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The lights were off at the house. She'd even cut the carport light off. Easing in, or trying to, I bumped into things. There wasn't even a lamp on. And then
suddenly there was, with her hand on it, and the quick furious anger all over her
face.
"Where you been?" she said.
"Riding around," I muttered.
"You know what time it is?"
I was heading into the bedroom with my shirt already unbuttoned, but I stopped
and looked back at her.
"No. What time is it?"
She tapped her foot on the floor and reached for her cigarettes.
"You can't keep doing me like this," she said.
I was tired and I didn't want to hear it. All I wanted to do was close my eyes
and try to sleep a little before the alarm went off.
"Okay," I said. "Okay. Now please let me go to sleep."
I left her in there, smoking, tapping her foot. I went into the dark bedroom,
where my baby son was sprawled in sleep in the middle of our bed, and I took my
clothes off, lay down beside him, touched his hair, and the side of his face. I
loved him. I knew what I was doing to him. He never moved. I thought of how
horrible my life was and then I closed my eyes. Just before I drifted off to
sleep I was vaguely aware of her getting into bed. She didn't speak, and the next
thing I knew the alarm was going off.
I decided not to go to work that day. I have the kind of job where I don't have
to be there every day, and people working for me who can take care of things. I
wanted to go fishing. I wanted to be on a boat in a lake with a pole in my hand
and crickets or minnows in a bucket or a box and a cooler full of cold beer to
help me think over everything I needed to think over.
Later that day I was on the lake, in the boat, a beer in my hand, fishing. I
eased up to a stump where I thought a few crappie might be hiding out. I caught a
little minnow from the bucket, put the hook through his back, and lowered him
down to meet some of his big brothers. It kept going down, never did stop, and I
pulled in one that weighed about two pounds. I had another cooler with ice just
for fish and I put him in there. It looked like I was going to lay them in the
shade. But after another hour, I hadn't caught another fish. I fished up, down,
all around, changed minnows, squirted on Mister Fishter, did everything I knew,
and still I had just that one fish in my cooler. Finally I let my cork rest and
took stock of things.
I was fucking up with these other women. I wasn't spending any time with my kids.
My wife and I never spoke to each other hardly unless we were arguing. I couldn't
stand to stay home, and I hated myself every time I went out. Now I'd met another
one, and she seemed wonderful except for the car pulling up and catching us,
which hadn't been her fault. I wasn't catching any fish, and since it was only
ten o'clock in the morning, I knew that if I kept drinking beer I was headed for
a bad drunk sometime later that day. Possibly, even a DUI conviction. For the
moment I was safe. I wasn't driving anything but my boat, and they couldn't get
me out there, unless it was some gung-ho officer of the Mississippi game wardens,
and I knew all of them. I knew I'd probably be facing another bad scene when I
got home, whenever I got home. I knew I could probably make everything right by
going home with a big load of fish and dressing them and cooking a good supper
for my whole family, but the problem was I'd only caught one and it didn't look like I
was going to catch any more now that I'd started drinking beer. There comes a
time some days when you say fuck it, and I didn't know whether to say that early
in the morning or not. I hated to. I'd said it so much in the past and it hadn't
ever helped anything. It looked like the whole problem was with me, looked like
my wife could just keep rocking on the way she was  until she was old and gray and
sixty and I couldn't. It seemed like we were raising our children simply for
their own benefit and not for ours. But our own lovemaking had brought that. Now
it seemed we'd locked into a position that was far beyond our imagining when we'd
married, and there didn't seem to be any recourse. Be born, live, bear children
in turn, get old, die. There didn't seem like there ever was anything else. And
there didn't seem like there ever was anything else. And there didn't seem like
there was ever anything else since man had been man, since the first primitive
ape-person — was that Adam? — crawled down from the tree and found a
female under another tree and hauled her away to a cave, where he ravished her. I
was uneasy about a lot of things, my own mortality among them. I didn't know if
when I died I was going to die forever, or maybe just for twenty years, and come
back as a house cat or something. The whole universe was a secret to me,
including what happened over there in Siberia in the 1920's when something hit
the ground and knocked all that timber down and set all those woods on fire. I
was uneasy about the Bermuda Triangle, and how long I could keep getting up and
getting it up, and afraid I'd never find the best woman in the whole world for me
to love. I decided I'd better just keep drinking beer and keep my hook in the
water and hope for the best.
It was nearly dark when I got home. I had three miserable fish, and all the ice
I'd had on them had melted. Still, I was determined to cook fish for my family.
My wife was just walking into the carport with a basketful of clothes. The kids
were playing ball in the yard. Me, I was pretty drunk.
My wife came up to me and tried to kiss me and we messed around some right there
in the carport and she got hot, and before I knew it we were back in the bedroom
with our clothes partway off, bumping together like two minks. That was when one
of my kids shot his head around the side of the window where we'd been in too big
a hurry to close the blinds and said "Hey, Dad! Want to pitch a few balls?"
He slunk away, with many looks back. I got my clothes on and got the hell away
from there.
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