by Mary Lawson
Ian reeled in his line, checked the lure, and stood up to cast again. He whipped the rod back and forth, listening to the hiss of the reel as the line played out, and let it fly. The lure sailed out over the water and then dropped down, light as a raindrop. Not a bad cast. He began slowly reeling it in, the line drawing a delicate V-shape across the surface of the water.
“Got a job today,” he said after a while.
“Yeah?” Pete said.
“Yeah. My Dad said I should work this summer. Saturdays too.”
“You still have time to fish?”
“Oh, sure. I’m working eight till six. I’ll still have evenings free.”
Pete nodded. He looked after the store in the summer while his grandfather acted as a guide for tourists who fancied themselves woodsmen and loved the idea of a real, live Indian guide. “Found this old Injun up in the woods in Northern Ontario,” they’d say to their friends back in the manicured suburbs of Toronto or Chicago or New York, nodding casually at a bear’s head nailed to the rec room wall. “Knows the country like the back of his hand.”
“I’m working on Arthur Dunn’s farm,” Ian said offhandedly. He reeled in his line, checked the lure, and cast again. He was aware of Pete looking at him curiously. “I thought it would beat being cooped up in town. There’s a job going in the drug store but I didn’t fancy standing behind the counter all summer long, listening to people complain about their headaches.”
Silence from Pete.
“Or listening to women complain about… . women’s stuff,” Ian went on, and then he paused, suddenly wondering if that could be his mother’s problem. The menopause. He’d read about it when looking through his father’s books in search of something—anything at all—to do with sex. The whole business had sounded gross. But his mother was too young for that sort of problem. She was nineteen years younger than his father and had produced Ian when she was only twenty. “Or old guys complaining about their in-grown toenails. I get enough medical crap at home.”
More silence. The problem with deceiving Pete was that they had known each other too long. A friend who has known you since you were four years old really knows you, whereas your parents only think they do.
They fished. Across the bay they heard the drone of an outboard, the sound gradually dying as it rounded a point of land. Silence settled again. Then two loons started calling to each other, laughing at some melancholy joke of their own, their cries shimmering back and forth across the water. The color was ebbing out of the trees lining the shore, turning them from somber green to black.
Pete said, as if ten minutes hadn’t elapsed, “Standing behind a counter is just standing, man. Working on a farm is work.”
He twitched the jig, paused a second or two, and then jerked the line sharply. A trout broke the surface ten feet away. He hauled it in and dropped it in the bottom of the boat. “You could’ve got a job at the sawmill,” he said, rebaiting his hook and dropping it over the side again. “You’d get a job there easy as nothin’. Every guy there’s had bits of them stuck back on by your dad sometime or other. They’d make you foreman in three days flat, you’d be running the place in two weeks. Good money, too. Moren Arthur Dunn can afford.”
“Yeah,” Ian said, “but who wants to spend the summer working for Fitzpatrick? I’ll take Arthur Dunn any day.”
Pete hauled in a four-inch perch, too small to keep. He unhooked it and tossed it back into the water. “You could’ve got a job waitin’ on tables in Harper’s. Put a cup of coffee down here, pick a cup of coffee up there. Good money, easy work… . Or the library … Or the gas station.” There was another tug on his line. It was the tiny perch again, the hole in its mouth from last time clearly visible. Pete raised it to eye level and said, “Where’s your brains, man?” The fish gaped in astonishment. Pete tossed it back over the side. “Or the hardware. Woolworth’s. The post office. Any of them’d be better than a farm. Specially Arthur Dunn’s farm.”
“The farm’s okay,” Ian said mildly. “The horses are kind of fun.”
“The horses?” Pete looked at him, slitty-eyed. Then suddenly, he grinned.
“What?” Ian asked defensively.
“Nothin’,” Pete said. “Nothin’ at all.”
They fished for another hour or so but the pike weren’t interested, and when Pete caught the little perch for the third time they gave up and went home.
His parents were both in the living room when Ian got back. His mother was sitting in front of the television, though for once she wasn’t watching it, and his father was standing in the doorway. When he came in they both looked around. There was a moment’s pause, and then his father said, “You’re home early. Fish not biting?”
“Nothing worth hauling out of the water,” Ian said.
His mother was looking vaguely down at her lap. There must have been a crumb or a bit of fluff on her skirt—she picked it off carefully, studied it for a moment, and then dropped it on the floor.
Copyright © 2002 Mary Lawson
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