Gone Girl

can’t allow it.
    Hours later, I am still awake, thinking in the dark, when my door rattles, a gentle bang, Jeff’s bang. I debate, then open it, ready to apologize for my rudeness before. He’s tugging on his beard, staring at my doormat, then looks up with amber eyes.
    ‘Dorothy said you were looking for work,’ he said.
    ‘Yeah. I guess. I am.’
    ‘I got something tonight, pay you fifty bucks.’
    Amy Elliott Dunne wouldn’t leave her cabin for fifty bucks, but Lydia and/or Nancy needs work. I have to say yes.
    ‘Coupla hours, fifty dollars.’ He shrugs. ‘Doesn’t make any difference to me, just thought I’d offer.’
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘Fishing.’
    I was positive Jeff would drive a pickup, but he guides me to a shiny Ford hatchback, a heartbreaking car, the car of the new college grad with big plans and a modest budget, not the car a grown man should be driving. I am wearing my swimsuit under my sundress, as instructed (‘Not the bikini, the full one, the one you can really swim in,’ Jeff intoned; I’d never noticed him anywhere near the pool, but he knew my swimwear cold, which was flattering and alarming at the same time).
    He leaves the windows down as we drive through the forested hills, the gravel dust coating my stubby hair. It feels like something from a country-music video: the girl in the sundress leaning out to catch the breeze of a red-state summer night. I can see stars. Jeff hums off and on.
    He parks down the road from a restaurant that hangs out on stilts over the lake, a barbecue place known for its giant souvenir cups of boozy drinks with bad names: Gator Juice and Bassmouth Blitz. I know this from the discarded cups that float along all the shores of the lake, cracked and neon-colored with the restaurant’s logo: Catfish Carl’s. Catfish Carl’s has a deck that overhangs the water – diners can load up on handfuls of kitty kibble from the crank machines and drop them into the gaping mouths of hundreds of giant catfish that wait below.
    ‘What exactly are we going to do, Jeff?’
    ‘You net ’em, I kill ’em.’ He gets out of the car, and I follow him around to the hatchback, which is filled with coolers. ‘We put ’em in here, on ice, resell them.’
    ‘Resell them. Who buys stolen fish?’
    Jeff smiles that lazy-cat smile. ‘I got a clientele of sorts.’
    And then I realize: He isn’t a Grizzly Adams, guitar-playing, peace-loving granola guy at all. He is a redneck thief who wants to believe that he’s more complicated than that.
    He pulls out a net, a box of Nine Lives, and a stained plastic bucket.
    I have absolutely no intention of being part of this illicit piscine economy, but ‘I’ am fairly interested. How many women can say they were part of a fish-smuggling ring? ‘I’ am game. I have become game again since I died. All the things I disliked or feared, all the limits I had, they’ve slid off me. ‘I’ can do pretty much anything. A ghost has that freedom.
    We walk down the hill, under the deck of Catfish Carl’s, and ontothe docks, which float slurpily on the wakes of a passing motorboat, Jimmy Buffett blaring.
    Jeff hands me a net. ‘We need this to be quick – you just jump in the water, scoop the net in, nab the fish, then tilt the net up to me. It’ll be heavy, though, and squirmy, so be prepared. And don’t scream or nothing.’
    ‘I won’t scream. But I don’t want to go in the water. I can do it from the deck.’
    ‘You should take off your dress, at least, you’ll ruin it.’
    ‘I’m okay.’
    He looks annoyed for a moment – he’s the boss, I’m the employee, and so far I’m not listening to him – but then he turns around modestly and tugs off his shirt and hands me the box of cat food without fully facing me, as if he’s shy. I hold the box with its narrow mouth over the water, and immediately, a hundred shiny arched backs roll toward me, a mob of serpents, the tails cutting across the surface furiously, and then the mouths are below me, the fish roiling over each other to swallow the pellets and then, like trained pets, aiming their faces up toward me for more.
    I scoop the net into the middle of the pack and sit down hard on the dock to get leverage to pull the harvest up. When I yank, the net is full of half a dozen whiskery, slick catfish, all frantically trying to get back in the water, their gaping lips opening and shutting between the squares of nylon, their collective tugging making the net wobble up and