The Patch at the Boat Ramp

One evening

Ansel had come by my house on Wednesday at noon. I was in the driveway putting new line on reels for the weekend, and he pulled up in his truck and sat in it for a minute before he got out.

Ansel Rademacher is married to my little sister, Marlys. He is 39 years old. He had been laid off from the mill in spring, and he had not found steady work since.

He and Marlys had been living apart since August. She had taken the kids to our mother’s house in town and said she needed some time. Nobody in the family talked about it much. We just set two extra places on Sunday and waited.

“Tess,” he had said, standing at the edge of the driveway with his hands in his pockets, “I was wondering if I could borrow the boat. Just for one evening.”

I had looked at him. He looked tired. His shirt was clean but it had not been ironed, and I knew Marlys used to iron his shirts.

“What for?” I had asked.

“Just to clear my head,” he said. “Just fish a little off the point by the ramp. I’ll have it back tied up and covered before you know it’s gone.”

I should have said no. I know that now, and I knew it then, in some small corner of my mind. But he was family, and he was hurting, and I thought a quiet evening on the water might do for him what it has always done for me.

So I showed him how the bilge pump switch worked and where the life jackets were and told him to stay off the shallow end of the cove because the water was down. I handed him the keys and told him to bring it back to the house when he was done.

He said he would. Then he hooked up my trailer to his truck, and he drove away, and that was the last I heard from him.

No text that night. No call Thursday morning. Not one word.

The quote

I called the marina at eight o’clock from the ramp lot. The service manager there is a man I have known for years, and he knows my boat because he has done my winterizing more than once.

He said he was swamped. Every boat on the lake was coming in to be winterized before the first hard freeze. But he said he’d drive out on his lunch hour and take a look.

While I waited, I called Ansel. It rang until it went to voice mail. I did not leave a message. I did not know what I would have said.

At a quarter past twelve the marina truck pulled into the lot. The service manager got out with a flashlight and a little hammer, and he crouched down by the bow for a long time.

He tapped around the hole with the hammer, listening for the dead sound that means the glass has come apart from itself underneath. He shined the flashlight inside the front compartment. He pressed on the floor of it with his thumb.

Then he stood up slow, the way men do when they have bad news and bad knees.

“$7,200,” he said. “Maybe a little more if the foam’s soaked bad. And three weeks, Tessa. I’m sorry. I’ve got forty boats ahead of you.”

I nodded. I had expected something like it. The number still sat in my stomach like a stone.

“I’ve got a charter Saturday,” I said.

He looked at me with something close to pity. “Not in this boat you don’t.”

He left, and I sat down on my own tailgate and looked out at the water.

Saturday at seven o’clock I had a four-hour charter booked with Hobart Quist. Hobart is 66 years old, a retired pipefitter from Tulsa, and he has driven the four hours to Bull Shoals every October for longer than I have been guiding.

He fished with my dad first. For twenty years, every fall, Hobart and Dad went out together, and then Dad got sick, and the fall after we buried him, Hobart called the house and asked if I was still taking people out.

I was. He has been out with me every fall since, and he has sent me more clients than any advertising ever did. He is the kind of man who tells everybody at his church who the best guide on the lake is, and then tells them to tip her well.

I was not going to call Hobart Quist and tell him I didn’t have a boat. Not because of a man who couldn’t be bothered to send me a text.