My silver line lifts a C shape of rolling light, midair. Settling. Then I feel the snap of my hook find something hard/good—a surface firm yet yielding—springy, live, worthwhile. There’s much game “play” in it. And, even as I realize I’ve hit, not the red ring, but one pale human wrist (not the left, holding a target, but Dan’s other one), some excitement, some malice unaccountable, makes me jerk it anyway. Gotcha, motherfucker!

Snagging the arm of a man who’s always been only kind to me is a response so male, so savage, automatic—it scares me sick. The Sports Gene! “Owwweesh!” Dan howls. (Might this not be Dan’s exact sexual-release cry?)

My rod drops to grass. I speed toward my prize. Even in pain, even after studying the wound I’ve caused, Dan is easing down. He’s kneeling on our lawn. Readying himself, because, at my level, he plans to comfort me!

I follow line to him. Filament burns a hole in the center of my chubby fist. He’s before me, guessing how upset I’ll be. The guy prepares a grin. He means, even in his shock, to protect me from embarrassment.

On his knees, Dan is just about my own height fully standing. This close, his head appears enormous as a puppet’s, its handsomeness gone jagged as Sherlock Holmes’s hat and pipe and shoebill nose. He receives my running weight with a little grunt. He shields me from seeing his bleeding arm. Cardplayers have heard Dan’s holler. Two lean off the porch. “It’s nothing,” Dan’s baritone calls, warming my neck and ear. The one good arm cradles me against him. It pulls me closer to my target, home direct between a squatting hero’s opened knees.

Tuffie’s chewed red plastic ring is now suspended—bull’s-eye—just above my friend’s clumped crotch. Other men are toasting us with bourbon, laughing, calling all their usual usuals.

(In polite Falls, you never ever say what’s gone previously unsaid. If something has not yet been spoken, it probably never needed saying. So: “Caught you a big one, hunh, kiddo? Six inches shy of a six-footer, best just throw him back, what say?”)

Trying to keep our dealings private, Dan smiles at me, apologizing for those clods. His fibrous arm flips over, accidentally showing me white skin, powder-blue marbled veining, and one long spittle of opaque red leaving the silver beak of my own hook. That surgical hook puckers a two-inch sample of someone’s bacon-fat flesh. “Noo,” I cry. The barbed beak looks too big ever to cut quite out of him.

We’re bound together for good, flies tied. I nuzzle, sobbing, “Didn’t mean to, not to you, Dan….”

I feel half faint, daylight overdoing it and drenching me, accusatory. I’m pitched even deeper in a pliant vise between Dan’s open sinew thighs.