The big blind man with the pulpy face began to weep.
“Thank you, Lord. Thank you, Brother Weeb. Thanks for everything.”
With that, Skink turned to face camera one.
And winked.
And when he winked, the amber glass owl eye popped from the hole in his head and bounced on the stage with the sharp crack of a marble. They heard it all the way in the back row.
“Oh, I can see again, Brother Weeb,” the formerly blind man cried. “Come, let me embrace you as the Lord embraced me.”
With simian arms Skink reached out and seized the Minicam and pulled it to his face.
“Squeeze my lemon, baby!” he moaned, mashing his lips to the lens.
In the crowd, thirteen women fainted heavily out of their folding chairs.
This time it was for real.
“Want a beer?” Lanie asked.
“No,” said Dennis Gault.
“A Perrier?” Lanie dug into the ice chest.
“Quiet,” her brother said.
He had been casting at the brushpile for a long time without a nibble. He had tried every gizmo in the tacklebox, plus a few experimental hybrids, but returned to the Double Whammy out of stubbornness. It had been Dickie Lockhart’s secret lure, everybody knew that, so Dennis Gault was dying to win the tournament with it. Flaunt it. Rub it in. Show the cracker bastards that their king was really dead.
Gault knew he was in the right spot, for the sonic depth-finder provided a detailed topography of the canal bottom. The brushpile came across as a ragged black spike on an otherwise featureless chart; an elliptical red blip shone beneath it.
That was the fish.
From the size of the blip, Dennis Gault could tell the bass was very large.
It did not stay in one place, but moved slowly around the fringes of the submerged crates. Gault aimed his casts accordingly.
“Why won’t the damn thing eat?” Lanie asked.
“I don’t know,” Gault said, “but I wish you’d be quiet.”
Lanie made a face and went back to her magazines. She wanted her brother to win the tournament as much as he did, but she didn’t fully understand why he took it so seriously—especially since he didn’t need the money. At least Bobby Clinch had had good reasons to get tense over fishing tournaments; he was trying to keep groceries on Clarisse’s table and gas in Lanie’s Corvette.
She spun in the pedestal seat so the sun was at her back, and flipped to an article on bulimia.
Thirteen feet beneath the bass boat, in a tea-colored void, the great fish sulked restively. A primitive alarm had gone off somewhere in its central nervous system; a survival warning, powerful but unse-lective. The great fish could not know what triggered the inner response—acute oxygen depletion, brought about by toxins in the water—but she reacted as all largemouth bass do when sensing a change in the atmosphere.
She decided to gorge herself.
Loglike, she rose off the bottom and hung invisible beneath the floating shadow. She waited under the boat for the familiar rhythmic slapping noise, and peered through liquid glass for the friendly face of the creature who always brought the shiners. The hunger had begun to burn in her belly.
Glancing at the screen of the depth-finder, Dennis Gault said: “My God, the damn thing’s right under us.”
“I sure don’t see it,” Lanie said.
“Under the boat,” her brother said. “Right there on the sonar.”
The fish was so close that he didn’t need to cast. He merely dropped the spinnerbait straight down, counted to twelve, and began the slow retrieve. The lure swam unmolested past the brushpile and rattled up, up, up toward the surface. Its rubber skirt shimmied, and its twin spoons twirled. Its mechanical agitation exuded the fear of the pursued, yet it did not behave like a frog or a minnow or even a crawdad. In fact, it resembled absolutely nothing in nature—yet the great fish engulfed it savagely.
Dennis Gault had never felt such a force. When the fish struck, he answered three times, jerking with all his might. The rod bowed and the line twanged, but the thing did not budge. It felt like a cinderblock.