s light for us to better see the river by, and the brother that I am was kneeling in the back of the boat, what’s called the stern, with one hand on the outboard’s tiller, the other hand hanging itself over the edge of the boat, the fingers of that hand dragging themselves across the muddy skin of the river. We were on our way upriver, up to where the dirty river that runs through our dirty river town begins, it runs all the way up through the city, us brothers heading up there to see if we might catch us some of the big city’s big dirty river fish, when out of nowhere in the night and in the river’s muddy dark we heard, then saw, a boat, much bigger than ours, it was cutting across and down the river, it was heading right for us brothers. There’s a boat coming right for us, Brother turned his head and said, as he held up the lantern light with that fire glowing inside it so that his face flashed full like the moon. I looked up at Brother then. There was a look that us brothers sometimes liked to look at each other with. It was the kind of a look that actually hurt the eyes of the brother who was doing the looking. Imagine that look. Do I look like a brother born blind? was what I said to Brother then, and I cut the tiller hard and to the right. But that boat, that other boat much bigger than ours, that boat with us brothers not sitting down inside it, it kept on coming toward us brothers, as if it didn’t see us brothers, as if us brothers weren’t even there. But it saw us, this boat, the people sitting there inside it: this, us brothers, we knew. When we moved it, our boat, it moved closer toward where it was we moved. And before we knew what to do next, because we knew we couldn’t outrun it, this boat, it was soon coming across our bow, it was doing what it could do to hit us, this boat, even though we didn’t, we couldn’t, know why. What did we, us brothers, do, to a boat like this boat? Us brothers, all we ever really did out on the river was fish. We didn’t know what we should do, other than what we ended up doing. Us brothers, the both of us brothers, we both jumped, headfirst, out of our boat, the dead man’s boat, the dead man who fell into the river pissing into the river for luck, we headed down into the river, and we swam ourselves down to get us away from this coming-after-us boat. When we stuck our boy heads up out of the river, to see if we were both of us still alive, to see where our boat was, to see where that other boat was, all us brothers could see was our boat drifting its way back and down the river, back to from where us brothers, ourselves, had just come from. That other boat, it seemed, had all but disappeared, and not even the sound of it could be heard by our ears. Our boat, the dead man’s boat, away from us brothers, it had drifted too far away from us brothers for us to be able to swim back to it for us to get back in it. So, us brothers, we swam ourselves toward the river’s muddy shore, we swam ourselves out of us brothers’ breath, and plopped ourselves down in the mud at the edge of the river. Yes, like a couple of out-of-water fish, us brothers, there in the mud, we sucked in at the air until the sky above us, it helped us brothers to begin breathing again. We stood up, in the mud, out of the mud, but we did not wipe the mud off us. Us brothers, we liked mud and the fishy river smells that always smelled of river and mud and fish. With mud in our eyes, us brothers, we turned to look one last time back downriver, to where our boat, the dead man’s boat, it had floated downriver and down around a bend in the river and almost out of sight, this boat with our fishing poles inside it, our buckets empty of fish. Us brothers, we didn’t know what we were going to do, or how we were going to get back home, now that we didn’t have us brothers a boat to take us back home in. So what us brothers did was, we figured it, in our boy heads, that it was too early in the night for us to head ourselves back home. We’d gone out, that night, out onto the river, out on the river in the dead man’s boat, to spend the dark night fishing. It was what us brothers did, at night, and in the morning, and sometimes, too, in the day: we fished. Our mother and our father both believed that we were brothers sound asleep in our beds when we stepped outside through our bedroom’s window and slipped, as we always did, down to the river. We had until the sun’s rise for us brothers to get us back home before our father would call out to us to wake us with the word, Son. When our father called out to us brothers, Son, we both knew, we were crossing that dirty river together. But us brothers, we didn’t want to go back home, to bed, in a room in a house with our mother and father asleep in it. Our house, with our mother and father in it, it was not the kind of a house that us brothers liked to go back to. The river, out fishing on the river, that was where us brothers liked to be. But now, us brothers, we didn’t have a boat to be out on the river in, we didn’t have us our fish-fishing poles for us to fish for our fish with, we didn’t have us our buckets of mud and rust and worms for us brothers to bait our hooks with. It was just us brothers now standing on the upriver banks of a river and a city that was not ours. Our mother and our father had often told us brothers that the city was not a place for us boys to be. Don’t ever go, was what our mother told us. But us brothers, we didn’t much like to listen to what our mother liked to tell us. Our mother, she was the kind of a mother who told us brothers not to walk through mud, a mother who told us to wash our hands before we ate, our hands that always smelled of fish, our hands with mud dried hard in our palms. We liked mud and we liked it the way the fish’s silver scales stuck to our hands. These were fish that we fished out of the dirty river that runs its way through this dirty river town, fish that we took back home with us and we gutted the guts out of those fish, we cut off the heads of those fish, and then we hammered them, those fish, those fish heads, into the backyard telephone pole out back in the back of our yard. In the end, there was exactly a hundred and fifty fish heads, hammered and nailed into that pole’s creosoted wood. Each fish, each fish head, us brothers, we gave each one a name. Not one was called Jimmy or John. Jimmy and John was mine and my brother’s name. We called each other Brother. Brother, Brother said to me then. What do you want to do? Brother was the brother of us brothers who always liked to ask these kinds of questions. To Brother, I did not know what then to say. Us brothers, we stood there like that on the dirty river’s dirty banks, and we looked around this place that us brothers, we’d been told, this was not the kind of a place for us brothers to be. But this place, this city with this dirty river running through it, it didn’t look much different than the town that was ours with its dirty river running through it and with its dirty river mill built up along its dirty river banks, its smokestacks that stained the sky the color of rust and mud. We liked a sky that was stained the color of rust and mud. Our mother once let it be known to us brothers that there was a sky, there was a sky, our mother told us, bigger than the sky above the river that was ours. Us brothers, we couldn’t picture this, a sky bigger than the sky that was our backyard. We couldn’t picture a town without a dirty river running through it where us brothers could run down to it to fish. This is our river, was what we said to our mother then, and this was what I said to Brother too. This is our river, I said, then. There’s no place else for us to be. We stood there, like this, for a while, like this, just standing there along the edge of the river. The moon in the sky had not yet begun to rise. The sky, it was mostly dark. Behind us, away from the river, most of the houses sitting side by side in the dark, these houses did not have lights lighting them up from inside them. We stood there, on the edge of this river, but us brothers, we couldn’t fish. We reached down into the mud and found us some stones and we threw them out and into the river. Sometimes the stones skipped. Sometimes, in the dark, the stones made a sound like a fish leaping up out of the water. Us brothers, we knew more about fish than most people know about fish. Us brothers know that when a fish jumps up out of the water, what that means is that that fish, it isn’t a fish for us brothers to fish for and catch: not with our fishing hooks baited thick with mud and sunk down to the river’s bottom. Us brothers, we didn’t know how to fish for fish that were fish that jumped up as if to bite the sky. It’s true, sometimes us brothers, we could walk out into the river and reach with our hands down into the river and fish us up some fish with our bare boy hands. It’s true, too, that we could sometimes dunk our buckets into the river and like this we’d fill them up with a mix of fish and mud. But it was not one of those kinds of nights for us brothers. We didn’t have us our buckets or our poles or a boat for us to fish from. And our hands hanging down by our legs, they were all four of them balled up into fists. Let’s go for a walk, was what I said to Brother then, and we both of us turned and started walking in from the river, up past houses that did not look like anyone was living inside them. There were no lights lit up and burning on the insides of these houses, there were no streetlights lighting up the streets outside. But us brothers, we had us eyes like the marbly eyes of fish, eyes that, like moons, could see in the river at night. And so, us brothers, into this dark, we walked. We walked and we walked, it didn’t matter where, until the mud on our boots had all of the way been walked off. That’s how us brothers liked to wash the mud from off the bottoms of our boots. We didn’t like it when our mother made us wash the mud off with a brush held in our hands. So we walked, and we walked, but we didn’t see a face that looked like the faces that were ours. It was as if we had walked into a dead town, or maybe it was just a town that was early-to-bed asleep. Even the stars in the sky above this dead town seemed not to be shining. But still, us brothers, we walked. We did not talk. We just listened to the voice that was us brothers inside the each of our boy heads. In this town, even the cars that we saw, here on our walk, all of them seemed to be made out of rust. What us brothers needed was a couple of fishing poles for us to do some fishing with. Even though the fish were jumping, this night, maybe us brothers could get those fish to go back down to the river’s muddy bottom. So we went looking around town for two poles for us to fish with. There was a store with a sign above the door that said on it,