Chapter 6: Two

I called Dewey from the pull-off with Emlyn zipping his coat beside me.

"They moved you because somebody upstairs asked," Dewey said. His voice was gravel in a coffee can. "Somebody on the civic council."

"The director won't say who."

"I know who."

"You want me to fight it?"

"No." I watched my breath fog the glass. "Dewey, can I borrow your fish house Saturday night?"

There was a long pause.

"Key's under the sled," he said. "Don't tell my wife."

"You didn't ask why."

"Kid, I've been asking people why for forty years. It never gets me anywhere."

He hung up.

Emlyn looked at me with his glasses fogged and his hair wrecked.

"What's a fish house?" he said.

"A little shack on the ice. You drill a hole, you drop a line, you freeze your ass off."

"Is there a reason we're going to freeze our asses off in a shack?"

"There's a heater," I said. "And a door that locks. And nobody on the entire bay will care what we do."

He understood.

I watched it hit him, slowly.

"Saturday," he said.

"Saturday. I'm picking the second one."

He took my hand and brought it to his mouth and kissed the inside of my wrist, where the pink mark had faded to nothing.

"Thank you," he said, "for telling me. I'd rather have the time to want it."

The shack was a plywood box eight feet square on runners, painted a terrible green, a quarter mile out on St. Louis Bay.

I got the heater running by nine.

Inside there was a bunk with two sleeping bags.

A shelf held a thermos and a deck of cards, and a round hole in the floor had a lid on it.

The ice was black under the lamp, and under the ice something moved in the dark water.

Emlyn stood in the middle of the shack in his camel coat, unable to find a place for his hands.

"It's terribly ugly," he said.

"It's perfect."

"It is, rather."

I zipped the door shut behind us, and the wind went to a murmur.

I sat on the edge of the bunk and unlaced my boots.

"Come here."

He came, and I took his glasses off and set them on the shelf, beside the cards.

He looked suddenly young without them.

"I've thought about this for three days," I said. "I want you to know that. I've been thinking about it at red lights."

"What have you thought?"

"That I want it to be the best night of my life. And I want to be the one who tells you how."

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