The Uncanny Influence of Keith Wright, Part 9

"You don't need a secretary," I told him.

Keith grunted through a mouthful of doughnut. "I want a secretary. It made things so much easier when I was a senator."

"You're not a senator. You're an editor. Of sixteen pages a month."

"Cheryl was a huge help. Just having someone around to bounce ideas off of. She was psychic, too, she always knew when to go out and get me a sandwich."

"Think like a businessman. You answer the calls yourself, not only do you have more money for things like marketing, but you're more hands on, you have a better handle of what's coming and going."

"And who am I supposed to flirt with?"

I wondered if he was playing with me. "Rich."

"You really don't think I need a secretary?"

"No. And I think you'd enjoy doing that work yourself anyway."

He sighed. "You're the boss." He was sitting in the office's only chair, beside the only table, which currently supported only a console, a picture of Lysa on top of a mountain and a box of doughnuts. I was standing. Keith and Rich had moved the table and the chair in this morning, offering repeated assurances that I'd have my own space as long as I was helping them. But Rich had disappeared and there I was with Keith in the echoing, chair-deprived room. It was three weeks after what had turned out to be our final session. The ink on his exit survey, fluttering anonymously off to the West Coast Psychology Report offices, was barely dry. If they knew what I was doing now, my license would be gone before another three weeks was up.

Keith had no idea. It had clearly never occurred to him -- or maybe he assumed that if I wasn't allowed to hire myself out to a client, I'd have said something. He had a trust in my professionalism that bordered on religious faith.

"Well, you're the boss. It's really up to you."

"No, no." He waved me off. "If you think I don't need one..." He flicked a finger at the console screen. "Marketing, do it in-house or outsource it?"

"You and Rich need to decide who you want to market this thing to, first. Universities? Armchair environmentalists? Are you going to support it with ads, or just subscription costs?"

"Subscription costs, subscription costs. We already talked about that. We don't want any corporate influence."

"Are you sure? A lack of incoming ad money can have its own influence."

"Yeah. Listen, do you think I need a better chair? I am the editor. And this thing is... crap."

Now I was pretty sure he was playing with me. He was rocking, watching me, fidgety.

"Would a better chair help you focus on defining your market?"

"Yes... absolutely, yes, doctor." Keith grinned.

I caught a pained smile on my own face. "I'm curious... what did you tell Rich about who I was?"

Keith let the front legs of the chair hit the carpet. He leaned forward and I tensed. "I told him you were a business consultant I knew."

I didn't say a thing.

"I thought it might be a bit awkward. Right?" His voice was quiet and I felt it even in my nervous abdomen. "Not that there's anything wrong with therapy. But people don't always know how to take it. Well, I could bring some other people onto the project and make it okay. Hey, Rich, here's Fred, he does accounting but he was also my dental hygienist. And Gloria, she does filing, but I met her back when she was my yoga instructor."

His smile was gentle and at that moment I became powerfully aware of my surroundings, the white walls around us, the air in the room and his presence, which was, to me, so full and vivid that I was literally afraid. He was Keith Wright, in the flesh. We were outside of my office, we were in the world, and he hadn't dissipated to a phantom. He was real. My heart was pounding. "Wait, I forgot, we don't need a secretary... forget Gloria... screw Gloria" he was saying, and I was thinking that he must know, any second now. He would see it in my eyes and know I was forfeit to dissolute processes, that when I went home to my apartment I could not think of anything but him. That last night I'd dreamed he kissed me, so real I felt the breath from his nose tickling my cheek, and I woke up in hot fear.

He finished by saying his head hurt from thinking about business, that Rich had obviously abandoned us and we should go out to lunch.

So I finally had Keith, after a fashion. I had what I wanted. It's funny how when he told me he'd left office, finally and before his term was up, I was angry. It took me a moment to remember that was what I'd wanted him to do -- to leave, to follow his dream, to be happy and healthy and a contributing member of society like every psychiatrist should want her patient to be. But when he told me, I was angry he could be so irresponsible. I barely even noticed I felt it, but I did catch it, just before Keith changed the subject again.

And I was about to accept his offer to lunch when Rich finally burst back in, an office chair in his arms, and Keith sprung into action as between the two of them they moved all the furniture in and spent an hour arranging it to their liking. Lunch was forgotten. I clicked through catalogs of office supplies while they worked, hollow with the loss.

By now I knew everything. Infatuation may be blind, but I had still had seven years of education in psychology, and by this point was quite capable of self-diagnosis. I was under the influence of animus, as they say -- or perhaps I should after all say anima in my case, considering my particular attributes. Keith was everything I lacked: he was effusive where I was restrained, emotional where I was reserved, trusting where I was skeptical, spontaneous where I was careful.

I was aware of projecting... at least, I say this now. The truth was that, as I thought: How wrong can I be? How far off can I be? If I'm seeing and responding to nothing more than an image projected from my unconsciousness, how far off yet can it be? when the man is a Boy Scout senator, environmental activist, devoted monogamist, nice guy? How far off from perfect can he really be? In short, how could I really go wrong by getting closer to someone of such moral fiber and harmless good cheer?

Paradoxically, the twin obstacles of my being his former therapist and his being utterly, incontrovertibly married only spurred me on. That having me around apparently meant enough to him to ignore not only legal but social convention struck my heart with special poignancy, precisely because it was the opposite of how I'd lived my whole life. I could not think of a time I had put a friend in front of a rule, and now began to rue myself for it. And Lysa? She was the icing on the cake, the balm that let everything roll forward smoothly. Keith was safe. I might pine for him to the depths of my soul, but he would never leave his wife. My feelings would have no consequence. No one would be hurt.

He did take me out to lunch, of course. Many times. I say with satisfaction that many of those times, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Keith loved tacos but hated mess. He was almost prissy in that respect. He would eat with his face practically against the plate, trying not to get the tiniest spot of hot sauce on his expensive wool. Yet he still talked through his food. He couldn't stop talking. He made me laugh. I remember getting up one morning feeling as though I was twenty again and had been up all night doing sit-ups, trying to get in shape for track season. He was oddly generous as well as amusing. Sometimes when we were out purchasing something or visiting a printing company he would get an urge and put the car down somewhere unfamiliar, saying he wanted to show me "this great spot." I stood with Keith in the middle of a garden of orchids, listening to him overflow with everything he loved about the flowers. He was not courting me. It was just how he was.

I let my practice tail off over the next year until I was seeing just a handful of clients. There was something oddly fulfilling about my life now, going into the city a couple days a week to help with the journal. Keith was especially grateful to me on one account: I had provided the name. I was talking about marketing. I said "The California Nature Review" would appeal to one kind of audience, and a more poetic name to another. I chose "Monsoon" as an example, not thinking much about it until Keith asked me why Monsoon. I struggled for a moment, then I remembered a movie by that name I'd seen as a young girl -- about an Indian meteorologist who fights the powers that be over global warming. For some reason that idea tickled him and he became besotted with the word. Or maybe he was tickled by the idea of my having been a young girl. I couldn't be sure. In any case we figured the connotations were fine, and it let him feel a poet, so we kept it.

So my life became richer with enjoyment. But it simultaneously became threadbare of purpose -- I had come so that I wanted nothing other than to know that man, and while I increasingly got it, there was an empty sort of tension in it. I had achieved much of what I wanted, yet I felt more than before as if I were waiting for something, that there was something about me that had become forever imminent.

And so I waited. But I would be remiss to say that the waiting was the last of it. There was also the pain. The times he conversed with Rich, and though I tried to join the conversation, Keith waving me off or ignoring me, and Rich unwittingly following his irresistible lead. I felt vanished. Some days Keith would be in a black mood, and though it never lasted long, his moods provoked special hurt, partly because of the things he said and partly because I could not figure them out. There in the Monsoon office, with Rich and the newly hired staffers running in and out, I couldn't play therapist anymore:

"Just go home. I need to get this done. Why do you always have to take issue with every little aspect of how we run this thing? You're acting like my mother-in-law."

The sudden ugliness and unfairness in his words would hit me like a punch, out of left field. And more than one part of me would head straight for why... why do you say that? Why are you in a bad mood today? Why won't you talk to me? but I would bite down hard. "Keith, it's just a few paragraphs. You have all day to finish it. You told me you wanted to know if your intro ever sounded pedantic, right?"

"I'm not the one who's pedantic, all right? Let me write or there won't be an intro for this issue."

My mind reeled. Where was this coming from? Who had swapped my smooth politician with an indecipherable fourteen-year-old punk? What was he thinking? That was the very worst; not the behavior, but the randomness of it; to know that after all this, I could still be blindsided. My gut would twist and I'd go home eventually, and stew until I saw him again. Until I could make things clear. This happened every few weeks.

So that was where we were when I was finally invited into his home, for the big party he threw election night. Everyone in the office was invited, and I was tingling as I knocked on his door, my heart pounding again as it had the first time we stepped out from my office. This is real. I'm getting what I want. But it was his wife who opened the door, and my reaction to her presence hit me with the surprise of an entire firehose of cold water.

That was the November everyone thought the Greens finally had a chance -- in fact, it was to be the year they finally won the presidency. But that is not the political development I remember most from that night.

Of course, it would not be -- in fact -- what any of us here remembers most from that night.

The most overdue Middle ever

Wow, ten months and I feel like I'm finally getting to the story. You know the idea about how the first thing you do when rewriting a story should be to go back to the beginning and delete the first page... I think in my case if I went back and deleted parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 I'd be doing pretty well. But I'm relieved to discover there IS a story waiting to be told, rather than just endless foreplay. Well, I knew there was. For once I had some idea of where I was going and how I was going to get there. I just seemed to have forgotten about it for about thirty pages.

I have a thing for dialogue, I love to write dialogue. And I always feel like I'm indulging it too much. I can go on for pages with just dialogue. So I always feel like I need to be breaking it up with some exposition. I'm not sure whether to be pleased or chagrined seeing that a major issue with the story as it is is that I keep interrupting perfectly reasonable dialogue with ridiculous comments about who shifted which way in what chair.

I was at the library the other day looking for new books to read about writing. I'm very picky about self-help books. I'm chauvinistic. I am biased toward action. I don't really want to read about how to write. I just want to do it. At least, I like to think I want to do it. That's the really chauvinistic part. The point is that I tend to disregard any book that sounds wishy-washy. I don't want to discover my true inner self. I just want to be reminded of what order the basic story elements come in.

I have no problem telling a story when I'm not thinking about it. I sometimes do this at parties. Not at parties where I'm trying to impress anyone, though. My ability to tell a story decreases in proportion to the amount I think about it, to the point that most of the stuff I write has about as much plot energy as a typical hour of C-span. Maybe I do need to discover my inner self. She's probably an accountant.

The Keith Wright story makes a surprising amount of sense for something that came from my keyboard. One thing leads to another (just like in real life!) and things happen that basically make sense. I'm not sure to what I should attribute this. The mermaid thing is also surprisingly coherent, and I attribute that to the fact that it's not the first time I wrote it. The first time I wrote it was when I was doing the exercise of making myself write a story in two pages every night. This put pressure on me to consider such important things as Beginning, Middle, and End. Lawdy. Maybe I should do that again.

The Uncanny Influence of Keith Wright, Part 8

The week he failed to show up for an appointment was the week I crashed my car. I had passed through the waiting room at about a quarter of, half to go to the bathroom and half just to see if he was there yet. And again a few minutes before the hour I stuck my head out, and no Keith. And then five minutes after the hour. That was more like him, though. He was more lateness than earliness, and more unpredictability than he was either of those in particular.

At quarter after I left him a message.

When the hour was up I left him another message, which isn't something I do. It wasn't until halfway through that I realized I had nothing to say. "Just calling again to make sure... just checking up, give me a call and we can reschedule." I was a damn fool. And the next day, I ran my car straight into a postal service van hovering blatantly in front of me. I had never seen it.

And Keith never called me back. Instead he simply showed up a week later, at his usual time. And of course I had the hour open. He bustled himself into my office. "Sorry about last week," he said with a grin. "I was thinking maybe we could talk some more about career issues..." he had already closed the door and was sitting down. "...I feel like I need to get stuff done. You know?"

So I didn't ask him about what had happened the week before. The hook set out -- to have another conversation about something significant to him -- was too tantalizing to pass up, in any case.

"Tell me what you've been thinking," I said.

And we spoke about his career for a good ten minutes. He had decided, he said, that it was his career after all that was making him unhappy. "I know that was why I came here in the first place," he interrupted me partway through, "and that it's what you've been telling me all along. But I didn't really see it until now."

"Sounds like good news... what happened?"

Keith was wearing a yellow tie that day, I remember, one that would only have looked good on him. He loosened and re-loosened it probably three times while he was talking. "This morning was a great morning, I had eggs... Lysa made me breakfast... I had a record commute... spent the first half hour going over stuff with a new intern, she was brilliant... then Bob Ricci came in with some stuff they wanted me to sign onto and I felt my stomach drop, I felt my mood just go ten times worse." His hands dangled between his knees, having illustrated the drop in dramatic style. "It's not coming from nowhere. It is the job. It's this crap I have to do. Being fake and signing stuff I don't want to sign."

His eyes shone with eagerness to reenact the eureka moment for me. When I asked him what he was going to do, he immediately went flat.

"What would I do? I can't quit. What do you want? I'll wait until my term's up, then I'll be free to move on."

I ignored the rhetorical questions. "How are you feeling right now?"

He opened his mouth, then -- uncharacteristically -- paused, took a couple breaths, then spoke. "I feel a little better."

I nodded.

"The world makes more sense."

I remember maintaining a thoughtful silence.

"Thank you."

"Me? You're the one doing all the work."

He was impish. "Oh no, Frau Doktor, it's you with the..." he paused to tap his skull. "Vit ze shmartzhaben."

I sniggered.

"Any old jamoke can run his mouth for fifty-five minutes, it takes a true professional to make sense of it all. No, really, this is doing amazing things with my life. What, stop laughing. Did you know, the other day I actually capered? I did. Like this. Lysa thinks I'm crazy."

And on my word, the senator thrust himself from his chair and skipped a short skip to the window, making the floor tremble a little, where finding himself already out of room he turned around and looked at me, straightening his tie. "Do you ever do a little walking therapy? Get out of the office, take a client around the block? I had a teacher who used to like to do that with us. Maybe next week, if it's this nice." A grin stretched his face. "It'd be criminal not to take advantage of this mood. Or this April."

So that was the first time I met Keith outside the office, in a manner of speaking.

He lacked the particular bounce he'd had the previous week, an energy that had continued through the rest of a session devoted mostly to discussions of other teachers and mentors he'd taken particular liking to. This week he was calm in a cheerful way. When I caught up with him in the waiting room he stood and said, "Well?" so I opened the door onto the street, my heart pounding between ribs of jelly.

I had never, in fact, conducted therapy anywhere but in an office -- the office worked, so why trouble myself? But I could not have refused Keith's suggestion if I'd wanted to. The idea of being with him in the real world -- a place apart from the dim sanctum where all my transactions were usually performed -- aroused a greed so mammoth that my power of decision was not only overthrown, but forgotten. Why in the world would I want anything else but to spend more time with this man, in more places? To let him bleed into a little more of my life, if he so desired... and he apparently did!

In my first steps I was afraid I would not be able to concentrate on the conversation, would not even be able to draw a normal breath. I was suddenly afraid he would know. Surely there was some glazed look to my eye, or some hateful audibility to my swallow that would tell him not all was right in the world that walked beside him. But nothing happened. And as he began to talk about the usual things, a strange feeling came over me. I was happy. I was walking down a street lined with cherry trees on a beautiful April day, gifted with the company of a rather handsome, zanily charming man -- in a bright green tie with tiny turtles on it -- whose attention in its full force was like an industrial heat lamp. I found myself smiling for no reason at every other point in the conversation. I was enjoying myself!

"Dad really wanted me to get into a profession where I could make some money," Keith was saying. "But it wasn't like he was a distant or particularly hard-driving man. He cared a lot about me." His tone became wistful and he stopped for a moment, then jerked a flower up from the sidewalk border and stuck it behind his own ear. "I didn't think he'd be happy with me as a writer. Though I obviously should have been."

"You've been thinking about this some more."

"I've been more than thinking. I've been talking to some people. Every time I started rambling about maybe leaving office to write full-time for magazines, they'd get excited."

"People like who?"

"Oh... people like my brother-in-law. The other secretary who works in our office. My hairdresser."

Keith didn't look particularly like he'd had a haircut recently. "People who know you, you mean?"

"They'd have a reaction like this--" He grabbed both my hands in his and let his eyes light up. "Really? That's great! Keith, that's wonderful!" His high-pitched rendition made me laugh. When he stopped squeezing my hands I slipped them into my pockets without thinking, warm.

"So... I see."

"So it's like everybody's been just waiting for me to come to this decision. Like it was obvious for everyone but me. Don't be a politician, stupid!"

"What are you going to--"

"Everyone's been really supportive. It left me with a huge smile on my face."

"Have you talked to your wife about it?"

"No... well... I didn't want to worry her until I got a better feel for what I wanted to do. She's been busy with a big case they're bringing to court. I've barely even seen her lately. I feel like I see you more than I see her. So... what am I going to do... My brother-in-law said he knew a guy who wanted to start up a new nature journal, something more balanced than the usual left-wing radical proselytizing. Rich Wegman, do you know him? He's a meteorologist."

My ears were buzzing. "No, I don't think so."

"So I talked to Rich--" All this in the past week? "--who's a brilliant guy, and he says he was just going to make it a local thing, but if I wanted to join he says he'd push to try to make it statewide coverage, statewide readership. He said with my experience and reputation that... not only would my name sell copies, but that he'd be crazy not to offer me the lead editorial position. If I was available."

"Are you available?"

"Can you imagine? The California Nature Review, edited by Keith Wright. He says it's just going to be a monthly, about fourteen, sixteen pages per issue. Still."

Keith strolled nearly as fast as he talked, and we'd come most of the way around the block by now, turning the last corner. I let my overfilled mind struggle through the last few sentences to sit at a point of vague irritation. Did he not hear my question? I realized he'd slowed down as we headed back toward my office building. The light breeze was tugging some of his hair over his eyes.

"Rich said I was welcome to bring anybody else on board... we really hit it off. This is going to be a true collaboration. He said he trusted me to bring in anybody else who knows anything about business, or science, or writing. So I was wondering... how'd you like to do a little consulting?"

"What?"

"You know, help us get things set up, figure out a business plan, see what we need for staff. You said you used to do consulting for small businesses. I only worked for a giant corporation. Not the same. Plus, you're smarter than me and Rich put together. Don't tell Rich I said that, though," he laughed.

My chest and face felt hot, my stomach icy. The California regulations on fraternization never had a chance; it was too late; the words were already vaulting from my mouth. "Of course. If you think I'd have something to add--"

"You're way too modest. Please, five months ago I was a miserable political lackey. With a bad case of melodrama. Now, look at me! I'm almost the editor of a monthly journal! with a bad case of melodrama." He pulled the flower out from behind his ear and tossed it over his shoulder.

My cheeks were still burning. I wanted to ask him again, What about your job? What did you decide? It's the therapist's role to get a client thinking clearly about his life. It was all too late though. As we ascended the steps to the office, one of his restless hands seized me at the elbow and he turned me bodily to point out how the full moon hung above a blooming cherry tree. "I love April," he said, and I felt myself nod in agreement; then we were inside.

The Inopportune Moment

I had just left a party at my friend Jeff's and was walking home, because I was drunk. I had only gone a few steps when I sort of hazily became aware of a presence next to me. At the time it felt natural to only sort of hazily be aware of someone being next to me, because I'd been that way since about nine o'clock in the evening, but then I started to wonder if it was more because it was Jesus.

My mind was too sluggish to be really startled. I had kind of a delayed startled reaction. By the time I realized I was startled I had already moved on to not caring that the guy next to me had a beard and robes. In fact I knew right away that he must be Jesus. Pretty right away.

"Hello, Ben," He said.

"Hi," I said.

"How have you been doing?"

"All right, I guess." I pushed against a telephone pole for balance as I walked past it and wondered if I'd been doing that with all the telephone poles, because I couldn't remember.

"Things have been difficult lately, haven't they."

I looked at Jesus. I wondered what to say. I was still wondering this when I noticed I was already talking. "I'm sad about Mom," I said.

"I know." He walked quietly with me for a while and I was upset because I was trying to focus on Jesus but frankly it was requiring a lot of my concentration to make sure I kept my balance. I thought about apologizing to Him for being so sloshed but I wondered if that was stupid. Then a car turned into the road in front of me, which I hate. I was upset at the car.

"Ben?"

"Yeah?" I couldn't believe Jesus was still talking with me.

"It will be all right. There will be a place for her. And there will be a place for you." He laid His hand on my arm.

"I know," I said. And God I really wanted to say something nice to the guy but it was hard to push it through the question of whether this was weird or not. Then after that He was gone, and I fished around in my pockets for half a minute before realizing I'd already forgotten why I wanted to do that.

"Shit," I said.

Experiment; Googlism.com: The Bird

the bird is starting to boss you
the bird is orphaned
the bird is the word the wild turkey didn't return to illinois until the late 1950s
the bird is
the bird is no longer there
the bird is transferred to a new keeper the registration document is returned to us with the transfer details filled in at the base of the form and a new
the bird is treated correctly
the bird is tame
the bird is chaotic in the sense that its dippy behavior is regular but not predictable
the bird is under anesthesia
the bird is eating approximately the same amount every day
the bird is held firmly between the index and middle fingers of the hand
the bird is spotted some tens of times every year
the bird is repeating some of the gossipy conversations he learned when he eavesdropped on the customers
the bird is in a box
the bird is a substance with a low vaporization point; it evaporates easily
the bird is truly orphaned or is it a fledgling who is fine where it is
the bird is sent out to a lab for identification
the bird is like a rudder
the bird is called the quetzal
the bird is rescued
the bird is in the cage or box then it should be removed to a warm place
the bird is a warm

In the Tissue Box

The bird is eating approximately the same amount every day. This was fine when it was just brought in, bleary in a tissue box, but now it's starting to worry me. Well, worry is a strong word. I take note. Jamie would be worried. Little girls are easily attached to little birds. When I was her age and found a dying baby bird under a hedge, I picked it up and put it in the woods to see if a wild animal would come eat it.

A part of me wants this little robin to die, just so Jamie and I can have a "teachable moment." It seems a horrible thing to admit. But both my parents are likely to pass on within the next year, and how could a four-year-old understand? How could I even hope to do the job I'll need to do? I've been waiting for the question, "Daddy, will you die?"

"Not for a long time" is what a magazine article counseled me to say.

That isn't really what I want to say, though. I vacillate between the truth in my heart, which is "No, I'll always be with you" and "Yes," flat-out Yes, which is also the truth. Is it selfish of me to feel unable to dilute the truth? What is it that makes me want to raise my hatred of equivocation over the needs of a preschool girl?

Selfishness lingers. Sometimes I feel I don't have the strength to slay it, or the nobility to transcend it. Sometimes I only hover beside it, and watch it breathe.

The Future of Sportfishing

The coast of Ireland wasn't the same as when Rory was a boy. He was eighty now, and he could remember all the way back to when they used to haul in five fish a day. Now people were lucky to get one in a month of sportfishing, and that too little to keep.

This was an observation that escaped most of the fishermen these days. They were ecstatic whenever they did get a fish. That's what ignorance did to you. Lowered expectations had brought the joy back into being a sportsman. It had also kept the objective situation from improving. This was the way it was! One fish a month. The young things out there on their foils, sixteen, eighteen, twenty years old, that's what they'd grown up with. Plus, there were other things out there, unnatural things in the water that didn't belong there. Stuff that was taken for granted now.

Rory didn't use a hydrofoil. They were ungodly noisy. If you want to catch fish, you need to be quiet. Rory still used an old wooden rowboat, with carbon muffler oars. He and Willis went out every Sunday morning to catch fish. Willis was also eighty, or thereabouts.

"Bad weather today," said Willis that morning.

Rory nodded.

They pushed the boat into the water and rowed out on the pewter bay. The sun hadn't come up yet and what light there was seemed to come from nowhere, no source, but there was enough for them to find their way all the same. They got out far enough into the bay that the little boat began to rock slightly. Willis unscrewed his thermos of coffee.

Rory looked out at the ocean. "Let's head out a ways."

"Storms, they said."

"When?"

"In the morning."

"It's not stormy now."

Willis shrugged.

"We want to catch fish, we've got to get out of this bay. The only thing we're going to catch in this bay is plastic."

Willis took his time drinking half the thermos of coffee, screwed the top back on and picked up the oars again, and they rowed out into the sea. By the time they got there the water already had more chop on it. The little boat bobbed up and down. The sun had risen but couldn't be seen; the sky was all cloud, from north to south.

Rory set his pole up and slid his fingers into the bag of bait. The squid was still cold, half-frozen, squid from Japan, shipped in just for crazy sportsmen like them who just had to keep fishing, damn the drain on their bank accounts. He pierced the squid with the hook and dropped his line in the water. Willis put on a lure.

"What are you doing that for?" Willis was stupid with lures. Anything Willis thought was pretty, he figured the fish would too. He figured the fish thought like he did. Rory didn't give either of them that much credit.

Willis shrugged. "I bought it, might as well use it."

"You've never caught anything here with a lure. Here, use my bait."

"I have too. There's plenty of stuff in here'll go after a lure."

"Have it your way." Rory leaned back in the boat and looked up at the sky. The storm was coming up, sure enough. The breeze that hit his face was wet, and stronger than when they'd set out. He sat there while Willis jerked his line about, reeled it in, cast it again. He looked like a fool.

When the chop got high enough to rock him back and forth in the boat, Rory wedged himself in and gripped the gunwales. He figured the sun was high by now, but the day was no lighter. Willis had given up jiggling the lure around and had wedged himself in the bow with his coffee. Fishing was being out on the water as much as it was catching a fish, but even the prettiest storm, wild and real like a black and white photograph brought to life, could leave you feeling a little green. When the rain started Willis looked about ready to head in.

"Not yet," said Rory. "Wife'll be after me about why didn't I stop in at the store if I come home early."

After twenty minutes the storm was starting to come into its own, blowing cold rain in their faces from all directions, so of course it was then that one of them finally got a bite on the line.

"I'll be damned, Willis," said Rory. "There IS something that'll go after those lures."

Willis was already cranking on the reel. The pole was bent nearly double. Rory grabbed the oars.

The big fish began pulling them out to sea, hauling the boat through the heavy chop, and Rory didn't dare slow them down too much for fear of snapping Willis's line. He knew Willis wouldn't let it go. The old fool had too many years of experience in him to mishandle a big catch like this. The fish zigged and zagged, but kept them on a course away from land, which Rory noted. Still, even if they wasted hours rowing back through the wind and chop, it'd be worth it for their first catch in weeks.

"This is a good one," shouted Willis over the wind, his old fingers working like lightning to let out slack then crank on the reel again.

"You bastard," said Rory.

It was ten or fifteen minutes until their catch slowed at all. Its course became more meandering, at times drifting back toward shallow water. Rory was glad. The cold and wet was seeping in, and the row in would be wearisome. The wind made it hard to keep his hood up.

As Willis reeled in the final yards of line it was apparent that the fish would outrank most of the rare beauties they'd caught so far. His pole was still doubled, even though the struggle had stopped. Rory got the net ready. The boat was bucking on the waves as Willis's catch came up in the soupy water high enough for Rory to see its pale bulk. It was huge.

"Get it over the side! Don't pull us both in now!"

But as Willis reeled in the last of the line, he stopped, scowling. Then he reached for his knife.

Rory tried to stand up high enough to see, gripping the gunwales in the howling wind. Willis cut the line and Rory saw through the murk the pale outline, the seeping blood where the hooks of the shiny lure had pierced flesh, before it sank down again unseen. He collapsed back down into the back of the boat in disgust, glancing at the shoreline that now lay darkly distant through the worsening storm. That was it.

"Bloody mermaids," said Rory.