Where I'm Calling From

But there was nothing to be seen anymore. You could hear the frogs going, but you could hear them going anytime it newly got dark.
    “Let me get the other crates,” my father said, and he reached over as if to take the hammer from Dummy’s coveralls. But Dummy pulled back and shook his head. He undid the other two crates himself, leaving dark drops of blood on the lath where he ripped his hand doing it. from that night on, Dummy was different.
    Dummy wouldn’t let anyone come around now anymore. He put up fencing all around the pasture, and then he fenced off the pond with electrical barbed wire. They said it cost him all his savings for that fence.
    Of course, my father wouldn’t have anything to do with Dummy after that. Not since Dummy ran him off. Not from fishing, mind you, because the bass were just babies still. But even from trying to get a look.
    One evening two years after, when Dad was working late and I took him his food and a jar of iced tea, I found him standing talking with Syd Glover, the millwright. Just as I came in, I heard Dad saying,
    “You’d reckon the fool was married to them fish, the way he acts.”
    “From what I hear,” Syd said, “he’d do better to put that fence round his house.”
    My father saw me then, and I saw him signal Syd Glover with his eyes.
    But a month later my dad finally made Dummy do it. What he did was, he told Dummy how you had to thin out the weak ones on account of keeping things fit for the rest of them. Dummy stood there pulling at his ear and staring at the floor. Dad said, Yeah, he’d be down to do it tomorrow because it had to be done. Dummy never said yes, actually. He just never said no, is all. All he did was pull on his ear some more.
    When Dad got home that day, I was ready and waiting. I had his old bass plugs out and was testing the treble hooks with my finger.
    “You set?” he called to me, jumping out of the car. “I’ll go to the toilet, you put the stuff in. You can drive us out there if you want.”
    I’d stowed everything in the back seat and was trying out the wheel when he came back out wearing his fishing hat and eating a wedge of cake with both hands.
    Mother was standing in the door watching. She was a fair-skinned woman, her blonde hair pulled back in a tight bun and fastened down with a rhinestone clip. I wonder if she ever went around back in those happy days, or what she ever really did.
    I let out the handbrake. Mother watched until I’d shifted gears, and then, still unsmiling, she went back inside.
    It was a fine afternoon. We had all the windows down to let the air in. We crossed the Moxee Bridge and swung west onto Slater Road. Alfalfa fields stood off to either side, and farther on it was cornfields.
    Dad had his hand out the window. He was letting the wind carry it back. He was restless, I could see.
    It wasn’t long before we pulled up at Dummy’s. He came out of the house wearing his hat. His wife was looking out the window.
    “You got your frying pan ready?” Dad hollered out to Dummy, but Dummy just stood there eyeing the car. “Hey, Dummy!” Dad yelled. “Hey, Dummy, where’s your pole, Dummy?”
    Dummy jerked his head back and forth. He moved his weight from one leg to the other and looked at the ground and then at us. His tongue rested on his lower lip, and he began working his foot into the dirt.
    I shouldered the creel. I handed Dad his pole and picked up my own.
    “We set to go?” Dad said. “Hey, Dummy, we set to go?”
    Dummy took off his hat and, with the same hand, he wiped his wrist over his head. He turned abruptly, and we followed him across the spongy pasture. Every twenty feet or so a snipe sprang up from the clumps of grass at the edge of the old furrows.
    At the end of the pasture, the ground sloped gently and became dry and rocky, nettle bushes and scrub oaks scattered here and there. We cut to the right, following an old set of car tracks, going through a field of milkweed that came up to our waists, the dry pods at the tops of the stalks rattling angrily as we pushed through. Presently, I saw the sheen of water over Dummy’s shoulder, and I heard Dad shout,
    “Oh, Lord, look at that!”
    But Dummy slowed down and kept bringing his hand up and moving his hat back and forth over his head, and then he just stopped flat.
    Dad said, “Well, what do you think, Dummy? One place good as another? Where do you say we should come onto it?”
    Dummy wet his lower lip.
    “What’s the