The Bass Boat in My Machine Shed

Arnie Takes Cole Fishing

It was Arnie who finally moved. He stood up off the cooler, stretched his back, and looked at the lake.

“Well,” he said, to nobody in particular. “Those walleye aren’t going to catch themselves.”

He stepped down into the boat, slow, the way men his age step into boats, one hand on the gunwale.

Jake held it steady. Then Arnie looked up at Cole, who was still standing there with the rod in his hand.

“You coming, or you going to stand there till July?”

Cole looked at me. I nodded. Cole looked at his dad. Rick nodded too, just barely, with the sandwich still in his hands.

Cole stepped in. Jake untied the lines. And then Jake did something I won’t forget. He moved over from the console and pointed at the driver’s seat.

“You drive, Cole,” he said. “It was your dad’s boat. You ought to get to run her first.”

Cole sat down behind the wheel. Arnie sat in the seat beside him and put on his sunglasses.

Jake turned the key with the little orange bobber on it and handed the wheel over, and that 225 came to life with a sound that went right through my chest.

They idled out past the no-wake buoys, slow and careful. Then Cole pushed the throttle forward, and the bow came up, and the sparkle blue went skimming out across the water into the sun.

I stood on the dock and watched them go. Rick stood up from the bench and watched them too. We stood maybe six feet apart and didn’t say anything.

“Arnie taught me to fish,” Rick said finally. “You know that? On this lake. I was eight. My dad was always too busy with the cattle. Arnie took me out in that old green rowboat of his every Saturday one summer.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“He’ll teach Cole things I didn’t,” Rick said. He wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist. “That’s all right. That’s all right.”

They were out until almost three. When they came in, Cole had caught two walleye and Arnie had caught one and Jake had caught nothing and was taking a lot of grief for it.

Arnie told me later what they’d talked about out there. He said Cole asked him whether his dad was a bad man. Arnie said no. He said, “Your dad is a good man who got scared and did a dumb thing. Those are different.”

Then he told Cole about the green rowboat, and the summer he taught an eight-year-old boy named Ricky Ruud how to bait a hook.

Arnie said Cole cried a little, and Arnie pretended not to notice, and then they caught the walleye.

When Arnie told me that, standing in my yard by the mailbox, I had to go in the house for a minute.