The padlock on the front door of Kregel’s Bait and Tackle has a habit of freezing with the first hard frost, so I keep a lighter in my coat pocket and warm the brass before I fit the key. That is how I came to be standing on my own porch at ten minutes to four on a Tuesday morning in October, thumbing a flame under a lock.
The lake was black past the gravel lot. County Road 9 was empty for eleven miles in both directions, the way it is every morning. Inside the window the minnow tank bubbled under its lid, and the board Junia touched up every spring said Live Bait in her careful white letters.
I got the door open and switched on the lights over the counter. The tackle wall came up out of the dark the way it does every day: jigs and spoons and bobbers and stringers, the leech cooler humming in the corner.
On the wall behind the register, in the same two brass hooks where it has hung for fourteen years, hung one fishing rod. It is a seven-foot Shakespeare spinning rod with a cork grip worn dark where a boy’s hand used to sit.
It was never for sale. When people ask, I tell them it is a family rod.
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I am Doss Kregel. I am sixty-five years old, and I have run this shop on the east shore of Tamarack Lake, in Still Fork, Michigan, since my father’s knees gave out. I have opened that door at four o’clock every single morning for seven years and seven months.
Nobody in town has ever asked me why. Roscoe Albright knows, and he has had the decency to keep it to himself. This is the first time I have written the reason down, and I am doing it because of what happened that Tuesday, and what I did about it on the Friday after.
The Man in the Orange Vest
At a quarter past four the bell over the door rang. I thought it was Roscoe, who is eighty and arrives with the Bay City paper folded to the fishing page. It was a heavier tread, and a cheerful voice calling from the counter.
“Anybody home? I saw the lights from the highway.”
It was Mr. Hasselquist, a retired dentist from Toledo, in a blaze-orange vest and a plaid cap. He has been driving up to fish bluegills on Tamarack for about eleven years. He is seventy-six now and moves like a man carrying a good meal.
“Two dozen shiners,” he said, “and a box of number six hooks. And Doss, I have news. I finally did it.”
“Did what?”
“I booked your boy.”
I had a box of leeches in my hands. I set it down on the counter very carefully, the way you put down something that might go off.
“I said I would, didn’t I?” he went on. “Three summers I kept trying. Your son runs the best walleye charter on Saginaw Bay and he is booked solid. But I got a Monday cancellation yesterday. My grandson and I fished with him all day.”
I said, “Is that right,” in a voice I did not recognize.
I should explain why my hands shook, and for that I have to go back a long way.