“They are,” he repeats. “I remember back in the fall my dad would take us from the city. You know most people took vacations in the summer. Well. He’d work straight through. Even in August when it got real hot and all the other kids’d be on the lakes, some water-skiing. We’d be stuck in the city. Dad’d come home and it was too hot even to get out the barbecue. Too hot to get drunk, he’d say. So we’d sit there in the basement and he’d drink iced tea and me and my brother’d watch TV and wait for the fan to swing our way. Even our T-shirts stuck to us. It was that hot.

“So we went on vacation in the fall. By that time it was cold. No snow yet, but it’d sleet some mornings. You’d think we’d get to sleep in, but he’d wake us up at four-thirty in the morning, way before dawn.

“We’d eat hard-boiled eggs—our mother wasn’t there, ‘Just the guys,’ Dad said—and get dressed in the dark and take the boat out. It was still dark and I had to sit up in the bow, with a big flashlight so we wouldn’t ground out the boat in shallow water and burn up the prop in the weeds. Dad sat in the back with his hands on the tiller, smoking a cigarette, and my brother sat right in the middle, shivering and complaining. Though he didn’t complain too loud cause Dad would get that look on his face.

“Dad had put out milk jugs on the lake, anchored to the bottom with tractor bolts so we’d know where to go. I mean it was impossible to see the shore, even with the flashlight. You could see it, but it all looked the same: just trees and more trees.

“When I saw the milk-jug buoys I’d whisper to Dad and he’d nod, his cigarette dipping in the dark, just a little red dot where his face was.

“He’d nod and angle the boat in where there was a cut in the weeds. My brother complained that it was cold, but me and my dad didn’t say anything. It was cold. What could we say?

“Once it got real shallow, so I could see the bottom with the flashlight. Just green weeds and the stunned minnows, I’d whisper at him again. He got mad if we talked loud. Even though the motor was louder than we were.