Carolina Moon

but panic. He smelled of sweat and whiskey. “Let’s see the bag.”
    “Okay. All right. It’s right back here.” Licking his lips, he pointed with one finger.
    “You be real careful how you step, Piney. I’m awful nervous right now and my finger’s liable to shake.”
    She kept the gun aimed while Tory moved forward.
    “See here? See? Been frogging with this old burlap sack.”
    Tory crouched down, looked inside. Perhaps half a dozen unhappy frogs looked back at her. “This is a pretty pitiful haul for an hour’s work.”
    “Lost most of ‘em when I dropped the bag. Dropped it twice,” he added, as a flush worked up his neck. “Tell you true, I damn near shit a brick when that gun went off. Thought I heard somebody running off thataway, barely had time to wonder on it when the gunfire started. I figured I’d best get myself out of harm’s way, nice and quiet. Maybe somebody’s target shooting like Mr. Cade and his friends used to, and I could catch a stray bullet if I wasn’t careful. I do some frogging every couple weeks. You can ask Mr. Cade if that ain’t so.”
    “What do you think?” Faith asked Tory.
    “I don’t know. He has frogs, such as they are.”
    He wasn’t a young man, she thought, but he knew the swamp and his muscles were tough from fieldwork. Still, nothing could be proved. “I’m sorry we frightened you, but someone was sneaking around near the clearing.”
    “Wasn’t me.” His eyes jumped from Tory to the gun, then back. “I heard somebody running, like I said. Lotsa ways in and out of here.”
    She nodded, stepped back. Piney cleared his throat, reached down for the bag. “I guess I’ll go on then.”
    “Yeah, you go on,” Faith told him. “If I were you, I’d make sure Cade knows when you plan to do some frogging.”
    “I’ll see to that for sure. You bet your life. I’m just gonna go on now.” He backed up, watching Faith’s face until he could slide into the shadows of the trees.

25
    F or close on to thirty-five years J.R. and Carl D. fished on Sunday afternoons. It hadn’t started as a tradition, and even now both men would have been annoyed and embarrassed to have called it one. It was simply a way to relax and pass the time.
    After J.R.’s father died and his mother went to work, it had been Carl D.’s mother Iris had paid to watch Sarabeth after school and on Saturdays. And it had been an unspoken agreement between the women that she would run herd on J.R as well.
    Fanny Russ cooked like an angel and had a will of steel. Both were a matter of pride. J.R. learned to call her ma’am in a quick hurry. And during his growing-up years in the fifties when the Klan still burned their hate throughout the South in shapes of crosses, and no coloreds were allowed to sit at the counter in the diner on Market Street, the young white boy and young black boy quietly became friends.
    Neither made an issue out of it, and Sunday after Sunday, with a rare miss for holidays or illness, both men sat side by side with rod and reel on the bank of the river, just as they had as boys. They each had less hair and more girth than they’d had when they’d started, but the rhythm of the afternoon stayed essentially true.
    For a time during J.R.’s courtship and through the early months of his marriage to Boots, she’d prepared fancy little lunches in a wicker basket for them. It had taken J.R. some little doing to discourage this without hurting her feelings. Picnic baskets filled with chicken salad sandwiches and neatly sliced vegetables made it all too female. All the men needed was a cooler of beer and a fistful of night crawlers.
    And if they were lucky, a couple of wedges of Ma Russ’s sweet potato or pecan pie.
    All that had remained constant for years. There were little changes by the river. The old peach tree had died three winters before, but it had sent out a half dozen volunteers that had grown like weeds until the town council had elected to nurture the best pair of them, and cut down the rest.
    Now the fruit, still underripe, hung on the branches and waited for children to come along to devour those hard green orbs and give themselves bellyaches.
    The water flowed slow and quiet, as always, with the grand old willow bent over it to dip its lacy green fronds.
    And now and again, if you were patient enough, fish stirred themselves to bite.
    If they didn’t, a man was no worse off than he’d been when he dropped his line.
    Years had forged the men into