Decker opened his eyes and sat up. They were at Morgan Slough.
Jim Tile got out first and checked around. The cool darkness was ebbing from the swamp; another half-hour and it would be dawn. Skink took his fishing rod from the car and went to the edge of the water, which was the burned color of black tea. The slough was a tangle of lilies and hydrilla, dead branches and live cypress knees. In the tall boughs hung tangled tresses of Spanish moss. The place looked prehistoric.
Jim Tile stood with his hands on his hips. Skink started to cast, reel in, cast again.
“What’s going on?” Decker said, shaking off his drowsiness. The crisp winter air had a faint smoky smell.
“The plug I’m using is called a Bayou Boogie,” Skink said. “Medium-fast sinker, two sets of treble hooks. I sharpened ’em earlier, before you got here. You probably noticed I put new line on the reel since you and I went out.”
“I didn’t notice,” Decker muttered. All this way for a goddamn fishing lesson. Didn’t these people ever just come out and say something?
“Fifteen-pound test Trilene,” Skink went on. “You know how much weight this stuff’ll lift?”
“No idea,” Decker said.
“Well—there we go!” Skink’s fishing rod bent double. Instead of setting the hook, he pumped slowly, putting his considerable muscle into it. Whatever it was on the end of the line barely moved.
“You’re snagged on a stump,” Decker said to Skink.
“Don’t think so.”
Slowly it was coming up; somehow Skink was pulling the thing in. He pumped so hard that Decker was sure the rod would snap, then Skink would slack up, reel fast, and pump again. The line was stretched so tautly that it hummed.
“You’re almost there,” Jim Tile said.
“Get ready!” Skink’s voice strained under the effort.
He gave a mighty pull and something broke water. It was an iron chain. Skink’s fishing lure had snagged in one of the links. Jim Tile knelt down and grabbed it before it could sink back into the slough. He unhooked the fishing lure, and Skink reeled in.
By now Decker knew what was coming.
Hand over hand, Jim Tile hauled on the chain. The wrong end came up first; it was an anchor. A new anchor, too, made of cast iron. A clump of hydrilla weed hung like a soggy green wig from the anchor’s fork.
Jim Tile heaved it on shore. Wordlessly he started working toward the other end, the submerged end of the chain.
Instinctively, R. J. Decker thought of his cameras. They were locked in his car, back at Skink’s shack. He felt naked without them, like the old days. Certain things were easier to take if you were looking through a camera; sometimes it was the only protection you had, the lens putting an essential distance between the eye and the horror. The horror of seeing a dead friend in the trunk of a Seville, for example. The distance existed only in the mind, of course, but sometimes the inside of a lens was a good place to hide. Decker hadn’t felt like hiding there for a long time, but now he did. He wanted his cameras, longed for the familiar weight around his neck. Without the cameras he wasn’t sure if he could look, but he knew he must. After all, that was the point of getting out of the business. To be able to look again, and to feel something.
Jim Tile struggled with the chain. Skink knelt beside him and loaned his weight to the tug.
“There now,” Skink said, breathing hard. The other end of the chain came out of the water in his right hand.
“Get it done,” said Jim Tile.
Tied to the end of the chain was a thin nylon rope. Skink’s massive hands followed the rope down until the water was up to his elbows. His fingers foraged blindly below the surface; he looked like a giant raccoon hunting a crawfish.
“Ah!” he exclaimed.
Jim Tile stood up, wiped his hands on his uniform, and backed away. With a primordial grunt Skink lifted his morbid catch from the bottom of Morgan Slough.