Free Under Cover of Daylight by James W. Hall Page B

jumbo shrimp, flicking away in front of their noses, snap, they’d be gone into the fourth dimension. But flicker one of those garish little gremlins nearby and they just might gulp a ton of them. You never knew. Not even the best ever knew.
    Far as Thorn could tell, it was a kind of voodoo. He didn’t have any picture in mind, but he’d sit there at that old railroad desk, start pulling scraps of fur from pigeonholes, badger, possum, raccoon, horse, cow, dog. Get his clear nail polish ready, his bobbin, his scissors, his hackle pliers, holding, tying, looping, imagining. Three-eyed Louie came in a frenzy like that. No plan. But it emerged, three silver eyes across a bar in front, and for one whole June in 1979 it caught bones every day from Marathon to Card Sound. Then poof, it was over. The guides standing out on the dock, shaking their heads, grinning at the bounty, frowning at the ongoing search.
    That was the great pleasure of this for Thorn. The minor wacko variations. Permutations of eyes, head, body, tail. And always the barbless hook. There were a hundred thousand possible bonefish flies. Oh, hell, lots more than that. Nobody had found one that worked every time. Nobody ever would. The best bonefishermen in the world could go a week without having one on. They could pole across a hundred miles of flats, see a hundred tailing fish, lay a quiet line and a perfect lure right in their path, perfect presentation a hundred times, and that fish would rather starve.
    Those guys were priests. They thought like priests. It meant whatever they thought they kept to themselves. When they did talk, they all talked alike, quiet as dust floating in church. And they had eyes burned hard and transparent by the sun off shallow water, from tracking ghosts with a ten-ton pull.
    Thorn had been one of them for a decade. Back from his failed year at college, he’d started up. Nineteen and with about nineteen years of experience on the flats. Baptized out there. Knew how to be quiet and blend in. For ten years he tried to learn how to take money from strangers who knew how to do neither.
    The lures, though, they were the real art. And as he moved through his twenties, he found it was tying flies, dreaming into life these surreal roaches, that sustained him.
    At thirty he had quit guiding and started carving soap molds for his epoxy bodies, looking for the shape that slid across the bottom, glided and twitched with that rhythm he could picture but not describe.
    Until Sarah had begun to change things, he’d been content with the hours of narrow focus. Willing to warm himself before these small, fiery creations. For years he’d stayed hidden away in the woods, the only action in his life happening deep inside. That had been enough. The silence. The reading. The food. The weather. The bonefish strikes. But now it wasn’t. He was starting to feel a hunger. Lately he’d found his eyes drifting up from the desk, looking off.
    God, Thorn couldn’t believe it, but he’d even begun, at those moments, his eyes wandering out into the distance, to speak her name.
    Thorn finished the Crazy Charlie. Set it beside the Flig and the Muddler he’d finished last night. Crazy Charlie—its knobby backbone was glossy purple. Iridescent trailers. Bug-eyed with a silver eyelet for a mouth. This one had a small disposition problem. Thorn noticed it now. One of its bead-chain eyes looked askance. Walleyed Charlie. It wasn’t pleased, brought together like this.
    Thorn broke the eye out of the epoxy body, touched the socket with another speck of clear nail polish, and reset the eye. There it was. A straight-ahead look. Smug, cocky even, but still vulnerable. Not an inch long, and nothing on it had ever met up with salt water before. But the thing would drift down to the marshy bottom and flicker into the dreams of the strongest, spookiest fish there was.
    He stood and stretched, walked outside, and sat on his porch railing, watching the distant mangrove