The Johnboat Ramp at Lake Week

“He used to throw hay bales up onto the wagon one-handed. Two at a time. I’d stand on the wagon and stack, and he’d throw them up to me all day in July, and he never got tired. He was the strongest man in Morrison County.”

“He still is, some days,” I said.

“I know it.” Brad’s voice cracked. “I know it. I just couldn’t stand to watch him get lifted onto my boat in front of my boys, like something you load. So I said there wasn’t room. ‘No room’ was easier than saying it. It came out of my mouth before I even thought about it.”

“He heard it,” I said. “He heard every word. So did your boys.”

“I know.”

“He turned his own chair around, Brad. With one hand. So you wouldn’t have to feel bad about it.”

Brad put his face in his hand. I let him. Out on the water, a loon called, and another one answered from way down the shore.

“I’m not mad at you for being scared,” I said, after a while. “I was scared this morning too. I was scared I’d drop him in the lake. But he doesn’t need either one of us to like watching it. He needs us to be there when it happens.”

Brad nodded. He wiped his face on the shoulder of his shirt.

“Today was supposed to be the day,” he said. “I bought that boat thinking about him on it. That was the whole idea. And I spent the day on the porch.”

“There’s six more days,” I said.

He did not answer that. He finished his beer, said goodnight, and walked back up to his cabin.

At ten minutes to six the next morning I woke up to the sound of a drill.

I heard it again, out on the water, a cordless drill driving a screw, and I got up and pulled on my jeans and went out on the porch.

The mist was back on the lake, same as the morning before.

Down at the end of the dock, in the gray light, Brad was standing on the deck of his pontoon in a sweatshirt and his slippers, holding my plywood ramp up against the side gate and squinting at it.

He saw me coming down the path and set the ramp down.

“I measured,” he said. “The gate’s thirty inches. Ramp’s twenty-eight. The deck’s higher than yours, though, so it’ll be steeper. So I screwed a block under the top end. Tie it to the cleat and it’ll sit right.”

I looked at the ramp. I looked at the pontoon. Then I looked at him.

“You’ll want the seat,” I said.

“That’s the thing.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “That’s why I’m out here at six. The captain’s chairs don’t turn far enough, and the bench doesn’t have arms. He needs your seat. The swivel one.”

“It bolts through the deck, Brad. Four holes. Through your new deck.”

He looked at me a long time. Then he looked down at the brand new gray vinyl floor of his sixty-eight thousand dollar boat.

“Then it’ll have four holes in it,” he said. “Show me how it goes in.”

So I showed him. We carried the seat off my johnboat and set it in the front corner of the pontoon by the gate, where Walt could see water on two sides.

I marked the holes and handed him the drill.

He hesitated for about one second, with the bit right on the mark.