her hook was still baited, and then started swinging it around, I suppose to throw it out where she’d seen the fish. But in mortal terror I crouched down in the boat, yelling, “Don’t do that! Stop it! Stop whirling that hook around! Do you want it to rip out my eye?”
    She hadn’t thought of that.
    But the tree saved her the trouble, the one we were pulled in beside, a big white sycamore sticking out of the water just off our bow. Ordinarily it was on land, but with the river in flood, the water had risen around it, so the boat was almost touching it, and the hook, where she’d whirled it around, had snagged in the tree, so we wouldn’t be catching fish until we got it out. I told her: “First, sit down. Sit down, keep still, and stop hollering.”
    She did.
    â€œNow, take hold of me and move from the stern to the bow. Don’t stand up— or you could go overboard.” To trim the boat, I moved from the cross-seat, where I was, to the stern, where she had been. “Now wait till I snug the boat in, jam it against the tree, and hold it tight with the oar.”
    She did.
    I bumped the bow to the tree, then held it tight by shoving an oar to the bottom. The water at that point was no more than two feet deep, so it made as firm a fix as is possible with such a boat.
    â€œNow reach as well as you can without standing up and try