Dan discovered me tossing line at a chalked blue ring on the side of our white garage. Waiting for my father, Dan had come wandering seeking me. On our white-frilled porch, his golf buddies audibly milled, swilling vodka, massacring baby onions.

“Why not cast her my way, pardner? You’re gettin’ good at it, I see that plain. Here, maybe try and put ’er about here?” Dan had spied a red plastic ring. It was the chew toy for Tuffie, our boxer. Dan lifted it free of a boxwood bush, then held red out, an exact right angle to his body. His jaw so square and blue, his face so blankly direct, he looked earnest as some model in a Red Cross diagram for Boating Safety. I felt weakened by appreciation, patriotic.

Dan squinted in April sunlight. With his face screwed up, you saw how he must’ve looked as a boy, winsome if underfinanced, rawer. He was not like me. He’d been born poor. Part of his sexiness came from some lasting smell of that. I once believed that dogs were the daddies, cats were the moms. I once thought women were rich and men born poor. Go figure.

Today Dan wore fresh-pressed chinos, deck shoes, a plaid short-sleeve shirt. He smiled across sixty feet. Distance reduced him to trout size. But his hundred-watt attraction remained a lure, immense. I readied my aim. I took a bowlegged stance. It was my own approximation of the Male. I posed, tough, fifty-six whole pounds.

Dan’s pals played raucous Twenty-One on our side porch, they gossiped hard (some young country boy who worked at Aetna had got engaged to Donna!). Big drinks’ ice cubes clinked. I readied my rod, checked all my interior devices. It was a day of birdsong, temperature in the seventies, a day both gold and blue.

Studying Dan’s pale inner arm held direct off his torso, I so wanted to touch him. “Here she comes, Dan. On your mark …”

I aimed. I recall the thumb release of line. “Go!” The reel sang its precise ratcheting, pure play-out. April!

(Later, during sex, I’d recall this giddying suspension. A man feels his release “go off,” you feel the aim-out pleasure unspiral into air, your reel line is moving, about to mainline joy throughout your groin, then flooding every cell of you. You know it’s literally coming, you are. You know that nothing on the earth—not even a jealous macho God—can stop it now, your gusher, eureka!

The Fellow Ship fullsteamahead!)