What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories

hardly get the plug loose from the cork handle of my pole. It was while I was trying to get the hooks out that I felt Dummy seize my shoulder with his big fingers. I looked, and in answer Dummy worked his chin in Dad's direction. What he wanted was clear enough, no more than one pole.
    Dad took off his hat and then put it back on and then he moved over to where I stood.
    "You go on, Jack," he said. "That's all right, son—you do it now."
    I looked at Dummy just before I laid out my cast. His face had gone rigid, and there was a thin line of drool on his chin.
    "Come back stout on the sucker when he strikes," Dad said. "Sons of bitches got mouths hard as doorknobs."
    What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
    I flipped off the drag lever and threw back my arm. I sent her out a good forty feet. The water was boiling even before I had time to take up the slack.
    "Hit him!" Dad yelled. "Hit the son of a bitch! Hit him good!"
    I came back hard, twice. I had him, all right. The rod bowed over and jerked back and forth. Dad kept yelling what to do.
    "Let him go, let him go! Let him run! Give him more line! Now wind in! Wind in! No, let him run! Woo-ee! Will you look at that!"
    The bass danced around the pond. Every time it came up out of the water, it shook its head so hard you could hear the plug rattle. And then he'd take off again. But by and by I wore him out and had him in up close. He looked enormous, six or seven pounds maybe. He lay on his side, whipped, mouth open, gills working. My knees felt so weak I could hardly stand. But I held the rod up, the line tight.
    Dad waded out over his shoes. But when he reached for the fish, Dummy started sputtering, shaking his head, waving his arms.
    "Now what the hell's the matter with you, Dummy? The boy's got hold of the biggest bass I ever seen, and he ain't going to throw him back, by God!"
    Dummy kept carrying on and gesturing toward the pond.
    "I ain't about to let this boy's fish go. You hear me, Dummy? You got another think coming if you think I'm going to do that."
    Dummy reached for my line. Meanwhile, the bass had gained some strength back. He turned himself over and
    The Third Thing That Killed My Father Off
    started swimming again. I yelled and then I lost my head and slammed down the brake on the reel and started winding. The bass made a last, furious run.
    That was that. The line broke. I almost fell over on my back.
    "Come on, Jack," Dad said, and I saw him grabbing up his pole. "Come on, goddamn the fool, before I knock the man down."
    THAT February the river flooded.
    It had snowed pretty heavy the first weeks of December, and turned real cold before Christmas. The ground froze. The snow stayed where it was. But toward the end of January, the Chinook wind struck. I woke up one morning to hear the house getting buffeted and the steady drizzle of water running off the roof.
    It blew for five days, and on the third day the river began to rise.
    "She's up to fifteen feet," my father said one evening, looking over his newspaper. "Which is three feet over what you need to flood. Old Dummy going to lose his darlings."
    I wanted to go down to the Moxee Bridge to see how high the water was running. But my dad wouldn't let me. He said a flood was nothing to see.
    Two days later the river crested, and after that the water began to subside.
    Orin Marshall and Danny Owens and I bicycled out to Dummy's one morning a week after. We parked our bicycles and walked across the pasture that bordered Dummy's property.
    It was a wet, blustery day, the clouds dark and broken,
    What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
    moving fast across the sky. The ground was soppy wet and we kept coming to puddles in the thick grass. Danny was just learning how to cuss, and he filled the air with the best he had every time he stepped in over his shoes. We could see the swollen river at the end of the pasture. The water was still high and out of its channel, surging around the trunks of trees and eating away at the edge of the land. Out toward the middle, the current moved heavy and swift, and now and then a bush floated by, or a tree with its branches sticking up.
    We came to Dummy's fence and found a cow wedged in up against the wire. She was bloated and her skin was shiny-looking and gray. It was the first dead thing of any size Fd ever seen. I remember Orin took a stick and touched the open eyes.
    We moved on down the fence, toward the river. We were afraid to go near the wire because we