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I was standing directly behind him, on the raised poling platform above the outboard, pushing the boat forward with my guide pole. I had to duck quickly as the crab on his hook whirred past my ear on his back-cast, snatched my hat off coming forward and whipped a good thirty feet ahead. His crab hit the water with a belly-flop smack, which knocked my hat loose from the hook. It went floating off to the right.
“What are you trying to do, Pete?” I said through carefully gritted teeth.
“This is supposed to be good fishing?” he accused. “You said fish. So where’s the fucking fish?”
“Well, the fucking fish were up ahead. If you haven’t terrified them into heading for Cuba with all that splashing, they might still be there.”
“That supposed to be funny?” He glared at me. “How the fuck long am I supposed to wait? While you dick around with the pole like it’s fucking Venice or something.”
“How about if you wait until I tell you, then cast to something we can see? Is that too long?”
He looked sour and savage and turned away. He started to pump his reel furiously. “I’m not paying four hundred fifty bucks for a fucking boat ride,” he grumbled. And since the reel was apparently too slow for him he gave a tremendous, two-handed backward yank on the rod. The tip slapped my ear and smashed onto the poling platform. Even as I turned slightly and watched the small silver loop of the rod tip snap off and roll onto the deck I felt the crab smack into my head just above the other ear.
“Some fucking guide,” said Pete. “Can’t find fish. Can’t even duck in time.” He snorted.
Some people belong on the dock. If they really have to go fishing they should do it standing on the end of a long pier, clutching a $6.98 Flintstones Model Zebco and a plastic bucket, swearing because the water is too far down for them to reach over and wipe the worm goo off their hands. They don’t belong on a flat guide’s skiff, sliding across the shallows on the edge of the great ocean. They don’t even belong on a head boat, where there are more people in range of their half-deadly stupidity.
The problem is, flatfishing from a skiff got popular a few years back, the way fly-fishing got popular. And now all across America there are thousands upon thousands of garages with unused or once-used fly rods hanging next to the golf clubs and the badminton sets.
An increasing number of people have too much money and not enough sense to pound sand, as my grandfather used to say. So they take all that disposable income and spend it on things that looked really good on the cover of their sixty-dollar-a-year coffee-table magazines and then feel cheated when they don’t look as good on them. They have spent their money on The Best, and it was a lot of money, and they think that is supposed to guarantee them a good time.
They think it’s supposed to guarantee that they’ll look just like the modern-day, upper-middle-class Norman Rockwell picture of themselves they have in their heads from the pictures on the coffee table and they feel cheated when it doesn’t work out that way.
Nothing they do is fun, but it’s all expensive so they try to persuade themselves that they really are having fun when they’re not, or the game is rigged against them. They never figure out that a big bank balance is no guarantee of the good life. Somewhere along the way they read the fine print wrong, but they’ve already signed and they’re stuck with the product.
So they end up just like Pete: rich, miserable, and dangerously stupid on a small boat.
I felt the blood trickling down the right side of my head from where the rod tip had slashed my ear. I felt the salt water rolling off a dull ache on the left side where the crab had smacked me at 100 miles per hour.
I stepped off the platform and moved forward to where Pete was sitting, snarling at me. I stared down at him for a moment, reviewing mentally the ways I knew to kill him, quickly or slowly, with my bare hands, or perhaps with the pliers, a few big shark hooks, a little bit of leader wire—I leaned down instead and pulled the rod out of his hands.
“This is a handmade rod,” I told him. “It is worth more than the gold crown on your molars. When we get to the dock you will find an extra hundred and fifty dollars on your bill to cover repairing it.”
“The fuck I will,” he said.
“You are going to start fishing the right way, just like I tell you, or we’re heading back.”
“Fuck that noise, I paid in advance—four hundred fifty dollars, one day’s fishing. Bait the fucking hook.” He started trying to fumble a new rod out of its clamp.
I nodded at him, just like he’d really said something, and took his hand away, placing it in his lap and thinking how fragile the bones in the hand really are. I placed the broken rod back in the teak holder along the side of the boat and stepped back to the platform. I put the pole in its clamps and tied it down. I turned to the control panel and started the engine.
“Hey! Won’t that scare the fish away?”
I nodded at Pete and showed him some teeth. “I owe them that,” I said, and shoved the throttle forward hard.
The acceleration caught Pete by surprise and he slid onto the floor. He scrambled back up onto the seat just as I made a wide turn and stopped to pick my hat out of the water. The stop threw Pete forward and back onto the floor. By the time he got back up again, white-knuckled on the gunwale, we were headed for the dock at full speed.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he screamed at me.
“Going home,” I shouted over the noise of the engine. “Life is too short to spend any more of it with a dumb asshole like you.”
All the abuse and screaming he’d tried before were just a warmup. Now he really hit his stride. I’d never before heard some of the things he said, even in seven years as a cop. Maybe I’d underestimated Pete: some of it was impressive. I made a mental note to pass on some of the really choice ones to Art, who had a connoisseur’s appreciation of good cussing.
But Pete was no artist; he lacked patience and stamina. In a few moments he was winding down, repeating himself, and he finally started to bottom out. “You stupid cock-sucking piece of shit! I paid for a full day! You can’t fucking do this!”
“I’m only charging you for a half-day,” I yelled back over the sound of the motor. “But when you add on the damage to the rod, it comes out the same.”
“You dickhead shitbag butt-sucker!” he screamed.
