Nothing of this should have occurred.
Roger thought of his father, who had always loved animal life and was quite a scholar on the habits of anything on land that roved on four legs.
Well, where was Roger now?
Roger was at Mexico Beach, thirty miles south of Panama City. He was out of money and had brought only a Zebco 33 with a stiff fiberglass rod. He had no money for bait, and he was just helping pay for some of the groceries for George and Anna Lois and their son and daughter-in-law, who had a baby. The house was old and wooden, with a screen porch running around two sides; a splendid beach house owned by Slade West, a veteran of Normandy, who had once kept a pet lion there. The lion started chasing cars when the Florida boom hit, and he had to give it to a zoo.
At the moment, Roger was alone in the house. He was looking out over the ocean at some crows. The crows hung around, although it was not their place. They fetched and quacked in the air and were rolled by sea breezes off the mark.
Somebody’s dog from down the way came in and rolled privately in the sea oats. What a lark, all to himself, he was having! Feet in the air and twisting his back in the sand and the roots! But the heavy dangerous trucks going by were just feet from the dog. The dog was playing it very close.
Yesterday, Roger had caught a crab on his line that reminded him of himself. The crab was aging well and, dumb as hell, was holding on till the very, very last, where Roger might drag him in out of the water if he wanted him. The crab was in the surf, clamped on the shrimp and hook, trying to prove something. While the crab was looking at Roger and deciding on the moment, the dog dashed into the water and tore the crab to pieces with its jaws.
Roger had never seen anything like this. Not only was Roger stunned, he had now caught a dog! So he ran down the beach lickety-split with a loose line — so the hook wouldn’t hurt the dog’s lips. Roger offered abject apologies, pulling the last ten from his wallet to pay the vet bill.
Next door to the house where Roger was staying was an ugly little brick house fenced in as if somebody would want to take something from it. The owner and occupant was a Mr. Mintner, possibly a vampire. Roger had never seen Mr. Mintner come out into the sun and all the plant signs around the house were dead and dry. Parked outside was a Harley-Davidson golf cart, and at 11 p.m. three nights ago Roger had seen Mr. Mintner crank up the golf cart and come back from the Minute Market with several bloody-looking steaks and beef bouillon cubes and some radishes. Roger saw all this in the dim outside light of Mr. Mintner’s. He saw Mr. Mintner in a black golf outfit and black boots, and his arms were pale almost to luminescence. There was a story that his heart had been broken by a woman years ago and that he had never recovered.
Roger had a fascinated aversion to this Mintner and believed that he should be hauled away and made to eat with accountants.
Roger, with no financial resources at the time, cleaned up the house and read some of the National Geographic and Discover magazines around the place. He had brought along his fisherman’s log, in which there was not one entry, only some notes on the last pages where it said NOTES.
He looked out at the green softly rolling ocean again. There were a lot of things out there in “the big pond,” as McClane’s New Standard Fishing Encyclopedia called the Gulf. There were things like marlin and sailfish and cobia(ling) and bluefish. As for the little ocean catfish, Roger had caught his weight twenty times over of them.
They were trash and insignificant.
Today George and his son Steve were out casting in the surf and catching some small whiting. Roger waded into the water, feeling the warm wash over his sneakers, and then stood straddle legged, arms behind his back, rather like a taller Napoleon surveying an opposing infantry horde from an unexpected country of idiots.
Two-thirds of the world was water, wasn’t it?
There were king mackerel out there, too, and big snapper. But Roger had no funds to hire a boat, and all his wonderful gear was back in Louisiana in his garage, every line coiled perfectly, every hook on every lure honed to surgical sharpness, every reel oiled and soundless. As for what Roger had here at Mexico Beach, it was the cheap Zebco with a light-medium — weight rod, the whole thing coming out of a plastic package from T.G.&Y. at a price of twenty-four dollars — such a rig as you would buy a nephew on his eleventh birthday.
Roger’s friend George Epworth was having a good time with his son Steve. They were up to their hips in water, casting away with shrimp on the hook. They caught a ground mullet, which Roger inspected. This kind of mullet is not the leaping vegetarian that is caught with a net only. Roger looked on with pursed lips. Then there were some croakers, who gave them a little tussle. It was fine kid sport, with the surf breaking right around the armpits of the fellows. Steve’s wife, Becky, had made a tent over their baby, and Anna Lois, newly a grandmother, was watching the baby and reading from one of Slade West’s encyclopedias of sea life. George was a biochemist back at Millsaps College in Jackson. Anna Lois worked for the state crime lab, and their ocean time was precious. They liked everything out here and knew a good bit about sea chemistry. Roger envied them somewhat. But he had only a fever for the big one, the one to write home about, the one to stuff, varnish, and mount, whereas none of these fish were approaching a pound, though they were beautiful.
Roger was wondering what in the deuce was so wrong with him and his luck now.
Not just the fish.
Not just the fact that his Reba had gone a bit nuts when menopause came on her.
Not just the fact that she bought a new dress every day, and from high-priced boutiques, and that she stayed in the bathroom for an hour, making up — but that she emerged in earrings and hose and high heels only to sit on the couch and stare at the wall across from her. Not at a mirror, not at a picture, not at the television, not smoking anymore, not drinking, not reading — which she had loved — just sitting there with a little grieving smile on her face. She wasn’t grouchy. She just sat, staring with the startling big gray eyes that had charmed Roger to raving for her back in college days. They’d just had their twenty-fifth anniversary, Roger and Reba.
Further, his luck with money recently. Why, he’d had near a hundred-fifty thousand in the bank, and they were thinking about living on interest for the first time ever when bang, the offshore-drilling speculation in which they had the stock exploded and the money was gone.
It made Roger so tired he had not the energy to track down the reasons.
As for Nature, Roger was tiring, too. He had a weary alliance with Nature — the roses, the wisteria, and the cardinals and the orioles and the raccoons round the deck on the rear of his dutch-roofed little castle. But he was not charmed much now when he went out there and looked.
Were his senses shutting down? He who had never had to use even reading glasses and about whom everyone said he looked a decade younger than he was? At least?
Roger Laird was about to turn and go back to his room, shut the curtains, write in his fishing log something that might give him an idea as to what was wrong with him, when something happened out beyond the breakers.
He saw it roll, and he saw a fin of some kind stand up.
Then it rolled again!
A rising shower of small fish leapt up and the gulls hurried over, seconded by the crows, quacking but not knowing how to work the sea as the gulls did.
The big fin came up again!