Dad waved a hand dismissively. “We’ll see.” He changed the subject. “Hey, we picked up some cans of anti-bear spray. Anybody wants to borrow a can, let me know.”
Bob smiled. “I keep my Smith and Wesson in my tackle box. Maybe I’m gonna have to start carrying it with me everywhere I go.”
Terrific, I thought. We could all get guns and wander around the place packing heat.
Everyone agreed to meet back at Dad’s place within the hour, and once Dad was settled inside, Bob motioned for me to join him.
“It’s a good thing you’re here, your dad really needs you right now,” he said. Bob was a tall guy, an inch or two over six feet, and even though he was twenty or more years older than I, I had to work to match his stride.
“Yeah, well, he’s not always the best at making one feel welcome,” I said.
“He does like things just so,” Bob conceded. “But he’s really improved this place since buying it from Langdon. Langdon, he fixed the place up when he first bought the camp, but in those last few years he had it, he let it run down. Broken boards in the docks, busted steps into the cabins. You had to be careful you didn’t trip and break your neck.”
“If it was a safety issue, I’m sure Dad was all over it,” I said. I don’t know whether I was comforted or distressed by the fact that I might have come by my own safety phobias honestly.
We were walking along the lake’s edge, listening to the water lap up against the shore. We passed a high, small wooden table with a hole cut in the center, and positioned directly under it, a short metal trash can with a lid on it.
I pointed. “What’s this?”
“That’s where we clean our catch,” Bob said. “Scrape what’s left into the hole, falls into the bucket. Has to be emptied every day. That right there would be incentive for a bear to wander down here. Need to mention that to Arlen.”
My eyes darted about nervously. I reached under the table and gingerly lifted the lid for a peek inside. An eye, still tucked into a fish’s severed head, glared at me.
I put the lid back on.
“Anyway,” Bob continued, “your dad’s kept what was good about this place, and fixed what was bad, and I’m grateful to him for that. This lake, it means the world to me, coming up here year after year. The fish don’t bite quite the way they used to, there’s a few more people fishing out of this lake than used to, but it’s still beautiful up here. I’m up here three weeks of every year, and the other forty-nine I’m wishing I was. I’m thinking, now that my wife is gone—she passed four years ago from cancer, awful thing—that maybe I’ll spend my whole summer here. If I thought your father would go for it, I’d sell my home in the city, get cabin two winterized like the one your dad lives in, just live up here year-round.”
“You should talk to him,” I said. “I bet he’d go for it.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But first, he’s going to have to figure out what to do about them.” He nodded his head back in the direction of the farmhouse. “They’re trouble.”
“Dad doesn’t want to talk about them.”
“That’s ’cause he don’t know what to do about them. And that embarrasses him.”
“Just what’s the problem?”
“They remind me of that bunch at Waco, remember them?”
I nodded.
“Cutting themself off from the world, thinking everybody’s out to get them, getting themselves ready to defend themself against attackers.”
“What attackers?”
“The government, most likely. But if not them, black folk, homosexuals, Communists, who knows? That woman, the young one whose boyfriend got eaten by the bear? She’s got a ten-year-old boy. He don’t go to school. They teach him right there, up at the house. Y’imagine the kind of poison that’s going into that boy’s head?”
A hopeless feeling washed over me.
Bob led me out onto one of the five docks. On one side, secured with braided white nylon rope, bobbed an aluminum boat, about fourteen feet long, loaded with fishing poles, tackle boxes, nets, and life preserver cushions. “That’s my rig,” Bob said. The other side of the dock was empty, and Bob reached for a metal chain slipped around one of the posts. I recognized it as a stringer, with oversized hooks that closed like a baby’s safety pin through a fish’s jaw and kept your day’s catch fresh, and underwater, until such time as you wanted to bring it in and clean it.
Before Bob pulled the stringerful of fish out of the lake, he said to me, “Whaddya say, tomorrow morning, I take you fishing? We’ll go out early, before you have to start helping your dad with camp chores.”
I shrugged. “Sure,” I said. It actually sounded like a fun thing to do. More fun than with my son Paul, griping about not having his Game Boy with him.
Bob gave me a thumbs-up. “Wait’ll you see what I got today. We got some good eatin’ here, that’s for darn—”