Today the Atlantic is flat and glassy, the perfect mirror of a cloudless periwinkle sky. Kids are out of school so the pier bustles; above, a circus of swooping gulls and terns. Emma and I shield our pasta salads, in case of bombardment. Squinting against the fierce summer sun, I search for Ike's fluffy gray head among the anglers lined along the rails.
"Maybe he went back north until the weather cools off," Emma suggests.
"Maybe."
"Or he's laid up in the hospital. Have you called Charity?"
"Not yet." I don't even know the man's last name.
We're distracted by a lumpish, hirsute tourist in a sweat-stained tank top. He has reeled in a small barracuda, which flops frenetically on the wooden planks. The tourist has his heart set on supper, for he's endeavoring to stomp on the fish before it flips back into the sea. He seems unheedful of the ample dentition of barracudas, impressive even in juvenile specimens. Within minutes the man's pallid ankles are striped crimson, and in retreat he can be heard moaning like a branded calf.
Emma walks over and, with the toe of a conservative navy blue pump, carefully nudges the wriggling fish off the pier. Rejoining me on the bench, she says, "It's that time again."
"No, I'm begging you."
Every day she asks: "When are you coming back to the paper?"
Abkazion has offered me a slot on the new investigations team, but the time isn't right. I'm still having night sweats about what happened on Lake Okeechobee. These I don't mention to Emma, because she's had some unsettling dreams of her own.
"Jack, you should take the job. You worked hard for it."
"Maybe that's the problem. As Jimmy Stoma would say, I'm all humped out."
"And, as Emma Cole would say, I'm going to hurt you now." She thumps the side of my head. "Come back to work, dammit. I miss you."
"She's right. What's your problem, Tagger?" a scratchy voice demands at my back.
I spin around and there's Ike, a sly smile on his whiskered possum face. He is carrying an orange bait bucket, a small cooler and his three spinning rods. He looks fit and frisky.
"Where've you been?" I ask.
"Battling an unmannered polyp," he replies cheerily, "but fear not. I prevailed."
"Ike, this is my friend, Emma."
He sets down the fishing gear and takes her hand. "You are most lovely, Emma. I'm dazzled to meet you."
The old hound!
"You had a birthday, didn't you?" I ask him.
"Number ninety-three," he reports proudly.
"Incredible," Emma says.
"Not really. I planned it this way. All those years, writing all those hundreds of obituaries—well, pretty lady, I paid attention. I learned a few tricks."
Emma is taken with the old guy, as I knew she would be. After arranging his clutter of fishing tackle, he methodically rigs a bait and casts it over the rail.
"Sunscreen." He cocks his head our way. "Both of you should be basting in the stuff. Forty years from now you'll thank me."
Ike's rod begins to bend, and he gallantly passes it to Emma. She cranks up a nice snapper, which he guts and tosses on ice.
"Fish is the healthiest food in the world. Cemeteries are full of people who didn't eat enough fish."
"Ike," says Emma, "please tell Jack why he should come back to the newspaper."
He wipes the blade of his fillet knife on a leg of his trousers. "Number one, you're not cut out for a regular job."
No argument there.
"Number two, you still get a bang out of the news." His crooked fingers are working a large sharp hook into a bloodless chunk of mullet. "And number three, you can make things happen, writing for a paper," he says. "Make a difference in the world. That's a damn fact."
Emma lightly claps her hands. "Well done!"
What the opossum man says is true." But if I came back," I say, "I wouldn't be writing obituaries."
"That's all right. It was a helluva piece you did about that wild young gal killing off her husband," says Ike. "It wouldn't surprise me if you got an award. I'm serious, Jack."
He rears back with the rod and arcs the fresh bait toward the water. The heavy lead sinker makes a faraway plop. Emma motions that it's time for us to go. Now that she's a deputyeditor, she cannot miss the one o'clock meeting. Some things haven't changed at the Union-Register.
"Ike, it was an honor meeting you."
"The honor was mine. Come angle with me anytime." He flashes his handsome store-bought teeth. Then, turning to me: "When will Isee your byline again, Jack Tagger?"
"Sooner or later." I shake his hand, mullet slime and all. "You're a piece of work, Ike."
He leans close and drops his voice. "When's the last time you had a checkup? I mean the works."
"Last year." With Emma's support, I've been able to break myself of those compulsive monthly treks to Dr. Susan.
"Next time you go, be sure and have 'em check the plumbing," Ike advises. "They stick a camera up your ass, but it's no worse than your average divorce."
"I'll keep that in mind."
"Live a long time, Jack. Remember, it's all diet and attitude."
Emma and I are halfway down the pier when we hear a hoarse cry. Ike has hooked up to a huge tarpon, which is exploding in silvery somersaults across the water. I can see the old man slammed fast against the wooden rail, struggling to keep a grip on the U-bent spinning rod. A few of the other anglers are gathering to watch, but no one seems to be helping. Wispy Ike is easily outweighed by the thrashing hulk on the end of his line. This isn't my sport, but I remember enough from fishing with my mother to know what might happen if the drag on the old man's reel freezes.
"It looks like he's in trouble," Emma says.
I'm already running.
And I'm already thinking, God forgive me, of his obituary. Undoubtedly Hemingway would be invoked. Then some dim acquaintance of the opossum man would be quoted as saying he died doing what he loved best, which is what—gagging on seawater?
Still, being dragged off a pier by a magnificent fish wouldn't be the silliest way to die, not by far. It's not nearly as pointless, for instance, as getting shitfaced drunk and tumbling out of a tree while attempting to romance a raccoon.
And I suppose the mythical aspects of being drowned by a silvery beast of the sea might appeal to a fellow who spent most of his life writing about the mostly ordinary deaths of others. Still, I can't stand back and watch it happen. Ike's had a grand ninety-three years, but I don't believe he's done. I don't believe he's ready to check out.
So I push my way through the gawkers to find the old man doubled over the rail. Of course he won't do the sensible thing and let go of the damn fishing rod; neither would my mother, in the same preposterous fix. The tarpon has run out all of Ike's line, so he has stubbornly wrapped the last loop in the fist of his right hand, which is seeping blood. Meanwhile he teeters like a human seesaw on the weathered railing, his head and shoulders extended above the water and his spindly legs waving in the air.
My view is of the bait-encrusted soles of his deck shoes. I feel a hand in the small of my back, pushing me forward. It's Emma.
Grabbing Ike by the belt loops, I haul him back onto the pier. In the distance the tarpon jumps once more, shaking its bucket-sized mouth. The line goes slack in the old man's doll-like fingers.
"I'll be damned," he says breathlessly. "That was something!"
The other anglers clap amusedly, murmuring among themselves as they drift away. Emma, the would-be nurse, is inspecting the bloody slice on Ike's wrinkled palm.
He's laughing so hard, his button-sized eyes are brimming. "Can you imagine the headline?" he says. "Can you, Jack?"