No Body, Though


    Wilbert Croke was shooting at the buzzards again, and even before Stanley McNew opened his eyes, he knew it would take
    every speck of self-restraint he could muster to keep from knocking the young pecker-headed animal control officer clean
    into next week.  The shooting had been going on for the last two weeks or so, Stanley calculated, as he turned onto his back
    and slid his leg off the sofa.  Ever since Randall Pupkin and his River Street Neighborhood Association had filed a formal
    complaint with the city manager’s office about the colony of buzzards roosting in the stand of sycamore trees along the
    riverbank behind the houses on River Street.  A large portion of the buzzard colony seemed to prefer the trees behind
    Stanley’s house, and Wilbert’s strategy was to get out there at dawn and roust the buzzards with a starter’s pistol while the
    trees were still full of the big, bald sleeping birds.  Stanley knew it was only a matter of time until young Wilbert would grow
    bored with the little starter’s pistol and make the move to the holstered 9mm he wore high on his hip and, so far, had only
    been able to use on skunks and the occasional raccoon or groundhog.
            Well, enough was enough, goddamn it.  Stanley knuckled the sleep from his eyes and pulled himself into a sitting
    position on the sofa.  He was a working man, toting the fatigue of a man who worked with hands that were cracked and
    scabbed at the end of a day, who worked on his own time and his own terms, and he could have used that last twenty or
    thirty minutes of sleep before he had to get up anyway.  He needed his rest.  He had work to do, lots of it, more than he could
    keep up with.  But he had to keep up—he needed the money.  Carly might show up, might realize what a bonehead she’d run
    off with, give him the boot and come home some day.  She might want to go to college after all, and this time he wanted to be
    ready for her, wanted to be a father this time around if he got the chance.  Besides, waking into another day of not drinking
    was hard enough as it was, and no working man in his right mind, drunk or not, liked the sound of gunfire as an alarm
    clock.      
            Stanley pushed himself up from the sofa, slouched toward the bathroom, and stubbed his bare toes into a stray pair of
    vice grips.  His foot recoiled, and his hand shot out to the wall, steadying him, as the vice grips spun over the wood floor and
    skidded through the open bathroom door, rattling across the tiles and clanking against the base of the toilet.
            “Ow, goddamn it all.”  
            Stanley leaned over, holding one hand to the wall behind the toilet to brace himself while he urinated and stared at the
    vice grips on the bathroom floor.
            “Was wondering what happened to those,” he said.  
            He stepped into a pair of overalls he retrieved from the bathroom floor, along with the vice grips, and shuffled into the
    kitchen to make coffee, pressing his fingertips into his eyes as he walked.  He laid the vice grips on the counter by a bundle of
    boiler baffles, poured water into the coffee maker, scooped coffee into a filter, and flipped the switch to start the machine
    brewing. While the coffee maker began to burp and gurgle, Stanley looked around the kitchen, rubbing his nose and squinting
    his eyes.  He’d mounted the new cabinet on the kitchen wall by the sink about a month or two before Louise left him six years
    ago, but he still hadn’t gotten around to putting on the cabinet doors.  Once he got a little more caught up, he’d have to
    remember where he put those doors and finish the job.  
            A pack of cigarettes lay on the counter by a box of copper pipe caps.  Stanley slid a cigarette out of the pack, lit it and
    smoked it, flicking the ashes into the kitchen sink while he waited for the coffee to finish brewing.  By Stanley’s estimate,
    Wilbert was close to completing his efforts for the morning.  The young man stomped around the base of one sycamore
    where a few stubborn buzzards still lingered on the branches, not yet annoyed enough to be budged by the popping of the
    starter pistol.  Wilbert’s camouflage pants were tucked into tightly-laced combat boots, his upper arms thick and his belly flat
    under his t-shirt, and from the kitchen window it looked to Stanley as if he’d had a haircut since he last harried the big birds
    behind Stanley’s house.  Closely cropped around the ears and spiky on top, it seemed, to Stanley, to shine as the sunlight
    began to inch its way into the trees.  Wilbert fired a couple more shots at the buzzards, as if aiming at them with a gun that
    actually discharged bullets.  Stanley could see his shoulders slump in frustration as the remaining birds fluttered upward,
    turned in a short loop and settled back onto the same branches.  Wilbert raised the pistol again, but before firing, he paused,
    lowered the gun, and pulled the walkie-talkie from his belt, responding to a call.
            “Good,” Stanley said.  “Maybe the little prick’ll let up for a while now.”
            The coffee maker spit out its last few spasmodic belches, letting Stanley know his coffee was finally ready.  He rinsed
    cigarette ash from a mug in the sink and poured himself a cup.  Stanley sipped at the hot coffee, watching Wilbert clip the
    walkie-talkie back to his belt and turn to walk out of his back yard.  When Wilbert reached the back of his house, Stanley
    stepped to the side door and opened it as the young animal control officer was passing on his way to the street where his
    truck sat.
            Stanley leaned against the door frame, his coffee mug cradled in both hands.
            “Morning there, Willy,” he said.
            Wilbert Croke stopped, as if under some obligation to acknowledge Stanley’s greeting, though it was clear he wanted
    only to get back to his truck and go about his important business for the city.
            “Morning,” he said.  “My name’s Wilbert.”
            “I know that, Willy,” Stanley said.
            One thing Stanley knew about Wilbert Croke was that the fellow had an over-developed sense of respect for authority.  
    And from what Stanley could tell, this respect wasn’t limited to his superiors in the police department, which meant every
    other cop in town.  In the hierarchy of local law enforcement, Wilbert stood on the absolute lowest rung of the ladder—even
    the woman who chalked the tires of the cars parked on Main Street was considered more of a police officer than Wilbert, the
    dog catcher.  As best as Stanley could make out, Wilbert recognized any conventional form of hierarchy, including age.  
    Stanley could see the kid’s jaw muscles grinding his teeth together in response to being called Willy, but since Stanley was at
    least twenty-five, maybe thirty years older than Wilbert, he knew he could push it without much serious concern of reprisal.
            “Well, you woke my tired ass up with that little toy pistol of yours,” Stanley said, grinning and turning his eyes toward
    the buzzards still roosting in the trees along the river. “Don’t seem as if it had much effect on those buzzards though.”
            “Just doing my job, Mr. McNew,” Wilber said.
            “And a hell of a job it is, Willy.  And call me Stanley, kid.  Hell, you’ve been kind enough to stop by the house and wake
    me up every damn day for the last couple weeks, well, I feel like we’re old pals.”
            Wilbert’s jaw tightened again and he grunted.
            “Tell me,” Stanley said, “how do you get your hair to do that?  Stick up all over—all prickly and such?”
            Wilbert jerked upright and his hand rose and patted the newly-spiked, gelled hair on his head, his face crinkled into a
    look of concerned confusion.  Apparently a comment about his hair could bring Wilbert nearly to the limits of his respect for
    the authority of age.
            “You could just as soon stop worrying about my hair and maybe worry about something else, like this house of yours.  
    When you going to finish fixing up this old dump?”
            Stanley looked over his shoulder into the kitchen, as if taking in all of his home at a glance.
            “You been talking to my good neighbor Randall Pupkin again, ain’t you.  Well, son, I can tell you exactly when I’m
    going to finish.  When I get around to it.”
            Stanley smiled, brought his coffee cup to his lips, and looked up at the scaffolding over his head along the east side of
    his house.  Rickety and rusting, draped with spider webs, just like the scaffolding that stood around the front and west side of
    his house.  He took another slug of coffee and grinned, deciding not to say anything to Wilbert just then about the huge
    splatter of buzzard crap on the young man’s boot.
            “It’s a work in progress, kid,” Stanley said as the young animal control officer trudged away down Stanley’s gravel
    driveway.
            He stepped back inside the kitchen, dug the cordless phone out from under an empty potato chip bag, and shuffled back
    to the open door.  He stared at the phone in his hand for a moment before he punched in his friend Danny Pinsker’s phone
    number to call his ex-wife.  
            He hadn’t called Louise since she came home from the hospital a couple weeks ago.  The severity of Louise’s accident
    had grown in proportion to the number of times Stanley heard the tale recounted.  He’d gotten the facts early in the morning
    on the day following the mishap when Danny called to tell him that Louise had lost three fingers.  She’d been trying to clear a
    jam in the punch press she operated at the plant and hadn’t bothered with the safety switch.  The sheeting she was tugging at
    jerked free, Louise lost her balance for a moment, and the cylinder of the punch kicked back into operation, tearing three
    fingers from Louise’s right hand, leaving only the thumb and pinkie.  When Stanley heard about it for the fourth time that
    morning, while gassing up his van at the Wilco, the injury had increased from lost fingers to a lost hand to the punch press
    tearing off Louise’s entire right arm.  
            He’d called her in the hospital once, but Danny had answered the phone in her room and told him that she couldn’t talk
    just then.  He told Stanley she was too doped up just then even to talk to herself.  Stanley had heard stories of detached limbs
    being reconnected and asked Danny if there had been any possibility of that for Louise.
            “These doctors can do a lot,” Danny had said, “but they ain’t yet learned how to reattach fingers that been mashed into
    hamburger.”      
            Stanley refilled his coffee mug and lifted the phone to his ear.  Louise answered between the second and third ring.
             “Hello,” she said.  Stanley imagined his ex-wife holding the telephone in her left hand, pacing back and forth in the
    kitchen she’d convinced Danny Pinsker to expand and remodel after she moved in with him.  Stanley marveled at how
    unchanged her voice was, throaty and rich as ever, even though she’d lost three fingers and had, for the last four years, been
    living with his oldest friend.
            “Hey, it’s me,” Stanley said and slurped in a large gulp of coffee, burning his tongue and causing him to cough.
            “Are you okay?” Louise asked.
            “Yeah.  Coffee.  Hot. That’s all.”
            Stanley blew across the surface of his coffee cup and attempted another sip.
            “How are you?” he asked.
            “I’m hanging in there,” Louise said.
            “I was just wondering.  Anything you need?”
            “From you, Stanley?”
            Stanley pursed his lips and looked toward the river.  The sycamore trees were empty now and just above the tree tops
    he could see the buzzards circling in slow, elegant spirals over the far side of the river.
            “Well…,” he said.
            “I’m fine, Stanley.  Danny’s here, remember?”
            At first Stanley had been surprised he wasn’t angry when his ex-wife found her way to his best friend’s bed a couple
    years after she left him.  Over the ensuing years he’d come to feel relief, gratitude actually, that Louise was with the one
    person he knew would always be good to her, the one person who would never expect her to be anyone other than who she
    already was.  He was glad that two of the only three people he loved in the world were safely together in the little house
    Danny Pinsker had built for himself on the other side of the river.  
            “Don’t worry yourself,” Louise said.  “I’m leading a full and meaningful life.  I have a full calendar.  For example, today
    I’ll be practicing holding my cigarette in my left hand.  Tomorrow I learn to pick my nose with my pinkie.”
            Stanley stepped onto the porch on the side of his house and curled his toes over the edge of the cracked planks.
            “Sorry, I just…,” he said, but Louise cut him off with a sigh.
            “No, I’m sorry, Stanley.  Needless to say, I get a bit bitchy from time to time these days.  I’ll get past it.”
            “Are you in pain?” Stanley asked.
            “Not as long as my stash of Demerol holds out.”
            Stanley set his coffee mug on one of the planks on the scaffolding and listened to what sounded like dishes dropping into
    the kitchen sink from the receiver.  He took a long breath.
            “Have you heard anything?”
            “From Carly?  No, Stanley.  Nothing.”
            “She ought to know about, I mean,…”
            “What?  That her mother’s a mutilated gimp?  Yeah, Stanley.  She ought to know.  She ought to know a lot of things.  
    And I ought to know where in the hell my daughter has run off to with that numb-nuts.  Can’t even get the cops to help, now
    that she’s an adult.”
            The phone went silent, and Stanley waited.  Louise would be struggling to get her breath.  Her bitter emphasis of the
    word adult rattled in his ear.
            “Relax, Stanley,” she said after a moment.  “If I hear from her, I’ll let you know.”
            “Thanks,” Stanley said and picked up his coffee mug.
            “Danny’s on the river already,” Louise said.  “He ought to be down your way soon.”
            “I’ll go down and look for him.  Well…”
            “Thanks for calling, Stanley.  I’m doing okay.  I’ll call you if—you know.”
            “Louise?  You still there?”
            “Yeah,” Louise said.  “Still here.”
            Stanley took a short sip from his coffee and gulped.  
            “I’ve quit drinking,” he said.
            “That’s nice, Stanley.  How many times does this make it now?”
            Stanley didn’t even think about protesting.  Didn’t bother to claim that this time he was serious.  Didn’t tell her that he
    hadn’t had a drink in, what was it, three months now?  Since Carly took off.  Stanley knew Louise had no reason to think that
    this time would be any different.
            “How many times, Stanley?  Say, forty, fifty times you’ve quit drinking?”
            “I think this makes forty-seven.”
            Stanley had a hard time believing it, too.  After three months he was still surprised not to find the coffee table littered
    with beer cans and whiskey bottles when he woke on the sofa in the morning.  Only a butt-choked ashtray, a pack of
    cigarettes, an empty coffee cup, and the remote control for the television.  He wondered when the usual rationalizations would
    kick in again, that there wasn’t really a problem, that a working man deserved a couple of cold ones at the end of a long, hard
    day.  Once, he’d tried going to a meeting, but it didn’t take.  Too goddamn much like church, Stanley had said to himself, and
    I’ve had quite enough of church, thank you.  He didn’t like the word alcoholic, and refused to call himself one.  Given the
    way he’d behaved over the years and what he done to himself and his wife and daughter, well, a word as clean and clinical as
    alcoholic just didn’t cover it as far as Stanley was concerned.  He was a drunk and that was what he was going to call
    himself, a drunk, no matter what all these simpering slobs said.  He slipped out the door before the meeting concluded.  
            This was his business and he’d take care of it on his own, in his own way, in his own words.  Besides, he didn’t have
    time for meetings.  He was too busy with work.  Too busy trying to remember what the years of drinking had blotted out.  
    Too busy trying to understand how his daughter’s entrance into the world had provoked his heavy drinking.  
            Louise and Carly had been home from the hospital for only a couple of days, and Louise had taken their daughter outside
    to enjoy a spell of warm, gentle weather.  Stanley had earlier refurbished the worn old Adirondack chairs on the front porch—
    scraping, sanding, painting—because Louise had said how nice it would be to sit out there with the baby.  Stanley had
    knocked off from work early that day, eager to be home with Louise and Carly.  They were on the porch, behind the railing,
    curled into one of the Adirondack chairs, when he pulled in the gravel driveway.  Not until he stepped onto the porch could he
    see that Louise was nursing Carly, right there, outside on the porch, for all the world to see.  Before he said a word, someone
    drove by along River Street and waved—maybe someone Louise knew, he couldn’t remember—and she casually raised her
    free hand and waved back.  Stanley looked back and forth, from the receding car to his wife’s bulging breast, and Louise
    grinned at his obvious discomfort.
            “Relax, Stanley,” she said.  “It’s not like I’m standing up shaking my boobs at them.”
            As Louise spoke, Carly pulled back from the nipple, her tiny lips and tongue gumming the air, her eyes closed, serene
    and satisfied.
            “That’s right, baby,” Louise said to the child in her arms, dabbing at the pumping lips with a cloth she took from her
    shoulder.  “Tell daddy to relax.  It’s a beautiful and natural thing.  And besides, a girl’s got to eat, doesn’t she?”
            Stanley had slumped into the other chair on the porch.  In an instant, the space between his wife’s red, drooping nipple
    and his infant daughter’s wet, pursing lips widened and filled with every danger, imaginable and unimaginable, that a perilous
    world could drop into the path of his helpless child.  Dangers he could do nothing to prevent, to protect her from.  That night
    he drank several more beers than usual, medicating this sudden terror.  By the time he passed out on the sofa during Carly’s
    fifth birthday party, his daughter astride his stomach licking lime-green cake frosting from her fingers, he’d succeeded
    beyond all expectation in dispelling that terror and Louise had long since rejected the idea of having a second child with the
    drunk sprawled on her sofa.
            Stanley set the phone down on the kitchen counter beside a faucet wrench and walked into the living room to look for
    his boots.  They’d be somewhere at the end of the sofa where he’d kicked them off the night before.  When Louise had
    picked up one more crumpled beer can than she could bear and dropped it into her trash can in the kitchen, she packed up
    half the furniture, half the dishes, both the dogs, and Carly, and moved out.  Stanley still hadn’t replaced the bed.  For six
    years now he hadn’t slept in a regular bed.  The old sofa sufficed.  It was long, comfortable, and Stanley felt at home
    stretched out on it.

    Over the far side of the river, the buzzards glided in loose spirals and rose on the warming air.  A careless eye would have
    assumed an obvious interpretation of the scene—hulking, unsightly birds of carrion, searching out the carcasses of the dead
    to feed upon.  Stanley knew better, thanks to Danny Pinsker.
            “Look at them buzzards,” Danny had said one day longer ago than Stanley could recall.  They’d been in Danny’s
    jonboat, drifting leisurely over grass beds full of fat bluegills, yanking in a scrappy panfish here and there between beers.  
    Stanley had squinted through the late afternoon light, slowly locating the buzzards Danny had referred to.  “Damn, but them
    birds is having fun,” Danny had said.
            Before that afternoon, it had never occurred to Stanley that buzzards were anything other than what most people thought
    they were—big, ugly birds existing on the rank flesh of road kill and dead fish.  True, the incessant turns of Hart Hollow Road
    on the other side of the river would, most any day, offer up ample fare for the birds.  At times it seemed that every other bend
    in the long riverside road revealed to a traveler yet another mashed body of a skunk, a possum, a raccoon, or a groundhog.  
    The first three were slow and nocturnal.  They waddled out onto the road at night, and by the time they were caught in the
    headlights of a car coming around a bend, it was too late for either the driver or the slow rodent to do a damn thing about it.  
    The groundhogs were just stupid, insisting on the sweeter grass at the roadside and getting caught unaware.  And the
    buzzards would certainly avail themselves of such food.  It was their role in the scheme of things, and they performed their
    job dutifully.  But just now, as Stanley leaned into the trunk of a sycamore and drained his second cup of coffee, that was not
    what occupied the buzzards.  They were having fun, joyfully riding the currents of air, playfully intoxicated by the insane
    levity of their own bulky bodies.  It was obvious, Stanley thought.  A blind man could see that the buzzards were just having a
    hell of a good time flying, riding the updrafts for the simple sake of the fact that they could.
            Stanley hadn’t been down to the riverbank in a few days.  Heavy thunderstorms at the end of the previous week had
    churned the river into a surging, muddy torrent, but Stanley hadn’t seen it, except when driving his van across the bridge.  
    He’d been too busy those days with installing or repairing sump pumps in flooded basements and unclogging backed up sewer
    lines.  Plumbers in town were in such demand following the storm that Randall Pupkin, because no other plumber in town
    could possibly get to him before another week, at least, had been forced to go back on his pledge never to employ Stanley, no
    matter what, come hell or high water.  Stanley had to admit to himself that he’d gotten great pleasure from digging an ugly
    gouge through Pupkin’s lawn to get to the aged sewer line that had ruptured and flooded the yard in front of the old Victorian
    house that his neighbor had been meticulously restoring over the last two years.  And Stanley had taken great care to do a
    remarkably sloppy job of filling in the trench once he’d replaced the broken pipes, knowing that Randall Pupkin wasn’t ever
    going to hire him again, not until the next high water.  Along River Street, there would always be high water.
            Silt had settled out of the water now, and the river flowed clearly, its depth returned to less threatening levels, safely
    contained within its banks.  The sudden rise and fall of the river did what it always did—left the riverbank and low
    overhanging branches intermittently festooned with snarled brush and dead branches from other trees upstream, with plastic
    bags and soda bottles, rusted barbeque grills and bicycles, and other flood trash.  Stanley slipped down the bank and tugged a
    tattered Wal-Mart bag from a low branch of a river willow.  As he brought his arm down and crumpled the bag into the
    pocket of his overalls, he saw Danny’s boat drifting under the trestle.
            Danny cast into the pocket behind one of the trestle supports.  Stanley knew  Danny Pinsker would never float that
    stretch of the river without dropping his line into that spot.  Only under the most unusual circumstances would there not be at
    least three or four worthy smallmouth bass lurking in that gentler water.  Upstream and down the five miles the river ran
    through town lay innumerable pools, holes, eddies, and grass beds rich with hefty bass, and Danny Pinsker knew every one
    of them better than anyone else.  He’d been fishing the river for the better part of forty years, and for a good number of those
    years, Stanley had been there with him.  Over the past decade or so, as the river had gained an increased reputation as a “hell
    of a bass river,” Danny had been approached on more than one occasion to serve as a river guide.  On each of those
    occasions Danny had tersely declined, stating that he wasn’t interested in “being no goddamn floating bus boy for some city
    shit.”  Once he had turned down the offer of a substantial fee from a photojournalist from Outdoor magazine, saying to
    Stanley later that “all you ever get from outdoor writers is more out-of-state plates at the boat ramp.”  The river was the blood
    in Danny Pinsker’s veins.
            As the stern of his jonboat cleared the trestle support, Stanley saw Danny’s line go taut and a moment later the surface
    of the water exploded with what Stanley guessed, from his distance, could well be a four-pound bass.
            “Every goddamn time,” Stanley muttered as he watched his friend haul in the fish.                    
            Stanley located his earliest memory of Danny Pinsker, as his friend, on the railroad trestle Danny had just drifted under,
    above the pool he had just yanked yet another good fish from.  Stanley had long since forgotten what specifically had brought
    him to the trestle that day, but, more than likely, it was the usual—to escape the wholesome Christian hellfire of his own
    house he would have gone to his grandfather’s place, the same house swathed in scaffolding that Stanley now inhabited.  His
    grandfather would have said “set a spell,” and Stanley would have plopped into the weathered Adirondack chair beside the one
    his grandfather occupied.  He would have lingered for a while, watching his grandfather nod to the occasional car or pick-up
    truck that passed along River Street, soaking in the old man’s quiet sadness, as well as one of his cigarettes and a few slurps
    of the beer in the old ceramic mug that always rested on the arm of his grandfather’s chair.  After a while, he would have
    slipped away, walked around the tool shed behind the house and set off down the scruffy path along the river to the trestle.  
    He could remember the bitter taste of his grandfather’s beer on his tongue as he scurried up the embankment and saw the
    dead collie between the railroad tracks midway across the bridge.
            Danny had come out of the trees on the Cross River side, hopped up onto the tracks, and started across the trestle,
    staying on the tracks and walking steadily, as if his stride were calibrated to fit the gaps between the railroad ties.  He never
    looked down at his feet once until he got to the collie.  For what Stanley thought must have been at least a full minute, Danny
    stood over the dead dog, staring at it.  Then Danny dropped to one knee between the rails on the train trestle, scooped the
    dead collie from the tracks, hefted it in his arms for a moment, and tossed it into the river like a bag of leaves.  A broken leg
    dangled and flapped from the corpse as the collie’s body rose in a brief arc, its long, matted hair waving, until gravity caught
    the dead weight and pulled it to the river fifty feet below.  The collie hit the surface with a broad, flat splash, dipped beneath
    the surface, rolled once, then floated up into the grip of the current.  Before the dog’s body hit the river, Danny had knelt
    again.  He rested on knees and elbows between the rails, exactly where the collie had been, pushed his glasses up his nose,
    and stared down through the creosote-blackened ties at the river breaking around the trestle supports.   
            There was something in the way Danny pitched the dead dog into the river, something in the way he knelt on the tracks,
    looking for all the world like he was praying, something there that made Stanley think Danny would be someone who might
    understand what drew him to the river days like that.  The two boys were vaguely acquainted from school, but neither would
    have considered the other a friend in any reasonable sense of the word.  And Stanley had no idea what he’d say to Danny, but
    he walked across the trestle to him anyway, carefully watching where he set each footstep on the ties until he arrived at the
    other boy kneeling between the rails.
            “Why’d you do that?” Stanley said, because it was the only thing he could think to say.
            Danny looked up and screwed his face into a knot.
            “Say what?”
            “Why’d you do that?  Throw that dog in the river.”
            Danny Pinsker looked at Stanley McNew like he was hearing some other dialect of English than the one he spoke.
            “’Cause it was dead,” Danny said.
            They looked at one another for a second or two longer, then Danny turned his face down to the railroad ties again and
    went back to looking like he was praying.    
            “That, and it was kind of in my way,” he said.
            Stanley watched Danny kneeling there for a few seconds more before he spoke again.
            “In the way of what?” he asked.
            Danny didn’t move or say anything, only raised his arm and pointed down at the railroad ties with his finger.  Stanley
    leaned over and looked through the ties.
            “What?” Stanley said.
            “There,” Danny said, pointing down again.  “There, around the trestle there.  Bunch of big smallmouths around that hole
    down there.”
            At first Stanley could see nothing but green, moving water, but as his eyes adjusted, he could make out the dark forms
    of a pod of big smallmouth bass.
            “Yeah,” he said.  “Some of them’s got to be at least four, five pounds, easy.”
            “At least,” Danny said.  “When I finish getting my boat patched up, this here’s the first place I plan to put a line in the
    water.”
            They had something in common.  They fished.  Since grade school, when he had a spare moment or didn’t know what
    to do with himself, and later, when he wasn’t with Louise, Stanley would be along the river, fishing from the patch of
    riverbank behind his grandfather’s house, the old ferry landing.  Bass, bluegills, red eyes.  Sometimes a big muskie would slide
    by, but he never caught one of those.  When Stanley began to choke in the sanctified air of his parents’ house, when he was
    bored or dreamy, he came to the river, either to the old ferry landing behind his grandfather’s house or up on the railroad
    trestle, to fish or just to sit and think and watch the river.
            Danny pushed himself up from his knees and settled into a crouch, resting his rear end on one of the rails.  He pushed
    his glasses back up his nose and fished in his shirt pocket and produced a notably fat joint.  The wind above the river was
    gentle that day, but Danny still needed to cup his hand around the sputtering flame of the match to light the joint.  His
    shoulders relaxed and he inhaled deeply and held the joint up to Stanley.
            “Marijuana, right?” Stanley asked.
            “That it is,” Danny said through a long exhale.
            Stanley shrugged, lowered himself onto the other rail, and took the offered joint.  
    They shared it quietly, squatting on the rails as the smoke caught the wind and followed the dead collie downstream.  Stanley
    didn’t speak again until the joint had made a few rounds between them.
            “You ever think about leaving town, ever think about living someplace else?”
            Danny released the smoke in his lungs and looked upstream.  
            “Never really thought about it.  Now that you mention it, can’t say as I could imagine living anyplace but right here.  
    The river’s here.”  
            “There’s other rivers, you know,” Stanley said.
            “Yeah, suppose so,” Danny said.  “But this river’s right here.”

    Stanley dropped down the bank to the little fan of silted beach where the old ferry landing had been and raised his hand as
    Danny cut his engine and drifted in.  
            “You going to be a responsible adult and go to work today,” Danny said as the bow of his boat skidded up onto the
    shore, “or are you going to be smart and go fishing with me?”
            “Don’t tempt me,” Stanley said.
            “Consider yourself tempted.  The water’s warming and the flooding last week got ‘em all stirred up.  They’re hitting
    hard—feisty as hell.”
            “I saw,” Stanley said, nodding in the direction of the trestle.
            “And so?  What’re you waiting for?”
            When he was drinking, Danny’s invitation wouldn’t have given Stanley a single moment’s pause.  He would already
    have been on his way to the shed to get his tackle.  Wasn’t that the whole point of being self-employed?  Not to punch a time
    clock?  Not to have his every move scrutinized by some self-important prick of a supervisor?  To be able to take off at a
    moment’s notice and go fishing with his best friend, even if it would put him behind another day, even if it might lose him a
    customer here and there, even if his best friend was living with his ex-wife?  To be his own man, that was the point, wasn’t
    it?  
            But now Stanley wondered if he still was his own man.  Wondered if he wanted to be.  Carly was out there somewhere,
    he hoped.  Might come home some day soon, he hoped.  He had to be ready, and to be ready he had to be responsible.  Since
    it looked like this business of not drinking might actually stick this time, he wondered if he shouldn’t be careful to make the
    most of it.  That was the difference in Stanley now.  He had to mull this over for a minute, had to think how much it might
    cost him in time, money, and overall good will of his customers before he said “fuck it” and scrambled back up the riverbank
    to get his fishing gear from the half-burned shell of a shed in his back yard.     

    Drifting over some of the calmer pools on the far bank, downstream from the soaring buzzards, Stanley and Danny had pulled
    in two good smallmouths each before either man spoke of anything other than fish and river water.  Stanley released his fish,
    almost three pounds if it was an ounce, shook some of the water from his fingers, and gazed upstream at the buzzards.
            “They really are just having fun,” Stanley said.  Danny followed the course of his friend’s eyes, spotted the buzzards in
    the distance, and nodded.
            “Uh-hunh.”
            “Pupkin and his bunch been whining about them to the city again.  That little prick Wilbert Croke been out there behind
    my house nearly every morning for the last couple weeks, trying to roust ‘em with that little cap pistol of his.  All that’s going
    to do is make for some cranky buzzards—and maybe some more buzzard crap on his pointed little head.”
            “That kid’s a little turd,” Danny said.  “Been driving Louise and her group nuts down at the animal shelter.”
            “Been driving me nuts, too.  Waking me up every damn morning.  Don’t see what all the fuss is about.  Just some
    buzzards hanging out in the trees.  Not like they’re noisy or anything.  What the hell else are buzzards supposed to do when
    they’re not flying or eating.”  Stanley glanced upstream at the rising ribbon of big, black birds.
            “Told you before,” Danny said as he cast his line into the shadow of a low branch near the bank.  “You live on the
    wrong side of the river.  Over here, there ain’t any Randall Pupkins and a buzzard’s a buzzard and that’s pretty much it.”
            “Maybe,” Stanley said, and cast his line to the other side of the branch.  “But that’s my side of the river and that’s pretty
    much it.”
            A red eye hit Danny’s lure and he drew the compliant fish in quickly, unhooked it, and flung it back into the water, while
    Stanley was working his lure through the water under the tree.  As Stanley brought his line back in, Danny pressed his foot to
    the pedal of the trolling motor and brought the boat around, so they could fish through the shadows under the tree again.
            “I know there’s a good smallmouth holding in there,” Danny said.
            “Gotta be,” Stanley said.
            Danny dropped the anchor to hold them in place and reached into his gear bag and produced a Krispy Kreme bag.
            “Want a doughnut?”
            “Hell yes,” Stanley said, and took a glazed doughnut from the offered bag.  “Ain’t had nothing but coffee since bird-boy
    woke me up.  Don’t suppose you got a beer in there too, eh?”
            “Not for a lot of years now, ol’ buddy, and you know that.”
            Stanley bit into his doughnut and said “just kidding,” but his jaw clamped tight onto the sweet, moistening goo in his
    mouth.
            “You heard the news yet?” Danny asked, and bit into his own doughnut.
            “Heard what?”
            “It was on the news on the radio this morning,” Danny said.  Flecks of doughnut sputtered from his lips.  “They finally
    found that Lyles kid.”  
            Stanley’s tongue pushed the soggy wad of doughnut into his cheek.
            “About time,” he said.  “Where was he?”
            “In a storage shed behind his grandma’s house,” Danny said.  “And the old lady’s so dotty, she didn’t even know he
    was there.”
            “And the girl?”
            “Oh, he killed her, alright.  Word is, he started fessing up as soon as they opened the shed door.  No body, though.”
            A week before the rains and the rising waters last week, a local high school girl, Jenna Sutphin, had gone missing after
    her night shift at Wendy’s, and the town had been on edge and the county sheriff’s people had been searching for her and the
    Lyles kid ever since.  There hadn’t been much doubt what had happened—the sheriff’s office had targeted Tommy Lyles as a
    suspect from the first.  She was last seen talking to him as she walked to her car in the parking lot after work.  According to
    all accounts, Tommy Lyles was regularly seen at the Wendy’s when Jenna was working.  “The little loser creep was always,
    like, hanging around, trying to get her to, like, go out with him.  As if,” one of her co-workers had told the sheriff’s
    investigators.    
            Stanley and Danny had both heard of Tommy Lyles, though they didn’t know him personally.  They’d gone to high
    school with his mother.  Stanley vaguely remembered how her graduation gown had poked out in the front, unable to hide
    seven months of pregnancy, and how Louise and some of her friends whispered something about a football player from Giles
    County.  When word got out that this Tommy Lyles was being sought by the authorities, Louise mentioned to Danny, who
    passed it on to Stanley, that he’d been working at the same plant where Louise worked.  “Doesn’t surprise me,” Louise had
    said.  “Beady-eyed little weasel.”
            Some years back, Stanley had installed a new toilet for Maureen Sutphin, the girl’s divorced mother, and he seemed to
    recall a child shuffling around the house while he worked, a young girl, maybe a couple years younger than Carly, with sandy-
    blonde hair and a runny nose.  Now that he’d apparently quit drinking, Stanley was clear-headed enough to remember bits and
    pieces like this from time to time.  And he was aware enough now not to miss the obvious connection between the Sutphin
    girl’s story and his own missing daughter.  His senses had also been replenished enough to feel the ache of both girls’ absence
    and to know that what he felt was doubled, tripled, in the hearts of both mothers.  But his resuscitated memory remained
    piecemeal.  He couldn’t recall, probably never knew, if Carly had known the Sutphin girl.
            “The little shit told ‘em he’d stashed her body in a pile of brush on one of the islands down by the old weir,” Danny
    said.  “Of course it ain’t there.”
            “Not after all that water last week,” Stanley said.
            Stanley cast his line into the shadowed pool and reached for another doughnut, holding it in his mouth, chewing at it,
    while he jerked his line in slowly.  The doughnut popped from his mouth and landed on the deck of the boat when the bass
    hit.  The fish was strong and stout and dove under the boat.  Laboring to work the fish back into open water, Stanley
    stomped on his dropped doughnut.
            “Looks like a good one,” Danny said.
            “Maybe four pounds, you think?”  Stanley said.
            “Could be.”  
            Danny took up the remainder of the news as Stanley worked the big smallmouth out from under the boat.
            “Ran into some of the search and rescue boys down at the Wilco this morning.  They’re starting the search up at the
    islands this morning—probably already at it.”
            “She ain’t going to be up there,” Stanley said, as he brought the bass to his hand.  “Them islands was completely
    submerged last week.  She’s way downstream by now.”
            “That’s what I told ‘em,” Danny said.  “But you know how those guys are.  By the book and all that.”
            “Guess we better keep our eyes open,” Stanley said, and both men involuntarily cast their eyes down the length of the
    river as Stanley was pulling the hook from the bass’s mouth.  He pinched the fish’s lower jaw and held it up.
            “Four pounds easy,” he said.
            “I’d say so,” Danny said.  “Want to weigh it?”
            Stanley shook his head and said