Where I'm Calling From

jacket over a pair of coveralls. In his top pockets he carried rolls of toilet paper, as one of his jobs was to clean and supply the toilets. It kept him busy, seeing as how the men on nights used to walk off after their shifts with a roll or two in their lunchboxes.
    Dummy carried a flashlight, even though he worked days. He also carried wrenches, pliers, screwdrivers, friction tape, all the same things the millwrights carried. Well, it made them kid Dummy, the way he was, always carrying everything. Carl Lowe, Ted Slade, Johnny Wait, they were the worst kidders of the ones that kidded Dummy. But Dummy took it all in stride. I think he’d gotten used to it.
    My father never kidded Dummy. Not to my knowledge, anyway. Dad was a big, heavy-shouldered man with a crew-haircut, double chin, and a belly of real size. Dummy was always staring at that belly. He’d come to the filing room where my father worked, and he’d sit on a stool and watch my dad’s belly while he used the big emery wheels on the saws.
    Dummy had a house as good as anyone’s.
    It was a tarpaper-covered affair near the river, five or six miles from town. Half a mile behind the house, at the end of a pasture, there lay a big gravel pit that the state had dug when they were paving the roads around there. Three good-sized holes had been scooped out, and over the years they’d filled with water.
    By and by, the three ponds came together to make one.
    It was deep. It had a darkish look to it.
    Dummy had a wife as well as a house. She was a woman years younger and said to go around with Mexicans. Father said it was busybodies that said that, men like Lowe and Wait and Slade.
    She was a small stout woman with glittery little eyes. The first time I saw her, I saw those eyes. It was when I was with Petejensen and we were on our bicycles and we stopped at Dummy’s to get a glass of water.
    When she opened the door, I told her I was Del Fraser’s son. I said, “He works with—” And then I realized. “You know, your husband. We were on our bicycles and thought we could get a drink.”
    “Wait here,” she said.
    She came back with a little tin cup of water in each hand. I downed mine in a single gulp.
    But she didn’t offer us more. She watched us without saying anything. When we started to get on our bicycles, she came over to the edge of the porch.
    “You little fellas had a car now, I might catch a ride with you.” She grinned. Her teeth looked too big for her mouth. “Let’s go,” Pete said, and we went.
    There weren’t many places you could fish for bass in our part of the state. There was rainbow mostly, a few brook and Dolly Varden in some of the high mountain streams, and silvers in Blue Lake and Lake Rimrock. That was mostly it, except for the runs of steelhead and salmon in some of the freshwater rivers in late fall. But if you were a fisherman, it was enough to keep you busy. No one fished for bass. A lot of people I knew had never seen a bass except for pictures. But my father had seen plenty of them when he was growing up in Arkansas and Georgia, and he had high hopes to do with Dummy’s bass, Dummy being a friend.
    The day the fish arrived, I’d gone swimming at the city pool. I remember coming home and going out again to get them since Dad was going to give Dummy a hand—three tanks Parcel Post from Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
    We went in Dummy’s pickup, Dad and Dummy and me.
    These tanks turned out to be barrels, really, the three of them crated in pine lath. They were standing in the shade out back of the train depot, and it took my dad and Dummy both to lift each crate into the truck.
    Dummy drove very carefully through town and just as carefully all the way to his house. He went right through his yard without stopping. He went on down to within feet of the pond. By that time it was nearly dark, so he kept his headlights on and took out a hammer and a tire iron from under the seat, and then the two of them lugged the crates up close to the water and started tearing open the first one.
    The barrel inside was wrapped in burlap, and there were these nickel sized holes in the lid. They raised it off and Dummy aimed his flashlight in.
    It looked like a million bass fingerlings were finning inside. It was the strangest sight, all those live things busy in there, like a little ocean that had come on the train.
    Dummy scooted the barrel to the edge of the water and poured it out.
    He took his flashlight and shined it into the pond.