Your father leaving you with me—it’s the best thing that ever happened.
Sometimes I get mad, but I’m not really mad. You know I love you, right? Right, buddy?
I squeeze my nails into my palms, forcing the thoughts away.
Stop it, Hector. No pity.
I jog over to the visitor center, which is shut up and closed, but I peek through one of the doors to see if there’s anything worth stealing.
A taxidermied wolf sits in a Plexiglas box in the corner. It rests on its haunches, stuffed and sewn into a stiff, howling position, facing a seven-foot-tall skeleton of a moose. The tip of the skull is pointy as a spear, and the dead teeth grin permanently at a joke that’s probably not funny.
It’s all for the sake of education, but the whole thing creeps me out. The enclosed wolf howls silently for what it can’t really howl for anymore. Maybe it’s sad the moose is dead. Maybe it’s sad that the moose can’t be eaten. Who the fuck knows, but it’s depressing as hell.
I walk away to the end of the dock as fast as I can.
I put the fishing rod together at the joints and study the lures. I’ve got three that came from a kit, along with a bobber and some weights. I choose between a dopey minnow, a baby frog with a hook sprouting out of its ass, and a Day-Glo orange worm with green sparkles on the smashed end. Hooray for variety.
I tie the worm to the end of the fishing line, along with the weights and bobber. I watched a few videos about fishing, but I don’t actually know what I’m doing. The one and only time I went fishing was seven years ago. I got invited to a fishing birthday party. My uncle was in a rare mood and actually let me go. I was the only kid who didn’t know how to fish, and the birthday boy’s dad had to show me everything.
“You hold it in your right hand, like this. Put this finger down on the release button.” He stood behind me the whole time, showing me how to cast, congratulating me when the worm I’d crucified on the hook actually plopped into the water, a reasonable ten feet away.
I didn’t smile at my success.
“So…I guess your dad’s not much into fishing, huh?” he’d asked kindly.
“My dad loves fishing.”
“Oh.” The dad had shifted in his sneakers. I could practically hear the wheels of confusion grinding inside his blond head. “So…why didn’t he teach you?”
I couldn’t say a word. Imaginary cracks fissured in my chest. Dad had sent me letters every six months, ones that I couldn’t understand for years because I couldn’t read a damn word until I was eight. By the time I could make sense of the pages, it was an explosion of information. Stuff I didn’t want to know, and stuff I really didn’t want to know.
He was at this army base, and then another. He was fishing in Florida on leave, catching tarpon for the third time. He hadn’t heard anything from my mother, had I? Was I being a good boy? Was I being respectful of my uncle, who was nice enough to give me a settled, normal life?
He’d asked questions, wondering what I was becoming, never coming close enough to the Duluth city limits to retrieve the answers himself. I wrote back, but the responses that arrived afterward gave no indication that he read them at all, or cared about their contents. He was a one-way street of words on paper.
“Hector? Are you okay?” The birthday boy’s father had put his hand on my shoulder. It was heavy with pity and radiated this nauseating warmth. I’d turned around and knocked it away violently. My fishing pole had fallen with a messy splash into the pond. I don’t remember the rest of the day. Didn’t matter anyway. For me, the party was over.
The wind picks up on the dock, and I stand to cast into the water. My hands are cold and shake with nervousness, which is stupid. There is no one here watching me make a fool of myself fishing. Well, except for the girl. I scan the shoreline carefully, searching for any glimpse of human anywhere. In the distance, I spy a thin curl of white smoke coming from the shoreline trees about a mile away, but then it disappears.
My first attempts at casting my rod are ridiculous. I forget to let go of the release button too late, and the lure winds jerkily around the tip of my rod four times. Another time, the bait plops straight down into the water and snags on a mossy stick. After a few more casts, I manage to get it out and away from the dock. As the little white and red ball bobs on the surface of the water, I smile grimly. I don’t need anyone to teach me how to do this.
I end up sitting on the end of the pier when nothing happens after the first twenty minutes. My nose runs from the cold and I wipe it on my jacket arm. Occasionally, something twitches and tugs the end of the line, but I reel in nothing. It’s like the fish know that there’s nothing but death waiting, so why bother? A rubber worm isn’t worth it.
When there’s nothing but you and a lot of silence, your head ends up filling with crap you didn’t want to be reminded of. Instead, I try to think about the girl. I wonder where she is. Who she is. Why she’s here. What she eats.
But mostly, I wonder who she’s running away from. Why else would she be on Isle Royale?
My mind fills with the stuff you see on the evening news, and it makes my stomach burn. I can’t think of an answer that isn’t horrible, so I make up all sorts of fantastical stories about her, like she’d run away from a Florida circus where she was forced to do backflips off elephants all day. Or that she’s a biology illustrator who’s drawing different kinds of fungus for a living.
I have no one else to keep me company. Soon, the curve of her cheek and the glint of her gray eyes become so familiar. Her eyelashes are wispy. Her eyebrows curve slightly upward in the middle, making her seem like she’s always about to ask a question, or doesn’t understand the one you just asked. She’s a little scrawny, like she could seriously use a steak dinner. I could describe her to a police sketch artist, if I had to. And then I wonder, what crime is she capable of committing?
Huh.
Killing mosquitoes is the only thing I can imagine.
Hours go by. The sun is getting low, and I’m a little panicked at having caught nothing. Just as I stand to pull in the line, a mighty tug yanks on my fishing pole. I almost drop it in the water, then pull it back with my sweaty hands and reel as fast as I can. I yank the tip of the rod up every few seconds, zipping my catch in, and then a flash of silver breaks the water and a tail flips spray into the air. I whoop out loud, then reel even faster.
“Please, please, please,” I pray to nobody. Afraid I’ll push the release button by accident, I grab the line when the fish is only a few feet from the tip of the rod.
God, it’s beautiful. And really fucking small. It’s maybe seven inches long, barely over a pound, shiny greenish-gray with cream-colored speckles all over and a slightly hooked mouth. My lure is sunk into the side of its mouth. Right where the barb juts out, there’s blood. It’s red like mine, which momentarily surprises me.