Later, when no one was looking, I grabbed a hotdog and set it outside the cage where Beauty couldn’t reach it. I watched as she pressed her nose against the wires and whined, like that would make the hotdog roll closer. She strained and strained, and I didn’t do anything to help her.
My line catches and for half a second I think I’ve got a fish. But then there’s no pull and I reel the line in, dragging up a beard of hydrilla. I tug it off the hook and throw it back into the lake. Hydrilla’s like seaweed, except it grows in the lake. So lakeweed, I guess. It’s not supposed to be here. It accidentally came in on someone’s boat, or someone brought it here to kill off something else, and now it fills the lake, wrapping itself around outboards, fishing lures, your legs and arms if you actually go for a swim in this toxic dump.
“Okay. I fished,” I say.
“You see that,” my stepfather says to my mom. And through her to me, of course. At first I think he’s talking about my defeatism, as he calls it, and going to say something about how kids today (meaning me) need more discipline, but then I see he’s pointing at the shore. He does this a lot, wherever we go. Spots wildlife like he’s our hunting guide. Part of that whole toughening-us-up scheme, I guess. So if me and my mom ever have to survive on our own in the woods or something, we can spot animals. Which will comfort us, I suppose, as we die of starvation.
“I don’t see it. What?” my mom says. She’s got this stupid pink hat on — like a baseball cap but with an oversized bill — that ties in the back with a bow, and the bow jiggles as she jerks her head looking up and down the shore.
“A nutria,” my stepfather says. “By that log. Now it’s gone into the water.”
I don’t even know what a nutria is.
“Oh, shoot,” my mom says. She’s always disappointed when she doesn’t see something my stepfather points out, like it’s this big deal. And for half a second I think, hey, maybe she’s right. Maybe I’m the idiot for not paying attention. Maybe I should be staring at nutrias after all.
Not long after my dad moved to Shreveport, he quit his job and started selling belt buckles and canteens at reenactments. He said it was his dream. He grew a beard, started dressing up like he was in a tintype and working on a book about some guy named Corporal Edwards who fought in the Civil War. He told me all this in a letter, said he was going to Xerox the book himself and sell it for five dollars. But I haven’t seen it yet.
Behind me I hear a whistle and I turn to look at the power plant. A little train runs from the plant to somewhere else — I don’t know where — and brings back coal. Maybe there’s a coal mine nearby, though in school when they gave us maps with little pictures showing Texas’s natural resources, I didn’t see a coal nugget. An oil derrick, yes. A cow, yes. A cotton boll, yes. But no coal nugget. So maybe it’s just a stockpile of coal this train goes to. Anyway, the train only runs back and forth from the plant to wherever the coal comes from. It does this all day and all night too, I guess. Right now it’s headed to the power plant, its cars filled to the top with coal.
I point to the train. “You see that?”
No one looks.
My favorite part of a fishing trip — yes, I do have a favorite part — is when we speed across the lake to find a spot to fish or speed back to the boat ramp. I sit up front and let the wind hit me. I like going places fast, even if it’s not really anyplace I want to go. Sometimes I imagine rolling off the boat when we’re speeding across the lake. Balling up my legs and wrapping my arms around them, then tumbling off. It would hurt, I know. I’ve gone tubing before, and every time I fell off the tube it was like someone slapping me in the gut, hard, before I sank into the water.
But my fear isn’t how it’ll hurt when I land on the water. It’s the propeller. What if I somehow roll the wrong way, get sucked under the boat and shredded by the propeller? It’s a small propeller, sure, but it scares me enough.
Still, it would be nice to hear my mom scream in worry. It would be nice for my stepfather to stop the boat to save me.
Just last week we were at a different lake, camping, when my stepfather said, “Heads up!” and pushed me underwater. I flailed, the dirty water flooding my nostrils and my mouth as I tried to scream.
“Don’t be such a pantywaist,” he said when he let me up. “I was just horsing around.”
I told him I wasn’t scared, that he was too quick, I didn’t have enough time. Which was a big lie, of course. I went after him to grab him, to pull him under. This was a rare sight: me trying. But he just looked at me and said it was too late. And it’s like I finally knew. Of course I could never win. So I said I didn’t give a shit. His back was turned, and I muttered it, but I meant it. I swam some more, my feet catching at tree roots, and didn’t give a shit.
In math class, I was erasing more numbers when Mrs. Pickett called my name. I’d been taking too many chances. Like, I’d erase a whole problem, which is just stupid because it shows my hand. I mean, when you look from problem eight to problem ten and see this huge blank space in between, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out something’s off.
I started to sweat. Mrs. Pickett was looking at me, and the class was quiet.
“Could you come up to the board and help Jason with this problem?”
Oh. That’s all. “Sure,” I said.
At the board, Jason breathed in my ear and whispered “pussy-licker” at me while I finished his problem.
I whispered, “You wish,” and only when I sat down did I realize the perfect comeback. You fucking bet I am. I said it now under my breath—“You fucking bet I am”—and Jenna Blalock, who’s already thirteen, flirts with everyone, and has the third-biggest tits in our grade, turned around, her eyes wide in mock horror.
Later, during lunch, I thought of what I’d say if Mrs. Pickett ever did catch me. It’s perfect. It’s in every after-school special and probably every teacher’s student psychology handbook. “What is this?” she’ll say, pointing to some empty spaces. “That,” I’ll say, “is a cry for help.”
I’ve got a sunburn now, so there’s that. My stepfather puts another fish in the livewell, ripping the hook out of its jaw like it’s nothing, and then decides it’s time to go home. My mom’s been ready for a few minutes. I’ve been ready for hours.
I help prepare the boat, though no one asks me, taking down the raised fishing seats so they screw in level with the deck. Then I sit in the one up front.
My stepfather heads us back toward the boat ramp, opening up the motor when we get to the part of the lake where the hydrilla isn’t so bad. The boat bounces a couple times when we cross someone else’s wake, and then we round a bend and come in sight of the beach, where the Army Corps of Engineers trucked in sand so people can swim and play in a lake that poisons fish.
“You’re going to help me clean these bass,” he shouts up to me, and all of a sudden I’m sick of it, I’m so sick of it. He knows I hate cleaning fish: the dead scales sticking to my fingers, the fish blood on my hands. And of course my mom’s just sitting there, saying nothing.