Secret Vows

Chapter 10: No Charge

No Charge

Somebody out in the yard said hello, and then said it again, politely, and Trey knocked the dry dirt off his hands and went to the door.

Neither of his uncles got up. Wendell looked at the door, then at Trey, then back at the cigarette he had going, which was how he answered most questions, so Trey went out.

There was a car parked in the middle of the bare dirt where the grading had taken the grass off, and it had no business on that ground.

Squared-off at the corners, high on its springs, dark glass all around, tires with room in the treads for a field. The scrapes from the blade were still in the dirt around it, gone gray at the edges where they had dried.

Trey stood in the doorway and looked at it. He had quit expecting anybody out here some time ago, and he could not have said what a car like that was doing on his road, or who had told it there was anything back here worth the drive.

The roof of it stood about six and a half feet off the ground. On the far side, back at the tailgate, a man stood with most of himself behind the car and the top of his head showing above the roofline anyway.

The one at the front of the car was tall himself, dressed plain, his hands easy at his sides. He had a level face on him and a level way of standing, squared off and not slouching about it, and Trey took a second look and still could not have said what had pulled the second look.

"Help you with something?" Trey said.

"Is this your place?"

"The land and the pond."

"We were wondering about the pond." The man tipped his head at the water, a dozen steps past the graded dirt, flat and brown in the light. "Whether you let people fish it. My boss would like to sit out here a while."

Trey looked past him, at the man at the back of the car, who had not moved and had not said anything, and who was, from where Trey stood, mostly a shirt and a pair of shoulders.

"It's open to anybody," Trey said. "That's what it's here for."

The man nodded once. "What's the charge?"

Trey took a second on that one. He had the dirt scraped flat and a pond and a building up beside it with a bed in it and a table in it and not a great deal else, and he had no sign out, no rate, no board nailed to a post. He had a first customer and no price to put on him.

"Fish it today," he said. "No charge."

That bought him a beat of surprise, and then no argument about it at all.

"Then I appreciate it."

Trey waved that off with the hand that had dirt dried in the creases of it. The pond had been netted twice before it came to him, both times by men who took out everything big enough to sell and left the rest to the mud. He had ordered fingerlings the day before yesterday and not one of them was in the water yet. There was not enough out there to fill a bucket, and taking a stranger's money for it would have been close to going through his pockets.

"Help yourself," he said. "I've got work to finish."

Trey turned back around. "Uncle Wendell. Uncle Ray. I'm going to finish the last of that before dark. We'll drink tonight."

"You'll drink a Coca-Cola," his uncle said.

"Uncle Wendell."

"With your tolerance."

"I can hold two beers."

"You can hold one." Wendell looked over at Ray, well pleased with himself.

"Even my dad doesn't ride me like that," Trey said. "He'd be right to, and it'd still be rude."

Ray laughed at that, slow, arms crossed, hat pushed back off his forehead. "Your dad? Son, you're his baby. He's never said a cross word to you in his life."

Trey laughed and went and got an arm around each of their necks and turned the two of them for the slope, and the three of them went off across the yard like that, one nephew hung between two uncles and both of them complaining the whole way.

At the car, the tall man had turned around. He watched the three of them go, and for a moment his face had nothing on it at all. Then it had something again, and he turned back to the car.

"We're set," the man from the front said, coming around the fender.

The tall one pointed with his chin down the road, where the bamboo stood in a green knot against the fence line.

"Two of those."

"Yes, sir."

It took him half an hour. He came back with two of them, green and knuckled and cut square at the butt, each one taller than a man, and got line and hooks out of the back of the car, and had both poles rigged inside of two minutes.

Then they sat down on the bank with their backs to the slope, one of them on a folding stool, and put the lines in the water.

Up on the hill, Trey went back to what he had left, with the sun on the back of his neck and that car sitting out on his ground. He worked, and sweated through his shirt, and stopped twice for water out of the jug, and looked down the slope more times than there was any need for. The two of them were still out there. From up there they came down to a shirt and a hat and two poles, and every so often one of the poles would move.

It was getting on toward evening when he came down. The yard was down to one vehicle. The car was where it had been all day on the bare ground, and Trey went down to the pond instead of up to the house.

The two of them were on the bank with their backs to him. He walked up behind them and stopped a step off.

"Any luck?"

"Some." The one in front answered him without turning around. "Two carp. Fat ones."

Two carp lay on the grass behind them, still moving.

Trey had the compliment up and ready — that was a piece of work, two fish out of this pond in an afternoon — and then he got a look at what they were fishing with. Two green bamboo poles, the line wound straight onto the butt, a hook knotted at the end, nothing else in the world. He took the compliment back and put the two carp down to luck.

"That's luck," he said.

"It'll do," the man said, and grinned.

Trey was opening his mouth to say something else when the pole in the big man's hands came up.

The bamboo bent double and the tip went under and stayed under, and for about a second nothing happened at all. Then the man straightened his arm, and the fish came up out of the water in one piece — long, dark, thick through the middle, the water running off its back in a sheet. The fish came back at him hard enough to take the pole out of most men's hands. His arm took the hit, and his hand closed on the fish just behind the head, thumb and fingers across the gill. It was still fighting. He held it the way a man holds a bucket.

A bowfin, and it went better than five pounds.

He put it on the grass and worked the hook out of it and dropped the line back in the water like he had done it a hundred times that afternoon.

Trey blinked. Then he looked at the man from the side, and stood where he was, and did not look away, and did not say anything else.