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Not only had she been expecting more of an argument, a part of her had been hoping for more of an argument, if only to delay the inevitable attempt at fishing that Griz was clearly going to make her go through with. But, she supposed, there was going to be no putting it off any longer, unless she could find some other innocuous thing to discuss to distract Griz from this nightmare of a pastime.
“Here’s your pole,” he said.
“Here’s your pole,” she said, patting the generous bulge in his pants.
At first she’d thought it would be a good distraction to delay the whole fishing thing, but then she thought,careful, Becca. Don’t wake up the sleeping dragon. Otherwise, you’re going to be holding an ice pack on your va-jay-jay later tonight.
Thankfully, he didn’t seem like he was going to follow up on her little flirtatious move.
“Take the worm out of the can,” he said.
It looked like there was no more putting this off.
“Oh, God,” she said, as she reached gingerly into the metal can. “Oh, my God. Don’t you have, like, rubber gloves or something for this?”
“No.”
“It is… it is moving all around. This is so gross. Nobody should ever touch these things.”
“Now put it on the hook. Careful not to poke yourself.”
Becca tried her best not to puke as she pressed the wiggling worm against the point of the hook. “Oh, this has got to hurt him. It has too. I feel like a war criminal.”
“It’s fine,” Griz said.
“I doubt the worm thinks that. Okay, it’s on. Is it on? It’s on. So gross.”
The good news was, once the worm was on the hook, she didn’t have to touch it any more.
Now that she’d endured that horror, Griz showed her how to swing the pole back, press the little button to release the line, and fling the hook with its impaled worm out into the water. The first try, the hook went into the bushes, and the second as well, but on the third, she managed to hurl the doomed worm into the water with a strangely satisfyingplunk.
Once this final ordeal was complete, she found herself standing there, wondering what was to come next. After Griz didn’t move or speak for a strangely long time, and in fact sat down in the dirt after casting his own bait into the creek, she began to suspect that there was nothing else to do.
She sat down next to Griz. The birds chirped, the bugs buzzed, and the seconds ticked by very, very, slowly.
“And so we just sit here, hunh?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“In silence,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Oh, boy. Going to be a longggg day,” she said.
Becca had just gotten to the point where she was giving serious thought to jumping into the creek and trying to karate chop a fish, just for something to do, when she noticed Griz straighten up from where he sat next to her. The movement caught her eye, but then, she saw that he was looking around the trees carefully.
It was when he reached back and took his pistol out of the back of his pants that she started to worry.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“The birds have stopped singing,” Griz said.
Becca strained her ears. She didn’t hear any birds, either, but then, she couldn’t remember if they had been singing much a few minutes ago to begin with.
“Maybe they’re just tired,” she said.
“Maybe there’s somebody out there,” Griz said.
