uses 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 up our buckets with a mix of fish and mud. But it was not one of those kinds of nights for us brothers. Us brothers, we didn’t have us our buckets or our poles or a boat for us to fish from. And our hands, us brothers, 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 did not see a face that looked like the faces that were ours. It was as if, us brothers, 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, they 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, Del Ray’s Live Bait, but the door, when we pulled on it to get it to open, it did not open up. There were other buildings with the same two words on it, Del Ray, Del Ray, some of them, these words, spraypainted on pieces of wood nailed into brick, DEL RAY, DEL RAY, but these doors, too, to these other buildings, they wouldn’t open up for us either. So what us brothers did then was, we turned back around and we decided in our heads to head ourselves back downriver. If we started walking along the road that runs its way along the banks of the river, we’d get home before the night began its turning into day. Us brothers, we were walking back this way, back downriver, back toward where we lived in a house with a mother and father inside it, when Brother turned and said that he was tired of all this walking. Would you rather swim back home? was what I said to Brother. Brother said what we both knew, it was too cold for us to be all the way back home in the river swimming. What we need, Brother said, is another boat, Brother said. I looked at Brother. I nodded with my head at what Brother said. Brother was right. Us brothers, we did need us a boat. It didn’t have to be a fancy boat. The dead man’s boat, it wasn’t a fancy boat. It was a boat that floats is all that it was, a boat that we found washed up on the river’s dirty river banks one day when the man that it once belonged to had fallen and drowned when he pissed into the river for luck. What other kind of a boat did brothers like us need? So we started looking with our eyes into the backyards of these unlit houses to see if we could find us a boat to get us brothers back on the river on. But in the backyards of these houses, houses not far from the banks of the river that runs itself down and through our dirty river town, there were cars rusting in the backyards of these houses — cars with no wheels and cars with the windows in them busted out and cars with weeds as tall as us brothers growing up on all sides of these cars so that the cars were hard for us brothers to see. But boats: there were no boats to be seen in these backyards for us brothers to see: no boats for us brothers to get back out on the river on, to take us brothers back home. Us brothers, we were standing out on the corner of Jefferson, that road that runs along the river, all the way from the big dirty city back to our dirty river town, when out of the dark, us brothers, we could see what we knew it, it was the shadow of a man coming on toward us. This man, this shadow, who here in the near river dark did not seem to have a face that us brothers could see it, he walked right up to us brothers, as if he knew us, and asked us what were we looking for. Who says we’re looking for something was what Brother’s mouth opened itself up to say. When Brother said this to this shadow of a man, this man without a face, I shot Brother this look. There was this 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. When this man didn’t say anything to this, I stepped in front of Brother and said that it’s true, we were looking for something. A boat was what I said into this man’s shadowy face. This man, when I said this to his face, the look on his face seemed to lighten. It was like a light winced on when I said the word boat. Then he turned his face away from us brothers and he started walking down along the river. Come, this man said. Stay close. Us brothers, we did what we’d been told. It’s true that, us brothers, we’d been told, by our mother and father, like most boys have been told: don’t talk to strangers, don’t talk with your mouth full, don’t walk into the house with mud on the bottoms of your boots. But us brothers, we weren’t the kind of boys who liked to listen to this sort of talk. When we heard our mother say the word don’t, us brothers, what we did was, we did. And so, us brothers, we walked in the shadows of this shadowy man, this man whose face was more shadow than it was flesh or even fish. We walked down along the river, past bars with steel bars rusted on the boarded up windows, past more buildings with the words DEL RAY written on their sides. After a while, we found ourselves standing outside the fenced-in yard of a hardware store, its backyard filled with boats. It was a boatyard of boats, this backyard was, and it was, to our eyes, like finding a river in the desert for us to make mud with. Us brothers, with our eyes, we looked and we looked at all of those boats. There were boats made out of steel and boats made of aluminum and boats that were made out of wood. Us brothers, we liked boats made out of wood best because it was hard for us to figure out how a thing made out of steel could float. What, we wondered, kept it from down-to-the-river’s-bottom sinking? This was something that us brothers, we hadn’t yet learned the reason why. So, the man turned and turned his shadow face to ours, which boat would you boys like? There was a wood boat there that looked like it had been painted with mud. Us brothers, we both looked at each other and knew that that boat was made for us. We pointed with our hands toward this mud-colored boat. The man who was more shadow than flesh or fish, he pointed with his hand, he pushed at this fence, and the gate of it swung away from its rusted lock. You boys sure you want that boat, the man asked. You could have any boat here. He waved at them all with his hand as if to say that they were us brothers’ boats to take. It doesn’t have a motor on its back, the man pointed this out. We’re sure, we said, and nodded our boy heads. We don’t need us a motor for us to get us back home, we said. The river will take us where we need to go, we said. Then it’s yours, the man said. I’ll even help you walk it down to the river. And this, we did. Us brothers, we lifted this boat made out of wood, this boat the color of mud, this boat that almost looked like it might be made out of mud, we held up its back, and the man who was a shadow to us brothers, he lifted this boat up by its front. And then we walked it, like this, this boat, down to the river, down to where the river’s edge was a mix of mud and stones and broken slabs of concrete. We set the boat down, there at the river’s muddy-watered edge, and got in. The man with the dark face dug his heels into the mud and pushed us brothers off and out into the river’s dark. We paddled with our hands out into the river’s swirling current. It was a good current. It wouldn’t be long before we drifted ourselves back and to our town. Us brothers, we raised our hands above our boy heads to say to this man goodbye. Thank you we said with our mouths, but only the river heard this. This man, at us brothers floating away, he raised up his hand at us too. He was a good man, us brothers, we knew. This man, like us brothers did too, he knew a good boat when he saw it. The moon in the sky was now rising up out of the river. This moon, it threw down its rope of moony light, but still, that man’s face, it was a face that us brothers, we could not see it. We could not see any eyes on that man’s shadowy face. We could not see a mouth. His mouth was just a hole in his face that sounds sometimes came out of that place. Somewhere in there there must have been a tongue, us brothers figured. Unless this man was the father of Boy, that boy, who was a brother to nobody, born with a full head of hair but with no tongue on the inside of his mouth. We’re going home was what I said to Brother then, and I turned to look at him in his face. Brother’s face, it was a face like mine, a face with a nose and two eyes and a mouth and a chin that sometimes had mud dried on it. It won’t be long now, Brother nodded and said. Tomorrow, I said, will be a new day for us, Brother, with a new boat for us brothers to fish from. For this, we had that man, whose face we could not see, whose name we did not ask for or know, to thank. Us brothers, we turned one last time back upriver to wave at this man our thanks. In the moon’s rivery light, we could see him walking, this man, out into the river, out onto the river, and the river, it was holding him, this man, up. He did not see us, this man, as he walked and he kept on walking on, he did not turn to look our way, until he had walked himself all the way across the river to the river’s other side, walking and walking and walking on until there was nothing left on the river for us brothers to see, there was nothing left for us brothers to hear, only the sound that the river sometimes makes when a stone is skipped across it.