Since he had lost his job, he had been spending most of his time fishing.  Fishing was good in the drought-reduced rivers, almost too easy since the fish were restricted to a few deep pools.  The freezer was filled with fish, and Danielle had forbidden him to bring home any more.  Tonight she was expecting him to take her to a play in Birmingham.  It was The Tempest.  She had bought herself a copy of the play and had read it not once but twice.  She read passages aloud over breakfast.  He was getting pretty tired of that.  Her interest in the cultural life in Birmingham alternately fascinated and repelled him.  His experiences at operas and art shows always got a good laugh from his friends over a round of beer.

“I missed out on taking courses I wanted to take when I was doing my degree,” she said.  “Now I’m catching up.  You can catch up with me.”

The opera.  That had been strange, people singing in another language.  Danielle claimed she had enjoyed it, but he wondered if she was just pretending.

He was going fishing because Danielle had given him an ultimatum.

“You go to that river again this month and you’ll have to move out,” she had said.

She did not shout the words.  She did not cry.  Her calmness was unnerving.  It was like one of those doctors she worked for telling the parents of a young motorcycle crash victim their son was going to die, that his brain was dead and they would have to cut off life support.

“It wouldn’t be so bad if yawl paddled those canoes,” she said.  “You use motors.”

That was true.  They had all mounted trolling motors on their canoes.

“The river down to Frog Eye is mostly dead water,” he said.  “Pretty hard paddling that far in this heat.”

“Trolling motors,” she said as she turned her back on him and walked away.

Now on the refrigerator there was a note that read: GONE FISHING.   After the trip was over his friends would drop him off at his mother’s house.  He would borrow some money from her and do the online course on blasting again.  He imagined himself planting the charges and then watching the earth buckle in that satisfying way when he set them off.   He would be respected.   Plenty of money in his pocket to buy women drinks in bars.

Danielle, well, he did not expect to hear from her again.  They were never likely to meet.  Besides, he had no passion for motorcycles.  No way he was going to wake up in her trauma center.

***

Prentiss stood on the narrow wood bridge with his friends Arnold and Franklin.  Downstream the river lay clear and low, a scattering of rocks near the bridge and then sandbars as the river made its leisurely way toward the ferry at Frog Eye five miles away, flowing in soft loops across the gently rolling land.  At the end of their trip, they had arranged for the ferryman’s son to drive them back to their truck.

“We’ll burn up,” said Franklin.

            “I thought they weren’t land clearing here until next month,” Arnold said.