Free A Man of Affairs by John D. MacDonald Page B

look bigger undressed than you do dressed. Sam the moose.”
    “Don’t hurt his feelings,” Puss said. “He’s very sensitive. Say, what are you kids going to do after breakfast?”
    “Me,” said Bridget, “me, I’m going to slob around in the sun and try to forget I should be inside at the good old Olivetti Studio 44, pecking out something deathless about our host for the lady editor.”
    “And I’m going to see if I can spear something,” Tommy said.
    “We’ve had breakfast and we’re going up the beach to fish,” Louise said. “You want to come along, Puss?”
    “Three’s a crowd,” she said. “Oops, that doesn’t sound right. Anyhow, Tommy makes me so nervous I have to watch the water and keep wringing my hands until he bobs up again.”
    “I wish I could have brought my compressor and my air tanks,” Tommy said wistfully. “I can stay down about two and a half minutes, but what good is that?”
    We went into the little dock house. Rods rested on wall pegs. I picked out two spinning rods and reels that looked sturdy, piled some lures, swivels, leader wire, a pair of rusty pliers and a sharp but rusty knife in a battered aluminum box, and we headed up the beach. The beach was sandy, but the shallow water just off shore was full of dark rocks. A half mile from the little bay the sand ended and we had to walk over gray-black, water-eroded rocks. The rocky area became wider. It had a lost and fearsome look, like part of a destroyed planet. We had to keep looking ahead to pick out the flat places. There were windows of conch shells, tossed high on the rock by tide and winds. The sun had whitened them, and they were like the bones of the dead in a barren world.
    Louise stopped and made a sweeping gesture with her arm and said, “Just look at it, Sam!” I saw what she meant. The scrub was vivid green on our right. The black-gray tortured rock was a fifty-yard strip between the green of the leaves and the streaked blue and tan and green and yellow of the water.
    I found us a place on a point where we stood six feet above the water. I rigged the rods and showed her how to handle spinning tackle. After three casts she had the knack of it and began to get the yellow feathered dude out to a respectable distance. There were no fish left in the world. There was not even a knock. Two vultures dipped to take a closer look at us, and then sailed away, rising effortlessly on the wind currents.
    I realized Louise had stopped casting. I looked at her and she was looking farther up the shoreline.
    “What is it?”
    “Isn’t that Skylark up there?”
    I looked. The boy was two hundred yards away, kneeling on the rocks, looking down into the water. I saw him yank something small and silvery out of the water. We folded our futile tent and walked up to him. He grinned at us. The water right next to the rocks was black and roiled with a dense school of menhaden minnows. The school was twenty feet long and ten feet wide. Skylark was dangling a small bare bright hook in the school and rolling the line back and forth between thumb and finger to spin the hook. The minnows, three and four inches long, would bite at the bare hook and he would yank them out and drop them in a small tide pool behind him. He had over a dozen in the pool, scurrying around busily.
    “Do you eat those?” I asked him.
    “Oh, no. No, I will show you.” He put the small hook and line aside and picked up a heavy line with a large hook. He hooked a live minnow through the back and swung it around his head several times and threw it out about forty feet. I swear it wasn’t out there ten seconds before something gulped it down. Skylark set his hook and brought the fish in, hand over hand. It was a five-pound yellowtail, and he carried it over and put it in a pool shaded by the rocks. There were two other yellowtails and about a ten-pound albacore in the pool.
    He told us to go ahead and use his minnows. We hesitated perhaps one hundredth of a