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Show Blue Run/2 and the man never checks your coolers Two boys, fourteen, fifteen, romp beside the men's lines They ride boogie boards and inflatables, brown skin against the green water. The overcast sky starts to pinken. Pink sky at night, sailor's delight, that's what Renee always says. It's the sort of afternoon you can get your teeth into. What I'm saying is that these people seem decent and hard working, like Stepwells and Harvells in Arkansas, and they have this Friday afternoon off like me to fish the rising tide within eyeshot of the millionaire beach palaces that line the coast toward Cocoa. We've hit the blue run square on the nose, and there's nothing save this labor, this motion, this way of being. And if our mothers drown a thousand miles away, who's to say? The Mexicans catch two-at-a-time on double rigs: tailor blues, three-pounders. We mirror each other this way for who knows how long. And I start thinking how right the world can be, how we're all knee-deep in this shit together. That's how blind I'm thinking, like the kid who grins into the jack-in-the-box that's about to knock his teeth out. It's an old story. The Mexicans see me too, cranking the blues, how I hang with them. Maybe they think I'm decent, or hardworking, and not one of the candy-ass tourists or snowbirds whose concrete driveways they pour, whose houses they roof and whose yards they mow and whose bugs they poison in the ungodly heat. Whatever, workers move my heart My people are workers. I choose to see them as workers this afternoon. This is how I'll remember them. These workers and me, we watch each other land fish as the boys surf riptides. How much time passes this way? Baiting and casting, reeling the torpedo blues onto shore, the bright gills and darting eyes. His teeth will lay you open. The smell offish, oily and sweet. When he hits, let drag go, let him run and jump and feel the hook buried in his jaw. Keep the rod |
