as she lost her balance on her elbow. “I’m going to the beach. I’ll cash a check.”
“Don’t make it over seventy-five,” I said. “That’s all we’ve got in the bank.”
“That’s fine. That’s just fine. I’ll stay at the YWCA.”
I got up and took the envelope out of my clothes. “Here,” I said, tossing it. “There’s a hundred and twenty-five in there.” It landed on the bed next to her naked midriff. Well, it’s gone full circle, I thought. That’s where it came from—a girl on a bed.
“What about Buford?” she asked.
“I’ll stall him. I’ve done it before. He knows he’ll get it.”
“You won’t mind batching for a week, will you?”
“No.” Suddenly I was fed up with everything—the quarreling, the heat, money, the job, all of it. I wanted to go fishing worse than I’d ever wanted anything. “I think I’ll go to the lake.”
“I may not have to spend all of it, Jack. I’ll take it along, just in case.” She had the money out of the envelope and was looking at it. She hadn’t heard me. I went out in the hall to the telephone. After trying the office and Billy Barone’s, I finally located Buford at the Elks Club. He sounded as if he had a pleasant glow.
“This is Marshall,” I said. “I just wanted tell you I’m going fishing. I guess you can struggle along without me for three or four days.” The way I felt, I didn’t care whether he liked it or not.
Nothing ever flustered Buford. “Fine, Jack. It’s all right, son. You need a little vacation. Bring me back a channel cat.”
Two
I began to feel better the minute I turned off the highway onto the old logging road. It wound up through the pine and then dropped off toward the lake bottom country to the east, very rough and full of chuckholes and not used for anything any more. The highway crossed the south end of the lake some five miles further down, where there was a general store and restaurant and a place that rented boats, but I always went in here, as it was less used and saved that five miles by boat if I wanted to go very far up the lake. It was about fifteen miles from here clear in to the upper end of it, up in the swamps, but I’d never been that far. It was rough country, with unnumbered miles of sloughs winding all over the bottom, and you could get lost in it if you didn’t know your way.
It was still two or three hours before sunset when I eased the Ford pickup and boat trailer down the last quarter mile of the old road and stopped under the big oaks at the end of a slough. The minute I cut the motor, absolute silence closed in on me and I felt at peace with everything.
It took only a few minutes to launch the boat, load it, and clamp on the motor, and then I was under way. The slough was about a quarter mile long, and when I rounded the turn I was in the main channel of the lake itself, winding off toward the north and northeast. It was about two hundred yards wide with dead snags and cypress clumps here and there and dense timber hanging out over the east bank. There were occasional weed beds and I knew the bass would be feeding in them around sunset, but I had four whole days and wanted to go on up toward the head of the lake, farther than I’d ever been before.
Two or three miles up I met another boat coming down, with two men in it. They waved and held up a string of bass, then they were gone behind and I was alone again. At times the channel was so narrow the trees almost met overhead, and it was cool in the shade with the breeze blowing in my face. At other places it widened out into long flats full of dead snags and stagnant, dark water, not muddy but discolored from rotting swamp vegetation, with the lowering sun slanting brassy and hot across it. Now and then a grindle would roll just under the surface, making a big, spreading ring on the water, and two or three times I saw big gars swimming by very close to the top. Innumerable arms and sloughs wound off on both sides into the timber, but I knew the main channel here and stuck