The Bait Shop I Would Not Sell

Chapter 7

The hardest stretch was the middle of July, and it almost broke me, and I am going to tell it straight because the easy version where I never wavered is a lie and you deserve the true one.

The committee gave the Classic to Glen’s Lodge.

The chairman called me himself, decent enough to not make me hear it from someone else. Sixty thousand in new docks had won. A gravel lot and one dock and a seventy year old woman had lost. He was sorry. He sounded sorry.

I hung up the phone and I sat down on the stool behind my counter and for about an hour I was done.

I thought, he is right. Glen is right. The water moves one direction. I am tired and my knees hurt and I have lost the one thing that would have proven August wrong, and maybe twenty-six thousand and a salary is not surrender, maybe it is just sense.

Then a storm came. A real one, the kind that stands the lake up in whitecaps and empties the shoreline. Three days of it. Nobody fished. My new line of credit had bought inventory that was swimming in my tanks eating money and not selling.

On the third day the roof over the bait room started to leak, right over the tanks, and I stood in the dark with a headlamp and a bucket at two in the morning and I cried again, and this time it was not the good cry on the ladder. It was the other kind.

I had spent the cushion. I had put the line of credit into minnows and crawlers and a new aerator, and the storm had taken a week of sales, and the roof needed money I had just spent, and Glen’s offer sat in my chest like a warm bed I was too proud to lie down in.

I want to tell you an angel came. None did. What came was morning.

The storm blew out before dawn on the fourth day. I had not slept. I opened at four anyway, because that was the promise, and the lake was dead flat and glowing and the fish, after three days penned up by weather, were going to be insane.

And every man on Carlow knew it too.

They came at four. They came in a line of headlights down the shore road like I had never seen. A big bite after a long blow brings everyone, and I was the only shop open at four, and my tanks were full because I had bet the credit line on exactly this, even though I had not known the storm was coming. I had just known that full tanks at four beat empty tanks at six.

I sold out of leeches by six thirty. I sold three weeks of crawlers in one morning. Men stood in my gravel lot in the dark drinking my coffee and laughing about the blow, and I ran that counter like I was forty again, and I made more money before nine a.m. than I had made in the whole storm week, and more than I would have made the whole weekend of a tournament I had lost.

Harlan was the last of the dawn rush. He put his dollar fifty on the counter for his leeches and he looked at my face, which must have shown the whole week.

“Rough patch,” he said. It was not a question.

“I lost the Classic, Harlan,” I said. “And the roof’s leaking over the tanks.”

He nodded slowly. He is eighty-one. He has lost more than a tournament. “Earl’s roof,” he said, “or Glen’s roof.”

I did not understand.

“You can fix Earl’s leaky roof,” Harlan said, “or you can go work for Glen in a building that don’t leak. One of them’s still yours in the rain. Your choice.” He picked up his leeches. “Bite’s good off the second point. You should be out there. I’ll mind the counter, I’ve watched you do it forty years.”

I did not go fishing. But I climbed up and I tarred that roof myself that afternoon, on Earl’s ladder, over Earl’s sign board, in the sun after the storm, because an eighty-one year old man had just reminded me that a thing you can fix in the rain is a thing that is still yours. And I was not done lettering the sign.