all I ever do,” Waylon said. “And I still don’t gain an advantage.”
“If he can’t horse it, maybe he can pony it some,” Marsue called from her side of the boat as she pulled an undersized red grouper out of the water and swung it into the boat.
“Is this one big enough?” she said to the captain.
“Not that one, no ma’am,” Metcalf answered, taking it off the hook and lifting it toward his face. Leaning forward, he made a kissing sound in the vicinity of the grouper’s nose and tossed it back over the side.
“Did you just kiss that fish?” Leo asked in an amazed tone.
“I kiss everything I don’t keep,” the captain said, “before I throw it back.”
“I’m going to remember that,” Marsue said, reaching into the bait box for another squid to put on her hook. “Sounds like a damn good policy.”
“Why do you do it?” Leo asked, looking ready to laugh at a witty reply. “Kiss a fish like that?”
“I don’t know. It always just seems like the right thing to do.”
The Gulf Princess was the last boat of the day in at Bud’s Marina. The woman who had been working the calculator behind the counter when Waylon last saw her was standing at the end of the dock with both hands on her hips watching Captain Metcalf and his party proceed through the No Wake area of the channel. She didn’t offer to catch the tie-up line when Metcalf lifted it toward her, and he had to ask Teddy to hop off the front end of the still moving vessel and wrap the rope around a cleat.
“Sorry we getting in so late, Libby,” Metcalf said. “We had to go way out past that Sunoco platform before we got into any keeper grouper.”
“Your radio broke, Bill?” she said, still standing in the same position but backed up a little to allow Teddy to get past her.
“To tell you the truth, I’m afraid it needs working on, and that’s a fact. These folks can tell you I was trying all afternoon to talk at you.”
“I’ll testify to that,” Leo said, hopping from the boat to the dock and giving Metcalf an exaggerated wink after he had turned his back to offer his hand to Marsue. “The way it was cracking and popping, I believe that radio must’ve got seawater in it.”
“Well, ain’t nobody left around here this time of day to help you all unload your fish,” Libby said. “If you got any.”
“We got them, all right,” Leo said. “Didn’t we, partner?” He looked to Waylon for confirmation and laid his hand on Marsue’s shoulder.
“I hope to shout,” Waylon said. “At least you and your wife and Teddy did.”
“You get some of these,” Leo said as Marsue started up the dock toward the building at the end of it. “Share and share alike.”
“I don’t want but one or two,” Waylon said. “That’s all I can use.”
Later, the grouper and grunt and amber jack divided and distributed among three styrofoam chests, Waylon remembered the borrowed hat on his head and walked over to the green Cherokee where Marsue was sitting in the passenger seat looking in a mirror on the visor as she poked at her hair with a brush.
“Thanks for letting me use your cap,” he said. “It saved my delicate complexion.”
“Live the Dream,” she said, reading the words off the visor and then, turning back to the mirror, looked at Waylon through the reflection.
“Everyday and in every way,” he said to the green eyes in the glass looking back at him.
“You can keep the cap,” Marsue said. “For a souvenir.”
“I’d be glad to, if you sign it on the visor for me like the baseball stars do at these card conventions.”
“You got a ballpoint?”
“Always,” Waylon said, digging a pen out of his pants pocket. “Be prepared is the scout’s motto.”
Marsue took the pen and turning the cap upside down wrote something on the underside of the visor and handed the cap and the pen back to him.
“That a Beaumont number?” he said.
“To be called only between ten in the morning and six in the afternoon weekdays. Don’t leave any messages.”
“I don’t talk to machines,” Waylon said, setting the cap back on his head. “Enjoy your fish. A little dill weed’s always nice on that grouper. Gives it a different taste.”
“That’s what I’m looking for.”
Leo and Teddy came walking up, carrying an ice chest between them, and Waylon turned to head toward the Chevrolet.
“We’re sure glad we ran into you, buddy,” Leo said, setting the ice chest into the rear of the Cherokee. “Wasn’t for your thirty-five dollar contribution we couldn’t have gone out and caught all these fish.”
“It was sure worth it,” Waylon said, touching his forefinger to the bill of his hot-pink cap in salute. “It was my pleasure, friend, believe me.”
On his way back to Port Arthur, up from the Gulf, Waylon drove the posted speed limit, adjusting his sun visor to allow him enough shade to be able to snatch glimpses of the sun setting in the west as cars, trucks, and pickups pounded by him. Two good-sized grouper, gutted and packed in ice, were riding in the floorboard in a donated styrofoam cooler not damaged enough to leak too much, and the breeze off the marshes coming into the car was not so hot he had to roll the windows up. The only lack he felt was that of a drink at the end of the day, and that would be cured as soon as he reached Charlie McPhee’s house on Helena.
He turned on the radio just at the beginning of a song about margaritas and shrimp boils, and he hummed along to the tune, remembering every other line or two, so that by the end he finished singing aloud right along with the artist word for word. “Hell, I know,” he warbled, “it’s my own damn fault.”
Would this Marsue Butler woman be worth the trouble, he wondered, if he did decide to call the number on his new pink hat some morning in the middle of a work week? She was probably a little dangerous, and that possibility had its charm, he had to admit. Nothing wrong with being scared a little.
He could imagine the scenario. The call, the conversation, the meeting for lunch at some little fern bar in Beaumont, across a small table with the martini for him and the white wine for her. She’d be wearing something tight, her eye makeup just a shade this side of heavy, her hair puffed up and worked on by a dryer and a teasing comb.
“Let me see,” Waylon said out loud to the bank of pink and orange and red clouds low on the western horizon. “Do you ever feel like things in your life are going along too much in the same old patterns? Like you’re locked in, stuck in the regular, predictable path here in the middle of where you live? Do you feel, I don’t know, restless?”
