hung from its walls and lay in crumbles where rain water had dripped from the eaves, the single gas pump in front of the building still hadn’t been updated since the fifties, and the same woman was working behind the counter, squinting down at a calculator through a plume of cigarette smoke.
She didn’t look up as Waylon opened the screen door and stepped inside, and it was not until he had rummaged through a soft-drink box and placed a bottle of Diet Mr. Pibb on the counter that she acknowledged him.
“Fifty cents,” she said. “I hope that’s the last one of them suckers in the box. Nobody’ll buy a Mr. Pibb.”
“I had to hunt for it,” Waylon said. “It was hid way in the bottom under the ice. You got an opener?”
“Ain’t it twist-off?”
“No,” he said. “It was probably bottled before they discovered twist-off. This here Mr. Pibb’s real low-tech.”
The woman handed him an opener from beneath the counter, and Waylon drank his soda while he wandered around the store, inspecting the boxes of plastic grubs, spools of line, lead weights, leaders, peanut-butter crackers, and filet knives. When he finished the Mr. Pibb, he turned back to speak to the woman studying her calculator.
“Everybody’s gone already, huh?” he said. “All the charters?”
“Nope,” she said. “It’s one boat at the far end still tied up. Party from Beaumont’s not figured out what they’re going to do yet.”
“What’s slowing them down?”
“I imagine they’re like everybody else,” the woman said, punching at the calculator and then looking up at Waylon. “Still trying to get things counted up.”
“It’s the figuring’s slows a man down,” he said, nodding toward the counter. “All right.”
“A woman, too, Buddy-Ro,” she said and lighted a new cigarette.
The boat at the end of the dock was dark yellow and looked homemade, its finish rough textured and the supports of its sun roof two-by-four planks rather than marine lumber. The nameplate at the rear of the vessel was the work of a professional painter, however, declaring the identity of the Gulf Princess in script letters, and Waylon could hear the low mutter of a large inboard engine as he walked toward the group of people gathered on the dock near the fishing boat.
Nobody looked his way as he approached, and Waylon didn’t expect them to, he not being part of the event transpiring near the waters of the Gulf and therefore of no more concern than a brown pelican flying over or a gull perched on a piling waiting for a fish scrap. He stopped at an appropriate distance from the scene and began looking from one person to the next.
There were four, a woman and three men. One of the men was obviously the charter boat captain, his baseball cap faded by the sun to a mottled blue, his forearms the shade of saddle leather, and his footwear a Wal-Mart version of running shoes. He was holding two cardboard boxes of frozen squid under his left arm and a sack of ice in his right hand, and he was listening with his head bowed to one of the other men.
The one speaking was wearing a long-billed cap, he had a dab of white sun screen centered on the bridge of his nose, and his boat shoes looked like they had been purchased in the last month in an outfitters store in a mall somewhere.
The woman, whose she was Waylon couldn’t tell yet, was leaning over the transom of the Gulf Princess and staring into the live well. The way she was standing caused the back of her T-shirt to ride up from the waistband of her pants and revealed about two inches of skin the same pecan-shell hue as that of her arms and what Waylon could see of the side of her face, as she watched the shiners dart back and forth in the bait well. She stuck in one finger and swished it around and increased her lean enough to show another inch or two of skin. Still no tan line.
“What kind’s this one, Teddy?” she said and turned to look toward the third man, who stood nearest her steadily rubbing sun screen squeezed from what looked like a plastic banana into the back of his neck. “The one with the blue stripes.”
When Teddy stepped forward to join the woman at the bait well, Waylon could see that the sun screen container was in fact a plastic banana suspended from a matching yellow string.
“That one there,” Teddy said, “is what’s known as a blue-striped fish. The small-mouth variety.”
“Right,” the woman said, straightening up to face Teddy. As she did, she noticed Waylon and nodded in his direction. “And I guess this boat’s what’s known technically as a fishing boat.”
“Ask Leo,” Teddy said, turning his attention again to the banana and squeezing more lotion onto his finger tips. “He’ll tell you a name.”
“I know that,” the woman said. “But he’s busy talking some talk right now.” She looked at Waylon again, this time for a longer spell.
“Do you know?” she asked. “What kind it is?”
“The boat?” Waylon said, putting on a smile and moving a step or two closer. “Or the bait fish?”
“The fish,” the woman said. “The blue-striped one.”
“I haven’t looked at it,” Waylon said, “but I’d guess a shiner or a small shad.”
“See there, Teddy,” the woman said. “Everything’s got its own name. Mine is Marsue. He’s Teddy.”
“I’m Waylon,” Waylon said. “Waylon McPhee. Y’all are from Beaumont, right?”
About then, the man in the long-billed cap turned to look toward the others, the expression on his face that of a man who had just learned that the insurance payment hadn’t arrived in time or that the fourth-down try was inches short and the Oilers drive was over on the three-yard line and the point spread was again not beaten.
“They don’t take plastic,” he answered to all who might be attending, “and Captain Metcalf says he needs at least two hundred dollars in cash to take us out on the water. How much you got on you, Teddy?”
Teddy let his banana drop to swing freely by its string around his neck and reached for his wallet, and Marsue looked silently at Leo for a space before moving back to peer into the bait well at the shiners.
Between them, Teddy and Leo came up with a hundred and sixty-five dollars cash, and Leo gathered it all into one hand and fixed Captain Metcalf with a pleading look. “What do you think, Captain?” he said. “Can you see your way clear for just under two hundred?”
“I’d love to, gentlemen,” the captain said, including Waylon in his explanation as he looked from face to face. “But for a half-day, I’d just barely break even for that amount. I got to have a little to show for my work. You know, bait, ice, fuel, time.”
Everybody stood silent for a minute, listening to the throb of the inboard on the Gulf Princess and the purr of the air pump in the bait well. Teddy stared at his banana, Leo looked at the money in his hand, and Marsue dabbled her fingers in the water where the bait fish splashed.
“I could come up with the extra thirty-five bucks and go with you,” Waylon said, “if somebody’s got a spare hat they could lend me to keep the sun off.”
“That’s
