The Middle of Somewhere (12 page)

“Bait?”

“Fish don't go for hooks because they're so nice and shiny. There has to be something juicy
on
the hook, like a worm or a grasshopper.”

The worms all seemed to be on vacation, and the few grasshoppers we found didn't want to be caught, so we settled for a piece of hamburger Gee found in the garbage. Then we walked down the nearest pier and threw out our line as far as it would go.

After a while, I said, “Maybe we have to keep throwing.” I pulled the line in, only to find the bait gone. Gee thought something ate it, but my guess was it just fell off. “We could try bologna. Or just wait until Pop comes back and ask him to—”

“Hey, look!” Gee yelled. “It's the windy-farm truck!”

He was pointing back toward the boat ramp, where a dusty blue-and-white pickup was backing down. An aluminum johnboat stuck out over the tailgate. I recognized the driver's John Deere cap first, then the boy under it.

He noticed us while sliding out his boat. “Hey.”

“What are you doing here?” I blurted.

He was nice enough not to say that he had as much right to be here as we did. “My aunt Melba's the supervisor. I come here to fish. Once or twice a week?”

Gee and I glanced at each other, then back at him. “You do?” I gave what I hoped was a fluttery sigh. “I always wanted to learn how to fish.”

His name was Howard Sayles, and his aunt's name was Melba McClintock, and we all agreed she was real nice. He'd be glad to take us out for an hour or so on his boat but didn't think there would be room for the dog. Gee volunteered to stay on shore, which was okay with me. Even though Kent Clark says you should be ready to accept a certain degree of risk, sharing a boat with a hyperactive kid and a paranoid dog is just asking for trouble. Howard loaded up his gear, then helped me aboard, handed me his second-best pole, and pushed away from the ramp. As he hopped in and turned the switch on the trolling motor, I warned Gee, “Be careful—and keep a sharp lookout.”

“Keep a lookout for what?” Howard asked as we buzzed out to deeper water.

I decided to level with him. “For our grandfather, in case he comes back early. We're not exactly supposed to have that dog. Pop ran him off a couple of days ago, but
Leo came along anyway.” Howard nodded, like he suspected as much. “Is that your truck?”

“Almost. I'm buying it from my dad. Since he got a new one last summer.”

“What does your dad do?”

“Oh, we farm,” he said, like it should have been obvious.
We
farm—I guess he earned that driver's license. As we swapped our life stories, I started to like the way he talked, even with all the pauses and question marks stuck in. His voice was calm and steady, not tense like my mother's or blustery like Pop's or chattery like Gee's. He was in eighth grade—just a grade ahead of me!

“How do you like it out here?” I asked.

“It's home. How do
you
like it?”

“Well… it's different.” Our trip so far hadn't made me a big Kansas fan, but I was reserving judgment until the end.

He grabbed a plastic crayon bucket and set it between his knees. When he pulled the lid off, my stomach lurched a little at the squirmy lump of worms inside. “So. Can you bait your own hook? Or not?”

Accept challenges
, I told myself. “Sure! I mean, show me?”

He pulled a worm out of the heap and stuck the hook in, kind of parallel to one end. Head end or tail end, what was the difference? Then I tried it, and after the little quiver my worm made when the hook went in, it wasn't bad.

“They don't feel it,” Howard said. “Not pain, anyway. This is the most fun they'll ever have.” He showed me how to make a cast, by pushing the button thingy on his reel
and flicking the rod with his wrist. The line flew out over the water.

“Looks like fun, all right.” I imagined his worm yelling “Yippee!” as it soared through the air and splashed into the lake.

It took a few tries for me to get all the steps together: push in, cast, let out, reel in. Meanwhile, Larry (that's what I named my worm) must have been having the time of his life. Trying to look cool and assured, I finally made a perfect cast, except that the line jerked behind me so hard it nearly pulled the rod out of my hand.

“What happened?” I gasped.

“You hooked my boat.” When I turned around, Howard was pulling the hook free from the aluminum rim and Larry had disappeared. I felt like taking a dive myself, but he just stuck on another worm and handed it back. “Good thing you didn't hook me.”

After a few minutes, I was casting out and reeling in like a pro, almost. The little motor on the boat kept us turning in wide, slow circles while Howard cast from one side and me from the other. After a while, he said, “Trade?” and we switched sides. He caught three perch and promised me the innards for Leo, but my line didn't get any action at all. It wasn't as boring as I'd thought, though. A late-afternoon breeze fanned ripples on the water, and every sound turned liquid. Once we'd slowed down to barely moving, it was like time itself thickened up and made the light and land and water as rich as cake batter.

We stayed within sight of the bank so I could keep an eye on Gee. By now he had stopped throwing sticks for
Leo and was trying to ride him instead. “Is he always like that?” Howard asked.

“Well, let me tell you …”

Once I got started, it was hard to stop telling: how Gee screamed for the first six months of his life and wouldn't stay still for the rest of it. How giving him a bottle was like trying to pin down an octopus using only one hand.

“When he started walking, the only way Mama could get anything done outside was to put him in a harness with a long leash and tie it to the clothesline. If she was inside, she tied the leash to an eye hook screwed into the living room floor. One time a social worker from the Division of Family Services came over because somebody reported that we kept Gee tied up. Of course, she didn't have the story straight—there was a lot of area he could reach, including the DFS lady's purse. After he opened it and dropped her car keys down the furnace grate and ate all her Digest-Tabs, she decided to leave us alone.

“When he was three, he figured out how to unbuckle the harness. When he was four, he climbed every chainlink fence in sight. Plus the water tower, the kiddie roller coaster at Six Flags, and … oh yeah, the rock wall at First National Bank. At five, he started kindergarten—three times with four different teachers. At six, he tripped the fire alarm at school, the smoke alarm at church, and the sprinkler system at my great-grandmother's nursing home.”

Howard gave a low whistle, duly impressed.

“Everybody says there's not a streak of meanness in him,” I went on. “He's just all streak, kind of like a Roman
candle with no—” Suddenly, the rod jerked in my hand. “What was that?”

“Well,” Howard said slowly, “maybe it's a fish.”

“What'll I do?”

He reached over and gave my line a quick, firm tug. “That'll set the hook. When you feel the line go slack, reel 'er in.”

That wasn't so easy; whatever was at the other end of the line sure didn't want to be caught. We seesawed back and forth until finally it broke the water, a flash of pure fight. “It's a largemouth bass!” Howard shouted. “Maybe four pounds!”

To me it looked
huge
. “You take it!” I thrust the pole at him.

Four pounds may not sound like a lot, but the fish was almost as long as my arm, and all muscle. It flopped so hard it might have flopped right out of the boat if Howard hadn't got a grip on it and worked the hook out. “He's a beauty. Got a name for him, too?”

I grinned. “Dinner.”

When I noticed Gee starting to teach Leo how to chase cars, we headed back to the bank with a string of perch and my world-class bass trailing behind. It was turning out to be a perfect day—even for Leo, who got a snack of fish guts and livers when Howard showed me how to clean and scale my catch.

Howard told me how to cook it, too: “First you wrap him up in tinfoil with some butter and sliced onion. After you build your fire and let it burn down to coals? Throw on
the fish and listen close. When he stops popping on one side? Turn him over and wait for the other side to get done. Squeeze on a little lemon juice. Nothing better.”

That's just what I did. By the time we heard Pop's Yamaha approaching, Dinner was wrapped and ready to go and the fire had burned down to a steady glow. Gee raced out of the brush where he'd been hiding Leo: “Guess what, Pop! Ronnie caught a big ol' bigmouth!”

Pop, who was expecting macaroni and cheese, absolutely beamed when he caught sight of the grill. While we were telling him about Howard and his boat, Melba McClintock motored up on her little scooter. I had to wonder if she'd been watching for the Yamaha.

“Say, Mr. Hazeltine! I hear your granddaughter is quite the fisherman.”

Next, the retired gentleman from the fifth-wheel camper next door sauntered over, leading to the kind of buddy-buddy just-call-me-Jack conversation Pop is good at. After carefully turning my bass on the grill, I joined them. It felt nice and neighborly to stand around just before dinner at twilight, with other campers pausing in their evening walks and Gee making like a frog after the grasshoppers.

That is, until Mrs. McClintock said, “I hate to tell you this, Ronnie, but Dinner is served.”

I turned, to a sight I will never forget: one big hairy mutt with his paws in a nest of shredded aluminum foil and the remains of my four-pound prize catch hanging out of his mouth.

At first, I was just plain mad: I didn't catch Dinner to be scarfed down by a mutt who couldn't even appreciate fine dining. But that was the least of our problems.

Because Pop was even madder—more than I'd ever seen him. “Didn't I say
no dogs?
What do you think that meant? One dog that I don't see? You kids have just about pushed your limit—”

Leo bolted for his old hiding place under the rear axle and flattened himself like a rug. Gee followed, but before diving under the RV he turned around and screamed, “If you run over him, you'll have to run over me, too!”

If I were Mrs. Mac, I would have gunned my Italian scooter and buzzed away right then, but she was better stuff than that. “Jack, what is it you have against this dog?”

“How about stealing my dinner, for starters? Besides, dogs are nothing but trouble, and they have fleas and they bark.”

“Well,” she said reasonably, “it wasn't just your dinner. It was Ronnie's, too, and she—”

I spoke up. “This dog doesn't bark or have fleas. And if we hadn't been forced to hide him, he wouldn't have got into the fish. Gee was in such a hurry when we heard you coming, he must've got careless with the rope.”

Pop pointed a finger at me. “You mean to say it's
my
fault the dog got loose?”

“Of course not,” said Mrs. Mac, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Nobody's blaming you, Jack—”

“They'd better not. They flat-out disobeyed me—I made myself very clear about not taking him, and they brought him along anyway.”

“That's
not
what happened.” My natural anger mode is sarcastic and huffy, but I tried to chill on the huffy while explaining how Leo had stowed away on the bike trailer, with Clint the A-1 Auto guy as accomplice. “Here's your money, by the way.” I pulled the five-dollar bill out of my pocket, but Pop just looked at it like it was a poopy diaper. My story hadn't softened him a bit, but it did earn sympathy with our audience, which had grown while I was telling it.

“Come on, Jack,” said Mrs. McClintock. “Have a heart.”

Our next-door neighbor chimed in. “Besides, every kid needs a dog. Didn't you ever have a dog, Jack?”

Pop doesn't like to be pushed—and he especially doesn't like to be boxed in, like he was now, with a feisty female on one side and a nosy neighbor on the other. Any attempt to
make
him change his mind only set it harder. I let the huffiness loose, turned away with a sharp sigh, and stomped back toward the campfire to clean up Leo's mess. But a noise from under the RV stopped me: Gee's sobbing. I could barely see him, wrapped around all that fur. It reminded me of how he used to go to bed with a new pair of socks.

But Leo was a lot more than his latest special thing. That dog, I realized, was the only living creature on this earth who could take Gee exactly as he was, without getting frustrated or sending him to the principal's office or lecturing him about thinking before acting.

I turned back to Pop. “How about we play cards for the dog?”

That startled him out of his stubborn expression. “How's that?”

I took a deep breath, making up the deal as it came to me. “Suppose we play a hand of… five-card draw. No, three hands. Best two out of three. If I win, we keep the dog. If you win, we try to find him a good home with somebody else.”

“That's the spirit!” our neighbor exclaimed. “I like it. Whaddya say, Jack?”

Mrs. Mac spoke almost too soft to hear. “Give it a chance, Jack.”