be
staying long at the Twin Palms trailer court. It wasn't a very
comfortable place.

I was wrong there. It wasn't comfortable, but we stayed.

I couldn't have said at first why we stuck, and if Doc could he didn't
volunteer. Neither of us talked about it. We just went on living the
way we were used to living, a few weeks here and a few there, all
over the States.

We'd hit the Florida west coast too late for the citrus season, so I
went in for the fishing instead. I worked the fishing boats all the
way from Tampa down to Fort Myers, not signing on with any of the
commercial companies because I like to move quick when I get restless.
I picked the independent deep-water snapper runs mostly, because the
percentage is good there if you've got a strong back and tough hands.

Snapper fishing isn't the sport it seems to the one-day tourists who
flock along because the fee is cheap. You fish from a wide-beamed old
scow, usually, with hand-lines instead of regular tackle, and you use
multiple hooks that go down to the bottom where the big red ones are.
There's no real thrill to it, as the one-day anglers find out quickly.
A snapper puts up no more fight than a catfish and the biggest job is
to haul out his dead weight once you've got him surfaced.

Usually a pro like me sells his catch to the boat's owner or to some
clumsy sport who wants his picture shot with a big one, and there's
nearly always a jackpot--from a pool made up at the beginning of every
run--for the man landing the biggest fish of the day. There's a knack
to hooking the big ones, and when the jackpots were running good I
only worked a day or so a week and spent the rest of the time lying
around the trailer playing cribbage and drinking beer with Doc Shull.

Usually it was the life of Riley, but somehow it wasn't enough in this
place. We'd get about half-oiled and work up a promising argument
about what was wrong with the world. Then, just when we'd got life
looking its screwball funniest with our arguments one or the other of
us would look out the window and see Joey Pond in his wheelchair,
waiting for a one-eyed dog named Charlie to come trotting home across
the palmetto flats. He was always there, day or night, until his
mother came home from work and rolled him inside.

It wasn't right or natural for a kid to wait like that for anything
and it worried me. I even offered once to buy the kid another mutt but
Ethel Pond told me quick to mind my own busi