not enjoying having to yell into the face of the man just three feet from his own, and he was particularly ready to stop having to look into the man’s mouth as he answered back. “Not much further. They go out for about two hours usually. Charters do. But this one’s only a half-day.”
Teddy nodded, not speaking this time, to Waylon’s relief, and headed back for the front of the boat, pausing to say something to the woman in passing. She laughed and pulled her feet back from out of the sun and was leaning forward to squirt some lotion from a tube onto the tops of her toes when the roar of the engine suddenly subsided and the boat immediately slowed its speed to a wallow, as the captain pulled back on the throttle and looked back and forth from the control panel to a composition notebook he held in his hand.
The sudden quiet seemed louder than the engine had been. Teddy straightened up from the ice chest for which he had been headed when Captain Metcalf slowed things down and held up a can of beer toward Waylon.
“You didn’t get a chance to bring any with you,” he said. “Want one of mine?”
“Later,” Waylon said. “After I’ve caught my first fish.”
“What’s this mine stuff?” the woman said. “Share and share alike on the open seas. That’s the law of the deep, right?”
She was directing her question toward Waylon in the stern while she felt around for her shoes with her feet without looking down. She found one, then the other and stood up to stretch, her gaze still on him. He wondered if her tan line had been altered yet on her feet.
“That’s the way I always heard it,” he said, grinning and then nodding toward Metcalf who had killed the engine and was beginning to rig some rods he had pulled from an overhead rack. “On a boat, the captain is the only law. The judge and the jury.”
“Is that right, Captain?” Marsue asked. “What the man just said?”
“Only boat I know about is a fishing boat,” Metcalf said, reaching for one of the boxes of frozen squid stowed in a floor compartment. “On a charter boat the captain is the one gets to do all the work.”
“At least he gets to put the bait on the hook,” Marsue said, watching Metcalf rip into the cardboard and begin prising individual squid apart from the frozen mass inside. “Bait comes first.”
“Bait,” Metcalf said, holding up a palm-sized squid and reaching for one of the rigs, “is what makes it all happen. Here’s one ready for somebody.”
He held the rod out toward the woman and reached for another one. “But you know I have seen fish hit a bare hook, and I ain’t talking about a plug made to look like something. I mean just the plain old steel hook with the barb on it.”
“It takes a hungry one to do that,” Waylon said, taking the next prepared rod from the captain.
“Starving,” Marsue said. “Just famished.” She held up the hooked squid on her line for examination, poking at it with the tip of a fingernail.
“A fish couldn’t starve, could it?” Leo asked, his hand out ready for the next rod being worked on by Captain Metcalf. “Out here in the Gulf with all these other ones to eat.”
“Naw,” the captain said and handed Leo the rod. “Way before he starved to death, he’d get eat up by something hungrier than he was.”
“A fish gets hungry enough, he loses all caution, I imagine,” Marsue said. “He forgets to keep his head down.” She walked to the bow of the boat and dropped her line over the side toward the water, but it was too short to take the hooked squid and the lead sinker below the surface. “How does this reel work?” she said.
“Sir,” Captain Metcalf said, looking at Waylon, “could you show her while I get this last one rigged? You know how, don’t you?”
“I’ll figure it out,” Waylon said, “if you give me long enough.”
“What are we after?” Leo asked from the other side of the boat. “Right here at this point?”
“Grouper,” the captain said, finishing up the last rig and giving it to Teddy. “They’re a bottom feeder. Let it out until it won’t go any further. When you feel one of them hit, jerk him fast before he backs into the rocks.”
“Oh, he’ll hide from you, then?” Marsue said, flipping the lever Waylon had pointed out to her. The weighted bait slid into the water with a whirring sound of the line off the reel. “Doesn’t want to come in the boat with us, huh?”
“He’s reluctant to leave his element,” Waylon said, moving away to cast his own line into the Gulf. “Afraid he won’t be able to breathe right.”
“Maybe he should learn to hold his breath,” Marsue said, leaning forward to look over the side. “I believe I’ve got there.”
“Flip that lever I showed you the other direction,” Waylon said. “And get ready to catch a big one.”
“I hope he’s not afraid to hit it,” Marsue said. “Suppose he’ll keep his mouth shut?”
“Not if he hadn’t eaten anything in a long time. Not if he’s hungry enough.”
On the other side of the bow, Leo jerked his rod tip up and began to reel, the line singing and throwing off a spray of water as he leaned back and worked the mechanism. “I got one on,” he yelled. “First strike of the day.”
The captain moved toward him and reached out to catch the line as the hooked fish broke surface. “A grunt,” he said. “That’s what I figured the way he was coming up.”
“Aw shit,” Leo said. “No good, huh?”
“It’s good, all right,” the captain said, unhooking a dark-colored fish about a foot long and opening the compartment in the floor to throw it on top of some ice. “You filet it and cook it real fast.”
“Leo will cook it fast, okay,” Marsue said over her shoulder. “I flat guarantee you. Won’t you, honey?”
About then the tip of her rod dipped, and before Waylon could turn to see what Marsue would do with the strike, something hit his bait and moved powerfully downward as he gave a jerk in response.
“Don’t let him back into the rocks,” Captain Metcalf said. “Reel him quick before he cuts the line on you.”
“I guess I ought to be doing the same thing,” Marsue said, pulling back on her line as she reeled.
“Yes ma’am,” the captain said, looking in her direction, “but I believe you got yours coming along fine. This’un here’s the one I’m worried about. I believe it’s bigger than the man that’s hooked him.”
“That’s the story of my life,” Waylon said, rearing back on the rod with his left hand and trying to reel with his right against the weight bowing the tip down. His foot slipped in some water on the deck, banging his knee against an upright. “Everything I hook always outweighs me.”
“Did you set your drag?” the captain demanded, fumbling at the mechanism of Waylon’s reel.
“No, I never remember to do that, neither,” he
